Roman Governor Ploughs the Temple Mount; Rabbi Akiva Laughs at a Fox

Beitar had fallen only days earlier. Hadrian was not satisfied with breaking the revolt. He set out to break the memory of Judea.

His governor, Tinneius Rufus — the Sages call him Turnus Rufus ha-Rasha, 'the Wicked' — brought a team of oxen up onto the platform where the Temple had stood and dragged a plough across the site of the Sanctuary and across the streets of the ruined city. The Sages number this ploughing as the fifth calamity of the ninth of Av that the Mishnah lists on this date: the spies, the two Temples, Beitar, and this.

The Talmud preserves a story of four sages walking together shortly after. They came up to the Temple Mount and saw what Rufus had done. A fox came out of the place where the Holy of Holies had been and trotted across the ploughed ground. Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Yehoshua began to weep. Rabbi Akiva laughed. They turned on him. 'Akiva, how can you laugh?' He answered: it is precisely because I saw the fox that I am laughing. The prophet Michah said, 'Foxes will walk on Mount Zion.' The prophet Zechariah said, 'Old men and old women will yet sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with a staff for old age.' Now I have seen the first prophecy fulfilled with my own eyes, right down to the fox. So I know the second will be fulfilled just as exactly. They said, 'Akiva, you have comforted us. Akiva, you have comforted us.'

Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman city. He renamed it Aelia Capitolina — Aelia for his own family, Capitolina for Jupiter. A statue of Hadrian on horseback was set where the Ark had stood. On his maps he crossed out the name Judea and wrote in Syria Palaestina, after the ancient Philistine enemies of Israel, trying to cut the name of the people from the name of the land. Jews were forbidden, on pain of death, from entering the city. The ban was relaxed one day a year — the ninth of Av — when they were allowed to come up to the ruins to weep. The rule held for centuries.

Everything had been taken. Sanctuary. Army. King. City. And now the very name of the land. The exile that began here would last, in its outward form, until the twentieth century — and in its inner sense, the tradition teaches, until the mourning of these days is turned to joy.