70 A.D.: Fighting to the End

They were fighting to the end.  The Jews who had retreated into Jerusalem, the Holy City of God, were determined not to surrender to the besieging Romans but would hold out, daily expecting divine deliverance. 

       Certainly only divine deliverance could save them.  Titus had brought five legions along with auxiliaries, engineers, and calvary to Jerusalem to subdue it once and for all and remove the perennial threat to Roman authority and security in the city.  Some 80,000 men were assembled outside the city walls to take the city down. 

The city was subjected to siege and the suffering was almost indescribable.  Food rations within the city were scarce to non-existent and some desperate Jews used hidden passages to sneak outside the city to steal food from the tents of the besieging soldiers.  Those who were caught were crucified.  And the crucifixions were many:  trees from the surrounding countryside were chopped down and the land denuded, as some 500 Jews were crucified each day.  Other Jews who tried to escape were caught and their bodies ripped open, as Roman soldiers searched their stomachs for the jewels and gold they imagined the escapees were trying to take with them.

Within the city, the ravages of hunger were appalling.  The only witness to the horror of the siege, the Jewish author Josephus wrote in his history The Wars of the Jews of the example of a woman named “Maria” who fled from her home in Perea into the (imagined) safety of Jerusalem (Book 6, 199-219). 

According to Josephus, she took her nursing child from her breast and said, “Miserable infant!  Why go on living? If we survive, we will be slaves to the Romans and we will die of famine even before that!”  She therefore killed her son, roasted him, and ate half, keeping the other half hidden for later.  When other Jews came upon her, having smelt meat roasting, they threatened to cut her throat if she did not tell them where she was hiding food.  She then uncovered the half-eaten corpse and shouted, “This child is mine and the deed is mine! Eat!  Are you weaker than a woman or more merciful than a mother? If you are too pious to eat, leave the leftovers for me!”  The men, horror-struck, fled away.  Josephus offers the story as an example of the suffering endured by all trapped in the doomed city.

       The question is:  why was everyone fighting to the end?  Given such unspeakable torment, why did they not simply surrender—or at least commit mass suicide, as a later crowd did as Masada when besieged and faced with certain defeat. The answer:  those in Jerusalem were certain that God would intervene to save them, even to the last minute, and they were holding out, waiting for Him to act.

       With hindsight (and a secular view of the possibility of divine intervention in the world) such stubborn courage and perseverance strikes us as mindless culty fanaticism.  But given their understanding of the Scriptures, was it?

       Let’s recap:  the prophetic Hebrew Scriptures promised that after Israel had been returned to the Promised Land after the Babylonian exile, God would protect them so that they would never again suffer defeat and exile.  They would dwell secure in the land of Israel and God’s Messiah would arise to defend and exalt them.  Should any of the Gentile nations invade them, God would intervene with supernatural power and wipe out the invaders, keeping His people secure (see, for example, Ezekiel 38-39 and Zechariah 12-14).  These promises meant that Israel, having returned from the Babylonian exile in 520 B.C., would be protected by their God and would never again experience national defeat and dispersion. 

       This feeling that “now is the time when God will act to finally save us and fulfil all the promises He made to us through the prophets!” was especially prominent during the period of the Second Temple.  (See N. T. Wright’s wonderful and massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God, part 1 for the paper trail.)  During this period many Jews were using Daniel chapter 9 to calculate the time when God’s definitive intervention could be expected and when the Messiah would finally come.  Different men made different calculations (Rabbi Akiba who supported Bar-Kochba as a Messianic candidate in around 135 famously got it wrong) but the expectation of Messiah’s arrival and Israel’s final triumph was in the air.  And since, the residents of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. thought, Messiah had not yet arrived, they concluded that now must be the time when he would come.  It was, for them, now or never.  

It was therefore impossible, according to their understanding of the prophets, that the Romans would be victorious and that Zion would fall to the invading powers.  The only faithful and sensible option therefore was to hold on and wait for the promised rescue—a rescue which, of course, never came.  Their stubbornness was not based on mindless fanaticism but on a belief that the words of the prophets must be fulfilled and their calculations about the time of Messiah’s predicted arrival.

The Christian response to this was that the words of the prophets in fact had been fulfilled—that Jesus came as the promised Messiah and that the security of God’s people was spiritual, not political.  Israel should not therefore expect a political deliverance, since they had rejected God and His Messiah, thereby dooming themselves to Roman catastrophe.

The Lord Himself had long ago predicted this:  “The days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not  recognize the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:43-44).  That is, because you rejected the Messiah, God will abandon you and your holy city to destruction.

The choice for Jerusalem and its Jews in that generation, therefore, was between Jesus and death.  Having rejected Jesus in the generation following His triumphal entry into the city, the only fate remaining for them was destruction, death, and national extinction—a fate which overtook them in 70 A.D.  If Jesus was not the Messiah, then they could realistically have expected rescue from the Romans.  But if Jesus was the Messiah—a Messiah they rejected—then divine wrath was sure to follow.

 I mention this bit of history because these are the same options remaining to all the children of men in every generation.  If we knowingly, decisively and finally reject Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, the only option remaining for us is death—not death at the hands of Roman armies, but eternal death and divine wrath at the hands of God.  Jesus is our life and the only alternative to death.  For us, the road to salvation and life still remains open and we can choose life.  Moses said it long ago and that Biblical binary remains: “Behold, I have set before you life and death. Therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).