The Blood of Beitar Reaches the Sea

Beitar was a fortress town on a ridge in the Judean hills, southwest of Jerusalem. Refugees had been crowding into it for years — the last of the fighters, the last of the countryside. Rabbi Elazar ha-Moda'i, Bar Kokhba's uncle, was inside the walls. He was a great sage, and the Talmud says as long as his mouth was moving in prayer, the Romans could not break through.

Cassius Dio, writing later in Rome, gives the numbers for the whole war. Fifty of the strongest Jewish fortresses had been destroyed. Nine hundred and eighty-five villages wiped out. Five hundred and eighty thousand Jewish fighters killed. Countless more dead from starvation and disease. Judea, Dio writes, was left almost empty. The Yerushalmi says the siege of Beitar alone lasted fifty-two months — one for each week of the year.

The end came from inside. A Samaritan slipped out of Beitar to the Roman camp with a story. He said he had seen Rabbi Elazar whispering to a Roman officer, secretly arranging a surrender. It was a lie. But he told it to Bar Kokhba in front of witnesses. Bar Kokhba was already exhausted and suspicious. He sent for his uncle. 'What were you doing with a Roman?' 'Nothing,' said Rabbi Elazar. 'I was praying.' Bar Kokhba kicked him. The old man fell and did not get up.

A voice from heaven, the Talmud says, went out at that moment: 'You have broken the arm of Israel and blinded its right eye — therefore your own arm will wither and your own eye will go dark.' The walls cracked that same day. It was the ninth of Av. Bar Kokhba was killed. One tradition — the Sages tell it gently — says his body was found afterward with a snake wrapped around his throat, so that no Roman could claim to have killed the man Rabbi Akiva had called messiah.

The Talmud describes what the Romans did next. So many were killed inside Beitar that Roman horses sank in blood up to their nostrils. Boulders were rolled by that blood four miles down the ravine to the sea, and the sea turned red.

Hadrian would not allow the dead to be buried. The bodies of the defenders were left on the field as a warning. Years later, when a new emperor finally allowed burial, the bodies were found — the Talmud records the miracle — still whole, undecomposed. The Sages added a fourth blessing to Birkat ha-Mazon, ha-Tov ve-ha-Metiv, on the day the dead of Beitar were finally allowed to be gathered.

Rabbi Akiva himself was arrested afterward for teaching Torah in public against the ban. The Romans tortured him to death in the amphitheater at Caesarea, tearing his flesh with iron combs. His students were with him. He was saying the morning Shema as they cut. His students, crying, asked, 'Rebbe, even now?' He said, 'All my life I have wondered when I would get the chance to fulfill the verse — to love Hashem even when He takes your soul. Now the chance has come.' He stretched out the word 'Echad' — One — and died on it.

Bar Kokhba was the last Jewish attempt at real sovereignty in the Land for eighteen hundred years. What Hadrian did with the empty ground after the war is the next dispatch.