How the Jerusalem temple fell

Woe to you, O Jerusalem—and woe to the historian who writes about your fall to the Romans! The enterprise, undertaken by Guy MacLean Rogers, is woeful because our knowledge of the great Jewish revolt and the subsequent siege and destruction of Jerusalem comes almost exclusively from the prolific but troublesome Josephus. A perusal of Rogers’s endnotes betrays his heavy reliance on Josephus, accounting for maybe 80 percent of his citations. Josephus wrote about the war while comfortably ensconced in Rome, where he dined with the emperor. The emperor had given Josephus expensive land in Judaea and had exempted that land from the onerous taxes that all other Jews had to pay. Josephus and the emperor were tight.

By the time he wrote of the war, Josephus had come under increasing criticism for his involvement. According to his own accounts, he had tried to dissuade the rebels from their growing insurgency before taking a military post in Iotapata in 67 CE. As the Romans were breaching that city’s walls, Josephus famously entered into a suicide pact with his comrades—but then reneged at the last minute and threw himself on the mercy of his enemies. The Romans saw merit in keeping Josephus alive, and the Jewish general became a Roman asset from that day onward.

As might be expected, in the years following the fall of Jerusalem, some of Josephus’s fellow Jews—among the few who were left alive—looked unfavorably upon his betrayal. He wrote The Jewish War, his Life, and On the Antiquity of the Jews as histories, but also as apologias for his own actions. It was God, he said, who told him to side with the Romans. And it was also God who granted the Romans victory, he asserted, because of the unfaithfulness of the Jews.