Second Temple

The day the sanctuary caught

Josephus dates the decisive fire to 10 Lous/Av in the year 70. After renewed fighting, Roman troops drove the defenders back into the Temple’s inner court.

In his version an unnamed Roman soldier, acting without orders and helped by another, threw burning material through a golden opening into rooms on the sanctuary’s north side. Greed then outran discipline: Josephus says the soldiers expected the gold-covered sanctuary to be full of treasure.

Did Titus try to stop it?

Josephus says Titus ran from his tent and repeatedly tried to have the fire extinguished, but the troops ignored him or could not hear him; looting, fighting and additional fires consumed the sanctuary.

A conflicting late-antique account preserved by Sulpicius Severus says Titus’s council deliberately decided to destroy the Temple, and scholars debate whether that passage preserves material from Tacitus’s lost Histories. Josephus wrote in a pro-Flavian setting, which is a strong reason to scrutinize his absolution of Titus.

Which day, and what was still standing

The date is contested too. Josephus gives 10 Av while the Mishnah’s commemorative tradition gives 9 Av, and one modern analysis argues that Josephus may have shifted the destruction by a day for ideological reasons.

“About August 4” is not a secure conversion: modern reconstructions of Josephus’s calendar produce 6, 10 or 29 August, depending on the system assumed.

Nor did the Temple’s fall mean the fall of Jerusalem. Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala still controlled the Upper City, which the Romans captured later.