Three Groups Set Fire to Their Own Food

Herod had been dead for sixty years. His kingdom had been chopped up among his sons and was now mostly run by Roman governors even the emperors couldn't stand. The last of them, Gessius Florus, walked into the Temple treasury one afternoon and helped himself to money in broad daylight, in front of witnesses.

In the Temple, a young priest named Elazar ben Chananyah announced that the daily sacrifice offered for the emperor was over. That was the official start of the revolt. Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, marched down from the north with his legion to put things back in order. Jewish fighters ambushed him at the narrow pass of Beit Horon (the same pass where Yehoshua once stopped the sun). The Roman legion was crushed. Its eagle — the sacred symbol every legion carries — was captured. It was the biggest defeat Rome had suffered in the East in a generation. And it made the war unavoidable, because Rome does not lose eagles.

Nero sent his best general. Vespasian showed up with four legions and began methodically working through the Galilee, fortress by fortress. Yodfat fell after a forty-seven-day siege. A priest and general named Yosef ben Matityahu — the man we know as Josephus — surrendered from a cave, went over to the Romans, and spent the rest of his life writing down what he had seen. In the middle of everything, Nero died in Rome. Vespasian's own soldiers named him emperor. He went home to claim the throne and left his son Titus to finish Judea.

Jerusalem, meanwhile, was destroying itself. It was packed with Pesach pilgrims stuck by the war and refugees from the countryside, and it was controlled by three Jewish groups who spent as much energy killing each other as they spent fighting Rome. The Zealots under Elazar ben Shimon held the inner Temple courtyard. Yochanan of Gush Chalav held the outer courtyard. Shimon bar Giora held the Upper City. In a moment of spite, one group burned another group's warehouses. When the fires stopped, the huge grain reserves of Jerusalem — enough, Josephus writes, to feed the city for years of siege — were gone. Starvation set in months before the Roman battering rams were even in range.

The Talmud remembers one scene from that starvation. Marta bat Baitos was the richest woman in Jerusalem. She sent her servant to buy fine flour and there was none. She sent for coarse flour and there was none. Then barley flour, then barley meal, and by the time he got back she had gone out to look herself. She walked into the market barefoot. A piece of animal filth stuck to her foot, and the shock killed her on the spot. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, hearing about it, cried and said the verse: 'The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not set her foot on the ground.'

That same Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was inside the city, watching. He could see that the Zealots would kill anyone who tried to make peace with Rome, and that the war could only end one way. So he had his students Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua pack him into a coffin. 'He's dying,' they told the guards. 'He has to be buried outside the city.' They carried him out. He climbed out of the coffin at Vespasian's camp and told him he was going to be emperor. Vespasian was flattered, and then astonished when a messenger from Rome arrived making it true. He offered Rabban Yochanan a wish. Rabban Yochanan asked — famously, and generations of Jews will argue about whether he asked for the right thing — for 'Yavneh and its sages, the family of Rabban Gamliel, and doctors to heal Rabbi Tzadok.' Yavneh was a small town on the coast where the Sanhedrin could keep going after Jerusalem fell. That one request, granted that day by a general who didn't know what he was giving away, is why Torah did not die with the Temple.

The Sanhedrin was already quietly moving to the coast. Starvation was closing in inside Jerusalem. And outside, Titus was calmly building siege ramps.