The Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

What happened

In the spring of 70 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War, the Roman general Titus — son of the emperor Vespasian — laid siege to Jerusalem with four legions. The siege opened around the time of Passover, when the city was swollen far beyond its normal population by pilgrims who were then trapped inside by the encircling Roman lines. Titus built a circumvallation wall to seal the city completely and to make escape, and resupply, impossible. After roughly five months of bombardment, assault, and starvation, the Romans broke through; the Second Temple was destroyed in the late summer (commemorated on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av), and the city was sacked. Outlying resistance continued until the fall of Masada in 73/74 CE.

The food connection

Jerusalem's fall is one of history's starkest demonstrations that a city most often defeats itself. Our principal source is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish commander who had defected to Rome and witnessed the siege from the Roman side; his account in The Jewish War is detailed, partisan, and chilling. According to Josephus, the city was riven by three warring factions — the Zealots under Eleazar ben Simon, the fighters under John of Gischala, and those under Simon bar Giora — who fought one another inside the walls even as the Romans pressed outside. In the course of this internal war, the factions burned one another's grain stores — reserves Josephus says could have sustained the city through a long siege. This act of self-destruction, the deliberate torching of the food supply during a power struggle, may be the single most catastrophic own-goal in the history of siege warfare. The defenders starved themselves before the Romans could.

As the famine deepened, Josephus describes the familiar descent: people ate leather, belts, and shoes; they stripped old hay and chewed it; the wealthy bought scraps at ruinous prices while the poor died in the streets. His most notorious passage recounts a woman of means, driven mad by hunger, who killed, roasted, and ate her own infant — an account meant to convey that the famine had dissolved the most fundamental human bond. Whether literal or emblematic, it was the image with which the ancient world remembered this siege.

The human cost

Josephus gives the figures the ancient world received: approximately 1.1 million dead and 97,000 taken captive and enslaved. Modern historians treat the death toll as almost certainly exaggerated — Jerusalem's resident population was far smaller, and even with Passover pilgrims and refugees the realistic figure is debated, with serious estimates ranging from the high tens of thousands into several hundred thousand. The captive figure feeding the Roman slave markets is likewise uncertain. What is not in doubt is that the dead were overwhelmingly civilians; that famine and factional murder killed many before the legions did; and that the survivors were enslaved, dispersed, or executed. The number is contested. The catastrophe is not.

Political & economic context

Rome besieged Jerusalem to crush a provincial revolt and to make an example that would echo across the empire. For the Flavian dynasty the victory was political capital: Vespasian and Titus celebrated a joint triumph, the Temple treasures were paraded through Rome and immortalized on the Arch of Titus, and Judea was reorganized under direct Roman control. Rome then imposed the fiscus Judaicus, redirecting the tax Jews had paid to the Temple toward the temple of Jupiter in Rome — turning the conquest into a permanent revenue stream and a standing humiliation. Inside the walls, the factional leaders had gambled the city's survival on their rivalries and lost everything, the people most of all.

Historical legacy

The destruction of the Second Temple is one of the axial events of Jewish history. It ended the sacrificial, Temple-centered Judaism of antiquity and forced the transformation of the religion into the rabbinic, text-and-community-centered form that has defined it since. The event is mourned to this day; it shaped two millennia of diaspora, and the contested figures of Josephus have been argued over by historians and theologians ever since. The Arch of Titus still stands in Rome, and for centuries Jews would not walk beneath it.

Food culture legacy

This siege reshaped Jewish foodways more profoundly than almost any event in this section. With the Temple and its sacrificial system gone, the table became the altar: religious life relocated to the home and synagogue, and the meal — the Sabbath table, the Passover Seder, the laws of kashrut observed in the domestic kitchen — became the central arena of sacred practice. The annual fast of Tisha B'Av, mourning the destruction of both Temples, is the most significant fast in the Jewish calendar after Yom Kippur; it is bracketed by mourning customs and a pre-fast meal, making the absence of food itself a ritual. A catastrophe of starvation thus became, in cultural memory, encoded in a deliberate annual fast — a community choosing hunger to remember hunger.

Reference notes

Related entries: The Caloric Mathematics of a Siege (the grain-store destruction is the textbook case); future entries on Tisha B'Av and the Passover Seder (food-and-memory cross-link); Kashrut and the Jewish home table. Related cuisines: Jewish / Sephardi / Ashkenazi / Mizrahi foodways (origin point of the diaspora dispersal). Content advisory: standard section advisory, with specific flag for the cannibalism account — frame as historical testimony from Josephus, never sensationalized.

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