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In his rogues’ gallery of procurators, Josephus highlights two stand-outs whose corruption and incitement seem to render the war all but inevitable: Albinus and Gessius Florus. Albinus’s administration (62–64 CE) was »characterized by every possible form of corruption«:

This was not only in his official capacity, which he used both to steal and loot private property and to impose crippling taxes on the whole nation; but he also took ransom money from their relatives for the release of men imprisoned for terrorist activities by […] previous procurators, so the only prisoners left in prisons were those who did not come up with the cash.¹⁷

This passage is one of several in which Josephus mutually implicates Jewish radicalism and Roman dishonesty. Albinus’s successor Gessius Florus made him seem an innocent by comparison. Josephus describes Florus (64–66 CE) as vicious and disrespectful of Judean norms, going so far as to accuse the Roman of intentionally starting the rebellion as a way to cover his crimes. When Florus’s superior, the moderate Syrian legate Cestius Gallus, visited Jerusalem right around Passover in 66 CE, the Jews came to him en masse demanding relief. Sitting beside the legate, Florus mocked them. In another instance, Florus took the Greek side in a dispute between a synagogue in Caesarea and Greek neighbors who were provoking them. Ethnic tensions in Caesarea were high, culminating in a massacre of the Jews of the city (War 2.457). Given the collapse of the Judean economy, moreover, in addition to lining his own pocket, the procurator was likely under pressure to meet his Roman tax quotas. When Florus brazenly robbed the Temple treasury in May of 66 (War 2.293), open hostilities ensued. Even Agrippa II’s intervention, attempting to dissuade the angry Jews from rashly taking up a cause they were sure to lose, could not quell the rising tide.

When the high priest’s son Eleazar suspended the daily sacrifice on behalf of Rome, he effectively declared war:

Eleazar, the son of the High priest Ananias, a young radical who was Captain of the Temple at the time, persuaded the ministers in charge of the temple to accept no gift from a foreigner or any sacrifice on behalf of a foreigner. This laid the foundation for war with Rome, as it meant rejecting the sacrifices offered for the Roman people and the emperor. The chief priests and other notables made earnest appeals for the retention of these customary offerings on behalf of their rulers, but the rebel ministers would not give way.¹⁸

Late in the fall of that same year, Cestius Gallus returned from Antioch, leading a legion to the region in attempt to calm things down. The Jews attacked and rather unexpectedly defeated him in Beth Horon, emboldening them to believe victory possible. In 67 CE, Nero deployed an army under the command of Vespasian to quash the rebellion. As he moved south through the land, Vespasian faced little resistance and soon quieted the Galilee (where he picked up Josephus as a willing prisoner cum embedded chronicler of the war). Vespasian conquered much of Samaria, Judea, Peraea (the Transjordan), and Idumea. This effectively consolidated resistance in Jerusalem and a few fortified locations, such as Herod’s fort at Masada, which had been taken by the rebel group known as Sicarii at the outset of the fighting.

Nero died ignominiously in 68 CE, and the war went on hold as Vespasian hurried back to fight for and ultimately claim the imperial throne, leaving his son Titus in command. The war’s most momentous chapters took place inside besieged Jerusalem during this relative calm. The pause in fighting was squandered by the rebels. Instead of preparing for the inevitable renewal of the Roman assault, Jewish factions turned on each other, and the year was spent in bloody civil battle.

The dynamic in the city itself unfolded in stages. When the Romans took the Galilee and other parts of the land, many Jews fled the countryside for the heavily fortified capital. The crowds in the city heightened the tensions of the previous decade or so: »there was bitter contest between the militants and the advocates of peace« (War 4.131). A protagonist of the war, and key player in the events playing out in Jerusalem was one John of Gischala, who led an extremist Zealot faction based in the north, many of whose members were now in Jerusalem. He was a bitter rival of Josephus both ideologically and on account of his authority and popularity in Josephus’s own military theater: Galilee. For this reason, it is hard to get an accurate picture of the man from Josephus, who depicts the influx of John’s rural extremists in the darkest light, calling them more vicious than the Romans. Of Gischala’s men, he writes,

there was no limit to the atrocities they would commit. No longer confining their criminal activities to robberies and muggings, they graduated to murder: and these were not run-of-the-mill killings under cover of darkness, but open murder in broad daylight, with the most eminent citizens as their initial targets.¹⁹

In this passage greed and class war eclipse principled resistance to Rome.

