Watching from the ramparts of Jerusalem, the defenders were horrified when they saw the besiegers starting to erect what looked like three small cities. Seizing their weapons, they made a sudden sortie in force, charging across the Kedron ravine and up the Mount of Olives to attack the enemy. Having taken off their armor and swords in order to dig, the legionaries were caught by surprise and were cut down in droves. Encouraged by the sortie’s success, reinforcements rushed out from the city and in a short space of time threw the Romans out of their uncompleted camp.
The entire Tenth Legion might have easily been wiped out if Titus had not arrived with his bodyguard in the nick of time. Cursing his men for being cowards, he rallied them and counterattacked the Jews from the flank, killing many of them and driving the rest into the ravine. They quickly regrouped on the far side, stubbornly continuing the battle. A little after noon, Titus decided that the situation had cooled down enough and, placing reinforcements on the edge of the ravine, sent the battered Tenth Legion up to the Mount of Olives to start a new camp at the top.
Mistaking their ascent for a retreat, the Jews charged once again, “hurling themselves [at the Romans] like ferocious wild beasts,” says Josephus.11 The Romans fled to the very top of the mount, leaving behind Titus and a few troops on the lower slopes hemmed in by the enemy. His men shouted at him to break through immediately and to run for his life. Instead, he tried to beat back the Jews, who were attacking uphill in increasing numbers, attempting to drive them down into the ravine. Daunted by his extraordinary ferocity, the enemy gave Titus a wide berth but went on pursuing panic-stricken Romans up the mount. Finally, after realizing that Titus had not run away with them but that he was still fighting and ashamed at having abandoned their general, the legionaries on top of the mount regrouped and countercharged downhill, pushing the Jews into the ravine. Titus went on fighting until the Jews had been evicted from the Mount of Olives. Even before the enemy retreated, he once again gave orders for the Fifth Legion to build their camp on top.
“Without the slightest flattery or without in any way being prejudiced in his favor, I want to emphasize as strongly as I can,” writes Josephus, “that it was [Titus] Caesar himself who personally rescued the entire legion from annihilation and then gave it a chance to build its camp in safety.”12 Nevertheless, while Titus may no doubt have given a superlative display of combat skills and showed dazzling leadership in action at close quarters, this was the second day on which the Roman army’s supreme commander had risked and nearly lost his life. Yet again, Josephus must have reflected on the imminent likelihood of a painful death.
Fortunately for the Romans, these discouraging preliminaries to the siege failed to unite Jerusalem’s defenders, and there was yet another outbreak of bitter, self-destructive infighting within the city walls. With the start of Passover on 1 May, Eleazar unwisely opened the gates of the inner Temple to let in anyone who wanted to worship. John sent in some of his less-well-known followers, heavily cloaked in order to avoid being recognized. Once inside, they gathered together, drew their weapons from under their cloaks, and attacked everybody in sight. It appears that Eleazar was killed in the fighting, and his men fled from the ramparts to hide in the huge vaults beneath the Temple, while the terrified worshipers who huddled around the altar or in front of the Sanctuary were clubbed or cut down. Many harmless people died as the victims of some private hatred, murdered on the pretense that they belonged to the other side.
Although John’s men went on killing and torturing innocent worshipers caught up in the fighting, his lieutenants did reach an understanding with the Zealots hiding in the vaults, who were allowed to come up and join them. Now he had gained possession of the Temple’s inner court and all its stores, and Eleazar had been eliminated. A conflict between three factions had been reduced to a conflict between two.
In the meantime, undismayed by his experience on Mount Scopus, Titus decided to establish a camp nearer Jerusalem. He stationed a force of infantry and cavalry, all of whom were picked men, in sufficient strength to deal with any sallies by the defenders, and then used the rest of his troops to level the ground for 400 yards in front of the walls. This was a lengthy business since fences around the gardens, vineyards, and olive groves had to be pulled up, trees cut down, hollows filled in, and hillocks leveled, and every big rock needed digging up with iron crowbars. He intended to flatten the entire area from Mount Scopus to Herod’s monuments near the Serpent’s Pool.
While this work was in progress, a group of Jews emerged in front of the walls from the Women’s Towers, as if driven out by people inside who were insisting that Jerusalem must surrender at once, and began to cower dramatically under the ramparts. Other Jews on top of the walls shouted offers to the Romans to make peace, throwing stones at the supposed fugitives below and promising that they would open the gates. Delighted, the legionaries moved forward, thinking that they were being given an opportunity to rush the defenses and charge into the city.
Titus quickly smelled a rat—only the day before, using Josephus as an intermediary, he had offered terms of surrender, but the Jews had demanded impossible conditions—so he shouted to his men to stay where they were. However, some of the Roman troops who were too far out in front to hear him continued to run forward. As soon as they reached the walls, the Jewish “fugitives” produced swords from beneath their clothes and attacked them, and they were showered with stones and javelins from the ramparts. Those who survived the ambush turned and ran, as the Jews continued their attack. The defenders on the ramparts cheered and brandished their weapons in triumph, jeering at the Romans.
