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Herod's Temple, rebuilt over eighty years and finished for just six, reconstructed here from Josephus and surveyor's drawings.

Titus brought four legions up to Jerusalem in the spring of 70, a few days before Passover, when the city was swollen with pilgrims who would never leave. Inside the walls the revolt had already been eating itself for two years: the factions of John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora held different quarters, fought in the streets, and during the winter had burned each other's grain reserves to deny them to rivals. The stores that might have outlasted any siege were ash before the first Roman ramp went up. The siege ran through the summer, wall by wall. When deserters kept slipping out, Titus ringed the city with a wall of his own, five miles of it in three days, and let the famine work. Josephus, the captured rebel general turned Roman interpreter, walked the perimeter shouting offers of mercy and recorded what the hunger did inside; some of what he recorded is not repeatable. By August the fighting had narrowed to the Temple platform. Josephus, writing later under the patronage of Titus' family, insists Titus wanted the sanctuary spared; a rival tradition says he ordered it burned. On the ninth day of the month of Av, or the tenth, a soldier, ordered or not, threw a burning brand through a gilded window, and the house that Herod had rebuilt over 80 years, finished only six years earlier, went up in an afternoon and a night. Josephus himself points at the calendar: it was the same day of the same month, he writes, on which the Babylonians had burned the First Temple on that spot more than six centuries before. The day was already the calendar's wound, and now it was the wound twice. The lampstand and the golden table were carried to Rome and paraded in the triumph, where the Arch of Titus still shows them on the shoulders of soldiers; Josephus counts 97,000 enslaved. Part of the loot financed the new amphitheater in the city center, the one now called the Colosseum. The Temple was never rebuilt. A stretch of its western retaining wall stands, and is prayed at. David Roberts had walked this ground in 1839 with a sketching stool and a license from the local governor, making the studies that became his famous Holy Land lithographs. In 1850 he painted the city whole and dying at once: Herod's courts white and gold in the center, the outer districts already in flame, the legion standards coming up the near ridge. He set the vantage on the high rocks where he had once sat drawing, and painted the building he never saw more carefully than the fires.