Titus (according to Josephus) intended at first to save that magnificent work of architecture, as a trophy of victory, and perhaps from some superstitious fear; and when the flames threatened to reach the Holy of Holies he forced his way through flame and smoke, over the dead and dying, to arrest the fire. [546] But the destruction was determined by a higher decree. His own soldiers, roused to madness by the stubborn resistance, and greedy of the golden treasures, could not be restrained from the work of destruction. At first the halls around the temple were set on fire. Then a firebrand was hurled through the golden gate. When the flames arose the Jews raised a hideous yell and tried to put out the fire; while others, clinging with a last convulsive grasp to their Messianic hopes, rested in the declaration of a false prophet, that God in the midst of the conflagration of the Temple would give a signal for the deliverance of his people. The legions vied with each other in feeding the flames, and made the unhappy people feel the full force of their unchained rage. Soon the whole prodigious structure was in a blaze and illuminated the skies. It was burned on the tenth of August, a.d. 70, the same day of the year on which, according to tradition, the first temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. "No one," says Josephus, "can conceive a louder, more terrible shriek than arose from all sides during the burning of the temple. The shout of victory and the jubilee of the legions sounded through the wailings of the people, now surrounded with fire and sword, upon the mountain, and throughout the city. The echo from all the mountains around, even to Peraea (?), increased the deafening roar. Yet the misery itself was more terrible than this disorder. The hill on which the temple stood was seething hot, and seemed enveloped to its base in one sheet of flame. The blood was larger in quantity than the fire, and those that were slain more in number than those that slew them. The ground was nowhere visible. All was covered with corpses; over these heaps the soldiers pursued the fugitives." [547]
The Romans planted their eagles on the shapeless ruins, over against the eastern gate, offered their sacrifices to them, and proclaimed Titus Imperator with the greatest acclamations of joy. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy concerning the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place." [548]
Jerusalem was razed to the ground; only three towers of the palace of Herod--Hippicus (still standing), Phasael, and Mariamne--together with a portion of the western wall, were left as monuments of the strength of the conquered city, once the centre of the Jewish theocracy and the cradle of the Christian Church.
Even the heathen Titus is reported to have publicly declared that God, by a special providence, aided the Romans and drove the Jews from their impregnable strongholds. [549] Josephus, who went through the war himself from beginning to end, at first as governor of Galilee and general of the Jewish army, then as a prisoner of Vespasian, finally as a companion of Titus and mediator between the Romans and Jews, recognized in this tragical event a divine judgment and admitted of his degenerate countrymen, to whom he was otherwise sincerely attached: "I will not hesitate to say what gives me pain: I believe that, had the Romans delayed their punishment of these villains, the city would have been swallowed up by the earth, or overwhelmed with a flood, or, like Sodom, consumed with fire from heaven. For the generation which was in it was far more ungodly than the men on whom these punishments had in former times fallen. By their madness the whole nation came to be ruined." [550]
Thus, therefore, must one of the best Roman emperors execute the long threatened judgment of God, and the most learned Jew of his time describe it, and thereby, without willing or knowing it, bear testimony to the truth of the prophecy and the divinity of the mission of Jesus Christ, the rejection of whom brought all this and the subsequent misfortune upon the apostate race.
The destruction of Jerusalem would be a worthy theme for the genius of a Christian Homer. It has been called "the most soul-stirring struggle of all ancient history." [551] But there was no Jeremiah to sing the funeral dirge of the city of David and Solomon. The Apocalypse was already written, and had predicted that the heathen "shall tread the holy city under foot forty and two months." [552] One of the master artists of modern times, Kaulbach, has made it the subject of one of his greatest paintings in the museum at Berlin. It represents the burning temple: in the foreground, the high-priest burying his sword in his breast; around him, the scenes of heart-rending suffering; above, the ancient prophets beholding the fulfilment of their oracles; beneath them, Titus with the Roman army as the unconscious executor of the Divine wrath; below, to the left, Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew of the mediaeval legend, driven by furies into the undying future; and to the right the group of Christians departing in peace from the scene of destruction, and Jewish children imploring their protection.
The Fate of the Survivors, and the Triumph in Rome.
After a siege of five months the entire city was in the hands of the victors. The number of the Jews slain during the siege, including all those who had crowded into the city from the country, is stated by Josephus at the enormous and probably exaggerated figure of one million and one hundred thousand. Eleven thousand perished from starvation shortly after the close of the siege. Ninety-seven thousand were carried captive and sold into slavery, or sent to the mines, or sacrificed in the gladiatorial shows at Caesarea, Berytus, Antioch, and other cities. The strongest and handsomest men were selected for the triumphal procession in Rome, among them the chief defenders and leaders of the revolt, Simon Bar-Giora and John of Gischala. [553]
Vespasian and Titus celebrated the dearly bought victory together (71). No expense was spared for the pageant. Crowned with laurel, and clothed in purple garments, the two conquerors rode slowly in separate chariots, Domitian on a splendid charger, to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, amid the shouts of the people and the aristocracy. They were preceded by the soldiers in festive attire and seven hundred Jewish captives. The images of the gods, and the sacred furniture of the temple--the table of show-bread, the seven-armed candlestick, the trumpets which announced the year of jubilee, the vessel of incense, and the rolls of the Law--were borne along in the procession and deposited in the newly built Temple of Peace, [554] except the Law and the purple veils of the holy place, which Vespasian reserved for his palace. Simon Bar-Giora was thrown down from the Tarpeian Rock; John of Gischala doomed to perpetual imprisonment. Coins were cast with the legend Judaea capta, Judaea devicta. But neither Vespasian nor Titus assumed the victorious epithet Judaeus; they despised a people which had lost its fatherland.
