Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  In repeated sorties Simon’s troops and their Idumean allies had considerable success in slowing up the besiegers’ work at the tomb of John the High Priest, while those at the Antonia were seriously hindered by John’s Zealots. Everywhere, the Jews did serious harm to the besiegers, not merely in hand-to-hand combat, in which they had the advantage of fighting from higher ground, but also by undermining the ramps. They also had learned to use the captured artillery to lethal effect, practicing every day to improve their accuracy. They had 300 quick-loading, bolt-firing scorpions and 40 stone-projectors that made life extremely unpleasant for the Romans who were trying to build the ramps.

  It was probably now that Titus was hit on the shoulder by a stone from one of the Jews’ projectors. It was a serious injury that left him with a weak left arm for the rest of his life. Josephus does not mention the incident, which we only know from a third-century Roman historian, Dio Cassius. 16 However, it does not seem to have noticeably reduced Titus’s energy or lessened his determination.

  Still eager to capture Jerusalem intact, Titus never abandoned his hopes of persuading the Jews to surrender. He constantly shouted up at the walls that good terms remained on offer for those who would accept them. He used Josephus to try and talk the defenders into a more sensible frame of mind, under the illusion that they might be more likely to listen to a fellow countryman. Josephus had to go all around the wall before he could find a spot from where he could be heard without too much danger of being shot at. Anticipating the role of a Jewish “Lord Haw-Haw”—the sardonic Nazi propagandist—he then begged the defenders at considerable length to spare themselves and the Jewish people, above all to spare their country and the Temple, and show more concern for them than defeating foreigners.

  To a large extent his speech can be reconstructed from The Jewish War. Even if polished up several years later, and no doubt including what he would like to have said, extracts are worth quoting, since they give a useful insight into his mind and how he saw relations between Jews and Romans. It is almost as if he had been talking to himself.

  Although they do not share your beliefs, the Romans genuinely respect your holy places and have so far avoided doing any damage to them—in contrast, some of the people whom you’ve brought into this city seem bent on wrecking them. You can see how your strongest walls came tumbling down, and that the only remaining one is the weakest of the lot, while you know perfectly well that nothing can stand up to Roman power. You also know that the Jews are used to being governed by them. If fighting for the sake of freedom is so honorable, then you ought to have started fighting years ago, but after giving in and letting yourselves be ruled for such a long time, a war like this can only be the work of men who are in love with death, not of men who love liberty.

  It is all very well despising rulers who are inferior to one, but these people happen to rule the world. The only places which don’t belong to the Romans are not worth having, because they are either too hot or too cold. Everywhere, Romans have had a monopoly of good luck, and God who gives sovereignty to nations has taken up his residence in Italy. It is a well known law of nature, even among wild beasts as well as us men, that the strongest are always going to win and that being on top belongs to those who fight best. That is why your ancestors who, body and soul, were infinitely better people than you are in every other way, gave in to the Romans—something they would never have done if they had thought God was on their side.

  Just why are you so confident about being able to hold out when most of your city has already been captured and when those inside what is still left of it are suffering far worse than being taken prisoner? The Romans know perfectly well that famine is raging in this city, that it is already killing citizens and that soon it is going to kill plenty of those under arms as well. Even if the Romans decide to call off the siege and not to storm the place at the edge of the sword after all, a new and very different sort of war is coming nearer every hour. But perhaps you will put away your weapons and fight the famine, and somehow contrive to show us you are the only men who are able to conquer nature?

  You would be wise to change the way you have chosen to behave before total disaster becomes unavoidable and to take some helpful advice while there is still a chance of doing so. The Romans are not going to bear a grudge against you because of what has happened, so long as you stop being stupid. They like to be merciful when they win and they always prefer to do something positive instead of taking revenge—something that does not mean exterminating the city’s entire population and reducing the whole country to a desert. That is why our Caesar is still ready to take you under his protection, even now. But if he has to take the city by storm, then he will slaughter every single one of you, for turning down his offer when you were very nearly beaten. You can tell how quickly the Old Wall is going to be captured from the way the other two were taken. And even if that particular job turns out to be difficult, remember that famine is fighting for the Romans.17

  Josephus must have had lungs of leather if he said all this at the top of his voice. The Jews’ reaction was disappointing. They felt he was talking down to them, sensing his anger and contempt. In his account he makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he was jeered from the ramparts, with many defenders yelling insults and others throwing stones or javelins at him. Luckily, they missed and he went on shouting.

  You miserable crew! Don’t you know who your real friends are? How can you explain why you’re fighting the Romans with nothing more than weapons and human hands? Have we ever succeeded in defeating another nation like this? When did the God who created us ever fail to avenge genuine wrongs done to the Jews? Why can’t you turn round and look behind you [at the Temple], then remember the holy place from where you go out to battle and realize how omnipotent is the Ally you have polluted? Surely you remember the numberless superhuman victories that were won by our fathers and the countless terrifying enemies they destroyed in times gone by, all through His help for our sake? I am horrified at having to remind such worthless hearers of what God did for them. All the same, you can listen to me, so that you will understand that you are not just fighting Romans but God.

