Jerusalem. The Biography

demented that she killed her own son and roasted him, eating half and keeping the rest for later. The delicious aroma crept across the city. The rebels savoured it, sought it and smashed into the house, but even those practised hatchetmen, on seeing the child’s half-eaten body, ‘went out trembling’. 5
    Spymania and paranoia ruled Jerusalem the Holy – as the Jewish coins called her. Raving charlatans and preaching hierophants haunted the streets, promising deliverance and salvation. Jerusalem was,Josephus observed, ‘like a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh’.
    That night of the 8th of Ab, when Titus had retired to rest, his legionaries tried to douse the fire spread by the molten silver, as he had ordered. But the rebels attacked the fire-fighting legionaries. The Romans fought back and pushed the Jews into the Temple itself. One legionary, seized ‘with a divine fury’, grabbed some burning materials and, lifted up by another soldier, lit the curtains and frame of ‘a golden window’, which was linked to the rooms around the actual Temple. By morning, the fire had spread to the very heart of holiness. The Jews, seeing the flames licking the Holy of Holies and threatening to destroy it, ‘made a great clamour and ran to prevent it’. But it was too late. They barricaded themselves in the Inner Court then watched with aghast silence.
    Just a few yards away, among the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, Titus was awakened; he jumped up and ‘ran towards the Holy House to put a stop to the fire’. His entourage including Josephus, and probably King Agrippa and Berenice, followed, and after them ran thousands of Roman soldiers – all ‘in great astonishment’. The fighting was frenzied. Josephus claims that Titus again ordered the fire extinguished, but this Roman collaborator had good reasons to excuse his patron. Nonetheless, everyone was shouting, the fire was racing and the Roman soldiers knew that, by the laws of warfare, a city that had resisted so obstinately expected to be sacked.
    They pretended not to hear Titus and even shouted ahead to their comrades to toss in more firebrands. The legionaries were so impetuous that many were crushed or burned to death in the stampede of their bloodlust and hunger for gold, plundering so much that the price would soon drop across the East. Titus, unable to stop the fire and surely relieved at the prospect of final victory, proceeded through the burning Temple until he came to the Holy of Holies. Even the high priest was allowed to enter there only once a year. No foreigner had tainted its purity since the Roman soldier-statesman Pompey in 63 BC . But Titus looked inside ‘and saw it and its contents which he found to be far superior’, wrote Josephus, indeed ‘not inferior to what we ourselves boasted of it’. Now he ordered the centurions to beat the soldiers spreading the fire, but ‘their passions were too strong.’ As the inferno rose around the Holy of Holies, Titus was pulled to safety by his aides – ‘and no one forbade them to set fire to it’ any more.
    The fighting raged among the flames: dazed, starving Jerusalemites wandered lost and distressed through the burning portals. Thousandsof civilians and rebels mustered on the steps of the altar, waiting to fight to the last or just die hopelessly. All had their throats cut by the exhilarated Romans as though it were a mass human sacrifice, until ‘around the altar lay dead bodies heaped one upon another’ with the blood running down the steps. Ten thousand Jews died in the burning Temple.
    The cracking of vast stones and wooden beams made a sound like thunder. Josephus watched the death of the Temple:
     
The roar of the flames streaming far and wide mingled with the groans of the falling victims and owing to the height of the hill and the mass of the burning pile, one would have thought the whole city was ablaze. And then the din – nothing more deafening or appalling could be conceived than that. There were the war cries of the Roman legions sweeping onward, the howls of the rebels encircled by fire and swords, the rush of the people who, cut off above, fled panic-stricken only to fall into the arms of the foe, and their shrieks as they met their fate, blended with lamentations and wailing [of those in the city]. Transjordan and the surrounding mountains contributed their echoes, deepening the din. You would have thought the Temple hill was