Jerusalem: The Biography

Around the walls, there were gruesome scenes that must have resembled hell on earth. Thousands of bodies putrefied in the sun. The stench was unbearable. Packs of dogs and jackals feasted on human flesh. In the preceding months, Titus had ordered all prisoners or defectors to be crucified. Five hundred Jews were crucified each day. The Mount of Olives and the craggy hills around the city were so crowded with crucifixes that there was scarcely room for any more, nor trees to make them.¹ Titus’ soldiers amused themselves by nailing their victims splayed and spread-eagled in absurd positions. So desperate were many Jerusalemites to escape the city that, as they left, they swallowed their coins, to conceal their treasure, which they hoped to retrieve when they were safely clear of the Romans. They emerged ‘puffed up with famine and swelled like men with dropsy’, but if they ate they ‘burst asunder’. As their bellies exploded, the soldiers discovered their reeking intestinal treasure troves, so they started to gut all prisoners, eviscerating them and searching their intestines while they were still alive. But Titus was appalled and tried to ban these anatomical plunderings. To no avail: Titus’ Syrian auxiliaries, who hated and were hated by the Jews with all the malice of neighbours, relished these macabre games.² The cruelties inflicted by the Romans and the rebels within the walls compare with some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.

The war had begun when the ineptitude and greed of the Roman governors had driven even the Judaean aristocracy, Rome’s own Jewish allies, to make common cause with a popular religious revolt. The rebels were a mixture of religious Jews and opportunistic brigands who had exploited the downfall of the emperor, Nero, and the chaos that followed his suicide, to expel the Romans and re-establish an independent Jewish state, based around the Temple. But the Jewish revolution immediately started to consume itself in bloody purges and gang-warfare.

Three Roman emperors followed Nero in rapid and chaotic succession. By the time Vespasian emerged as emperor and despatched Titus to take Jerusalem, the city was divided between three warlords at war with each other. The Jewish warlords had first fought pitched battles in the Temple courts, which ran with blood, and then plundered the city. Their fighters worked their way through the richer neighbourhoods, ransacking the houses, killing the men and abusing the women – ‘it was sport to them’. Crazed by their power and the thrill of the hunt, probably intoxicated with looted wine, they ‘indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, decked their hair and put on women’s garments and be-smeared themselves with ointments and had paints under their eyes’. These provincial cut-throats, swaggering in ‘finely dyed cloaks’, killed anyone in their path. In their ingenious depravity, they ‘invented unlawful pleasures’. Jerusalem, given over to ‘intolerable uncleanness’, became ‘a brothel’ and torture-chamber – and yet remained a shrine.³

Somehow the Temple continued to function. Back in April, pilgrims had arrived for Passover just before the Romans closed in on the city. The population was usually in the high tens of thousands, but the Romans had now trapped the pilgrims and many refugees from the war, so there were hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Only as Titus encircled the walls did the rebel chieftains halt their in-fighting to unite their 21,000 warriors and face the Romans together.

The city that Titus saw for the first time from Mount Scopus, named after the Greek skopeo meaning ‘look at’, was, in Pliny’s words, ‘by far the most celebrated city of the East’, an opulent, thriving metropolis built around one of the greatest temples of the ancient world, itself an exquisite work of art on an immense scale. Jerusalem had already existed for thousands of years but this many-walled and towered city, astride two mountains amid the barren crags of Judaea, had never been as populous or as awesome as it was in the first century AD: indeed Jerusalem would not be so great again until the twentieth century. This was the achievement of Herod the Great, the brilliant, psychotic Judaean king whose palaces and fortresses were built on so monumental a scale and were so luxurious in their decoration that the Jewish historian Josephus says that they ‘exceed all my ability to describe them’.