On the Destruction of Jerusalem 5.32–5.42

Josephus finished his speech, but John was moved by no tears and bent by no promises. God had long been pressing on those faithless minds, from the time they stained themselves with impious parricide, nailing Christ Jesus to the cross. This is he whose death is the destruction of the Jews: born of Mary, who “came to his own, and his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). For when have the Jews not killed their own? Did not his own people kill the son of Saul? Naboth the prophet was certainly stoned by his own people; Jezebel was a Jewess, who gave orders to the Jews, and the elders carried out the command; Ahab was a Jew, who became the cause of his death. How many other citizens were slain by citizens! And yet the city remained whole for a long time; even if it was destroyed by the Babylonians after countless years, it was restored afterward. This is the final destruction, after which the temple cannot be restored, because by their crimes they turned away the guardian of the temple, the arbiter of its restoration.

By such an address of Caesar and the repeated speech, the minds of some were bent, those who were able to slip away, so that they came over to the Romans. The rest were held back by fear of the danger threatened by the robbers (and perhaps there was a certain inclination of minds against more being rescued from the coming overthrow). Caesar received with good grace those who fled to him, since among them were priestly men with their sons and other men of more distinguished family, promising them security of safety and the right to their possessions; and he sent them to the town named Gophna, so that no offense might arise from differing rites and diversity of worship. This was turned by those who were resisting in the city (whether because such a suspicion had arisen, or someone had contrived it by guile, so that more would not slip away) into a proof that they had been killed, so that they might be thrown up as slain. On learning this, Titus had them recalled and ordered them to go around near the walls with Josephus, so that they might be recognized by their own. With tears and great groaning they lamented not their own fate but the destruction of the homeland and the temple; they begged the citizens to follow Caesar's good faith and to snatch the temple from the prepared fire: nothing had been commanded them against the law, nothing taken from their liberty. Let them too consent and experience the clemency of the Romans, whose invincible valor they had experienced.

While they were pitiably lamenting such things, they were driven off by their own, and war was kindled. The Jews leapt in and burst rashly into the very sanctuary. They occupied all the recesses, all the secret places, which were inaccessible to men who had no share in the sacred rites. The Romans too prepared for battle. The prohibitions of the fathers were violated by the necessity of war, yet with greater reverence on the part of the Romans than of their own people. For the Gentiles looked upon the temple with fear; the Jews approached it with fury and rashness, and with hands wet with human blood they handled the very altars. Titus, however, still keeping to his purpose, addressed John and protested that he was being led against his will to the destruction of the city and the temple, saying to him: “What do those letters engraved before the doors of the temple mean, John? Do they not signify that no one but the consecrated ought to approach the temple? What do those barriers before the temple mean? Is it not that they keep away the gaze of all, so that the knowledge of the secret things may be open only to the initiated, and free sight may belong to those who have lawful entry? You shut out the gaze of foreigners and forbid their approach. You write that no stranger is to enter, no foreigner to come in; and you pour out foreign blood within the temple, and stain your altars with the gore of strangers and citizens together. I testify that it is not by our assault but by your transgression that you violate what is your own. I, a stranger, do not compel; nay, I solemnly pledge that if you will depart, the temple will be unharmed: no Roman will lay hostile hands on it; nothing of your sacrifices will be violated. I will preserve the temple for you and for proselytes; for the worship of the sacred rites is different, but the use of the building is common. What was worship has departed from you; what is the building has remained to the victors.”

