In spite of such gaunt famine, however, the war went on and the resistance continued. Soon the battering-rams made a breach in the wall of Antonia, and Titus called upon his soldiers to mount the breach, but only one soldier, Sibanus, and eleven others responded, and these were overwhelmed at once. Two nights later, however, twenty-four soldiers crept into the breach, and Antonia was taken. Titus at once made offers of clemency and many accepted his offer of mercy, but the rest fled to Zion and the temple. He then called a council of war to decide whether the temple should be saved; many of his generals were in favour of destroying it, but nevertheless Titus ordered the flames to be extinguished, fixing the next day for the final assault. But even Roman discipline could not control the infuriated soldiers and one of them threw a blazing torch into the gilded lattice of the porch. “The flames sprang up at once. The Jews uttered one simultaneous shriek and grasped their swords with a furious determination of revenging and perishing in the ruins of the temple. Titus rushed down with the utmost speed: he shouted, he made signs to his soldiers to quench the fire: his voice was drowned and his signs unnoticed in the blind confusion. The legionaries either could not or would not hear: they rushed on, trampling each other down in their furious haste, or stumbling over the crumbling ruins, and perished with the enemy. Each exhorted the other, and each hurled his blazing brand into the inner part of the edifice, and then hastened to his work of carnage. The unarmed and the defenceless people were slain in thousands; they lay heaped like sacrifices round the altar; the steps of the temple ran with streams of blood, which washed down the bodies which lay upon it.”
Titus himself entered the Holy of Holies before the flames had reached the sanctuary, and with a last effort attempted to save it, but in his very presence his soldiers fired the great door and the building was soon wrapt in flames.
[70-73 A.D.]
Thus was Jerusalem destroyed. Josephus reckons that the number of people who perished in this siege was one million one hundred thousand, and while this is probably an exaggeration it is not impossible that such a number may have perished, when we remember that a large proportion of the male population of Judea had gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover. Persecutions of the remaining Jews were soon begun at Antioch, where several Jews were burnt and tortured. It is to Titus’ credit that these persecutions were checked and his soldiers rebuked: “The country of the Jews is destroyed—thither they cannot return: it would be hard to allow them no home to return to—leave them in peace.” The booty taken at Jerusalem was so enormous as to cause an immense depreciation in the value of gold and silver throughout Asia, and this even though the treasures of the temple had been burned and destroyed.
The revolt lasted a little longer in the Dead Sea region. The castle of Herodion soon fell; Macherus surrendered, but the men were slain, the women and children sent to slavery. Masada held out till the year 73, when the garrison, seeing their case hopeless, killed their wives and children, and then themselves after setting fire to the castle. The Jews in other parts of the world suffered many disasters and made a few efforts at revolt under Zealots, but gradually all resistance was crushed out in blood, and the Jews having perished by the hundred thousand, ceased to be a nation. As Munk said, “Almost all Judea became a desert; the wolves and the hyenas entered the cities.”[a]
Entrance to the Tomb of the Kings, Jerusalem
From that day forward the Jews have no important history. The extremist party of the prophets and Zealots, which was likewise the nationalist party, no longer existed; it had been drowned in blood. As for the priests and rabbis, they had long since withdrawn from the conflict, but it is due to them that the Jews, having completely lost their national existence, have been able to subsist to this day as a religious body. “Renouncing the hope of playing a political rôle,” says Munk, “the Jews directed all their efforts towards a moral aim, and devoted themselves wholly to consolidating their religious unity.” Convinced at last that their mission as a body politic was at an end, and that the sanctuary at Jerusalem, with its priests and sacrifices, could no longer be the symbol about which the scattered remnants of the Jewish nation were to gather, they laid down their arms, and sought by peaceful ways and intellectual methods to strengthen themselves as a religious body. For a while Palestine still remained the chief seat of religious study, the rabbis settling in several cities of Galilee, notably Sephoris and Tiberias. From the school of Tiberias, founded about the year 180, came forth the famous rabbi, Yehudah, surnamed the Holy, who collected the incomplete codes and traditional laws of the schools of the Pharisees, and, in the first quarter of the third century, fashioned them into an immense system of laws known under the name of the Mishnah, or Second Law. This code is divided into six parts, entitled Sedarim, orders. Each of the six is subdivided into several treatises, each treatise into chapters. This code was annotated, discussed, and amplified, first by the Palestinian and then by the Babylonian school, and each school afterwards made a collection of these annotations and discussions. The name of Gemara, Complement, was given to these collections, which were much more voluminous than the Mishnah that serves for their text. The Mishnah and the Gemara together form the Talmud, the Teaching.