Titus was furious. “Although they may be driven by sheer desperation instead of real leadership, so far everything the Jews have done has been properly worked out well beforehand and very carefully calculated, with nicely planned tactics and ambushes—they are having all the good luck because they obey orders, they help each other, and they know how to be loyal,” he told his officers angrily. “Yet Roman soldiers, who’ve always won because of discipline and strict obedience to their officers, have started doing the exact opposite and are now being beaten on account of their wretched impetuosity. What makes it even more disgraceful is that they have let themselves fight without a leader although a Caesar was present. This sort of behavior is an insult to the Roman army, and an insult to my father.”13
Everybody who heard Titus was convinced he was going to punish the humiliated legionaries by decimation, which meant executing every tenth man involved in the route. If he had intended to do so in the heat of the moment, he was persuaded to change his mind. Josephus, who must have been present as a member of the staff, explains that although Titus believed in individual executions for the sake of discipline, he thought that mass punishments were extremely bad for morale. In any case, he had made his point and frightened his troops into a more alert frame of mind.
Determined to forestall any further surprises by the Jews and to ensure that baggage and provisions could reach his men in safety, he completed the leveling of the ground between his headquarters and the city within a mere four days. He then stationed his best troops seven ranks deep, in strongly fortified positions that were sited opposite the city’s northern and western quarters, but just out of range of the defenders’ bowmen. Three ranks of legionaries were in front, a rank of archers was in the middle, and three ranks of cavalry were at the rear. Supplies could now be brought up to the Romans on muleback from the depots without risk of being shot at. Moreover, from this point on, the defenders did not dare to make sorties outside the walls. Titus moved his headquarters camp to a spot that was also only about 400 yards from the ramparts. It was opposite the great tower called Psephinus, which was where the walls bent around from north to west. Another group of troops was entrenched opposite the tower named Hippicus—the tower of the Upper Palace—and similarly about 400 yards from the city. The Tenth Legion continued to occupy its position on the Mount of Olives.
Titus finally starte
d his siege on 1 May, the day that John of Gischala stormed the inner Temple. From the Roman point of view, it had scarcely been an auspicious beginning. Inside Jerusalem, the Zealots, having experienced a measure of success in their skirmishes with the Romans, were feeling rather confident.
17
The Siege Begins
“Gird yourselves and be valiant men and be ready against the morning, that you may fight with these nations that are assembled against us to destroy us and our Sanctuary. For it is better for us to die in battle than to see the evils of our nation and of the [Holy] of Holies.”
FIRST BOOK OF THE MACCABEES, III, 58-59
TACITUS IMPLIES THAT for Titus the siege of Jerusalem was just another step in his career, a means of showing the world that he was a gifted soldier and of demonstrating that sheer ability justified the Flavians’ occupation of the imperial throne. Yet at the time it must have seemed all too obvious that if Titus should fail to capture the city, then a humiliation on such a scale would be so shattering that it might easily topple his father, the new Emperor Vespasian.
On the other hand, for the Jewish people—however low may have been Josephus’s opinion of their capital’s defenders—it was a vital struggle to preserve the faith, the nation, and the land. More than life or death was at stake, on both sides.
It is important to remember that at no time in their history had the Romans ever besieged such a big city before, nor such a strong one. (Carthage was far smaller.) Shocked by Pompey’s humiliating occupation, the Jews had been preparing since King Herod’s time for a siege against Jerusalem, methodically bribing Roman officials to let them fortify the place as strongly as possible. Survivors who saw the capital in all its glory gave Tacitus the benefit of their recollections, and he describes how daunting it must have looked to the Romans:Standing on a height which is naturally difficult of access, Jerusalem was rendered even more impregnable by ramparts and bastions that would have made even places on a flat plain more than adequately fortified. Two very high hills were surrounded by walls that in some places jutted out but in others curved in, so that the flanks of any besiegers were exposed to enemy fire. Moreover, the hills were bordered by crags and ravines. Since the towers on the hills stood sixty feet high and those on level ground a hundred and twenty, they made an astonishing impression on anyone seeing them for the first time—from far away they seemed to be the same height. Inside the city there were further fortifications defending the royal palace, together with the fortress of the Antonia with its awesome turrets—named by Herod in honor of Mark Antony. The Temple was designed like a citadel, enclosed by walls that were thicker and more elaborate than anywhere else.1
Even the Temple’s colonnades were defense works in their own right. A spring down in Siloam supplied it with drinking water, but in case it should run dry, huge cisterns stored the rain. As for food, further supplies could supposedly be brought in through secret tunnels under the walls, although this was not borne out by events.
According to Tacitus—Josephus gives us a much bigger figure—Jerusalem contained at least 600,000 men, women, and children, who preferred to die rather than leave the holy city. Many were refugees, including, in the words of Tacitus, “the most indomitable spirits.” Among these fanatical hard-liners were 2,000 Tiberians, burning for revenge. In theory, it possessed a more-than-adequate garrison. Simon bar Giora had 10,000 followers under fifty officers, and he had been joined by 5,000 Idumeans with ten officers, of whom the senior were James ben Sosias and Simon ben Cathlas. In the Temple, John of Gischala had about 6,000 men and twenty officers, supplemented by the 2,400 Zealots who had gone over to him after Eleazar’s death and were led by Simon ben Ari.
