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.

In the meantime, Titus’s assault ramps were nearly ready, although the defenders’ artillery—now that they had learned how to fire it—was inflicting heavy casualties on the legionaries who were building them. Irritated by this ferocious resistance, Titus sent a detachment of horse to lie in wait for Jews searching the ravines for food. The majority of these seem to have been poor citizens driven by acute starvation, men who did not dare to try and escape because of what might be done to their wives and children, since it was far from unknown for the families of deserters to be butchered in reprisal. They fought desperately to evade capture so that when finally overpowered there was little point in their begging for mercy. After being scourged and tortured, they were crucified in front of the Old Wall.

Five hundred or more people like this were caught and crucified every day. Titus felt a twinge of pity—or at least Josephus claims that he did—but he was not going to risk freeing a large number of men who might turn out to be soldiers in disguise, and his army could not afford to waste time standing guard over several thousand prisoners. What really counted with Titus was the possibility that the sheer number of crucifixions might terrify the Jews into surrendering, out of fear that they themselves might die the same way. Angry at the high casualties they were suffering, the legionaries amused themselves by nailing up the captives in grotesque attitudes. So many were crucified that eventually there was no more wood left to make crosses.

The daily spectacle of these atrocities had no perceptible effect on the defenders’ morale. They dragged deserters’ kindred onto the ramparts, with any other citizens who were under suspicion, and pretended that the men hanging from the crosses had tried to desert to the Romans. Titus’s response to this was to cut off the hands of several of his captives and send them back into the city with a message for Simon and John. “Stop [your madness] and don’t force me to destroy the city. However late in the day it may be, even now you can still change your minds at the last moment, and save your lives and your famous city and preserve its marvelous Temple.” ⁷ Then he visited his ramps, telling the legionaries to hurry up, to show the Jews that he was going to launch an assault if they did not respond to his appeal.

After yelling insults at Titus and his father, the Jews on the Old Wall shouted back that they didn’t mind dying, as it was better than slavery, and that while they stayed alive they would do all the harm they could to the Romans. They added that since they were going to die so soon, they did not care what happened to their city. The world itself would make a better Temple than their own. Even so, they insisted that the Temple of Jerusalem was going to be saved by the God who inhabited it, and because they had him for their ally they could laugh at any threats from Titus.

An interlude was provided by the arrival of Antiochus Epiphanes, the king of Commagene, who had brought his heavy infantry. They were fine-looking young men, armed and trained in the Macedonian way—carrying the long sarissa, or two-handed pike, and operating in a massive phalanx sixteen ranks deep. These were the troops with which Alexander the Great had overthrown the Persian Empire. Athletic and arrogant, the king asked Titus’s permission to attack at once. He agreed, commenting with a wry grin, “Well, you’ve got as much chance as anybody else.” Antiochus immediately led his men in an attack on the Old Wall, but his soldiers were Macedonians in name only, while the ponderous phalanx and the clumsy sarissa were things of the past. Alexander’s troops had never had to face scorpions or stone-projectors, and their would-be heirs soon had to withdraw after being shot to pieces by the Jews. Josephus observes sardonically that if Macedonians were expecting to win victories in the way that Alexander did, then they needed some of his good luck.⁸

The legionaries made heroic efforts to make their ramps tall enough, laboring day and night. They had begun work on 12 May but only finished on 29 May, after seventeen days of exhausting toil that involved filling in the great ditch in front of the Antonia, which in places was fifty feet deep. All four ramps were huge. One of those at the Antonia had been constructed by the Fifth Legion in the middle of the reservoir known as the Quince Pool, while another, thrown up by the Twelfth Legion, was ten yards away from it. The Tenth Legion’s ramp, farther off, was near the reservoir called the Almond Pool, and the Fifteenth Legion had erected another, forty-five feet away, that stood next to the tomb of John the High Priest. Titus gave orders for the troops to bring up the battering rams and the siege towers, in preparation for an all-out assault on the Old Wall.

In the meantime, however, the Jews had been taught how to mine by a contingent of Jewish soldiers from Adiabene who were skillful sappers.

John’s men tunneled beneath the ground between the Old Wall and the siege lines, undermining the ramps to such an extent that—unknown to the Romans—they were resting only on pit props. The Jews filled the space with fagots covered in pitch and bitumen—obtainable in large quantities from the Red Sea. Then they set light to the props. Suddenly, the ramps in the Antonia area collapsed with a deafening roar into the chasms that opened up below, taking the siege towers with them. Dense clouds of smoke billowed from the debris as the fire below was smothered for a moment, until flames burst up from the bitumen and burned steadily.

