In the summer of 70 CE, as Titus tightened his siege, the Daily Tamid offering stopped on 17 Tammuz. Josephus marks the moment like a crack in the city’s soul: the Temple’s rhythm halted, and with it a thousand-year measure of time [3]. The silence inside the courts was louder than drums outside.
What Happened
The siege of Jerusalem squeezed life from the city before it killed it. By early summer 70 CE, Titus held the Mount of Olives, the Antonia fortress, and the approaches from Emmaus and Jericho. Food ran short. Factions turned inward. Then the heartbeat stopped. On 17 Tammuz, the Daily Tamid—the morning and evening offerings—ceased, a liturgical absence recorded by Josephus as both symptom and sign [3].
This was not just ritual. In a city defined by the Temple, the Tamid was time itself, as regular as sunrise over the Mount of Olives and sunset beyond Bethlehem. When it ended, people counted hunger instead of offerings. The smell of incense gave way to the bitter tang of smoke from burning storehouses. The sound of psalms gave way to the crack of Roman ballistae launching stones from the Antonia, their arcs visible in the dry, ash-gray air above the Tyropoeon Valley [3].
Inside, priests argued with fighters. John of Giscala’s men and the faction of Eleazar ben Simon disputed access and priority. Outside, the scarlet standards of Legio X Fretensis advanced their works under cover of arrow screens from the Antonia. The cessation of the Tamid was both consequence and accelerant: supplies were too thin to sustain worship, and without worship the city’s core identity dried to tinder [3].
Josephus places the date with precision because it meant that the covenantal order was collapsing. The Temple was not yet on fire, but its services were. That pause made a future flame thinkable. It is one thing for walls to crack under a ram’s thud; it is another for a ritual to fall silent by starvation. One breaks a barrier; the other breaks a people [3].
Titus’ siege crews heard the city less. The shofar blasts that typically framed the day faded. In their place came the drum of mallets on stakes, the groan of capstans raising towers next to the Antonia’s walls, and the rasp of saws cutting timber at Gethsemane. The Temple’s world was shrinking to a target.
Why This Matters
The end of the Daily Sacrifice marked the internal collapse of Jerusalem’s religious life before the physical destruction of the Temple. It showed how siege pressure—hunger, factionalism, resource scarcity—could break ritual continuity and morale as decisively as breaching a wall [3].
Through the theme of Jerusalem Remade, this moment reveals transformation by deprivation. A city oriented to offerings and priests was bent toward survival and knives. The change was audible and olfactory: incense and psalms replaced by smoke and siege engines, a cultural inversion that prefaced the coming fire [3].
As a waypoint in the larger story, 17 Tammuz sharpened the meaning of what followed. When flames rose and Titus was acclaimed imperator in the precincts, readers of Josephus could connect that climax back to this silence—the day ritual stopped and Jerusalem became a fortress rather than a sanctuary [3].
Event in Context
See what happened before and after this event in the timeline
Ask About This Event
Have questions about Cessation of the Daily Sacrifice in Jerusalem? Get AI-powered insights based on the event details.