On the Destruction of Jerusalem 3.9–3.16

From the city of Tiberias he went again to Jotapata, either because it was more fortified than the rest and therefore very many of those readiest for war had gathered there, or because Vespasian had sent many of his men there to make a road, since the way through the mountains was difficult and rocky, hard for foot soldiers and impassable and insuperable for horsemen. In four days, so that the narrows would not hinder them, the paved roads were opened, a route laid out by which the whole army could more easily pass. On the fifth day Josephus crossed there and raised the downcast spirits of the Jews. When Vespasian was informed that Josephus had gone there, this added a spur to hasten his march, because he thought it a short cut to finishing the war if the commander and the people readiest for war were caught. So he arrived with his army, and on the first day he gave the soldiers time to refresh themselves with food, so that they would not come to the business of war tired from the march. On the next day he surrounded the city with a double line, and on the third with a line of cavalry. When the Jews saw themselves shut in and besieged on all sides, with no place of refuge, they took daring from despair itself. For nothing makes a soldier readier for war than the necessity of fighting and a headlong danger. Vespasian pressed with javelins, pressed with arrows; and many of the Jews who went out beyond the walls were wounded by the missiles of a practiced art of striking, yet they remained undaunted. Roman valor tried everything, and especially where it noticed the weaker defenses of the walls, there it pressed with a greater force. Shame armed the one side, final hope the other, as they longed to open a way to safety with the sword. The Jews endured heavy blows and returned attempts of daring no less. Skill with courage on the Roman side contended with fury and rashness on the Jewish side. So, when both were worn out, fighting all day—the one for their lives, the other for triumph—night broke off the battle. On the next day, and the third and fourth, and the fifth, they fought fiercely in the same way; but, as usually happens in such battles, more wounds than deaths were inflicted, though sallies were often attempted by the Jews and breakouts by the Romans. Shame inflamed the Romans to anger, because the conquerors of Hannibal and Antiochus and all nations were delayed by battles with Jews. So great was the constancy of Roman valor that not to win quickly was reckoned a kind of defeat. But their contests were more against nature than against the enemy. For the city was almost cut off on all sides by steep rocks, surrounded not by rampart and ditch like other cities but by deep precipices, which neither human sight could take in nor use explore, and horror more and more enveloped the anxious onlooker. Only on the north, where the mountain slopes down, was there a single approach to the city, open yet by a steep ascent. This Josephus closed with a wall and fenced with defenders, so that between the lower wall and the upper city an assault would be dangerous for the besiegers, and the upper parts could not be estimated by one looking at them. For the city itself, set on the brow of a mountain, was surrounded by the circle of neighboring mountains as by a natural rampart, hidden in an innate enclosure, so that no one would know there was a city there before he had entered the city itself.

Since Vespasian could not conquer nature, he called nature itself to his aid, so as to force the besieged to surrender by a long siege through want of food and drink. But a supply of grain gathered long before drove off the danger of famine. The difficulty of water was very great, because there was no spring in the city, and the usual drought, with rare rains in those places, had reduced the means of drinking. He had blocked all the water channels so that they would not flow into the city. Want increased desire; nature resisted. Josephus brought forward a device: soaked garments were hung on the wall, so that, as the water gradually dripped off, they would be thought to have no lack of drink, since they had plenty for washing clothes.

