Judea in Open Revolt Against Rome; Factions Inside Jerusalem Burn Each Other's Grain

Herod had been dead for sixty years. His kingdom had been carved up among his heirs and was now mostly run by Roman governors whom even the emperors could not 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 suspended. That was the official beginning of the revolt. Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, marched down with his legion to restore order. Jewish fighters ambushed him at the narrow pass of Beit Horon — the same pass where Yehoshua once stopped the sun — and destroyed the legion. Its eagle, the sacred standard every legion carries, was captured. It was Rome's worst defeat in the East in a generation. And it made the war inevitable, because Rome does not lose eagles.

Nero sent his most capable general. Vespasian arrived with four legions and began methodically clearing the Galilee, fortress by fortress. Yodfat fell after a forty-seven-day siege. A priest and general named Yosef ben Matityahu — the man history knows as Josephus — surrendered from a cave, defected to the Romans, and spent the rest of his life writing down what he saw. Then Nero died in Rome. Vespasian's own soldiers acclaimed him emperor. He left for the capital to claim the throne, and left his son Titus to finish Judea.

Jerusalem, meanwhile, was destroying itself. The city was packed with Passover pilgrims trapped by the war and refugees from the countryside, and it was controlled by three Jewish factions who spent as much energy killing each other as 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 fit of spite, one faction burned another'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 in range.

One scene from that starvation is preserved in the Talmud. Marta bat Baitos was the richest woman in Jerusalem. She sent her servant to buy fine flour and there was none. Then coarse flour, then barley flour, then barley meal, and by the time he returned with nothing 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 wept when he heard, and applied 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 his students Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua packed him into a coffin, told the guards he had died and had to be buried outside the walls, and carried him out. He climbed out of the coffin at Vespasian's camp and told the general he was about to be emperor. Vespasian was flattered, and then astonished when a messenger from Rome arrived making it true. He granted Rabban Yochanan a wish. Rabban Yochanan — in a request Jews would argue about for two thousand years — asked for 'Yavneh and its sages, the dynasty of Rabban Gamliel, and doctors to heal Rabbi Tzadok.' Yavneh was a small town on the coast where the Sanhedrin could continue after Jerusalem fell. That one grant, made by a general who did not know what he was giving away, is why Torah did not die with the Temple.

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