After a summer of starvation and siege had been imposed on the people of Jerusalem, the great Second Temple was finally on fire. No one knows who threw the flaming brand, or indeed how the temple had avoided such a fate for so long, but once the conflagration began there was no stopping it.
The Jewish soldiers, outnumbered and hungry and armed only with weapons they had won from the Romans in battle, immediately refocused the physical courage and fanaticism that had helped them hold out for so long. The earthly embodiment of their ideals was now being destroyed, and their own freedom from Roman rule and even their own lives were nothing now that the Temple faced destruction.
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