When Caesar saw that they could not be called back even by these words conveyed through Josephus (for the leaders of the faction thought that such frequent invitations to desist came from distrust rather than mercy), he returned to battle unwillingly from necessity and ordered the Romans to be at hand. But because the narrow space was a hindrance to so great a multitude, he chose thirty men and assigned to each a thousand warriors. For such dense obstacles of buildings would not take in the whole army. He himself, wishing to go down with them, was held back by his men, lest in a narrow place, often at night too, when they had to meet the fraud of ambushers, he should stir up some danger for himself, when he would do more good if he were present as a spectator of the battle, since each man would think he must fight more readily when about to fight under Caesar's eyes. For everything that was being done around the temple could be seen from above from the place of the Antonia, as in a kind of theater. Caesar, persuaded to this view, entrusted the business to Cerealis, to come upon the Jews keeping guard around the temple at the ninth hour of the night; and he urged the rest to throw themselves eagerly into the contest: he too would not fail to reward the merits of those who fought, since from above he would examine the fight as witness of each man's cowardice or judge of his valor. Cerealis was promptly present at the appointed time, but found the guards awake: battle was joined. For those stationed within the temple were not asleep, and as those who were keeping watch engaged, the rest easily prepared themselves for battle. The Romans pressed on in close column; the Jews, while they relied on barriers and narrow places so as not to be surrounded, ran about in different directions, so that the danger to them came more often from their own, since in the darkness they could not be recognized, and they were often pierced by their allies while thought to be enemies. For who at night could tell whether he was meeting an ally or an enemy? To ask was too late, to be cautious useful, to strike first prudent; and it was a more tolerable outcome of the fault to err by wounding another than to incur one's own danger where an enemy is feared. So through the night the Jews labored under a double danger, either what the enemy inflicted or where an ally erred. Nor was the Roman less vehement by day, urged on, even silently, by Titus, the spectator of the whole contest. Until the fifth hour there was fierce fighting, the Jews too resisting vigorously, so that neither side gave ground.

While they were fighting these battles with one another, over a space of seven days everything was pulled down to the foundations of the ground that Herod had fortified in the castle named Antonia, and the road that led to the temple was made wider, so that not only did the soldiers have the means of running across, but also as much ground as was needed lay open for setting up fortifications and heaping up earthworks, by which even the tops of the temple's roofs might be battered. While the Romans were intently busy with this, the Jews, pressed more unbearably by famine, began to lie in wait for the Romans' beasts of burden: if any soldier had let his horse loose to graze, or a mule needed to carry loads, they seized it and drove it off; and food was sought by them not only at the cost of the Romans but also through their disgrace. Caesar removed the reproach of this carelessness at once, from the very beginning, by prescribing the penalty of death; but he checked the fraud, not the stubbornness. For, shut out from such plunder necessary to the starving, seizing the help of grasses, they thought of destroying the wall that Titus had drawn around the orchard country, so that they might have a freer sally for roaming and seeking roots of trees and fodder, they whom the circuit of the wall had shut in like a kind of prison, and there was now nothing with which to relieve their hunger. So they crept out and in a sudden sally fell upon those keeping guard on the Mount of Olives. These did not fail in the duty entrusted to them, and by the trumpet's call they summoned others from the rest of the camps or the fortifications of the towers to join the battle. The fight was fiercer at the beginning, while shame drove the one side and hunger, with its savage and compelling command, the other; but as the Romans flocked together the Jews were driven back and turned back to the walls of their city. Then one of a troop of horsemen, named Pedanius, spurring his horse, stretched out his right hand and, leaning over a little, lifted up one of the fleeing Jews and, carrying him as a captive to Caesar, the victor in a glorious seizure, he threw him down alive before Caesar's feet, as an eagle a little hare or a hawk a coot. Titus, greatly delighted by this, praised and honored him and dismissed him.

Now the porticoes around the temple were burning: everywhere grief, everywhere death; outside war, inside, beyond war, fire as well. Nor were the Jews broken in spirit: they thought that whatever they did without fraud or insolence was lost to vengeance. When they could do nothing else, they provoked the Romans to hasten the destruction. A certain Jonathan, small in body and rather deserving of contempt, near the tomb of John, challenged the Romans to fight him hand to hand, whoever wished. Some despised the man's smallness; others disdained to fight with one whom they would soon have as a captive; others considered that the contest was dangerous to wage with men who, in the last extremity of safety, sought vengeance not by any courage but by mere rashness: there would be no praise if one who was on the verge of destruction were conquered, and very great disgrace if someone stained the common victory by some slip. He boasted most insolently and taunted the victors with fear, uttering insults that the Romans relied not on their own strength but on the help of others, and that the Jews were afflicted not by the enemy's war but by domestic seditions. There was among the Roman soldiers one named Pudens, who, stung by these empty insults, while he rashly looked to his honor, neglected his safety, and made more careless by his very indignation, lay open to a wound; and falling to the ground, he brought shame on his comrades, and left Jonathan cause both for insolence and for death. For Jonathan, glad at the success of the contest and raising the pomp of a triumph, while he danced and exulted and made sport by clashing his shield and sword together, roused against his own wounds the centurion Priscus, who did not bear his proud and swollen boasting, and pierced him, careless in victory, with the stroke of an arrow. Laid low by this, Jonathan taught that in battle no one ought to exult unreasonably, where the condition of victor and vanquished is uncertain until the war is closed.

