Jerusalem Burning, AD 70

The Roman general Titus was napping when the news came. His soldiers were inside the walls of the Temple compound in Jerusalem. Rousing himself, Titus rushed to the Temple. After months of frustrated fighting beneath the scorching summer sun he found himself a few feet away from the doors of the Temple building itself.

The outnumbered Jewish rebels had spent the last of their energy defending themselves but could not hold out any longer. The Roman troops slaughtered Jewish soldiers and civilians indiscriminately. It was only the Temple that Titus cared to spare, as he had told his generals the day before.

When Titus saw his soldiers throwing their firebrands towards the Temple he signalled for them to stop, to no avail. Powerless to control his men, Titus pushed his way through the Temple’s gates and entered its inner sanctum. Inside the space that the Jews considered the holiest in the world Titus saw a rock outcropping where they had kept the Ark of the Covenant. But the Ark was gone and there was no statue of their god or treasure there either. Titus left the Temple in time to see one of his soldiers throw a brand into the hinges of its gates. Catching fire, by the end of the day the Temple was gone.

This version of the Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem is told to us by the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, author of The Jewish War. According to Josephus, the Temple had stood for 639 years and 45 days before it was burned down on the tenth day of the Macedonian month of Lous or Av (July or August) in AD 70. It was, supposedly, the same day on which the first Temple, built by King Solomon, had been destroyed by the Babylonians.

Titus and his soldiers had eradicated a building that the Jewish king Herod the Great (r.37-4 BC) had made into one of the world’s largest and most impressive structures. The architectural footprint of the stone platform that Herod had built for the reconstructed ‘Second’ Temple covered 35 acres. When completed it was three times as large as the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Herod had hired 10,000 skilled workers to build the platform and trained 1,000 priests as masons and carpenters to work on the Temple itself. Construction went on past AD 60. Though no admirer of Herod, Josephus claimed that the cost of the project was incalculable, its magnificence unsurpassed.

Josephus stated that it had not been Titus’ intention to destroy the Temple. Other ancient writers disagreed and modern scholars have been sceptical about the veracity of Josephus’ account. After the destruction of the Temple the Romans erected monuments and inscriptions in Rome celebrating the victory of the emperor Vespasian, his son Titus and the greatest of Roman gods, Jupiter Capitolinus, over the Jews. Such celebrations were premature, however. In destroying the Jerusalem Temple, Titus and Vespasian thought they had defeated the god of Israel. They were wrong. 

The Jewish Revolt

The destruction of the Jewish Temple in the summer of 70 was the culmination, though not the conclusion, of the Jewish revolt against Rome. The rebellion broke out in the spring of 66. The local Roman governor, Gessius Florus, had refused to intervene when a member of the local Greek population provocatively sacrificed some birds next to a Jewish synagogue in the harbour city Caesarea, thereby making the synagogue ritually unclean. Florus then travelled to Jerusalem and took the enormous sum of 17 talents of silver from the treasury of the Temple for the sake of ‘imperial service’. He did so because the emperor, Nero, needed funds to rebuild Rome after the great fire of 64 demolished three of the city’s 14 urban districts and damaged seven others.

When some Jews mocked Florus, imitating him by going around Jerusalem with a basket and begging people for spare change for the poor governor, Florus ordered his soldiers to sack the Upper Agora of Jerusalem. They massacred 3,600 Jews, including wealthy members of the Roman equestrian order. Cavalry reinforcements coming from Caesarea then trampled those Jews who came out from the city to greet them as a sign of obedience.

Florus’ actions led the Temple security chief Eleazar and some priests to refuse further gifts from any outsider. Sacrifices on behalf of Caesar and the Roman people had been made by the priests since the reign of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14). The cessation of such sacrifices was a peaceful declaration of independence from Rome, but what followed was not.

First, a group of Jewish rebels attacked the Roman auxiliary garrison stationed in the Antonia Fortress (adjacent to the northwest corner of Temple Mount). They then murdered a unit of Roman soldiers that had surrendered its weapons. In response, during the late summer of 66, the Roman governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, marched down from Antioch with an army of at least 29,400 legionaries and local allies to suppress the revolt. Jewish rebels ambushed Cestius’ army at Beit Horon on the road to Jerusalem and killed 515 of his soldiers. Cestius failed to quell the rebellion in Jerusalem, suffering further casualties – 5,300 infantry and 480 cavalry – during his retreat.

This disastrous intervention led Nero to send the experienced general Vespasian to avenge the defeat. At Ptolemais (now Acre, or Akko, in Israel) Vespasian mustered an army of some 60,000 legionaries and regional allies. During the spring of 67 Vespasian led his army into lower Galilee where all opposition was wiped out. He met sustained resistance only at the hilltop fortress towns of Iotapata in the Galilee and at Gamala (the Camel’s Hump) in the Golan Heights.

The rebels at Iotapata were led by the Jerusalem-appointed general Josephus, then 30 years old. After more than a month’s fighting the Romans broke through Iotapata’s wall and killed its defenders, enslaving women and children. Josephus survived the massacre by hiding in an underground cavern with 40 other Jews. When their hiding place was discovered they organised a ‘lottery’ to determine the order of their deaths. After almost all of those in hiding had killed each other, Josephus and another man opted instead to surrender to the Romans.

