So far I’ve been talking as though anybody who makes the attempt is bound to be killed. Yet survival is far from impossible for a brave man, even when he’s at such close quarters with danger. It won’t be too hard getting up on to the wall where it has collapsed while the new one has been thrown together so quickly that it should not be too difficult to pull down. The more of you who can find the courage needed, the easier it is going to be for you to cheer each other on, so that your impetus will soon knock the stuffing out of the enemy. You may even win a bloodless victory, if only you’ll make the effort. No doubt, they will try to stop you climbing up, but if you can do it without being seen, then it is quite possible that they won’t be able to put up much of a fight so long as a handful of you take them by surprise. As for the man who leads the attack, I should blush for shame if my rewards didn’t make him envied while any man who survives will receive instant promotion. Those who die in the attempt are going to be buried with every conceivable honor.13
Josephus comments that this rousing offer of immortality failed to reassure the army, who were appalled by what lay ahead. Even their commander had said openly that the Zealots were superb fighting men, more or less admitting that in some respects they were better than legionaries. His troops knew it already, from painful experience.
The first to respond was a wizened, black-skinned little legionary called Sabinus, a Syrian, so emaciated that he looked unfit to be a soldier, yet “there was a certain heroic soul in this small body,” Josephus tells us.14 “I will cheerfully do what you want, Caesar,” he announced. “I shall be the first to scale the wall and I hope your accustomed good luck will help my physical strength and determination, but if fortune goes against me, then please remember that it was scarcely unexpected and that I chose death for your sake.”15 Having said this, he held his shield over his head with his left hand and drawing his sword with his right marched up to the new wall, followed by only eleven others. It was about midday. The Jews immediately began to hurl rocks and javelins at him, but Sabinus pushed on until he reached the top.
Under the delusion that he was being followed by a large detachment of legionaries, the enemy lost their nerve and ran. However, when he fell over a rock onto his face with a loud crash, they turned round and attacked him. He got up on one knee, protecting himself with his shield, and fought back, wounding several of them, but was eventually overwhelmed by javelins—“covered in darts.” Three of his comrades were killed by the stones, and the remaining eight were badly wounded and pulled down to safety. Josephus comments that he was “a man whose gallantry deserved a better fate but whose death was only to be expected from such audacity.”16
It was two days before the Romans tried again. Twenty of the legionaries who were guarding the siege engines invited the standard-bearer of the Fifth Legion to accompany them in a further attempt on the new wall. On 5 July at about two o’clock in the morning, joined by two cavalrymen and a trumpeter, they climbed over the ruined wall and then up the new one into the Antonia. Finding the sentries asleep, they knifed them and took control of the new wall, after which they ordered the trumpeter to sound the alarm. Other guards nearby bolted, convinced it was a full-scale attack. Hearing the trumpet call, Titus reacted quickly, charging into the Antonia with his senior officers and bodyguard and bringing up the rest of his troops as fast as possible, some entering the fortress through John’s ill-fated tunnel. The defenders of the Antonia fled to the Temple.
As so often, the Zealots, despite all their bravery, were fatally handicapped by lack of discipline. They possessed no proper command structure that might have enabled them to respond faster and drive the legionaries from the Antonia. Now it was too late. Nonetheless, when the Romans tried to push on into the Temple, they rushed to meet them and fought it out hand to hand. At such close quarters, both sides could use only their swords. Even Josephus has to admit that the Zealots behaved magnificently, forcing the legionaries back to the Antonia. The crush was so great at the Temple entrance that there was no possibility of retreat. The men in front on both sides fought to kill or be killed, forced on by those behind them, trampling on dead bodies, deafened by the clash of weapons and the yelling. The struggle went on for twelve hours, from two in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon. The legionaries were unable to exploit their superior weaponry in such a confined space, and in the end the Zealots’ fury got the better of their opponents’ discipline. The entire Roman line gave way, and the legionaries retreated. But they kept possession of the Antonia.
For a moment, however, the Zealots were almost driven back once again during a Homeric episode. When the Roman line collapsed, a Greek centurion from Bithynia called Julianus, who had been standing at Titus’s side inside the Antonia, tried to retrieve the situation by charging forward alone. Rushing into the enemy, he cut down Jew after Jew, until their comrades began to run from this terrifying swordsman, much to Titus’s delight. Then his hob-nailed army boots slipped on the marble pavement, and he fell on his back with a loud crash. Recovering their nerve, the Zealots rallied. Crowding around Julianus as he lay on his back, they aimed blows at him from all sides with their spears and swords. Trying unsuccessfully to get back on his feet, he warded off many of their thrusts with his shield and, protected by his helmet and breastplate, even managed to wound several of them with his sword. However, hacking at his arms and legs, the enemy soon finished him off. Titus was deeply upset at losing such a gallant officer, who seems to have been attached to his staff.
“A man of good birth and one of the genuinely outstanding soldiers whom I got to know during the campaign, distinguished by his knowledge of warfare, his physical strength and his unfailing courage,” is Josephus’s encomium. Clearly, he was not only a friend of Julianus but must have watched his heroic death, just as he had seen Sabinus die, either while he was standing beside Titus or from a vantage point on one of the towers of the wooden wall.17
20
The Destruction of the Temple
“And they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.”