Disappointed by this, Vespasian was roused again to storm the city and gathered his whole army around it. He shook the wall with engines; the ram battered it. Its appearance gave it this name, because the head of a strong and knotty beam is clothed with iron, and, like the forehead of a ram, it is put forward, swelling with plates fastened over it and projecting; from its middle there comes out, as it were, a horn of more solid iron. The size of the beam is like a ship's mast, such as neither the storm of winds nor the swelling of sails can bend. Hung by ropes from the tops of strong beams bound together, it was driven powerfully against the wall by the hands of many. Then, drawn back and held by its ropes like a balance arm, it was aimed with greater force, so that the side of the wall, worn out by frequent blows, would give way and, hollowed by the force of the breaches, give a window through which a way into the inner parts of the city would lie open to the Roman enemy. At the first blow the wall was shaken and all of it trembled. At once there was a cry from all, alarmed as if the city had been stormed, lest the wall, struck again, should crack. But Josephus ordered sacks filled with chaff to be let down at the place where the ram was being driven by the Romans, so that every blow of the ram, landing in the loose folds of the sacks, would be softened. For solid things harm solid things they strike; against looser things they are spent. Indeed hard things give way to soft more easily than soft to hard. For rocks are dissolved by the washing of water, yet no harm is done to the waters by the fall of a rock; and when masses are thrown into the sea, the water keeps its own uses, but a rock among the waves cannot keep its own. Sand, too, is not broken by the fall of marble, but marble is crushed by the fall of sand. The Romans, however, also responded, to refute the Jews' devices, by binding sickles to poles with which to cut the sacks let down, so that, once the chaff was emptied, they could not avoid the blow of the ram. When the impact of the engine had been renewed and the Jews saw themselves pressed, one of them, Eleazar, lifting a stone of huge size, hurled it from the wall onto the ram with such force that he broke the head of the engine. Leaping out into the midst of the enemy, he seized it and carried it fearlessly to the wall in the sight of his adversaries, exposed to wounds. In the end he was pierced by five javelins; but, by no means turning to his wounds, he was intent on how he might bury the enemy in the fall of the stone. So he climbed the wall and stood, conqueror of pain, conspicuous for such daring; and he threw himself and the stone down onto the ram and fell with it—conquered indeed by death, but conqueror of the engine, since he alone departed from his country in his own person, while by breaking the engine he saved the whole city from destruction. Netiras and Philip too threw themselves into the middle of the column to turn back those they had attacked. And Josephus, having fires thrown, so as to burn all the engines, in a short time consumed very many; but what was consumed was repaired.

Vespasian pressed on and urged them so hard that he was struck in the heel by the shaft of an arrow. The Romans were thrown into confusion when they saw their commander's blood flowing. His son, alarmed, ran to his father. But he, bearing a courage of spirit greater than the force of the wound, forbade his son to be alarmed and fired the soldiers the more for battle, to avenge the injury to their commander. He himself, as standard-bearer, called back the army and drove it to the walls; he himself exhorted the others to battle; some pressed the enemy with arrows, others with missiles, others with ballistas. So great was the force of this engine by which stones were hurled at the enemy that one of Josephus's companions standing nearby was struck and fell with his head shattered, and the back of his head was flung as far as the third stadium; a pregnant woman too, struck in the womb, had her infant hurled out of the inmost seat of her womb more than half a stadium. At last, when the Roman soldier was already climbing the wall as victor, and at the very entrance there was fierce fighting with strong forces on both sides, Josephus ordered the Romans, locked in combat as they were, to be drenched with boiling oil, which easily ran down from head to the lowest step of the feet. The heat of the oil devoured all their limbs no less than the burning of a blazing flame. Yet others took their place, and with many the sweat pouring out even cooled the force of the oil. And although the nature of such oil is that it heats quickly and lets go of the heat it has taken in more slowly, yet in their eagerness for victory they hid the injury. They burned in spirit so that they felt no burning of the body, nor did they value the pain of the boiling punishment as highly as the loss of glory, if, as men without share in triumphs, they should leave the war, they who had been leaders in the dangers. So they strove to quench the burning of the oil even with their own blood.