Brought before Vespasian, Josephus saved himself by prophesying that Vespasian and his son Titus would become rulers of ‘the land, the sea and all the races of men’. Vespasian spared Josephus and put him to work trying to convince his fellow Jews to surrender. Unsuccessful, Josephus witnessed the Temple’s destruction in 70 and subsequently wrote the most complete account of the revolt.

Taking Jerusalem

After the demolition of Iotapata, Vespasian and his army besieged and captured Gamala in October 67, effectively stamping out all opposition to Rome in what is now northern Israel. Over the next six months Vespasian set about isolating Jerusalem in preparation for the siege of the city. Those plans were interrupted, however, by news of the revolt of Gaius Julius Vindex, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis (southern France) and Nero’s subsequent suicide on 9 June 68. The emperor’s death led to the outbreak of a civil war among aspirants to the Roman throne; 69 became known as the ‘Year of Four Emperors’. Vespasian was one of the candidates, urged on by legionaries in Alexandria and Caesarea.

Vespasian travelled to Rome, leaving his son Titus to capture Jerusalem. The army Titus took to Jerusalem by Passover of 70 numbered at least 48,000 infantrymen and 8,000 cavalry. To keep his men fed and hydrated, Titus had to produce 120,000 pounds of food and almost 100,000 litres of water every day.

To break through Jerusalem’s three defensive walls the Romans built four sets of stone embankments on which they mounted hundreds of artillery pieces and battering rams. The walls were defended by at least 23,400 rebel fighters, including large contingents of Idumaeans, Galilaeans and ‘Zealots’. It took Titus’ soldiers nearly four months to breach Jerusalem’s defences.

After the Temple was captured and destroyed Titus allowed his soldiers to burn the Upper City and massacre its inhabitants. In the aftermath Jewish prisoners of war were sent to work on imperial construction projects and to fight to the death against each other, or against wild animals, in the arenas of the eastern Roman empire. Josephus implausibly reported that 1,100,000 Jews perished during the siege of Jerusalem. More credibly, he wrote that 97,000 were captured. The latter figure is believable as we know that the Romans kept careful records of their captured enemies.

In June 71 Vespasian, now emperor, and Titus celebrated their triumph over the Jews in Rome. Treasures looted from the Temple, including a golden table, a seven-branched menorah and a copy of the law (the Hebrew Bible) were carried through the streets of Rome. At the end of the triumphal procession Simon bar Giora, the most effective rebel leader, was strangled in the carcer, an underground cell carved into the rock on the northeastern slope of the Capitoline Hill. Sacrifices were then made to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Yet, even as the Romans celebrated victory, the Jewish resistance continued. For another three or four years some 960 Jews lived on top of the fortress mesa of Masada, where Herod had previously built palaces, above the western shore of the Dead Sea beyond Roman rule. Masada was finally taken by the Romans in either 73 or 74, but not before its inhabitants killed each other rather than surrender.

Titus on trial

Ever since the destruction of the Temple there have been arguments over whether Titus intended to destroy it. Josephus reported that Titus tried to order his soldiers to put out the fire they had started. That report is consistent with what Josephus tells his readers about the outcome of the meeting that Titus had with his generals the day before the Temple was burned. There, Josephus claims, after listening to various recommendations Titus decided that the Temple should not be destroyed.

Later writers questioned Josephus’ version of events. Writing in the third century, the Graeco-Roman historian Cassius Dio reported that, after the Jewish defenders of the Temple unintentionally burned down the barrier around the Temple precinct, the Roman soldiers nevertheless held back because of superstition. Titus, Dio writes, urged them on and the defenders kept fighting (within the Temple) until it was set on fire. The implication is that Titus either did not care if the Romans destroyed the Temple or explicitly sought its destruction. 

Later Christian historians were more certain. Sulpicius Severus (c.363-425) claimed that Titus intended the Temple to be destroyed without delay so that the religion of the Jews and the Christians should be completely eradicated. Orosius made a similar claim around 418 in his History Against the Pagans, asserting that Titus burned the Temple after it was captured, having had a chance to think about it and admire it first. He decided to do it because the Christian church was spreading all over the world and so it was the will of God that the useless Temple be destroyed.

A close reading of Sulpicius’ account of Titus authorising the destruction of the Temple reveals, however, that it is based upon a tendentious rewriting of Josephus’ version of Titus’ meeting with his officers and not, as some modern historians have argued, upon a lost passage from Tacitus. The accounts written by Sulpicius and Orosius are important for what they reveal about later Christian interpretations of the Temple’s destruction. But they do not help us understand how and why the Temple was destroyed, or who bears responsibility for it. To understand the reality of the events which led to the Temple’s destruction we need to consider the issue of command and control within the Roman army in Jerusalem in the summer of 70.