The first stage of battle pitted the extremists against a more moderate group of the highborn, among them the high priestly elite (High priest Ananus ben Ananus was murdered), royalty, and the head of the treasury, whom the rebels describe collectively as »traitors to the freedom of their nation« (War 4.146). No doubt economic factors were in play and Josephus tellingly describes the rebels’ early destruction of debt records in the city archives (War 2.427). The removal of moderates did not end the violence however, and two other rebel factions continued infighting, securing strongholds in different parts of the city. The rural quasi-messianic leader Simon bar Giora was welcomed with his men into Jerusalem in 69 to depose John. Instead he made things worse. Eleazar ben Simon led a party of disenfranchised and radicalized priests. Eleazar was killed by John in the spring of 70, leaving Simon and John to fight one another in a city in the grip of famine.

Titus made his definitive assault on Jerusalem in the summer of 70 CE. By August he had breached the walls and sacrifice was suspended. The Jerusalem Temple was burned to the ground early in August, a date still commemorated by Jews late each year on the Ninth of Av. John and Simon were taken as prisoners to Rome. Josephus is anxious to describe his imperial patron, Titus, trying to protect the Temple, and blames its destruction instead on a combination of rebel impiety and overly excited Roman troops. Surely no Roman would have relished destroying a holy site of any sort, especially one of such grandeur … but after such a long war, who is to say?

It took three more years for the Roman forces to rid the region of rebels and Josephus ends his own chronicle by describing the mass suicide of the Sicarii in 73 CE. This group that had caused much trouble in the years leading up to the war (War 2.254; 2.425–27) had been holed up for the course of the Jerusalem siege at Herod’s fortress Masada (War 4.398–405). The Romans set siege to Masada. In Josephus’s romanticized telling, following the impassioned leadership of Eleazar ben Ya’ir, they chose collective death over Roman enslavement.²⁰ Oddly, this last stand is glorified by Josephus, a jarring reversal of how this sort of theological rhetoric and zero-sum extremism is depicted in the rest of his work.

The defeat of the Jews plays a central role in the legitimizing narratives of the Flavians and thus the war left an outsized impression on the city of Rome itself, today as yesterday. There are two major triumphal arches in the Italian capital, one still stands in the Forum, famously depicting the Triumph itself, including the menorah and other treasures stolen from the Temple. The second arch is currently being excavated at the eastern-most end of the Circus Maximus. Its inscription underscores how Flavian propaganda exaggerated their Judean victory:

Because […] he [Titus] subdued the Jewish people and destroyed the city of Jerusalem, which all generals, kings, and peoples before him had either attacked without success or left entirely unassailed.

Construction of the Roman Colosseum was financed in part by riches gained from Judea, as was Rome’s Templum Pacis, where the menorah, temple vessels, and other prizes from the war were displayed.

70 CE is often used as shorthand in current parlance for the end of sacrificial religion, marking a symbolic pivot around which Jewish religious consciousness turns from priest-centered Temple-based religion to Torah-centered rabbinism. It is hard to imagine that most Jews would have seen the destruction of the Temple as final. A temple had been destroyed before yet the Babylonian exile of 587 BCE turned out to be but a minor hurdle. Construction on a second temple began by 520 BCE. That said, the events of 70 allowed a set of religious experts unaffiliated with priesthood to begin to assert broader authority and culminated for others the capstone of a persistent critique of priestly abuses and corruption.

For the remainder of events described in this chapter, we don’t have access to any Jewish source comparable to Josephus. Detailed narrative history does not appear from Jewish pens again until the Early Modern era, and so we reconstruct events from other people’s history, more fragmentary material remains, documents, polemical materials by non-Jews, and religious, legal, liturgical and other genres of literature never meant to tell history.