The Jewish War: First half of Book 6

[cahn]

Last week: Sieges are awful. Josephus tells us that Titus really totally felt bad about all the awfulness (even though he didn't stop them) and there is a theory that maybe by "us" he meant "Berenice." Titus had dancing boys?? (Josephus does not mention any, sadly.) Does Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon owe anything to Josephus speaking truth to the wicked? Unclear. Talmud on the Sages vs. the Zealots as an interesting correlated story to Josephus. Poppea's complexity including both an interest in (conversion to?) Judaism as well as being ruthless; comparison to Constantine's much better press.

This week: The temple is destroyed.

Next week: End of Book 6.

Comments

[cahn]

Also, note to those who may not be following the previous posts any more: lannamichaels has joined the chat about the mass suicide in Book 4 (most threw themselves, their children, and their wives over the edge into the ravine)!

Recap

[cahn]

The siege of Jerusalem gets worse. The Jews put up a desperate fight to keep the Romans from breaking down the last wall, but when they do there's another wall behind it! Titus gives another stirring speech to get his men to scale that wall (which would be certain death). (One guy actually volunteers and against the odds does pretty well actually until he trips and falls. ) Titus sends Josephus out again to talk to John. Josephus is (as always) very well-spoken (but actually yeah, I do think he is very upset) and he says some people do decide to escape the city because of it. Some refugees try to ask the insurgents to give in to the Romans or at least to withdraw from the temple so the sanctuary could be preserved: unless there was absolutely compelling need, the Romans would never bring themselves to set fire to the holy places. (Our footnote says that Josephus' readers of course knew what was going to happen a few days later.) The insurgents kill them instead (I think? I can't quite make it out from the text). (Do we really think this happened?) Titus also tells them that he's willing to preserve the temple. John and his boys don't listen, of course. So Titus keeps fighting them. Josephus tells various stories of the fighting.

One of the stories involves the Jews setting fire to a colonnade (I didn't know what a colonnade was until now... I guess architecture is another thing I don't know about) which is obviously not good for the Romans who were on it. Nobody could help them, but it was at least some consolation to the doomed men to see the distress of the leader [Titus] for whom they were giving up their lives... Every one of them took with him to his death those cries, that sympathy coming from Caesar like some glorious burial shroud, and died content. Really? Really, Josephus? Another story is about a dude who asks his fellow soldier to break his fall by promising everything he has, but he doesn't ever have to pay up because "the weight of him flattened his catcher on the stone pavement with instantly fatal result."

Meanwhile, there is famine, resulting in the absolutely awful story of the woman who eats her own child. But it was the fathers, [Titus] said, not the mothers, who were responsible for the resort to such food: it was they who were obstinately remaining under arms even after privations as acute as these. I mean, on one hand we know Josephus is going to blame John for anything he can, but on the other, this actually sounds like a welcome exception to the rule that women get blamed for everything... maybe because Josephus is Jewish more than Roman? :P

Titus, now realizing that his attempt to spare a foreign temple was only causing injury and death to his own men, gave orders for the gates to be fired. Footnote says that this is the outer wall of the Temple enclosure. He then has a meeting where he and the others decide not to destroy the temple. Footnote says that "Sulpicius Severus, a Christian historian who wrote a universal chronicle in Latin in the late fourth and early fifth century AD, preserved a tradition, which may have come from Tacitus, that Titus' council of war had explicitly decided that the temple should be destroyed. But in favour of Josephus' accuracy in his account of this council are the date he was writing and his knowledge that many of those alleged to have been present could have denied its truth if it was an invention." However, if what selenak said in the last post is true and Titus wanted it to look to, say, Berenice, as if he'd wanted to spare the temple, even if at the time he'd said no, would anyone really have spoken up against him?

Anyway... one of the Roman soldiers, without waiting for orders and oblivious to the horror of what he was doing, in what must have been some devilish impulse grabbed a piece of the burning timber and, hoisted up by one of his colleagues, flung the brand through a gold-plated window which gave into the rooms lining the sanctuary on the north side. There is basically a riot in which Josephus says Caesar is trying to hold back the fire but various soldiers keep feeding it. And so, though it was none of Caesar's wish, the temple was fired.

[cahn]

Since I'm saying random stuff about the Book of Mormon: here, Doubtless they were cursing their God for being so slow to punish their enemies: it was no hope of victory now which steeled them to the fight, but rather despair of any other deliverance reminds me a bit of their sorrowing was not unto repentance, because of the goodness of God; but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin. And they did not come unto Jesus with broken hearts and contrite spirits, but they did curse God, and wish to die. Nevertheless they would struggle with the sword for their lives (Mormon 2:13-14). Again, this could have come from lots of other places too, of course...