  Wars had always been disastrous for Jews who were meant to rely on divine and not human power, Josephus explained. “Do you really think that what you’ve done has been blessed by the Lawmaker?” he asked the defenders. “You have not exactly avoided secret sins, have you—thieving and adultery—while you compete with each other at murder and rape, inventing new forms of evil. The Temple, which even Romans respect despite their own customs, is open to anybody and polluted by our own countrymen.” The Romans were simply demanding the normal tribute that had always been paid, in return for which they guaranteed family, property, and the Law. It was madness for the Jews to expect help from God in such a war. Instead of blessing them, so far he had blessed Vespasian, who had become emperor, and Titus, for whom fresh springs of water had flowed miraculously during his campaign

  He made a final, tearful appeal. “Men with iron hearts! Why don’t you drop your weapons and take pity on a country already on the brink of destruction? Turn round and look at the beauty you are betraying—what a city, what a temple!” He ended by expressing a personal wish to save Jerusalem, however much it cost him. “I am fully aware that I have a mother, a wife and a fine family, and belong to an ancient and illustrious clan, and that every one of them is in danger. Perhaps you think I’m giving you advice only to save their lives? Well, kill them, if you want. Shed the blood of my kindred, so long as you think that it’s going to save you. I am ready to die myself, provided you learn some sense after my death.”18

  There can be no doubt that Josephus regarded his harangues as more than psychological warfare and that, standing below the walls and bellowing up at the Zealots, he had begun to see himself as a prophet in the full sense. He took very seriously indeed the prophecies in the Torah and in other sacred writings that foretold terrible disasters for Jerusalem—warnings that had come
true—and he applied them to the circumstances of 70 CE. After all, as he saw it, he was doing his best to save the Holy Places of Israel.

  From a careful reading of his writings it is clear that he was fascinated by prophets because they saw into the future. “Nothing is more valuable than the gift of prophecy,” he wrote in his Antiquities.19 He regarded Daniel as a particularly great prophet, “a man who could discover what was impossible for anyone else to find out,” somebody who really must have spoken with God, because he had been so specific about what was going to happen.20 He also admired the Hasmonean King of Judea, John Hyrcanus, to whom he unhesitatingly attributes the gift of prophecy. “For the Deity conversed with him, and he was not ignorant of anything that was to come afterwards,” he wrote in the early part of The Jewish War.21 As has already been said, the gratifying accuracy of his own prediction about Vespasian becoming Emperor of Rome can only have added to his confidence in this field. Presumably, as at Jotapata, he was having nightly dreams during the siege of Jerusalem—this time about the ghastly fate in store for the Jewish people—while no doubt he was poring over the scriptures as well, in the best Essene style.

  Reminding his listeners of how the King of Babylon had overthrown King Zedekiah and demolished the city and the Temple, Josephus went so far on one occasion as to compare himself with Jeremiah. “Neither king nor people tried to kill him. You, in contrast—I ignore what goes on behind your walls since I’m incapable of describing all the horrors you omit—howl abuse at me for begging you to save yourselves, and throw javelins.” It has to be admitted that few prophets were more justified in their warnings.22

  18

  Inside Jerusalem

  “They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets; they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.”

  LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH, IV, 5

  WHEREAS THE ZEALOTS PROVED deaf to the appeals that Josephus constantly roared up at them, his words had a very different effect upon ordinary folk, more of whom tried to escape from the horrors of life in besieged Jerusalem. Many began selling houses or precious possessions for gold pieces, which they swallowed so that their rulers could not steal it, and then fled to the Roman lines where they emptied their bowels and recovered the coins, which they used to buy food. After questioning them, Titus generally let humbler refugees of this sort leave the area and go anywhere they liked, which was an added incentive to desert the city. Those who belonged to the nobility were told that he meant to give them back their estates after the war was over, when they would have a role in the new, restored Judea, but in the meantime they were sent to Gophna to be interned in a kind of open prison. Too many of their class had joined the Zealots for the Romans to feel entirely confident of their loyalty.

  “I kept a very careful record of everything that went on before my eyes in the Roman camp, being the only man there who knew how to extract worthwhile information from deserters,” says Josephus in his Contra Apionem .1 This was written toward the end of his life, when he had dropped his guard a little. Nowhere in the Vita or The Jewish War does he admit that interrogating refugees and prisoners was among his responsibilities. Being a Jew, he was better than any Roman at detecting those who were spies or messengers instead of genuine deserters, and at finding out from them exactly what was going on in Jerusalem. It is likely that he ran his own network of spies inside the city, but naturally he preferred not to give details in his account of the siege of these activities.2

  His “record” was probably some sort of journal, written from notes that had been taken down in shorthand in the usual Roman way, with a bone stylus on wax-coated wooden tablets and then transferred on to papyrus rolls with reed pens. He may have been given a secretary to help him. Each legion seems to have compiled a daily record, not unlike a modern army unit’s war diary. Following Julius Caesar’s lapidary example, Vespasian kept campaign notes of his own—presumably dictated to a secretary—which he later lent to Josephus.