Josephus saw the pompous spectacle of the humiliation and wholesale crucifixion of his nation, and described it without a tear. [555] The thoughtful Christian, looking at the representation of the temple furniture borne by captive Jews on the triumphal arch of Titus, still standing between the Colosseum and the Forum, is filled with awe at the fulfilment of divine prophecy.
The conquest of Palestine involved the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. Vespasian retained the land as his private property or distributed it among his veterans. The people were by the five years' war reduced to extreme poverty, and left without a magistrate (in the Jewish sense), without a temple, without a country. The renewal of the revolt under the false Messiah, Bar-Cocheba, led only to a still more complete destruction of Jerusalem and devastation of Palestine by the army of Hadrian (132-135). But the Jews still had the law and the prophets and the sacred traditions, to which they cling to this day with indestructible tenacity and with the hope of a great future. Scattered over the earth, at home everywhere and nowhere; refusing to mingle their blood with any other race, dwelling in distinct communities, marked as a peculiar people in every feature of the countenance, in every rite of religion; patient, sober, and industrious; successful in every enterprise, prosperous in spite of oppression, ridiculed yet feared, robbed yet wealthy, massacred yet springing up again, they have outlived the persecution of centuries and are likely to continue to live to the end of time: the object of the mingled contempt, admiration, and wonder of the world.
[541] Hist. I. c. 2.
[542] Matt. 24:1,2; Mark 13:1; Luke 19:43, 44; 21:6.
[543] Jos, B. Jud., VI. 5, 3 sqq
[544] The people called him Amor et Deliciae generis humani. He was born December 30, a.d. 40, and died September 13, 81. He ascended the throne 79, in the year when the towns of Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Pompeii were destroyed. His reign was marked by a series of terrible calamities, among which was a conflagration in Rome which lasted three days, and. a plague which destroyed thousands of victims daily. He made earnest efforts to repair the injuries, and used to say, when a day passed without an act of philanthropy, "Amici, diem perdidi." See Suetonius, Titus.
[545] Josephus, VI. 3, 4, gives a full account of this horrible and most unnatural incident.
[546] Josephus is, however, not quite consistent; he says first that Titus, perceiving that his endeavors to spare a foreign temple turned to the damage of his soldiers, commanded the gates to be set on fire (VI. 4, 1); and then, that on the next day he gave orders to extinguish it (§ 3, 6, and 37). Sulpicius Severus (II. 30) makes Titus responsible for the destruction, who thought that it would make an end both to the Jewish and the Christian religion. This is defended by Stange, De Titi imperatoris vita, P. I., 1870, pp. 39-43, but doubted by Schürer, l.c. p. 346. Renan (511 sqq.), following Bernays, Ueber die Chronik des Sulpicius Sev., 1861, p. 48, believes that Sulpicius drew his account from the lost portion of the Histories of Tacitus, and that Titus neither ordered nor forbade the burning of the Temple, but left it to its fate, with a prudent reservation of his motives. So also Thiersch, p. 224.
[547] B. J., VI. 5, 1.
[548] Daniel, 9:27; Matt. 24:15; comp. Luke 21:20; Josephus, B. Jud., VI.
[549] B. Jud., VI. 9, 1. Titus is said to have approved such passages (Jos. Vita, 65).
[550] B. Jud., V. 13, 6.
[551] Merivale, l.c., p. 445.
[552] Apoc. 11:2; comp. Luke, 21:24. In Dan. 7:25; 9:27; 12:7, the duration of the oppression of the Jewish people is given as seven half-years (= 42 months).
[553] B Jud. VI. 9, 2-4. Milman (II. 388) sums up the scattered statements of Josephus, and makes out the total number of killed, from the beginning to the close of the war, to be 1,356,460, and the total number of prisoners 101,700.
[554] The Temple of Peace was afterwards burned under Commodus, and it is not known what became of the sacred furniture.
[555] B. Jud., VII. 5, 5-7. Josephus was richly rewarded for his treachery. Vespasian gave him a house in Rome, an annual pension, the Roman citizenship, and large possessions in Judaea. Titus and Domitian continued the favors. But his countrymen embittered his life and cursed his memory. Jost and other Jewish historians speak of him with great contempt. King Agrippa, the last of the Idumaean sovereigns, lived and died an humble and contented vassal of Rome, in the third year of Trajan, a.d. 100. His licentious sister, Berenice, narrowly escaped the fate of a second Cleopatra. The conquering Titus was conquered by her sensual charms, and desired to raise her to the imperial throne, but the public dissatisfaction forced him to dismiss her, "invitus invitam." Suet., Tit. 7. Comp. Schürer, l .c. 321, 322.