Beitar Falls on the Ninth of Av; Bar Kokhba Dead, the Judean Countryside Emptied

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 one of the great sages of the age, and the Talmud teaches that as long as his mouth was moving in prayer, the Romans could not breach.

The scale of the wider war is preserved by the Roman historian Cassius Dio. 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 others 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 fabricated story. He claimed he had seen Rabbi Elazar whispering to a Roman officer, secretly arranging a surrender. It was a lie, told in front of witnesses. Bar Kokhba, already exhausted and suspicious, summoned his uncle. 'What were you doing with a Roman?' 'Nothing,' the old man said. 'I was praying.' Bar Kokhba kicked him. Rabbi Elazar 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 shall wither and your own eye shall go dark.' The walls cracked that same day. It was the ninth of Av. Bar Kokhba was killed. One tradition, told gently by the Sages, records that his body was found afterward with a snake wound around his throat, so that no Roman could claim to have killed the man Rabbi Akiva had called messiah.

What the Romans did next is preserved in the Talmud in a single terrible image. So many died inside Beitar that Roman horses sank in blood up to their nostrils, and boulders were carried 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 subsequent emperor finally permitted burial, the corpses 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 gathered in.

Rabbi Akiva himself was arrested afterward for teaching Torah in defiance of the ban. He was tortured to death in the amphitheater at Caesarea, his flesh torn with iron combs. His students stood by, weeping. He was saying the morning Shema as the combs did their work. 'Rebbe,' they asked, 'even now?' He answered: 'All my life I have wondered when I would get the chance to fulfill the verse — to love God even when He takes your soul. Now the chance has come.' He drew out the word Echad — One — and died on it.

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