DANIEL, XI, 31
THE ZEALOTS REMAINED undismayed when on 17 July, ten days after the loss of the Antonia, the daily sacrifice at the Temple was discontinued. Despite the famine, and at the cost of heroic self-denial, sufficient sheep and oxen remained for the offerings, but there were not enough priests loyal to John who could perform them properly. The sacrifice had been taking place here each morning and evening for hundreds of years, ever since the Jews had returned from their Babylonian captivity. Many who were not committed Zealots must have seen its cessation as proof that God had abandoned Israel.
Titus tried to exploit the mood of depression, with a message he gave Josephus to shout at John of Gischala. If John was so bloodthirsty that he wanted to go on fighting for its own sake, then why didn’t he march out with his men and settle his quarrel with the Romans in the open, without putting the city and the Sanctuary in danger? Whatever happened, he must stop polluting the Holy Places and insulting God. Surely he had sufficient priests to resume the sacrifice? But the Zealot hold was too strong for the appeal to have any effect.1
After delivering Titus’s message, Josephus made another of his speeches. He says he spoke in Hebrew and not Aramaic, which presumably he considered more impressive. The speech was designed to highlight the difference between John and the remaining moderates. He begged the people of Jerusalem to save their city and stop the flames from reaching the Temple, to resume the sacrifice. “At his words a great sadness and silence spread among the people.” Just as he intended, John of Gischala—whom here Josephus calls “the tyrant”—lost his temper, cursing him and shouting that the city could never be captured because it belonged to God.
“How wonderfully pure you have kept this city on God’s behalf, with the Temple quite unpolluted,” Josephus yelled back at the Zealot leader.
No one can say you�
��ve been guilty of any impiety towards Him from whom you hope for help, can they? Of course, he still gets his usual Sacrifice! But if someone stopped your daily meals, you filthy brute, wouldn’t you start seeing him as an enemy? Are you really expecting God to be your ally in this war when you take away his everlasting worship? And why blame your own crimes on the Romans, who respect our laws and want to restore the Sacrifice to God that you have stopped? Who would not feel sorry for a city plunged into such an upheaval, when foreigners and foes have to try and undo your blasphemies, when you, despite being a Jew bred up in our laws, are its worst enemy?
All the same, John, there is nothing wrong with repenting and putting things right at the last moment. If you really want to save the city, then you have been set an excellent precedent by King Jechoniah of the Jews who, when the King of Babylon arrived outside with an army, surrendered with his whole family rather than see it destroyed and see the House of God go up in flames—as a result, he is still remembered by the Jews, famous in history, while his story is more admired each time it is told and will be handed on forever. He is the right model for you, John, if somewhat difficult to follow, although I guarantee it will earn you a pardon from the Romans. Remember, I’m asking you to do this as one of your own nation, that I’m making these promises as a Jew myself, and that it might be wise for you to reflect on just who is advising you and to what nation he belongs. Because for as long as I live, I should never be such a poor creature as to disown my own people or forget the laws of my forefathers.
Then Josephus reverted to his role as prophet:Are you growing wrathful at me again, John, is that why you curse me so horribly? Well, I dare say I deserve much worse for flying in the face of fate by giving you good advice and trying to save men who have been damned by God. Everybody here knows what is in the writings of the old prophets and that their forecast about this miserable city is about to come true. Because they foretold it would be captured when somebody began slaughtering his fellow countrymen. And are not the city and the entire Temple heaped with the bodies of your fellow countrymen? So, it is God then, God himself, who is using the Romans to bring his purifying fire down on the place, and about to sweep away a city that has been almost drowned by your pollution.2
Despite his jibes at John, Josephus says he groaned and wept throughout his entire speech and that the Romans were full of pity, even if they had to guess what he was saying. In contrast, John and his friends were beside themselves with rage.
His words had a profound effect on many of the remaining magnates and their families—far more of whom still survived than one might expect from the massacres he describes so luridly. Most were too frightened of the guards to try and escape, although they were convinced that they and the city were doomed. However, some risked it. Among those who managed to flee to the Romans were the high priests Joseph and Jesus with several men whose fathers had been high priests. Three of these were the sons of Ishmael who was beheaded in Cyrene, four were the sons of Matthias, and one was the son of the Matthias murdered by Simon bar Giora—somehow he had evaded his brethren’s fate. They were accompanied by other members of the Jewish nobility.
Titus gave them an especially kind welcome, we are told in The Jewish War. Aware that they would feel polluted if they had to live with Romans in the Roman way, he sent them en masse to Gophna where they could live according to Jewish custom, telling them to stay there until the war was over and promising to restore their property. With the indispensable Josephus beside him, he was able to identify them as members of the old upper class who had once collaborated with Rome and whose cooperation might be of considerable value in reconstructing Judea when the war was over—and also in ensuring its prosperity as a source of taxes.
