“Sad Clamor” on the Temple Mount—Short Historical Tours       

In the opening verses of chapter 24 in Matthew’s gospel, we read that Jesus--having just left the temple--was stopped by a few of his disciples who were looking back in awe at the temple and its buildings.  Indeed, it was a formidable structure!  The prominent gate into the sacred building stood over 100 feet tall.  Gold covered the temple’s outer walls and gleamed so fiercely in the sunlight that men were forced to look away as though from the sun itself (Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 5:5:6).  Carved columns of white marble in the portico were crowned with ornately decorated Corinthian capitals.  Herod had undertaken to “improve” the temple that had been built by the Jews at the time of their return from Babylonia in 536 B.C.  In actual fact, he tore the old temple down and rebuilt it according to drastically more majestic proportions.  He doubled the size of the “mount” or pavement on which the whole complex rested.  He raised the temple itself on a platform so that it towered above all else.  And, he built a porch that was artfully supported by four rows of massive columns, all over 50 feet tall.  Although Herod started his project in 20 B.C., by the time that Jesus and His disciples viewed the temple in A.D. 29, it was still under construction. (In this way it directly resembled the Leavenworth Pool Project.)

Jesus prophesies total destruction

In view of this stately complex of buildings, so precious to the whole of God’s people, and in response to the disciples’ wonderment, Jesus asserted that “not one stone . . . shall be left upon another, which will not be torn down.”  To a disciple convinced that Jesus was the coming King who would soon set up His kingdom, these words were difficult to fathom.  To what exactly was he referring?  Was he making another symbolic reference to the temple of his body, which, as he noted in John 2:19, would be torn down and raised again in three days?  Or was he actually prophesying of the physical destruction of that building which to the Jews represented the very heart of their faith and nation?  Thankfully, the answer to this question is only too obvious when we open our history books. And the story that forms this answer is among the most gripping of episodes in the last two millennia.

The Jewish world in A.D. 70

By A.D. 70, forty full years had elapsed since Jesus prophesied the devastation of the temple.  James, Stephen, and Peter had all been martyred. By this time Paul had completed his several missionary journeys throughout much of the known world, and—some believe--had also been martyred.  Conditions across the Empire were at their hitherto worst.  Tacitus, the Roman historian, described those days as “rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace, full of horrors” (Histories, I:2). 

While Christianity was spreading like a ravenous flame, so, too, was the persecution against believers in Jesus Christ. Just six years before, in the summer of A.D. 64, a great fire had raged for six days and seven nights, devouring nearly three quarters of the city of Rome.  The suspicions of the people were that Nero, the unscrupulous emperor, caused the fire himself.  To deflect unwanted inquiry, he affixed the blame on the Christians.  Thus, Nero Claudius Caesar instituted the first official imperial persecution of the Church. 

The Zealots revolt

Two years later (in A.D. 66), several prominent factions of  Jews--endlessly chafing under Roman domination--organized a rebellion and marked the fact by two bold actions: they seized the fortress Masada from the Romans; and they forced the priests to cease making daily sacrifices in the temple on behalf of the Emperor (Josephus 2:17:2).  In relatively quick speed this brought the attention and wrath of the Empire to bear on all Jews, and for the next three years the Romans made systematic assaults and slaughter throughout the region of Palestine.  Every town and city was subdued, and thousands and thousands of Jews paid the price with the forfeit of their lives. All the while, the Zealots who led the rebellion, far from being humbled or cowed by such defeat, only hardened themselves to their original purpose, enforced a reign of terror on their own people, and fell back to their only remaining refuge: Jerusalem.

As it happened, this retreat to Jerusalem occurred just prior to the festival of the Passover.  At such a time it was normal for the city’s population to swell to over two million people! In the midst of the crowded city, the Zealots were divided and fighting amongst themselves even as the Romans were marching toward the area.  Three parties emerged under the names of their warring leaders: Simon bar (son of) Gioras; Eleazar bar Simon; and John  of Gischala, the most tyrannical of the three.  As Josephus unfolds the story, it becomes evident that these men were not so concerned for the freedom of their own people, or the purity of Jewish religion, as for the advancement of their own political ambitions.  They considered it no violation of conscience or principle to violently rob the Jews living in Jerusalem of their food or money for the sake of the ensuing war.  In fact, most of the people in the city lived in well-justified fear of these men and their followers.  Ensconced on and around the temple mount, they fortified their positions against one another for what they believed would be their final victory and, ironically, the coming of their Messiah. 

By April of A.D. 70, there were, according to Tacitus, over 600,000 armed Zealots who were diverted from their internecine conflict only by the arrival of a common enemy (V:13).  Titus had come.  That night, the various parties of Jews made “an awkward sort of concord,” as Josephus termed it, and sent men out of the city to attack the Romans in surprise (5:3:4).  Like the wilderness-savvy minutemen of the early American colonies meeting the ordered, ranked troops of British soldiers, the Romans were completely bewildered and overwhelmed by the guerilla approach of the Zealots.  This “strategy” was effective and for the next twelve hours the Jews made remarkable progress in casting their enemies in disarray and putting hundreds to the sword.  Encouraged by their success against the Roman army, the Zealots returned to the city only to renew their fighting against one another!