The Romans were aghast at this unexpected blow and their enemies’ ingenuity. Having thought that victory was within their grasp, they became badly discouraged. There was no point in trying to put out the flames after the destruction of the ramps.

Two days later, a band of Simon’s followers made a sortie during the night to destroy the remaining ramps, from where the Roman battering rams had started to pound the Old Wall, which was beginning to shake alarmingly. The leaders were a Galilean called Tephthaeus and a former bodyguard of Queen Mariamne named Megassarus, along with a half-crippled Adiabenian nicknamed Ceagiras (“The Lame”). Running through the astonished Romans as if they were friends instead of foes, they snatched up flaming torches and hurled them at the siege machines. The Jewish War informs us that these three Jews were among the toughest and most feared rebels in Jerusalem, renowned as hard men who were frightened of nothing. (The fact that Josephus knew such a lot about them shows the extent of his intelligence network.) Somehow surviving the javelins and sword thrusts aimed at them from all sides, they stayed there until they had succeeded in setting the rams and the towers on fire while their comrades beat off the enemy.⁹

Rushing out from their camps when they saw the flames roaring skyward in the dark, the legionaries tried desperately to save the rams, attempting to drag them out of the fire since the hurdles covering them were already ablaze. They were prevented by a host of Jews, who poured out from the postern gates in the Old Wall and started a pitched battle, pulling the rams back by their iron covering, although by now it was red-hot. The rams caught fire, and surrounded by a circle of flames, the demoralized legionaries gave up in despair, retreating to the safety of their camps.

The Jews, more of whom now ran out from the city to join in the fighting, became so encouraged that they chased the Romans back to their camps, setting fire to the stockades and attacking the astonished sentries. The author of The Jewish War is of course too tactful to admit to his readers that such a humiliating possibility had ever existed, but for a few moments, it really must have seemed that the outcome of the siege of Jerusalem lay in the balance.

Fortunately for the Romans, their strict military procedure came to their rescue. To deal with unexpected crises an armed guard was always stationed in front of every legionary camp, who was relieved at regular intervals. Any member of the guard who left his post was executed immediately, however good his excuse might be. Preferring to die with honor in battle rather than branded as cowards and hanged, these men stood firm. Soon, many of the troops who had run away rallied, mounting scorpions on the remnants of the Second Wall and firing at close range into the attackers. Even so, the Jews still came on, oblivious of the hail of bolts, and were soon on the point of driving the Romans back. “They gave ground more because of Jewish gallantry rather than from the casualties they were suffering,” comments Josephus, not without a hint of pride.¹⁰

At last, Titus galloped over from the Antonia, where he had been choosing sites for the new ramps. He gave his soldiers a short but furious dressing-down. “After taking two of the enemy’s walls, you’ve managed to put your own defenses at risk and are now being besieged yourselves, all because you’ve let those Jews out of their cage!”¹¹ Then he led his mounted bodyguard in a fierce charge against the attackers’ flank. Despite having to fight on two fronts, the Jews battled on, both sides cutting and thrusting at close quarters, so closely engaged that, blinded by the dust and deafened by the shouting, it was impossible amid the confusion to make out who was friend or foe. Even so, the Jews kept on fighting—not to win but to stay alive. Having regained their nerve, the humiliated legionaries fought to regain their self-respect. Finally, realizing that the battle was lost, the Jews retreated into the city.

The Romans had won, but they saw very little reason for triumph. They prided themselves on being the best soldiers in the world, and yet they had nearly been routed by what they regarded as a bandit rabble. Not surprisingly, they were thoroughly dejected. The success of the enemy’s sorties must have intensified their suspicion of Josephus—had he told his former comrades where and when to attack?

The destruction of the ramps meant that the legionaries had lost the product of weeks of back-breaking work. It was already midsummer, the hottest season of the Palestinian year, when the sun beat down mercilessly, a time (as Benjamin Disraeli described it long afterward) when Jerusalem becomes “a city of stone in a land of iron, with a sky of brass.”¹² Water was in short supply, since it had to be fetched on muleback from many miles away, as did the other supplies. The besiegers’ morale began to show signs of collapse; some of them deserted and went over to the Jews. By now, an increasing number of Romans were beginning to lose hope in their ability to capture Jerusalem.