Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

heavy artillery. They constructed a massive battering ram that easily
     breached the first wall surrounding Jerusalem. When the rebels retreated to a secondinterior wall, that, too, was breached and the gates set on fire. As the flames slowly
     died down, the city was laid bare for Titus’s troops.
    The soldiers set upon everyone—man, woman, child, the rich, the poor, those who had
     joined in the rebellion, those who had remained faithful to Rome, the aristocrats,
     the priests. It made no difference. They burned everything. The whole city was ablaze.
     The roar of the flames mixed with screams of agony as the Roman swarm swept through
     the upper and lower city, littering the ground with corpses, sloshing through streams
     of blood, literally clambering over heaps of dead bodies in pursuit of the rebels,
     until finally the Temple was in their sights. With the last of the rebel fighters
     trapped inside the inner courtyard, the Romans set the entire foundation aflame, making
     it seem as though the Temple Mount was boiling over at its base with blood and fire.
     The flames enveloped the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the God of Israel,
     and brought it crashing to the ground in a pile of ash and dust. When the fires finally
     subsided, Titus gave orders to raze what was left of the city so that no future generation
     would even remember the name Jerusalem.
    Thousands perished, though Simon son of Giora—Simon the failed messiah—was taken alive
     so that he could be dragged back to Rome in chains for the Triumph that Vespasian
     had promised his people. Along with Simon came the sacred treasures of the Temple:
     the golden table and the shewbread offered to the Lord; the lampstand and the seven-branched
     Menorah; the incense burners and cups; the trumpets and holy vessels. All of these
     were carried in triumphal procession through the streets of Rome as Vespasian and
     Titus, crowned with laurels and clad in purple robes, watched in silent resolution.
     Finally, at the end of the procession, the last of the spoils was carried out for
     all to see: a copy of the Torah, the supreme symbol of the Jewish religion.
    Vespasian’s point was hard to miss: This was a victory not over a people, but over
     their god. It was not Judea but Judaism that hadbeen defeated. Titus publicly presented the destruction of Jerusalem as an act of
     piety and an offering to the Roman gods. It was not he who had accomplished the task,
     Titus claimed. He had merely given his arms to his god, who had shown his anger against
     the god of the Jews.
    Remarkably, Vespasian chose to waive the customary practice of
evocatio
, whereby a vanquished enemy had the option of worshipping its god in Rome. Not only
     would the Jews be forbidden to rebuild their temple, a right offered to nearly every
     other subject people in the empire; they would now be forced to pay a tax of two drachmas
     a year—the exact amount Jewish men once paid in shekels to the Temple in Jerusalem—in
     order to help rebuild the Temple of Jupiter, which was accidentally burned down during
     the Roman civil war. All Jews, no matter where in the empire they lived, no matter
     how loyal they had remained to Rome, no matter if they had taken part in the rebellion
     or not—every Jew, including women and children, was now forced to pay for the upkeep
     of the central pagan cult of Rome.
    Henceforth, Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the
     eternal enemy of Rome. Although mass population transfer had never been a Roman policy,
     Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs, ultimately
     renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and placed the entire region under direct imperial
     control. All of Palestine became Vespasian’s personal property as the Romans strove
     to create the impression that there had never been any Jews in Jerusalem. By the year
     135 C.E ., the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents.
    For those Jews who survived the bloodbath—those huddled naked and starved beyond the
     collapsed city walls, watching in horror as the Roman soldiers urinated on the smoldering
     ashes of the House of God—it was perfectly clear who was to blame for the death and
     devastation. Surely it was not the Lord of Hosts who hadbrought such destruction upon the sacred city. No. It was the
lestai
, the bandits and the rebels, the Zealots and the Sicarii, the nationalist revolutionaries