WAR & DESTRUCTION · Lead Dispatch
Titus Cuts the Curtain and the Gold Runs Down Between the Stones
On the very same day the First Temple fell, the Second Temple falls. A burning stick flies through a window of the Sanctuary. The gold plating melts and runs down between the stones. The Roman general walks into the holiest room with a sword. Outside, there are so many dead bodies there are no more crosses left, and no more space for the crosses.
JERUSALEM · 9 Av, 3830 (70 CE) · about 1,960 years ago · By Our Correspondent in the Besieged City
Four Roman legions were dug in around Jerusalem. Titus had built an earth wall all the way around the city in three days to catch anyone trying to sneak out. Anyone caught was crucified where the defenders on the wall could see it. Josephus writes that at the worst of it, his soldiers were crucifying up to five hundred people a day, and they eventually ran out of room for crosses and out of crosses for the bodies.
Inside the walls, starvation had gone past hunger into places human beings are not supposed to go. Josephus records — plainly, in the middle of a paragraph, like a shopping list — a woman named Miriam bat Boetos, once wealthy, driven mad by hunger, who killed and ate her own baby. Rebel soldiers smelled the cooking and broke into her house demanding a share. She uncovered what was left. They ran. When the story reached the Roman camp, even Titus's hardened soldiers cried.
On the seventeenth of Tammuz, exactly as had happened at the First Temple, the daily offering stopped because there was no sheep. The Roman fortress just north of the Temple fell. Then the outer courts. On the ninth of Av — the exact anniversary of the Babylonian fire — Roman soldiers broke through the last defenses of the Sanctuary itself. A soldier, apparently against Titus's own orders, threw a burning stick through a window of the Sanctuary. Within an hour the whole thing was in flames.