But in the inner city, when they saw the enemy within the walls, towering on the highest earthworks and hanging over all the walls, and feared that the danger would go deeper, like a wound in the body, they cut through the northern portico on the side where it joined the Antonia, so that the enemy should not climb through it to the upper parts of the temple, or, as the higher party, press them in the lower parts; and they cut down everything nearest, lest, as the fires ravaged the parts next to the temple, the fire should feed on the temple itself; and they burned what they had cut through. So what they feared from the enemy, they began first themselves. They also prepared the portico of Solomon for a trick: they filled the inner parts of the roof with pitch and bitumen, which lay hidden within the vaulting of the top of the roof, and, pretending that they wished to defend it, and frequently attacking the enemy, they provoked the Romans and drew them on against themselves. The Romans brought up ladders and made for the top of the portico; the Jews gave ground little by little, because more Romans had climbed up. These crept up in rivalry; the more prudent, however, suspecting a trick, were wary; but the crowd, intent on victory, hastened ahead. When the matter seemed free of fraud, with very many placed as it were within the nets, fire was put to the inner vaults, and, with pitch and bitumen and the other fuels of burning added, it spread through the whole portico. The flames surrounded the victorious Romans, so that they had neither the means to resist nor the chance to flee; they could not find what to do. Titus watched his men in danger, indignant indeed that they had climbed without orders, but pitying them because they were perishing as victors. Many threw themselves down headlong; but when they had escaped the fire, they died with broken legs and crushed bodies; it was more wretched if they survived crippled. Caesar wished to help but could not; still he urged those nearest and shouted that they should help their comrades. These cries, this grief of Caesar, they held as their last comfort. This was the provision of the dying; consoling themselves with this as with a lofty tomb, they hastened to death, that they would be laid up in Caesar's heart; nor would the life of those perish whose glory lived, who died for Caesar, leaving a triumph as their inheritance. So some were surrounded by fires, others overtaken; nor was the enemy far away, to strike the one fleeing the flames.

Longinus, however, a man of outstanding courage, when he was invited by the Jews to entrust himself to them with a promise of safety, preferred to pierce himself alone with the sword rather than stain the courage of the Roman character with disgrace. But Artorius, cleverly enough, called out in a loud voice to Lucius, saying: “You will be my heir if you catch me as I fall.” And the poor man ran to meet him as he fell and transferred to himself the death of the man who should have died. Truly a soldier's will, written not in ink but in blood, not on paper but on the sword's point. That he promised him as heir was plainly great ingenuity, so as to find a voluntary substitute for death. So the portico was burned as far as the tower which John, when he was waging war against Simon, had built over the gates of the royal palace that King Hezekiah built for himself to live in; the rest of it the Jews themselves had pulled down. On the following day the whole northern portico was burned by the Romans as far as the eastern portico. For by laying hands on their own buildings, they taught the Romans not to spare them. The face of the temple was now bare, and the famine of men savage. They lay in wait for one another, to see who could snatch food from whom. Wherever there was suspicion of food, there was war among kinsfolk. They fought for food; the dearest were killed; the dead were searched lest some food lie hidden in their clothing. Some were thought to be feigning death, so that while alive they should not be suspected of having any food; but not even the living could either perform the function of life or feign death. But with open mouths, like rabid dogs, snatching at the breath of the air, they were carried about this way and that with want as their guide. Often too, as if drunk, they went back into the same houses to search again what they had left empty. And when they found no other comfort for their hunger, they stripped the leather from their shields, so that what could not be their protection might be their food. They chewed shoes; nor was there shame to take into the mouth what had been loosed from the feet and to lick it with the tongue. Old straw too, which had long since been thrown away, was sought with no small zeal; and if anyone found any, he sold it at a great price.

