WAR & DESTRUCTION · Lead Dispatch
Second Temple Destroyed by Rome on the Anniversary of the Babylonian Fire
On the same day the First Temple fell, the Second Temple fell too. A soldier hurled a burning brand through a window of the Sanctuary. The gold plating melted and ran down between the stones. Titus walked into the innermost room with a sword. Outside, the crucifixions had run out of both wood and space.
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 ringed the city with an earthwork in three days to catch anyone slipping out. Anyone caught was crucified where the defenders on the wall could see it. At the worst of it, Josephus reports, his soldiers were crucifying up to five hundred people a day, until they ran out of room for crosses and out of crosses for the bodies.
Inside the walls, starvation had passed the point human beings are meant to survive. Josephus records — plainly, in the middle of a paragraph — a woman named Miriam bat Boetos, once wealthy, driven mad by hunger, who killed and cooked her own infant. Rebel soldiers smelled the food and broke into her house demanding a share. She uncovered what was left. They fled. When the story reached the Roman camp, Titus's own hardened soldiers wept.
On the seventeenth of Tammuz, as had happened at the First Temple, the daily offering stopped because there was no sheep. The Roman fortress north of the Temple fell soon after. 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. A soldier, apparently against Titus's own orders, hurled a burning brand through a window of the Sanctuary. Within an hour the entire building was in flames.