God's Gold (16 page)

By the time Titus was ready to strike, Jerusalem badly needed a respite. Families were bitterly divided by factional infighting, father pitted against son. But with morale at an all-time low, the exhausted Jewish armies were about to receive a rude awakening.

The battle for Jerusalem was among the bloodiest in recorded history. The Jewish revolutionaries proved immensely stubborn, refusing honorable surrender and Rome's hand of peace. More crucially, the eyes of the world were focused on the Holy City. Vespasian may have been dispatched to Israel with a hard-man reputation and a track record for bringing troublesome provinces to heel, but by the time the siege of Jerusalem started he was emperor of the entire Roman Empire. Priorities had changed. Vespasian was back home in Rome sweet-talking the Senate and putting the imperial house in order after years of abuse under Nero. Titus alone was left to mop up Jerusalem.

The Flavian dynasty now on the throne had been elevated to power by nothing other than diligence. Farmers by background, Vespasian's ancestors had little military pedigree and no aristocratic history. So the new emperor desperately needed a foundation myth to solidify his claim to fame. And Israel, with the huge prize of Jerusalem and the Temple of the Jews, was the perfect opportunity for a propaganda coup. Time and circumstance had dealt the Jews an unlucky hand of cards. With a shattering victory essential, Titus marched out of the coastal port of Caesarea with four legionary forces, bolstered by Syrian auxiliaries familiar
with the local terrain. The sight of the greatest force ever assembled in ancient Israel must have been terrifying.

In theory, the logistics for taking Jerusalem were a nightmare. The city was protected by three walls and built on two hills divided by a valley. Even if you managed to punch a hole through these fortifications, the Antonia Tower mocked invaders—the brainchild of King Herod to protect the Temple and his own palace complex. The tower was impenetrable, perched 82 feet up a rocky precipice and built of seamless, polished stone to complicate assault. Four towers protected the fort's corners, one soaring 115 feet high into the heavens.

Poorly led and disenchanted, however, the divided Jews were unprepared for a long siege. Once again, Titus could rely on Josephus's inside information about city planning to draw up battle lines. Since offering his military and geographic knowledge to Vespasian after being captured during the battle for Jotapata in the Galilee in July AD 67, the former Jewish commander had proved invaluable to his new masters. Rome's engines of war—enormous platforms equipped with battering rams, catapults, and archer emplacements—were instruments of pure fear. Some eighty-two feet high and iron-plated, they went about their mischief, pounding walls with a tortuous thud day in, day out. The first city wall fell after fifteen days, the second wall only five days later.

With the military operation proceeding to plan, Titus started the psychological war. His soldiers caught, whipped, and crucified up to 500 Jews a day. From rage and spite, Roman soldiers amused themselves by nailing the prisoners in different positions until so many bodies lined the approach to the old city that wood for crosses ran out. Next Titus ordered the hands of prisoners to be cut off and sent to John of Gischala and Simon ben Giora, now united in fighting Rome. These brutal measures had one main objective: to scare the city into surrender.

Once the outer walls were leveled, only the Antonia Tower stood between Rome and the ultimate goal, the Temple, the beating heart of Israel and Judaism. Four mighty earthen siege ramps were built against the tower to bring the machines of war to close quarters. Jewish forces retaliated by undermining these banks and smearing timbers with inflam
mable pitch and bitumen, thus burning down the siege ramps that had taken the Roman engineers seventeen days to complete. For the first time, the Roman troops were downcast. The tower would not yield, so Titus changed tactics and decided to play the waiting game. If he couldn't get into Jerusalem, the Jews would not get out. He started building a new city wall guarded by thirteen towers. The townsfolk were now prisoners in their own city.

Inside Jerusalem, daily survival was a battle. Even at the start of the siege rations of corn had been worryingly low. Josephus tells us that the Roman army scorched Israel's wheat fields, and the Jews did themselves no favors by setting fire to Jerusalem's grain reserves during factional infighting. The grip of Rome intensified and famine incited grim tragedies of survival. The Jewish revolutionaries tortured the lower classes into revealing their secret stashes of food, while mothers snatched morsels from the mouths of their own babies. Old men were dragged through the streets, and fellow citizens stabbed them with sharp stakes until they revealed the location of any food they may have concealed. Josephus condemned this behavior particularly strongly, concluding:

If Josephus was reporting fact—and both historical and archaeological evidence exists to back up his testimony—then the actions of the rebel mob during the siege of Jerusalem marked a terrible descent into barbarity. The city turned into an endless “kind of deadly night.” Multistoried houses became charnel houses for the dead. The distress of the famine turned the town crazy. Some Jews staggered through the streets like mad dogs in search of sustenance. Others searched the sewers and dunghills for scraps of food, gratefully chewing even a blade of grass
like cattle. When even these scraps ran dry, the famished city turned on belts, shoes, and leather.