How shall I undertake to tell the deed of Mary, at which the mind of any barbarian and impious man would shudder? She was one of the wealthier women of the region of Peraea, which lies beyond the Jordan. When the horror of war arose, she had betaken herself with the others to the city of Jerusalem, because it was safer; there too she had carried her wealth, which the leaders of the factions seized in rivalry. Even if she had obtained any food at a price, it was torn from her hands. She was harassed by the faithless; she called down dreadful curses; she wished to die, but found no one to strike her. They preferred to mock her longer and afflict her more heavily rather than quickly destroy her. They thought that as long as she lived she would be plunder. Everything had now run out, and, accustomed to delicacies, she could not soften the harshness of straw or the toughness of leather. Savage hunger poured itself into her inmost marrow, sharpened her humors, harassed her mind. The woman had a little infant whom she had borne. Roused by its crying, when she saw herself and the little one wasting away, overcome by such monstrous evils and unequal to so atrocious a calamity, she lost her affection; and with the practice of a parent's love blotted out, she swallowed her grief and took on fury. So, turning to the little one, now forgetful that she was a mother and raging in mind, she spoke thus: “What shall I do for you, little one, what shall I do for you? Savage things surround you on every side: war, famine, fires, robbers, ruins. To whom shall I, who am about to die, entrust you, or to whom shall I leave you, so small? I had hoped that if you grew up you would feed your mother, or bury her when she died. Certainly, if you died first, I would shut you with my own hands in a costly tomb. What shall I do, wretched woman? I see no means of living for you or for me. Everything has been taken from us; for whom shall I keep you? And in what tomb shall I bury you, so that you may not be prey to dogs or birds or beasts? Everything, I say, has been taken from us. Yet you can, my sweet one, feed your mother even so: your hands are fit for food. O your entrails, sweet to me, your pleasant limbs, before hunger utterly consumes you, give back to your mother what you received: go back, my son, into that natural hidden place, the dwelling in which you received your breath; let a tomb be prepared for you there when you are dead. I myself will embrace him whom I bore, I myself will kiss him; and what the impatience of love has, let the force of necessity have, that I myself devour my own limbs, not with feigned but with real bites. So be food for me, a fury to the robbers, and a tale for life, the only thing lacking to our calamities. What would you do, my son, if you too had a son? We have done what love required; let us do what hunger urges. Yet your case is better, and a kind of love, because it is more bearable that you should give your mother food from your own body than that your mother should be able either to kill you or to devour you.” Saying this, with her face turned away she plunged the sword in and, cutting her son into pieces, put him on the fire; part she ate, part she covered, lest anyone come upon her. But the smell of the roasting reached the leaders of the sedition, and at once, following the odor, they entered the woman's lodging, threatening death because she had dared to eat while they themselves were fasting and to keep them without a share of the food she had found. But she said: “I have kept your share for you. I have not been greedy or inhuman. Do not be angry: you have something to eat too. I have prepared food for you from my own body. Sit down quickly; I will set the table. You have something to wonder at; and judge my service, that you have found such affection in no woman, who would not cheat you even of the delight of her sweet son.” Saying this, she uncovered the burned limbs and offered them to be eaten, with an exhortation of this kind: “This is my lunch, this your portion: look carefully, lest I have cheated you. See, one hand of the boy; see, one of his feet; see, half of the rest of his body. And lest you think it another's, it is my son; lest you think it someone else's work, I did it, I carefully divided what I would eat for myself and what I would keep for you. Never were you sweeter to me, my son: I owe it to you that I am still alive. Your sweetness held my soul and put off the day of death for your wretched mother. You came to my help in famine; you are the last gift of my old age, the restrainer of the slayers. They came to kill, they have become guests; they too will have something to owe you when they have taken my meal. But why do you step back, why do you shudder in mind, why do you not feast on what I, a mother, have made? These can delight you too, which have filled a mother. I am no longer hungry, since my son has fed me; I am abundantly satisfied; I do not know hunger. Taste and see that my son is sweet. Do not be softer than a mother, weaker than a woman. But if you are merciful at my wound and do not accept my victim, and turn away from my burnt offering, I will finish my sacrifice: I will eat what is left. See that it is not a reproach to you that a woman has been found stronger than you, to consume the feasts of men. I indeed prepared such feasts, but you made a mother feast thus: passion held me, but necessity conquered.”