During this delay of the siege, the people of the city of Japha, which was nearby, had also grown insolent, because the struggle at Jotapata was long drawn out. So Vespasian, moved by this, sent Trajan, who commanded the fifteenth legion, as commander with a thousand horsemen and two thousand foot soldiers. He set out without hesitation, a keen man skilled in the arts of war, and found an outcome of the war matching his efforts. For although the city was both enclosed by the nature of the place and surrounded by a double wall, its people, not content to protect themselves by its fortifications, thought they should go out to meet the Romans; but after daring to resist for a little while, as they wished to retreat within the outer wall, they took in the enemy along with them. For as they hurried in, the Romans too slipped in behind them; and as they fled to the inner wall, the gates were shut, so that the Romans would not burst in with them again. So, with God's help turned away from them, the Jews were fighting with that by which they used to conquer before; but they had offended by wicked crimes, and therefore the penalty owed was being exacted from them, so that their punishments were handed over to the nations. In fact more of them were destroyed almost by their own wars among themselves than by the enemy. An example is the people of Japha, who opened the gates to the Romans and shut them against themselves. For the first wall, so that the Romans might break in, they opened themselves; the second wall, so that Jews should not get in, Jews shut. So the enemy was received and the ally shut out—the one received so that there should be no lack of an executioner, the other shut out so that he could by no means escape. So between two walls the Jews were cut down, hand to hand at close quarters and from the wall at a distance. For many of the Roman soldiers, constricted by the narrow space, climbed the wall and from there hurled missiles on those below. So the Galileans, more hostile to their own than to the enemy, begged to be received into the entrance of the inner wall, but their own people resisted. There was fighting on the threshold of the gate, Jews fighting among themselves: these met the onrushing wedge with swords; those died resisting. Calling down savage curses on each other, they bore witness with their last words that they were suffering less from the enemy than from their own. So twelve thousand fighting men were killed. Trajan, thinking either that no one would now resist him or that the city would be easily stormed, a man of the old discipline, reserved the crowning victory for Vespasian and sent to him asking him to send his son Titus to bring the battle to an end. When Titus arrived, an assault was made and many people were killed; nor did victory come to the Romans without toil and danger. When they had entered the inner wall, all who were fit for war and in straits threw themselves in their way; they made the war doubtful for the victors, men and women fighting from above and often hurling stones and every kind of missile they happened to find even on their own people. For six hours they fought at the very end as if from the beginning. At last, when those who had made a stand to fight were killed, the Romans rushed on the rest without order, without measure, without mercy; old men were slaughtered with youths; women with little children were kept, not for pardon but for slavery; all the males were killed except those whom boyhood or infancy saved; two thousand one hundred and thirty were led away as booty, masters with their slaves, now of equal lot, since captivity had made them equals.

Nor were the Samaritans free of miseries. For according to their custom they had gone up Mount Gerizim, which was consecrated to them, where they used to worship—whence also in the Gospel the Samaritan woman says: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain.” And the answer was given her: “The hour will come when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” For it was owed that superstition should cease and true religion succeed, that the shadow should be emptied and the truth come, so that no longer on a mountain, like the Samaritans, nor in Jerusalem three times a year, like the Jews, but in spirit, in every place, lifting up pure hands, every man should worship God and bend the knee in the name of Jesus. So when, as we said above, they had gathered on the mountain and were staying there according to their rites, and the very appearance of the gathering held out threats of war—or the mind of men who did not come to their senses even through their neighbors' evils, and were much more stirred by envy at the Romans' successes—and things were close to a tumult, it was thought wiser to forestall them, lest they break out into a greater plague. Vespasian summoned the commander of the fifth legion and sent him there with three thousand men of both services. He, thinking it dangerous to climb the mountain at the very start (for the multitude of the people was joined to the steepness of nature to cause terror), surrounded the foot of the mountain with his army and kept a guard there all day, so that no one could come down for water. So when thirst tormented so great a multitude of men, which blazed more and more in the heat, and very many preferred to offer themselves to slavery or even to death rather than perish by hunger or thirst, Cerealis (for that was the commander's name), judging from those who came down that all were exhausted, surrounded the mountain, and, in military fashion, promising safety if they laid down their arms, ordered those who refused to be struck down. So eleven thousand six hundred men were killed there.

At Jotapata too, on the forty-eighth day, an assault was made at first dawn, while they were resting, worn out by the great labor of the previous day; Titus, first of all, entered with Sabinus and opened the way for the rest. Having seized the higher places, they struck down men everywhere in the narrow streets, still unaware that the assault had been made. Some paid the penalty in their beds, others just awakened, others awake but undone by hunger and sleep. Yet the force of the evils still lay hidden from the whole city. But when the army had entered and roared with a military yell, they rose almost to nothing but the feeling of facing death. If any tried to make for the heights, they were driven back and cut down; and those who might have had strength for vengeance, the very crowding took vengeance from them; and if any prepared to resist, they were buried in the fighting by others rushing on top of them. Others, worn out by the long struggle, lowered their hands and offered themselves to wounds, to be snatched by death at least from such deadly spectacles of their evils. Deceived by this security of the dying, the centurion Antonius, asked by a man who had fled into a cave to give him his right hand as hostage of pardon and pledge of safety, held it out at once, careless of treachery and—woe to the wretch!—too secure in his triumph. But the man struck the unwary centurion with a spear and ran him through at once, so that the Romans' victory would not be completed without blood. On that very day all who were found were killed. On the following days they were dragged even from the underground passages and the other exhausted caves, or were killed there, except little children and women. Over all the days forty thousand were slain, so far as they were counted; twelve hundred were led into captivity. The city and all its forts were overthrown and burned, in the thirteenth year of Nero's rule. Josephus meanwhile was hiding among the ashes of the city in a certain pit, well aware that, as commander of the opposing force, he was being sought more eagerly. Coming out on the second day, when he saw everything surrounded, he went back into the pit. On the third day a certain woman was found who knew his hiding place and showed it to those searching (in the pit forty men who had fled there were hiding with him). When they noticed that Josephus was being called by Vespasian to hope of safety, first through Paulinus and Gallicanus, then through Nicanor—who was bound to Josephus by the grace of old friendship and was therefore sent, so that he would more readily carry out the duty of the charge given him to offer his right hand—they surrounded Josephus and attacked him with words like these:

