The Wicked Rufus Drives a Plough Across the Temple Mount

Beitar had fallen only days before. Hadrian was not satisfied with just breaking the revolt. He wanted 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 place of the Sanctuary and across the streets of the ruined city. The Sages count 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.

There is a story in the Talmud about four sages walking together right after this happened. 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 cry. Rabbi Akiva laughed. They spun on him. 'Akiva, how can you laugh?' He said: it is exactly because I saw the fox that I am laughing. The prophet said, 'Foxes will walk on Mount Zion.' The same prophet also 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 come true with my own eyes, right down to the fox. So I know the second one will come true just as exactly. They said to him, '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 the god Jupiter. A statue of Hadrian on horseback was set where the Aron 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 away from the name of the land. Jews were forbidden, on pain of death, to enter the city. The ban was relaxed only one day a year — the ninth of Av — when they were allowed to come up to the ruins and cry. That rule held for centuries.

Everything had been taken. Sanctuary. Army. King. City. And now the very name of the land. The exile that begins here will last, in the outward sense, until the twentieth century — and in the inward sense, until the mourning of these days is turned to joy.