At once the abomination of so great a crime filled the whole city, and, as though the ministry of the parricidal banquet were set before the eyes of both, it shuddered. Afterward even the instigators of the sedition began to examine what food they seized, lest they find similar fare and take it unawares. All began to fear to live long and to wish to die. The monstrousness of this deed reached the Romans too. For many, terrified by this horror, fled to the enemy. On learning this, Caesar cursed the contagion of the unhappy land and, raising his hands to heaven, protested thus: “We have come to war indeed, but we are not fighting with men; we are contending against all the madness of monsters and wild beasts, and why do I speak of things with feeling? against all the savagery of rocks. Wild beasts love their young, whom they nourish even in famine; and those that feed on others' bodies abstain from the corpses of beasts like themselves. This is beyond all bitterness: that a mother should devour the limbs she bore. I am clean of this contagion. I absolve myself before you, whatever power you are in heaven. You know, you surely know, that with heartfelt affection I often offered peace, and, what I am not ashamed to say, as victor I entreated; that I wished to spare even the authors of such crimes and portents, to spare the people, to preserve the city. But what could I do with men who resisted, what could I do against men raging against their own? Often, after laying down arms, because they did not cease from the slaughter of their own, I returned to war, to free the besieged, not to destroy them; they themselves from the walls often urged us to fight, so that they might not perish more grievously at the hands of their own. What kind of citizens are these, for whom the enemy is a remedy? I had heard indeed of the unbearable fierceness of this people, who rouse themselves to every insolence by incredible beliefs: that they draw their race from heaven, that there they first put on the form of a body, that they were inhabitants of heaven and came down to cultivate the earth, and from the earth return to heaven; that they crossed the seas with dry feet, that the waves of the sea fled before them, that the streams of the Jordan turned and ran back to their source; that the sun stood still, so that they might conquer their enemies and night not hinder them; that their own were carried up to heaven in fiery chariots, that the powers of heaven fought for them, and in their absence all the forces of the enemy were routed, and victory was won while they slept. I had learned these things, but I thought that they boasted of divine favors toward themselves, not that they stretched their daring so far as to think they could not be conquered even by the Romans. So I recognize that our battle is with men who believe themselves invincible, since they boast themselves survivors of the flood, heirs of rivers, guests of lands, travellers of the sea, climbers of the sky; for whom the wave is a wall, the air a road, heaven a dwelling; to whom flames yield and chains do not hold. For the thirsty a rock is dissolved and pours itself out as drink. For the hungry heaven is opened, food is sent, the camp is filled with the flesh of birds, and man eats the bread of angels. Flowing waters are made firm, bitter things grow sweet, the sun stands still, darkness gives light. Finally, what more can there be, when how can daring be lacking to them? Who, as they say, live when dead and are raised when buried. There is also a common report that these men conspired even against divine things, and their punishment is the proof. Even today the lands burn because of the impiety of their inhabitants; many of them too a gaping of the ground has swallowed. How long then shall we stay in these places, where there is ruin of lands? We have seen even a dead sea; we have seen even the dead growths of the earth, dry ground, empty shadows of green fruits, grace outside, ash inside. Who can doubt that we are among the dead, among whom even the elements die? And indeed among them the very thing that usually lives after death has died, the love of nature, and the religion that survives the dead. For who does not love his parents even when dead? Who does not love the sons he has lost and keep them in the place of his dear ones? Affection remains, even if the dear one has died; the name of nature persists; its grace does not perish. But among these a mother does not recognize her living son, nor hear him calling, nor pity him crying; and for the sake of one hour's accursed food she laid parricidal hands on her child. But why do I reproach this as new, when they count the beginnings of their race from a brother's murder? When of Abraham himself, whom they call father and author of their discipline and founder of their worship, they proclaim his faith above all in this, that he thought he should not spare even his son, and brought him to the altar like a victim, and did not hesitate to offer him as a burnt offering? I do not condemn the devotion, but I look for the love. They say too that another of their people vowed as victor that whatever first met him as he returned home he would sacrifice to his God; and when he returned his daughter met him, and he laid hands on his daughter. And there are many other examples of this kind. What sort of nation is this, which ascribes the killing of a human being to religion and thinks parricide a sacrifice? What God could demand this, or what kind of priest could offer it? Indeed they say that the old one did not do it, as being more prudent, but wished to; that this one, as being more resolute, went through with it. Let these men have their own rites of hardness, among whom it is a discipline to kill sons. Unhappy city, in which there is such a workshop, such a mystery! Let its own ruins cover it, and let them, in their envy, hide its contagion, lest the sun see it, lest the globe of the stars look on it, lest the breaths of the air be stained; that purifying fire too will burn it. We think the banquet of Thyestes a fable; we see the crime, we behold a truth more atrocious than tragedies. There it was the stronger sex and another's offspring; here a woman for whom her own offspring was food. There another's fraud, here her own will. He grieved, she exulted: food worthy of such men, who by stubbornly fighting had brought their women to such a banquet. Indeed I think that, afflicted by such bitterness of evils, they are already mad and have lost their minds, since they do not feel these things. Therefore let us finish the war sooner, because they cannot be corrected; let us press on more urgently, so that we may flee the dying waters and the burning land of these regions.”