At a conservative estimate, the garrison of Jerusalem therefore amounted to over 20,000 well-armed troops, who still possessed the artillery they had captured from the Romans. Unfortunately, they were divided into two mutually hostile factions. This lack of unity was made even more serious by an obsession with exterminating the remaining members of the ruling class who had not become Zealots.
Simon bar Giora occupied the Upper City and the Great Wall, as far as the Kedron, along with a large part of the Old Wall, where it curved around east from Siloam and went downward to the palace of King Monabazus (of Adiabene). He also occupied the fountain together with a good deal of the Lower City, extending right up to the palace of Queen Helena, Monabazus’s mother. John of Gischala held the Temple and much of the surrounding neighborhood, with Ophel and the Kedron Valley. The two leaders had already wrecked the area in between, demolishing houses to get a clearer field of fire at each other. At this stage, apart from the brief moment of reality when they made their first sortie, they never stopped fighting, despite the Romans being just outside the walls.
“They did more harm to each other than anything the Romans did so that nothing worse could happen to the city,” comments Josephus in The Jewish War. “No horrors more dreadful can possibly be imagined.”2 As Josephus puts it, their ceaseless, fratricidal combat undermined the defense, until the Romans finally put an end to the feuding—“even harder than destroying the walls.”
Titus, this time with an adequate escort, rode around the imposing walls of Jerusalem, searching for the best place to attack. It was not an easy decision, since on the south and on the east the city was protected by the steep ravines of Hinnom and the Kedron, which would make it impossible for the besiegers to use battering rams and siege towers. The northern side was a bit more feasible, without any precipices or valleys in front of its ramparts. Although the Old Wall here had recently been supplemented by two additional walls, they were still a considerable way from completion, especially the outermost, Agrippa’s Wall.
Titus decided to launch his main assault on this side, the weakest spot in the defenses, from a position that lay northwest of the Jaffa Gate and more or less opposite the tomb of John the High Priest. The ramparts were still unfinished; Agrippa’s Wall was not yet high enough, and there was a big gap in the Second Wall. His plan was to smash through the first two walls, and then through the Old Wall, so that he would be able to push on into the Upper City and capture the Antonia Fortress, and finally the Temple.
Almost certainly Titus consulted his tame Jewish general, who, as a native of Jerusalem, had been familiar with the city since boyhood. Josephus may even have suggested the exact spot where the main assault should be launched. He had become an indispensable member of the Roman staff. Even so, he was distrusted by most officers, and throughout the campaign he had to keep as close to Titus as possible. However, it looks as though one or two had confidence in him. He tells us that he accompanied Titus during his ride of inspection around the walls and that his old friend, the tribune Nicanor, was wounded by an arrow in the shoulder when he himself was shouting up at the ramparts and advising the defenders to make peace.3
Titus ordered the construction of three siege ramps. To create these huge mounds of earth and timber, the legionaries demolished the suburbs and cut down trees for miles around to provide the building materials. As soon as the mounds began to rise and could give enough shelter, Titus positioned archers and javelin men between them and placed scorpions, catapults, and stone-projectors in front—their job being to fend off Jewish sorties and pick off defenders who were shooting from the ramparts in an attempt to slow up the work
According to The Jewish War, many in Jerusalem were delighted to see the siege making such rapid progress, hoping they might be left alone while their persecutors were distracted. They even looked forward to the Zealots getting their due when the Romans succeeded in capturing the city.4 When he wrote this, however, Josephus must have meant survivors of the ruling class rather than the population as a whole.
For the moment, John of Gischala was too nervous about an attack by Simon Bar Giora to make any useful contribution to the defense, and so Simon’s followers had to do most of the fighting, since they controlled the area where the main assault was expected and were in the front line. Simon moun
ted captured artillery on the ramparts, but his men proved incapable of operating them at long range, save for a few who had learned from deserters. Instead, they only had bows and slings to shoot at the legionaries who were building the ramps, sometimes sallying out to attack them.
The legionaries were amply protected, however, by wooden hurdles stretched across palisades, while their own artillery coped with raiding parties. The engines of the Tenth Legion proved especially lethal; in addition to utilizing exceptionally large stone-projectors, they employed unusually powerful, quick-firing scorpions that fired volley after volley of iron bolts. These machines kept the Jewish sorties at bay besides killing many defenders on the ramparts. The stone-projectors had a range of about 400 yards and hurled rocks as big as a cow that weighed over half a hundred-weight (38 kilos) and had a devastating impact. The Jews knew immediately when they were fired—not only from the noise made by the missiles as they whizzed through the air but also from their light color—having posted lookouts on the wall towers to monitor the loading of the projectors and to give warning—until the Romans painted the rocks black. Despite heavy casualties, the defenders managed to delay the ramps’ construction by harrying the builders day and night.5
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 21