Even this desperation seemed tame compared to one particular atrocity, whose notoriety resonated across the entire Roman Empire. Mary, the daughter of Eleazar from the village of Bethezuba, fled into Jerusalem from her rustic villa as the wrath of Rome swept south. Because she was renowned for her good family and fortune, the Jewish rebels lost no time plundering her home and raiding her kitchen every day, almost as if in sport. Rather than kill her, her tormentors preferred to toy with her by demanding daily meals. When stocks were exhausted, she committed the ultimate sin. Believing that “famine is forestalling slavery, and more cruel than both are the rebels,” she slew her infant son and roasted his body (
JW
6.202–213).

After eating half she saved the remainder for the rebels, who were paralyzed with horror at the evil they had inspired. Soon the city was abuzz with the latest tale of urban atrocity. Titus was appalled to learn of this cannibalism. There and then he swore to bury this accursed memory beneath the ruins of the country “and would not leave upon the face of the earth, for the sun to behold, a city in which mothers were thus fed” (
JW
6.217). Such was the psychological reality of the war raging in battleground Jerusalem in AD 70.

The city was hell on earth, and with so many terrible actions tearing apart the fabric of society it was hardly surprising that Jewish revolutionaries lost their focus on occasions. At one such moment of vulnerability, twelve Roman soldiers, a trumpeter, and a standard-bearer from the Fifth Legion crept into the Antonia Tower and cut the throats of the Jewish guards.

Titus lost no time smashing through the tower's earthen defensive banks to dig a passage for the Roman army to reach the very edge of the Temple. Once again, the Romans attacked the Temple guards by night. Four siege ramps were thrown up over the corners, gates, and cloisters. From here, the capture of Jerusalem literally hinged on the lighting of a match. Titus and his generals chose to smoke out the Jews: the Temple gates were far too heavy to succumb to Rome's battering
rams. Swords drawn, the soldiers waited to pounce while silver door plating melted around their sandals.

Josephus dated the final assault on the Temple of Jerusalem to August 30, traditionally the day when Solomon's Temple was burned to the ground by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The implication is that the end was fated: a Roman soldier, without orders, “but moved by some supernatural impulse,” according to Josephus, flung a burning timber through a low golden doorway leading to the northern side of the sanctuary. The Temple blazed, the Roman troops enthusiastically plundered its treasury, and the Jewish army was decimated. All the priests could do was tear golden spikes off the sanctuary wall and hurl them in desperation at the Romans. The air was thick with the war cries of legions, the howls of the rebels, and the shrieks of the dying. Finally, the people of Jerusalem were all reduced to the same class and status. As Josephus confirmed, “No pity was shown for age, no reverence for rank; children and graybeards, laity and priests alike were massacred” (
JW
6.271).

The Temple, spiritual heart of Judaism, was lost. The Romans carried their standards into its court and offered sacrifices; Titus then gave his troops permission to burn and sack the city. The Archives building went up in smoke and with it hundreds of years of Jewish history. A similar fate befell the council-chamber and the palace of Queen Helena, a Jewish convert and ruler of the kingdom of Adiabene in Mesopotamia.

Finally, the Jewish forces deserted the impregnable Acra Fortress in the Upper City of Jerusalem and its huge towers, Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamme, whose walls were so thick that they were capable of defying every engine of war known to man. On September 26, AD 70, Titus was master of all Jerusalem and raised Rome's standards along the towers. From this lofty height, the belly of Jerusalem was exposed beneath him. The strength of the towers, the size of their masonry, and the accuracy of their seams amazed Titus. While he gladly burned the rest of Jerusalem to a crisp, the Roman warlord left the Acra towers standing as a symbol of Rome's omnipotence.

The 140-day siege of Jerusalem changed the religious world order forever by destroying ancient Judaism centered on animal sacrifice, and by setting the stage for the rise of Christianity. By feeding the fires of sedition and civil war, Israel fell on its own sword. Upper-class avarice and arrogance brought a tidal wave of death and destruction to the land. Between 600,000 and 1.1 million Jews are said by Tacitus and Josephus to have been killed during the fighting. Another 17,000 were dispatched to a life of hard labor in Egypt's mines and a further 700 shipped to Rome as stage props for the triumph of Vespasian and Titus and a grim end in the amphitheater.

Rome's razing of Jerusalem was meticulous. Gone were the Temple, religious sacrifice, and homeland. The legend of the wandering Jew was born, and the stereotype of this people as social scapegoats would endure until the United Nations voted to recognize Palestine as the State of Israel in 1948. Early Christianity, the son of Judaism, was also flushed out of the land, relocating to the banks of the Tiber in Italy, where it would establish deep roots to become a global religion. Without the fall of Jerusalem, Christianity would never have been free to soar to such lofty heights.

