Second Temple Destroyed by Rome on the Anniversary of the Babylonian Fire

Four Roman legions were dug in around Jerusalem. Titus had ringed the city with an earthwork in three days to catch anyone slipping out. Anyone caught was crucified where the defenders on the wall could see it. At the worst of it, Josephus reports, his soldiers were crucifying up to five hundred people a day, until they ran out of room for crosses and out of crosses for the bodies.

Inside the walls, starvation had passed the point human beings are meant to survive. Josephus records — plainly, in the middle of a paragraph — a woman named Miriam bat Boetos, once wealthy, driven mad by hunger, who killed and cooked her own infant. Rebel soldiers smelled the food and broke into her house demanding a share. She uncovered what was left. They fled. When the story reached the Roman camp, Titus's own hardened soldiers wept.

On the seventeenth of Tammuz, as had happened at the First Temple, the daily offering stopped because there was no sheep. The Roman fortress north of the Temple fell soon after. 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. A soldier, apparently against Titus's own orders, hurled a burning brand through a window of the Sanctuary. Within an hour the entire building was in flames.

Titus went in. The Talmud does not soften what he did. He walked into the Holy of Holies — the room no one but the High Priest, and only 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 defeated the God of Israel. Blood, the Sages record, welled up from the curtain and would not stop.

Outside, the gold plating of the Sanctuary was melting. It ran down into the cracks between the stones. Roman soldiers, seeing the glint, pried the stones apart to reach it. Not one stone was left upon another, exactly as had been foretold. Only the massive outer retaining walls Herod had built to hold up the platform remained — and one piece of that wall is still standing tonight.

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, 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 triumph. Shimon was strangled in the Forum. The Menorah, the showbread table, and 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 academy — 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. Rabban Yochanan gave his own quiet diagnosis of what had brought the Second House down: 'Jerusalem was destroyed only because they judged strictly according to the law of the Torah.' Mercy had died before the city did.