In 70 CE, Jerusalem fell. Josephus’s eyewitness account details the breach from the Antonia, flames swallowing the Temple, and plunder pouring through the gates as “ten thousand” died in the precincts [1][2]. The city that had measured time by offerings now counted corpses and loot [17].
What Happened
The siege closed like a fist. After months of encirclement and inner strife, the city’s defenses failed where Roman engines had hammered hardest. From the Antonia fortress, legionaries surged into the northern courts; soon afterward, fire ran along the colonnades. The Temple’s cedar crackled, the gold flashed, and the city’s last moral hold—the rhythm of its worship—was gone [1][2].
Josephus puts the scene inside the courts: “While the holy house was on fire, everything was plundered… and ten thousand… were slain.” The ellipses can’t hide the specificity he elsewhere supplies—ensigns raised, soldiers acclaimed, thresholds crossed, the metallic grind of armor on stone. He notes the ensigns planted and Titus’ acclamation at the gate, a ritual pivot from battle to victory [1][2].
Beyond the Temple, the Roman method continued street by street. Titus’ cohorts pressed from the Antonia toward the Upper City, while detachments moved along the Tyropoeon Valley. In the Lower City, houses collapsed under fire; cries rolled up from the Hinnom Valley. At the Siloam pool and along the Ophel, survivors sought water and narrow alleys; Romans broke walls, not doors, advancing house-to-house through masonry—a dry tactic amid a city wet with blood [1][17].
Loot moved in the other direction. Spoils—bronze vessels, gold ornaments, textiles, and coin—flowed toward camps on the Mount of Olives and routes to Caesarea. The clink of captured silver mixed with the tramp of cohort boots. Already, artisans in Antioch and Rome would be sketching the panels that would later decorate an arch; already, mint workers were preparing dies for a mourning figure beneath a palm [15][17].
By the time resistance flickered out in the Upper City, the skyline was changed. The hulking mass of the Temple was a burnt skeleton; the Antonia a platform for watchmen rather than a fortress for rebels. From Bethlehem to Jericho, travelers could see the black scar and know the war’s outcome without hearing a word. The city was taken. Its meaning was under construction.
Why This Matters
Jerusalem’s fall ended the First Jewish Revolt’s core struggle and reset the province’s political and religious landscape. The capture destroyed the Temple, removed the priesthood’s institutional center, and gave Rome a trophy of unmatched symbolic value [1][2][17]. The victory consolidated Flavian authority and justified triumphal propaganda and mass enslavements.
In the framework of Jerusalem Remade, conquest became design. The city’s ritual calendar was replaced by imperial ritual—Titus’ acclamation, the triumph in Rome, and, decades later, Hadrian’s colony. What the siege burned, policy would later overwrite with stone and law [2][11][15].
The sack also redistributed populations: captives marched to Caesarea and Antioch, buyers filled the market at Ashkelon, and the region’s demography shifted. The memory embedded in Josephus’s words and later on the Arch of Titus became a resource for Roman legitimacy and a wound that shaped Jewish religious life for centuries [1][2][17].
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