In late April 2005, I stared across Jerusalem from the top of the Acra Fortress in the Upper City, today misleadingly called the Tower of David. Of its original three towers, only Phasael still stands. This beacon is the only major ancient landmark to survive the events of AD 70. Tracing
the excavated outline of the first-century AD Jewish city, my eye took in a dense cluster of stone ballista catapult balls abandoned in the fortress corner. The landscape and atmosphere of AD 70, however, is long gone.

Jerusalem has been intensively explored since the nineteenth century, from Edward Robinson's discovery of an arched pier at the southern tip of the western Herodian Temple wall to Professor Nachman Avigad's excavations of the Jewish Quarter from 1969 to 1983. All this fieldwork has exposed one clear truth: Titus really did impose a scorched-earth policy on Jerusalem, devastating the old city with fire. Today almost nothing survives from Herod's Temple Mount.

From the summit of the Acra Fortress I surveyed the same battle lines Titus had examined in September of AD 70. From here Titus gave the order to raze the city to its bones. The rectangular boxlike girdle that surrounded the Temple Mount in the first century AD still dominates Jerusalem, but within these walls not one piece of masonry survives from the Second Temple. I turned toward Robinson's Arch and the street it used to span, a main thoroughfare once abuzz with markets, shops, and screaming urchins. The original paving slabs of the street have been uncovered and above them the silent witness of Titus's resolve: three-ton blocks of white stone thrown down from the Mount by Roman engineers systematically dismantling the hulking exterior of the Temple. These stones are taller than men and offer a hint of the Temple's former monumental splendor.

Beyond Robinson's Arch, along the outer edge of the southern perimeter of the Temple wall, Professor Benjamin Mazar exposed the main staircase entrance sweeping up toward the Huldah Gates, still visible today as ghostly blocked doorways with semicircular arches. A series of first-century AD
mikvaot
reminds us where Jews were obliged to purify their bodies before approaching God's Temple. Although immaculately landscaped today, a collage of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monuments, the bustle of life two thousand years ago is sadly long gone.

From my vantage point I enjoyed a perfect spring day. A light breeze licked the flag of Israel planted on top of David's Tower, fluttering across the city. Israeli schoolchildren ran along the fortress walls. It was
time to leave Israel, but one question still disturbed me: Why did Titus go to such lengths to put Jerusalem to the torch?

In general, Rome didn't believe in the wholesale erasure of foreign civilizations. Using a friendly local king, they preferred to crucify and enslave a few leaders, but to leave the infrastructure of the state intact to serve the long-term interests of the empire. Josephus ascribed the destruction of the Temple to an appalling mistake by an ill-disciplined, overeager soldier. Resting in his tent at this time, Titus is said to have sprinted to the Temple in anger when word reached him that it was alight. Among the din of clashing swords and burning timbers, the soldiers pretended not to hear his order to extinguish the flames, but continued slinging firebrands. Liberalius, the centurion of Titus's bodyguard of lancers, was even allegedly ordered to restrain his men with clubs. Jerusalem in summer was a tinderbox and the fire was uncontrollable. While Titus was trying to restrain the forces, a soldier shoved a firebrand into the Temple gate hinge. “Thus, against Caesar's wishes, was the temple set on fire,” concluded Josephus.

Rome had nothing to gain by decapitating Israel. The land was diverse and immensely fertile, rich in wheat, olives, and grapes. The Sea of Galilee yielded exquisite fish and the Dead Sea lands all manner of luxury produce, such as dates, balsam, and bitumen. By restoring order, Rome could encourage specialized production and get a massive slice of the pie. Taxation greased the wheels of society and was the foundation of domestic and foreign policy. So why burn Israel to a crisp?

On no less than five occasions during the siege, Titus allegedly called a halt to the clash of steel to offer Jerusalem's Jewish leaders the hand of peace. At one stage even Josephus reminded the revolutionaries about the futility of resistance against an invincible force, stressing that the legacy of Judaism stretching back to the Exodus from Egypt was now in jeopardy. Quoting common Roman policy, Josephus reminded his people that “the Romans are but demanding the customary tribute…. Once they obtain this, they neither sack the city, nor touch the holy things, but grant you everything else, the freedom of your families, the enjoyment of your possessions, and the protection of your sacred laws” (
JW
5.405–406).

During a conference of war with Titus's six generals, many Roman commanders passionately argued that by being used as a base for warfare, the Temple was technically a fortress and could thus be legally attacked. Despite these logical appeals, again we are told that Titus refused to “wreak vengeance on inanimate objects instead of men, nor under any circumstances burn down so magnificent a work” (
JW
6.241). Finally, even a frustrated Titus beseeched the Jews to surrender, promising them life and liberty. The reply was a resounding no. Something inside Titus cracked.

The image of Titus as a sympathetic commander cornered into action has filtered down the centuries. Once the Temple was razed, the emperor's son was solemn rather than relieved:

If the destruction of the Jewish Temple, one of the wonders of classical antiquity, brought Titus no pleasure, how did he feel about the treasure inside? The fledgling Flavian dynasty's attitude to this prospect would prove to be a completely different matter.