Destruction of the City (70)

Destruction of the City (70).

The city, however, was doomed to destruction, partly because of the dissensions among its inhabitants and partly because of the exactions of the Roman procurators. Among the latter was particularly Gessius Florus (66 C.E.), who inflamed the multitude by taking 17 talents out of the treasury of the Temple, and by bringing his soldiers to Jerusalem, where they plundered the upper market-place and robbed many houses; though in the end he was forced to retire again to Cæsarea ("B. J." ii. 14-15). Cestius Gallus tried to retrieve the lost fortunes of Florus: he burned the new city Bezetha, stormed the inner wall, and had commenced to undermine the Temple wall when he was repulsed. Under Vespasian (70) was commenced the great siege of Jerusalem, which lasted from the 14th of Nisan until the 8th of Elul, 134 days. The war party, the parties of Simon and of John of Giscala, the Idu-means, and the peace party rent the city in pieces. Simon held the upper and lower cities; John, the Temple and Ophel; and they did as much destruction from within as the Romans did from without ("B. J." ii. 6, § 1). Vespasian was succeeded by his son Titus, who came with four legions. On the fifteenth day of the siege the wall of Agrippa was taken; on the twentieth and twenty-fourth, the second wall; on the seventy-second, the Antonia; on the eighty-fourth, the daily sacrifice in the Temple was stopped; on the ninety-fifth, the northern cloisters of the Temple were destroyed; on the one hundred and fifth, fire was set to the Temple and the lower city was burned; finally, the greater part of the city went up in flames. The Jews commemorate the Ninth of Ab as the day of the destruction of the Temple, though this seems to have taken place on the 10th of the month (Schürer, "Gesch." i. 530). Josephus says ("B. J." vii. 1, § 1) that orders were given to allow the towers Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne to stand, and "so much of the wall as enclosed the city on the western side," but that all of the remaining walls were leveled, and even their foundations were dug up. How far this is to be taken literally is not clear: recent excavations seem to show that it is only partially true. There is no proof that even the altar of burnt offering in the Temple was left, and that some sacrifices were still offered there; the explicit statement (Ta'an. iv. 6) that on the 17th of Tammuz the daily offering ceased is proof against the notices in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Clement of Rome, and Josephus (see discussion in Schürer, "Gesch." i. 548 et seq.). The suffering in the city must have been terrible. Many of the inhabitants were carried off and sold as slaves in the Roman markets. According to Josephus ("B. J." v. 13, § 7), as many as 115,880 dead bodies were carried out through one gate between the months of Nisan and Tammuz; and even before the siege was ended, 600,000 bodies had been thrown out of the gates. The 10th Roman legion was left in the city, for whosepurposes the towers mentioned were allowed to stand. Bricks marked "leg. X Fret." (i.e., Fretensis) have been found in numbers both in and outside of the city proper. Cæsarea, however, remained the capital of the Roman province (see Church, "The Last Days of Jerusalem," 1903).

The emperor Hadrian attempted to erect a Roman city upon the ruins of Jerusalem, and even to turn the Temple into a place of worship of Jupiter Capitolinus. A stone from the foundation of the statue of the latter, with a Roman inscription, is still to be seen in the southern wall of the Haram (Luncz, "Jerusalem," v. 100). The Jewish legend (Gen. R. lxiv.), mentioned also by Chrysostom, Cedrenus, and Callistus, that the Jews themselves attempted to rebuild the Temple, seems untrustworthy; and the "Chronicon Paschale" says expressly that it was actually rebuilt by Hadrian (Schürer, l.c. i. 564). This may or may not have been the direct cause of the Bar Kokba war (see Jew. Encyc. ii. 508, s.v. Bar Kokba); at any rate, during the Bar Kokba revolt Jerusalem suffered still further. It seems probable that the leader and his insurgents did occupy Jerusalem for a while; his restruck Greco-Roman tetradrachms have as symbol a portico with four columns, evidently representing the Temple (Reinach, "Jewish Coins," p. 51), with the inscription "Of the Freedom of Jerusalem." When the rebellion was put down, in 134, the city was further destroyed (Appian, "Syria," p. 50), and the plow was drawn over the Temple mount by the governor-general Tinnius Rufus (Ta'an. iv. 6; Jerome on Zech. viii. 19). The new city was finally built and was named Ælia Capitolina after Hadrian and Jupiter Capitolinus; heathen colonists were introduced, and the Jews were prohibited from entering—a decree of Hadrian which was in force certainly up to the time of Eusebius, 312 ("Hist. Eccl." iv. 6). After a while the walls were repaired; but the city does not seem to have had the same extent as before. The new wall did not include part of Ophel and Mount Zion, and seems to have stood on the south where the present wall is found. Various public buildings were erected: a temple to Venus in the northern quarter, and a sanctuary to Jupiter on the site of the Temple. Statues to Hadrian and Jupiter were placed on the Temple area. The Antonia was rebuilt, but on a smaller scale, the ground to the north being turned into a covered market-place on which a triumphal arch was erected to Hadrian, part of which is the present so-called "Ecce homo" arch. The above-mentioned edict does not seem to have been strictly observed; for the Bordeaux Pilgrim (333) states that the Jews were allowed to visit annually "the pierced stone," which they anointed, and at which they bewailed their fate ("Palestine Pilgrim Text Soc. Publ." i., v. 22), a fact corroborated by Jerome (on Ezek. i. 15) and by the rabbinical writings (Eccl. R. xi. 1; Cant. R. i. 15; Lam. R. i. 17; Yer. Ber. 13b, above; "LuaH Erez Yisrael," v. 16). Stone ossuaries ("osteophagi") containing bones of both Jews and Jewish Christians and dating from the second to the fourth century have been found in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

(see image) The Hereford Mappa Mundi, 1280, Showing Jerusalem in the Center of the World.

Jerusalem