With these words he ordered the rams to be brought up to the temple, but the strong blows achieved nothing. Many, however, terrified, even of the leaders of the seditions themselves, fled to Caesar; Titus hesitated to receive them, as men driven by necessity and not following his promise, but good faith tempered his anger. Yet he did not hold the later deserters in the same place as the earlier ones, and he began to press his men more intently, so that all the enemy might leave, struck with fear. But when they saw the walls remain unharmed by the blows of the rams, to their own harm, they nourished their daring. Caesar, forestalling them by ingenuity, ordered the doors covered with silver to be set on fire; when the fire was put to them, the silver melted away, and then little by little the wood too burned; so an entry to the inner portico lay open. But Caesar, out of pity, lest the temple be burned if the porticoes adjoining the inner forecourt caught fire, called the commanders of the army to council, saying that his contest was not with senseless things, nor his war with buildings, which would benefit the victors if they were preserved unburned. The commanders, however, maintained that the strength of the walls and the fortification of the temple would be an incitement to the Jews in the future too, since they delighted in insolence; the roots of rebellion must be dug out completely, lest rashness break out again. Caesar nevertheless put off the discussion of the council to the next day. But the Jews thought they should pour out upon them; the Romans, with shields locked, though fewer, withstood the first attack. Yet the line was wavering under the onrush of an innumerable multitude. Hence Caesar quickly came with the cavalry, easily trampling down those he found, and turned back the enemy column, relying on the fact that part of the forecourts already lay open. He arranged to break in on the enemy the next day with a greater force of his men and to set fire to the temple. That deed would have rescued the city from the fire, had not the perverse mind of the people provoked the enemy's flames against itself. For Caesar ordered the balls of fire to be put out, so that they would not hinder those about to break in. Seeing this, the Jews, while they lay in wait for those who wished to put out the fires of the temple, killed some and inflamed the enemy. One of the Romans, finding a half-burned piece of timber that had fallen from the roof, fed the fire and brought it to the gate called the Golden, because it had doors covered with gold. At once the stiffness of the gold, melted by the flames, laid bare the wood, which, as if with its side uncovered, lay open to the fire. So, with the doors burned, the fire made its way into the inner sanctuaries of the temple. And now the forecourts of its gate were blazing. All who had been defending themselves with the protection of the temple were thrown into confusion and at once trembled; and there was already a certain inclination of minds that that day was fated for the destruction of the temple, because on that very day it had once been burned when the Babylonians attacked, since it was the tenth day of the month of Loos, which they had long counted among the days of ill omen. The fire, rising to the upper parts by the breath of the winds, brought joy to the victors and grief worthy of such a disaster to the vanquished. A shout of everyone also arose, and not long after a messenger made the enemy's destruction plain to Caesar. He, rushing out, ordered with all the voice he could that the fires be put out. But amid the tumult there was neither the opportunity of being heard nor the will to spare, since the Roman soldiers were burning with zeal for vengeance, and Caesar's known clemency took away from his men the fear of disobedience, as nothing would be held against his own when even enemies were pardoned. Yet Titus by nod and hand called back those he could, and ordered some to restrain the soldiers' attacks. But with anger as guide the burning grew; they pressed on the enemy in despair of safety, now prodigal of himself and spending himself freely in dangers. The common crowd above all was struck down wherever it was met, because it was protected by no arms and was fit neither to ward off a wound nor to return one.