The Jewish War

"Yes. I think this is probably the greatest history book of all time, or one of them—up there with Herodotus and Thucydides , but the lesser-known of the three. The vividness of the writing, the research and the knowledge is so deep and so powerful. It’s a towering masterpiece. Josephus was really one of the first war correspondents, too. He was actually a general in the Jewish revolt in 66, against the Romans. He went to Rome and met the Emperor Nero and Nero’s wife. Then he took part in this revolt against Nero and the Romans. Then he defected to the Romans, was imprisoned and was going to be executed when a Roman general called him in and said, ‘You’re going to be killed.’ And Josephus said, ‘Wait, I’ve had a vision. I’m going to tell you something. You’re going to be emperor.’ And the Roman general, Vespasian, said, ‘Wait a sec! Let’s keep this guy alive.’ “There have been many Jerusalems and it is always changing. What seems ancient and constant is, in fact, often new and different” Months later he actually did become the emperor, the founder of the Flavian dynasty. So he called out Josephus and Josephus became a Roman collaborator. They put down the Jewish revolt and stormed Jerusalem. He was there in the entourage of Titus, the future emperor, and saw the destruction of Jerusalem. His account of it is amazing, but what’s also amazing is that he knew Vespasian and Titus. He also knew the leaders of the Jewish revolt and the family of King Herod—one of the five kings of that name. He ended up living in Rome as a friend of the royal family. He actually interviewed everybody and knew everything. And when he wrote the story of the Maccabees and the Herods, he was talking about families he knew well. He’s one of the great historians of all time, I would say. Yes, he describes it in detail. The account of it is just astonishing because he loved the Temple. He loved Jerusalem and he prayed there as a religious Jew when he was a young man. He trained for the priesthood there. He knew it inside out. Herod the Great had built this amazing Temple. It was a huge building, so great that, when you approached Jerusalem, as you came over the hill, if the sun was falling on it, it looked like it was made of a mixture of gold and snow. It shone and was enormous, like a mountain. And Josephus saw it destroyed in front of his eyes. He said that when the flames reached a certain height all the great stones cracked and that the noise could be heard all the way across the river Jordan. He said he knew it was the end of Jerusalem, but of course, it wasn’t the end of Jerusalem. Amazingly, Jerusalem has been destroyed twice and has been rebuilt each time and has come back. It’s had many different iterations and facets. There are two answers to that question. First, the more holy sites are destroyed, often the more sanctified they become. Because religiosity and holiness are all about having a history and a lineage, if you like, the more suffering there is the better. The destruction of a holy site is like a monumental version of martyrdom. There were two destructions of Jerusalem: in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar and then by Titus in 70 AD, the one that Josephus saw. Both only served to make Jews regard Jerusalem as even more holy than before, because the ruins were even holier than the building. But the other answer to your question is that modern Judaism, modern Christianity and later Islam all came about partly because of the destruction of the Temple in 70/71, because Jerusalem could no longer be the old religion based around the Temple and sacrifice outside the Holy of Holies, the way it had been up to that point. After the destruction, it became a religion that was based on the Torah, which was the law and the old books of the Bible. It became a sort of movable Jerusalem for Jewish people. They always loved Jerusalem, but they couldn’t always be there. That was how modern Judaism came about. The Judaism that we know today is very different from Temple Judaism. “There used to be a saying in Ottoman times that ‘there’s no one so evil as the citizen of a holy city’” Similarly, during the siege, a small Jewish faction, known as Christians or Nazarenes—followers of Jesus Christ, then led by a relative of Jesus—fled Jerusalem and divided themselves forever from the mother religion. It was really the beginning of Christianity as a totally separate religion. Then, 630 years later, when Muhammad started to preach the third revelation from God, he said that this was made possible because Judaism had been destroyed in 70, with the destruction of the Temple, which had made possible the second revelation, Christianity. He said Islam was the third. So, in many senses, the modern world was created by that siege."