After a summer of starvation and siege had been imposed on the city’s people during the fall 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. (Read more about the war-torn history of Jerusalem and the ancient battles that defined world history inside the pages of Military Heritage magazine.)
“As the flames shot into the air the Jews sent up a cry that matched the calamity and dashed to the rescue, with no thought now of saving their lives or husbanding their strength; for that which they had guarded so devotedly was disappearing before their eyes,” wrote the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.
When Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian and the Roman general in charge of the siege, heard the news he raced to the scene and demanded that the fire be put out. The Roman army either pretended not to hear, or simply disobeyed, throwing more wood on the fire. “Everywhere was slaughter and flight,” wrote Josephus. “Most of the victims were peaceful citizens, weak and unarmed.” As the Roman legionnaires pressed their advantage, the pile of corpses surrounding the alter grew ever higher.