The Romans respond

Titus, son of emperor Vespasian, soon organized his troops and for the next month set about building great ramps against the wall of the city. These would be used to mount  battering rams and other machines over them to open up the wall for attack.  Naturally, such structures required great quantities of wood in their construction and so, over time, all the trees in the surrounding region were cut down, leaving a halo of barren devastation for miles around Jerusalem. As this progressed, a  plan was formed on the part of the Zealots and successfully executed.  Raids were made on the ramps and ultimately, through the sheer lack of regard for their own lives and the bravery it occasioned, the Jews were able to set them on fire with great loss of life to the Romans.

Titus responded with merciless force.  Any Jewish soldiers that were caught were to be crucified.  On some occasions there were over 500 crosses, each with its own victim,  erected on the Mount of Olives in full view of the Jews at the temple (Josephus 2:11:1). Moreover, in council, Titus and his generals agreed to build their own wall and completely encircle the city.  Fueled by anger toward their adversaries, the legions completed this wall in just over three days!  As a result, the Zealots and the two million Jews in the city were cut off from all aid, reinforcements, and (most essentially) food. 

 The consequences were deleterious.  Thousands of Jews starved to death every single day.  Bodies were literally piled in the streets.  In just over two months, over 700,000 Jews died of hunger.  Those who remained grew desperate.  Some braved the fury of their Zealot oppressors to jump the walls and defect to the Romans.  Many were killed, but many were also received.  But even in the haven of the Roman camp they often found death at their own hands as they gorged themselves and died from the shock of a full stomach.  The most demoralizing consequence of the siege came on the 17th day of the month Tamuz (early July) when there were no longer any animals fit for the daily sacrifice.  For the first time since the conquest by the Babylonians 600 years earlier, the altar of the temple was empty.  In fact, that was the last day that a sacrifice was ever offered by Jews in the temple until the present!    As the effects of the famine grew more appalling, Titus made many attempts to reason the Zealots out of their mad purpose.  He promised to spare their temple.  He promised to restore the sacrifice.  He promised to save their lives.   But this appeal was met with disdain by the leaders of the rebellion.

 Over the next ten days, the Romans pursued a new strategy in which the foundations of the massive fortress, Antonia, which formed a corner of the temple mount, were undermined and disassembled.  Gradually the troops progressed until finally they broke up and through into the larger structures surrounding the temple.  To impede their progress, the Zealots set fire to Antonia and that corner of the complex.  The Roman soldiers, surprised by this strategy, incurred great losses.  Over the next few days fire burned and Jews and Romans made various raids on the other, but gradually and inexorably the Romans pushed the Zealots back into the courts of the Temple itself.  Their new enterprise was to build a ramp against the wall surrounding the holy structure.  When this project was completed, for six full days, the Romans used a great battering ram to try to penetrate into the last stronghold of the Zealots.  Remarkably, the walls stood firm and the Jews sent many Romans to their graves during this particular offensive.  Titus, seeing so many of his own men lost, resolved to withhold any more mercy.  He set fire to the gate he had been trying to enter, and he gathered his commanders to plan the final assault.  It was decided that the temple itself would be spared while none of the men defending it would be.  Nevertheless, as Josephus framed it, “God had for certain long ago doomed it to the fire, and now the fatal day was come” (6:4:5). 

Prophecy fulfilled

 That fatal day was the tenth of Ab in the Jewish calendar, the latter part of July in ours.  In the early morning a raid was made by the Romans through the gate into the very court of the temple.  In the fury of the assault, a Roman soldier, heedless of Titus’ order, seized a burning brand from the wall and set it to one of the windows of the priestly rooms that were part of the outer walls of the Temple.  Immediately the structure caught fire and the gold began to melt.  The Zealots made such a cry that the orders of Titus to his men to save the structure went unheeded.  In like fury, Romans and Jews set upon each other, but this time, the Zealots were subject to the unrestrained wrath of the legions.  While the building was becoming a massive torch of flame and the noise of the fire raged, still the screaming of the dying Jews added to the great sound.  Josephus, eyewitness to the catastrophe, depicts it with clarity:

“ten thousand of those that were caught were slain . . . one [cannot] imagine anything either greater or more terrible than this noise, for there was at once a shout of the Roman legions . . . and a sad clamor of the seditious [Jews].  The hill itself, on which the temple stood, was seething hot, as full of fire on every part of it, that the blood was larger in quantity than the fire, and those that were slain more in number than those that slew them, for the ground did nowhere appear visible” (6:5:1). 

 After the slaughter and the work of subduing the remaining Zealots was complete, Titus gave the order and every wall around the city was pulled down and every stone left standing at the ruins of the smoldering temple was cast to the ground.  Thus, the words of Jesus Christ to his disciples 40 years earlier were literally fulfilled. As were the words found in Psalm 74:

Turn Thy footsteps toward the perpetual ruins; The enemy has damaged everything within the sanctuary.  Thine adversaries have roared in the midst of the meeting place; They have set up their own standards for signs.  It seems as if one had lifted up his axe in a forest of trees.  And now all its carved work they smash with hatchet and hammers.  They have burned Thy sanctuary to the ground; They have defiled the dwelling place of Thy name. (vv.3-7)

While many interpretations of this calamity have been offered, one must proceed to read the text of history cautiously and with a diligent eye on the Scriptures.  Yet there is at least one lesson to be learned from the destruction of Jerusalem:  the very words of God are the very truth and are tested and pure and will come to pass in His time.  —MWT