Guilty

Titus had four months in Jerusalem to consider what he would do with the Temple, just as Alexander the Great had four months to think about what he would do with the Persian royal palaces at Persepolis before he let his soldiers burn them in April 330 BC. Titus’ inability to restrain his soldiers does not absolve him of responsibility for what happened. Their rage and indiscipline after months of fighting in the city under difficult conditions were easily foreseeable. A stronger and more effective commander would have issued stricter rules of engagement and ensured their enforcement. The destruction of the Temple took place on Titus’ watch; as commander of the Roman soldiers who set the Temple on fire, he bore ultimate responsibility for its destruction.

That failure should have resulted in his removal from his position. Instead his superior – his father, Vespasian – and the Roman Senate decided that Titus merited a triumph. The desecration of the Temple, along with the capture and devastation of Jerusalem, became one of the prevailing themes of the Flavian dynasty’s propaganda. Vespasian did not come from a renowned Roman family; his reputation was based on his military prowess and he needed a justification for his seizure of power. His and Titus’ victory over the rebellious Jews suited his needs and the Flavians were sure to remind Romans of their victory at key locations across the imperial city.

The most famous symbol of the Flavian triumph was the Arch of Titus, built on top of the Velian Hill at the southeast entrance of the Roman Forum. Though probably planned as a triumphal arch dedicated to Titus by the Senate and Roman people, it may have been fully elaborated later as a commemorative arch in memory of Titus by his brother Domitian after Titus’ death in 81. 

On its southern side, the arch’s panels show Titus and Roman soldiers, preceded by a bound captive, about to pass through a decorated arch following their victory over the Jews. Their prisoner must be a Jew captured during the revolt. The Romans carry spoils taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, including a table of shewbread with cups and receptacles of different sizes standing on it, perhaps to be used for offerings or libations, as well as two (perhaps) silver Roman tuba trumpets and a specimen or example of the gold candelabrum. Some of the objects shown (the offering table, the menorah, the tubas) are representations of real objects carried in Vespasian and Titus’ triumph in 71. Vespasian later displayed some of the treasures from the Temple in his own Temple of Peace. Perhaps a sense of irony was not one of the emperor’s strengths.

The treasures shown on the Arch of Titus imply that Titus and his family did not regret the looting of the Temple, nor its destruction. Two inscriptions from the city of Rome, less well known than the arch, make perfectly clear that Titus and the Flavians were proud of their victory over the Jews.

The first is a Flavian-era inscription on the lintel stone above the southern entrance to the Colosseum, or Flavian Amphitheatre, dedicated originally by Vespasian, but later re-dedicated in Titus’ name, stating that the amphitheatre had been paid for from the spoils of the war. The Colosseum, Italy’s most visited tourist attraction, was thus publicly presented as a memorial to the Flavian victory over the Jews. It is likely that some of the spoils that subsidised its building came from the Temple treasury.

The second is a now lost inscription from the Circus Maximus, which made it plain that Titus felt no remorse about what happened to the Jerusalem Temple. By early 81 the Senate had dedicated a triple-bay arch to Titus on the Circus Maximus’ southeastern side. Its dedicatory inscription read:

The Senate and People of Rome to Imp[erator] Titus Caesar Vespasianus, son of the Deified Vespasianus, pontifex maximus, with tribunicia potestas for the tenth time, [hailed as] Imp[erator] for the seventeenth time, consul for the eighth time, their princeps, because on the instructions and advice of his father, and under his auspices, he subdued the race of the Jews, and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, which by all generals, kings, or races previous to himself had either been attacked in vain or not even attempted at all.

The last three claims were not true. Titus had not subdued the Jewish people (only some of them); he had not destroyed Jerusalem (only part of it); and Jerusalem had been captured at least five times before Titus had done so, as Josephus informs his readers.

Though making at best exaggerated claims, the inscription nevertheless contradicted Josephus’ account of Titus’ actions, in which Titus struggled to prevent the destruction of Jerusalem. The Roman Senate and people who authorised the inscription apparently did not agree with Josephus’ attempt to relieve Titus of responsibility.

The wall of words 

When Titus destroyed the Temple of the Jews in 70 he brought to an end the sacrificial cult that had been practised in Jerusalem since the time of Solomon. As the inscription on Circus Maximus makes clear, Titus and Vespasian thought that, on behalf of Jupiter Capitolinus, they had defeated the god of Israel. But they, and later Romans, were in for a surprise.

After the destruction of the Temple, Jews turned to the words of their god. Under the spiritual and intellectual leadership of Johanan ben Zakkai – who had himself escaped from Jerusalem during the siege of the city – a reformulation of Judaism was begun in the town of Iamnia (modern Yavneh), once the property of Herod’s sister, Salome, and the first Roman empress, Livia Drusilla. The interpretation of Judaism espoused by Johanan ben Zakkai and his followers, which included the replacement of animal sacrifice with prayer, eventually became the most widely practised form of the religion. Rabbinic Judaism, which allowed the Oral Torah to be written down, is among the lasting legacies of his school at Yavneh. 

Almost 2,000 years later 4.1 billion Jews, Christians and Muslims still read the words of Israel’s god. God’s wall of words has successfully withstood all sieges. In the beginning, and until now, was the word.

Guy MacLean Rogers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Classical Studies at Wellesley College and the author of For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE (Yale University Press, 2022).