When these well-known figures disappeared from Jerusalem, the defenders, concerned that others might run away as well, spread a rumor that they had been butchered by the Romans. In response, Titus brought back the fugitives from Gophna and made them walk all around the city walls, led by Josephus who must have told them how to behave. Standing in mournful little groups below the ramparts, weeping, they begged the Zealots to let the Romans into the city and save their birthplace or, at the very least, evacuate the Temple and save the Sanctuary. At the same time they assured everybody that the besiegers were most reluctant to set fire to it. The demonstration infuriated the defenders on the walls, who yelled curses and insults at the deserters and trained scorpions and stone-projectors on them.
The Zealots had mounted their artillery on top of the gates of the Temple, which by now had the appearance of an overcrowded morgue because of all the corpses that littered it, while the Sanctuary was full of heavily armed men and looked like a gilded bunker. Traditionalist Jews were appalled at such an intrusion by ritually unclean soldiers, many of them bloodstained and with more than a few murders on their conscience. It was a profanation that shocked even the Romans.
According to Josephus, Titus himself was horrified. “You miserable men, didn’t your own people build that portico in front of your Sanctuary?” he shouted up at John and his followers, using Josephus as his interpreter.
Wasn’t it your people who set up all those tablets in Greek and Latin, forbidding anybody to go in. Didn’t we give you leave to execute anyone who did? So why, you unclean creatures, are you trampling over dead bodies inside it? Why are you polluting your Holy House with the blood of foreigners and even of Jews? I call upon the gods of my fathers, and on any other gods who once watched over this place—although I doubt if any of them is still doing so now—to bear witness, as I do on my army and on the Jews standing beside me, that it was not I who forced you to defile your Sanctuary. If only you would change the battle-ground, no Roman would go near the Holy Places, let alone profane them. Whether you like it or not, I’m going to save the Sanctuary.3
The Jewish War tells us that the Zealots reacted with contempt. Under the delusion that they could never be defeated, they were genuinely convinced that the Roman general was speaking from cowardice, because he realized that he would never succeed in taking Jerusalem.
Titus had always known they were unlikely to listen to reason, so in the meantime, in order to attack the Temple on as broad a front as possible, he had ordered the Antonia to be razed to the ground. Although the fortress was very strongly built, it took his troops only a week. Once the area had been leveled, he ordered each of the four legions to construct yet another siege ramp. Unfortunately for the Romans, the Temple was guarded by the thickest walls in Jerusalem, and its inner forecourt was protected by its own massive ramparts, making a fortress inside a fortress, so there was not enough room to use all their troops, as “the place was so narrow.”4 Titus’s solution was to pick thirty of the best men in every century, which he grouped in storm troops of a thousand under a tribune. The commander of this crack force was Sextus Cerealis, legate of the Fifth Legion, who had already distinguished himself by his ruthless efficiency.
Although the ramps were far from ready, Titus had given orders to launch an attack on the Temple outposts, at an hour before sunrise. He had to be restrained from leading it himself.
As he was putting on his armor and getting ready to accompany his soldiers, his friends stopped him, saying it was too dangerous. The generals insisted, “he would be of far more use if he remained in a command-post in the Antonia directing troop movements than if he came down and risked his life leading the attack—when they knew he was able to watch them, the men would fight better.” Reluctantly, Titus agreed, commenting that “the only reason for his staying behind was to see how gallantly they fought, so that no act of bravery should go undecorated and no cowardly behavior escape punishment—as a spectator he would know how to reward or punish the troops.”5
It sounds very much as if Tiberius Alexander was among the generals who insisted that this time Titus had to be cautious. It also sounds as though Josephus was among the friends at his side—presumably his staff—when, by the dim light of minute oil lamps, he was putting o
n his armor in his big leather tent.
In the event, it was lucky for Titus that he had decided to remain in the Antonia. He would have been risking his life to no purpose. When the legionaries reached the enemy guard posts, the Zealot sentries were far from being asleep as they had hoped and immediately sounded the alarm, whereupon more Jews ran to their help at the double. In the darkness, the confusion and din were so overwhelming that some Romans began to fight each other. However, they were crack troops, highly trained and experienced, who soon recovered their wits, locking shields together and charging in compact groups. Although not so disciplined as their opponents, the Zealots did not budge an inch, urged on by their “tyrant” John with threats or encouragement. The Romans were cheered on from the Antonia by their commander. The battle raged on from the small hours until midday when Titus finally called off the assault, neither side having gained any ground.
Many of the Romans had fought superbly, Josephus tells us, but so had the defenders. “Among the Jews, heroes [in this engagement] were Judes ben Mareotes and Simon ben Hosias from Simon bar Giora’s party; James and Simon—the latter being Acatelas’s son—from the Idumeans; and Gyphthaeus and Alexas, and also another Zealot Simon ben Ari.” He means that Simon ben Ari had been one of Eleazar’s men since he cannot bring himself to extend the name of Zealot, much as he dislikes it, to the others, whom he simply calls “robbers” when he is not calling them heroes, as he does here.6
Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea Page 26