  By now, however, it was even harder to get out of the beleaguered capital, since John and Simon seemed almost more concerned with stopping people from leaving than with preventing the Romans from entering. Anyone suspected of trying to flee was killed on the spot. Yet staying was no less dangerous for the rich, who were always being falsely accused of planning to escape and then put to death in order to lay hands on their wealth.

  By now, too, the famine was beginning to bite inside the city so that starvation was becoming widespread among noncombatants, some of whom were selling everything they had for just a single measure of grain—wheat if they were rich, barley if they were poor. People would devour it uncooked in a dark corner, or pull it out of the fire and swallow it half-baked. Wives started snatching food from their husbands, children from their parents, and still more pitiable, mothers from their babies, even when it was obvious that they were dying from lack of nourishment.

  The defenders had to eat if they were to fight. After the shops ran out of grain, they broke into houses which they ransacked; when any flour was found, they tortured the owner for having hidden it. If they saw a dwelling that was locked, they at once suspected those inside of having a meal and rushed inside, almost pulling morsels out of the diners’ throats. Old men were beaten to make them disgorge food, and women were dragged around by the hair of their head. According to The Jewish War, they sometimes tortured people to make them reveal where just a single loaf of bread or a handful of barley was concealed; they would block a victim’s genital passage with bitter vetch or drive a stake up his anus. Those who looked well fed could expect such treatment, but the emaciated were left alone, although the rebels robbed the pitiful creatures who had crept through the Roman sentries to gather wild plants and herbs.3

  Wealthy men were methodically marked down and killed. Hauled in front of one of the two leaders, some were falsely accused of scheming and then executed, while others were slaughtered after being charged with conspiring to surrender the city to the Romans. Whatever Josephus may imply, the motive for their destruction was not so much leveling as a straightforward desire to get hold of their money. The easiest way of liquidating them was of course to pretend that they were plotting to escape from Jerusalem. Anyone who managed to survive an accusation in front of Simon was handed over to John, who soon finished him off; similarly, John gave unwilling victims to Simon. The pair “drank the blood of their fellow countrymen and divided their carcasses between them.”4

  No other city has ever had to endure horrors like this, no generation has ever existed that was more stained by crime. Towards the end, these creatures even pretended to despise the Hebrew race, in order to conceal their lack of respect for other human beings. Yet in their everyday behavior they revealed themselves to be what they really were, the dregs of society, the bastard scum and abortive refuse of our nation. These were the people who destroyed our city, even though the Romans had to take all the blame after winning a melancholy victory, these men who seemed to think that the Temple was burning too slowly. When they were to watch it burning from the Upper City they were not going to shed a single tear, although even the Romans would be overwhelmed by sadness at the sight.5

  Josephus’s tirade sounds suspiciously like the outpourings of a patrician quivering with fury at the injuries done to his own class. He was incapable of feeling sympathy for the “brigands” among the defenders [lestai], whom he regarded as subhuman. They seem to have formed the largest part of the garrison, most of them peasant refugees from the Judean countryside, young men who were brutalized by years of want and ill treatment. They had never fed or drunk so well before their arrival in Jerusalem, never lived better. Naturally, they could see no overriding reason for making peace with the Romans, if peace meant going back to the soil or beggary, while it was understandable that they should dislike magnates.

  “From one point of view, at least, the Zealots certainly earned their name, and that was the way in which they behaved,” Josephus writes at his most bitter in The Jewish War.6 �
��They did their very best to copy every evil deed that had been committed throughout history, leaving no single crime from the past unrepeated. They appropriated the name [of Zealot] for themselves to demonstrate that they were ‘zealous’ in practicing virtue while all the time, animals that they were, they were jeering at those whom they ill-treated and pretending that their worst cruelties were acts of kindness.”

  Carefully highlighting any atrocities committed by the defenders, The Jewish War tries to obscure the genuine patriotism of those who were neither bandits nor ’am ha-arez and who really deserved the name of Zealot. Even Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala had their ideals. Significantly, they were supported by the lower clergy, who continued to offer the sacrifices at the Temple for as long as possible. Any proper analysis of the Zealots—who they were, what they thought—is impossible, however, because we have no source of information apart from Josephus. Although he deliberately calls them “brigands” or “rebels” instead of Zealots, he nonetheless admired their courage, and he mentions several whom he obviously accepts as his social equals.

  For all their conviction that God would save them from the Romans, there was nothing messianic about the Zealots’ inspiration or their beliefs. On the contrary, we can assume with some certainty that they read the two books of the Maccabees over and over again, and that Simon and John were each hoping to establish a new Judean monarchy with himself as king. It is a tragedy that the Zealots did not produce a chronicler to record their particular point of view, although we will catch a hint of it in the two speeches made by Eleazar ben Yair at Masada. Whatever Josephus may say, there must have been some fine men among them.