“Now a greater ruin of the Jewish name is being attempted, now an uglier ash, to bury and hide the discipline of a most splendid race and undermine all its honor, when Josephus is ordered to be kept for a triumph among the captives. What do these sudden, eager enticements of the enemy mean? What are these spontaneous gifts of safety? They did not spare others who begged for life. Josephus is summoned, Josephus is begged to live. They fear, no doubt, to lose the pomp of a triumph, lest there be no captive for Rome to gaze at, no one for Vespasian to lead in chains before his chariot. Is it for this mockery that you wish to be kept? And how will they triumph if the commander of those over whom they triumph is missing? Or what triumph is it if friendship is given to the vanquished? Do not believe it, Josephus: life is promised you, but things worse than death are being prepared. Roman arms have conquered you; let not their fraudulence capture you. Their gifts are more cruel than their wounds: these threaten captivity, those preserve freedom. Will you, Josephus, broken by a kind of softness of spirit, wish to survive your country? Where is the teaching of Moses, who asked to be blotted out of the heavenly book so as not to outlive the Lord's people? Where is Aaron, who stood between the living and the dead so that death would not devour the living people with savage contagion? Where is that spirit of King Saul and Jonathan, devoted to their country, and that death undertaken for the citizens and sought bravely and gloriously? The son invited the father by his example; the father did not desert the son in his resolve to die. He, though he could have lived, preferred to be killed rather than be triumphed over by the enemy. He urged his armor-bearer, saying: ‘Strike me, lest these uncircumcised come and strike me and mock me’; because the armor-bearer was afraid, he ran himself through with the sword. He was worthy to be avenged by David in the prophetic spirit, because a degenerate Amalekite had falsely boasted of his death and thought to diminish the glory of a man who had removed himself from the enemy, by lying that he had killed him. He was worthy also to be praised by so great a prophet, saying: ‘Saul and Jonathan, beautiful and most dear, inseparable in their life, and in death they were not divided; lighter than eagles, mightier than lions.’ David himself too, when he saw the people being struck by the angel, wished the heavenly vengeance to be turned on himself, so as not to be kept alive while the people perished. Finally, where is the divine law, whose interpreter you have always been, which for this brief life has promised the just everlasting immortality? Where is the God of the Hebrews, who teaches the just to hold death in contempt, even to flee this earthly dwelling, to long for things above, for the region of paradise, where God himself keeps pious souls? Now at last you want to live, Josephus, when you ought not—indeed when it is not lawful—indeed, what is more, when it is not fitting; and you wish to enjoy that light, I dare say, of servitude, which is in another's power, so that the Roman may snatch it away when he wishes and cover it when he wishes with the darkness of a prison, so that you would long to flee from here and not be allowed to die. And with what shame will you go to those whom you persuaded to die for their country? What excuse will you have for having stayed so long? They are waiting to see what you do; they will surely say: ‘Why does Josephus delay, who ought to have gone before? Why does he follow so late? Why does he refuse to imitate his disciples, whom he persuaded to die for freedom?’ We shall certainly bear it that you, champion of the law and of freedom, have chosen to serve, that you have handed yourself as a slave to the Romans, that you have preferred captivity to freedom. But granted you wish to live, how will you obtain this from those against whom you have fought so often? How will they look at you? With what eyes? With what minds? How will you wish to live under angry masters, even if it is allowed? Or who will not believe you a traitor to your country, when he sees the price of betrayal paid to you? Choose which you prefer: one of these must be. Your life will be either the reward of betrayal or the punishment of servitude.” With these words they pointed their swords at him, adding: “If you agree to die, we render you the service of friends; if you refuse, we exact vengeance as men betrayed.”