Titus Cuts the Curtain and the Gold Runs Down Between the Stones

Four Roman legions were dug in around Jerusalem. Titus had built an earth wall all the way around the city in three days to catch anyone trying to sneak out. Anyone caught was crucified where the defenders on the wall could see it. Josephus writes that at the worst of it, his soldiers were crucifying up to five hundred people a day, and they eventually ran out of room for crosses and out of crosses for the bodies.

Inside the walls, starvation had gone past hunger into places human beings are not supposed to go. Josephus records — plainly, in the middle of a paragraph, like a shopping list — a woman named Miriam bat Boetos, once wealthy, driven mad by hunger, who killed and ate her own baby. Rebel soldiers smelled the cooking and broke into her house demanding a share. She uncovered what was left. They ran. When the story reached the Roman camp, even Titus's hardened soldiers cried.

On the seventeenth of Tammuz, exactly as had happened at the First Temple, the daily offering stopped because there was no sheep. The Roman fortress just north of the Temple fell. Then the outer courts. On the ninth of Av — the exact anniversary of the Babylonian fire — Roman soldiers broke through the last defenses of the Sanctuary itself. A soldier, apparently against Titus's own orders, threw a burning stick through a window of the Sanctuary. Within an hour the whole thing was in flames.

Titus went in. The Talmud will not soften what he did. He walked into the Holy of Holies — the room no one but the High Priest on Yom Kippur was ever meant to enter — drew his sword, and slashed the curtain. He brought a woman in with him. He spread a Torah scroll beneath them. He announced he had conquered Israel's God. Blood, the Sages say, welled up from the curtain and would not stop.

Outside, the gold coating the Sanctuary was melting. It ran down into the cracks between the stones. Roman soldiers, seeing the shine, pried the stones apart to get at the gold. Not one stone was left on another, exactly as had been prophesied. Only the massive outer walls Herod had built to hold up the platform remained — and one piece of that wall is still standing tonight.

The count. Josephus reports nearly 1.1 million Jewish dead in the siege and its immediate aftermath, and 97,000 taken captive. Historians argue about the numbers, but not about the scale. Shimon bar Giora and Yochanan of Gush Chalav — the same faction leaders who had burned each other's warehouses inside the walls — were dragged in chains to Rome as part of Titus's victory parade. Shimon was strangled in the Roman Forum. The Menorah, the Table, the silver trumpets were paraded through Rome and carved onto the Arch of Titus, which still stands in the Forum, showing Roman soldiers carrying the Menorah on their shoulders.

But Yavneh remained. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai's school — the wish he had asked of Vespasian — became the new home of the Sanhedrin. The Mishnah took shape there. Then the Talmud. The house of study replaced the House. The daily offering was gone; now, the Sages ruled, prayer, teshuvah, and kindness would stand in its place. And Rabban Yochanan gave his own quiet diagnosis of what had brought the Second House down: 'Jerusalem was destroyed only because they judged strictly by the letter of the law.' Mercy died before the city did.