The Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple

Josephus puts the outbreak in the spring of AD 66, under the governor Gessius Florus, whose greed and violence he blames for it (Josephus, Jewish War 2.277–284). In the temple its captain, Eleazar, persuaded the priests to accept no offering from a foreigner, and the sacrifice for the emperor stopped. Josephus calls this the true beginning of the war (Josephus, Jewish War 2.409–410). Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, intervened with an army and was defeated with the loss of more than five thousand men (Josephus, Jewish War 2.555).

Nero gave the command to Vespasian, who gathered an army in Syria with his son Titus (Josephus, Jewish War 3.1–8). Josephus himself, the rebel commander in Galilee (Josephus, Jewish War 2.568), was captured at Jotapata and, by his own account, told Vespasian that he would be emperor (Josephus, Jewish War 3.392–408). Tacitus says that in two summers Vespasian took everything except Jerusalem, and that the civil war at Rome then halted the campaign (Tacitus, Histories 5.10). In July 69 the legions of Egypt and Judaea proclaimed Vespasian emperor (Suetonius, Vespasian 6), and the war was left to Titus (Tacitus, Histories 5.10).

Titus encamped before the city at Passover in AD 70, when it was full of pilgrims (Josephus, Jewish War 5.567) (Josephus, Jewish War 6.420–421). Inside, rival factions had been fighting one another, and famine set in (Tacitus, Histories 5.12–13) (Josephus, Jewish War 6.420–421). On the seventeenth of Panemus the daily sacrifice ceased for want of men to offer it (Josephus, Jewish War 6.94). On the tenth of Loos the temple burned. Josephus says that a soldier threw a brand through a window without orders and that Titus tried in vain to have the fire put out (Josephus, Jewish War 6.249–266). The rest of the city fell a month later (Josephus, Jewish War 6.403–408), and Titus had the city and the temple levelled, leaving three towers and part of the western wall (Josephus, Jewish War 7.1–3). Josephus counts 1,100,000 dead and 97,000 prisoners (Josephus, Jewish War 6.420–421); Tacitus had heard that the besieged numbered 600,000 (Tacitus, Histories 5.12–13).

At the triumph in Rome the golden table, the seven-branched lampstand and a copy of the Law were carried in procession (Josephus, Jewish War 7.148–152). The relief on the Arch of Titus shows soldiers bearing the lampstand, the table and the trumpets (Arch of Titus). The tax that Jews everywhere had paid to the temple now went to the Capitol in Rome (Josephus, Jewish War 7.218).

Josephus is the main narrative source. He watched the siege from the Roman camp and afterwards lived at Rome under the patronage of the victors (Josephus, Life 416–423); he blames the rebels for the city’s ruin and clears Titus of burning the temple (Josephus, Jewish War 6.403–408) (Josephus, Jewish War 6.249–266). The surviving text of Tacitus breaks off before the city falls.

The Gospels record a saying of Jesus that not one stone of the temple would be left on another, and Luke speaks of Jerusalem surrounded by armies (Mark 13:1–2) (Luke 21:20–24). Eusebius, some 250 years after the war, reports that the Christians of Jerusalem, warned by a revelation given before the war, left the city and settled at Pella in Perea (Eusebius, Church History 3.5.3).