The Last Temple (27 page)

Province of Judea

Then I heard another voice from heaven say: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.

“Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Mix her a double portion from her own cup. Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her heart she boasts, ‘I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn.’

“Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.”

REVELATION 18:4-8

From the Revelation, given to John on the island of Patmos in AD 63

Vitas woke early on the day that Jerusalem would experience the culmination of its sorrows of death and mourning and famine, as the sun rose bloodred behind the haze of columns of smoke from the smoldering gates and porticoes of the outer Temple. Its early light cast an otherworldly glow over the undisturbed sanctuary of the inner courts and the crowds of refugees huddled against the chill of dawn.

From an upper balcony of the tower of Antonia, he saw that the smoke came from fires whose flames had been extinguished the day before, fires of such size that the embers were still dull orange beneath the ruins of massive beams.

Not even the slightest breeze passed through the great city of Jerusalem, perched on the mountain that protected and isolated its beauty, surrounded by massive stone walls that had resisted the siege of legions of soldiers for half a year.

The columns of smoke formed straight lines to the heavens, eerily reminiscent of the smoke that had spiraled upward from the Temple altars during daily sacrifices without cease for centuries before this, what would be the final day of the Temple’s existence.

The Antonia Fortress had fallen; the massive towers and walls that had once been thought invincible had caved to the siege and determination of the most powerful military force in the history of mankind. The echoes of the screams of those who had died seemed to linger over the ruins, and still-burning heaps of homes that had been reduced to rubble added to the columns of smoke that were like sentries guarding the outer courts of the Temple.

Without a breeze, the stench of death imprisoned the city. This was a city where once, as decreed by law, bodies were not even permitted to lie waiting for a funeral overnight, lest the sacred house of God be defiled. Now, hundreds of corpses littered the streets—some savagely violated by sword or spear or fallen walls, others curled into a deceptive peacefulness that masked the torture of the final moments of bodies starved so thoroughly that the breath of life had departed in a feeble gasp.

Without a breeze to sigh through the stoneworks of the surviving buildings, it was silent in these moments after dawn, a silence unbroken by any of the waiting attackers outside the Temple or the unfortunates who still survived inside or those who lived in the upper city and waited in dread for the final walls to be broken and the soldiers to gush in for ultimate victory.

It was a mountaintop where hundreds of thousands lived. Yet now it was as hushed as if the hand of God pressed down upon it.

The priests and rebels and thousands of refugees who huddled within the inner courts of the Temple were exhausted from fear and famine and the horror of all the slaughter they’d witnessed in the previous weeks. Theirs was a silence of hopelessness, and those awake—especially the parents who held their children in numbed sorrow—prayed that those around them would remain in the oblivion of sleep for as long as possible.

On the other side of the walls, in tents gathered at the bases of the giant earthwork ramps that had finally allowed them to break through, the Roman soldiers shared that silence. Their silence was different, however; it was a silence of unexploded rage, a gathering of strength, a mixture of grimness and satisfaction that their victory was now so close.

Because of the silence and the stillness of the air, it seemed like the earth itself had paused in respect for the imminent terror that gripped the Temple and those within it.

Vitas was so lost in his feeling of melancholy that he didn’t realize Titus was there until he stepped forward and leaned on the balcony. “The battle is no longer in doubt,” Titus said. “Jerusalem will fall. But can I control my soldiers?”

Vitas knew what had motivated the question. Titus worried about delivering on his vow to preserve the Temple. His soldiers—professionals who were usually stolid under all circumstances—hated the Jews for their treacheries during the siege. Titus doubted he could find a way to hold them back once the inner court was breached.

Vitas didn’t answer. He knew it had been a rhetorical question.

They stood together without speaking.

Moments later, when the growing light of the sun broke over the top of the Mount of Olives across the valley, it was not greeted with the trumpet calls of the priests as had been done every dawn for generations. Instead, the sound that greeted the sun was a wailing, crazed howl from a solitary figure standing on a roof overlooking six thousand women and children gathered in a courtyard, a figure barely visible against the haze.

The uncanny sound echoed clearly in the silence of the city that had not yet begun to stir to its final moments.

The man on the rooftop spoke with a singsong cadence. Each word pierced the stillness. “The time is coming when the Lord will say to the people of Jerusalem, ‘A burning wind is blowing in from the desert. It is not a gentle breeze useful for winnowing grain. It is a roaring blast sent by me! Now I will pronounce your destruction!’”

Vitas wondered, had this man—insane from hunger and grief, his lungs half-destroyed by smoke—consciously known when the first heat of the day would begin to rise from the barren hilltops? For as his prophecy reached those huddled in the sanctuary of the inner Temple, so did the first winds of the morning.

“Our enemy rushes down on us like a storm wind! His chariots are like whirlwinds; his horses are swifter than eagles. How terrible it will be! Our destruction is sure!”

With the quickening breeze, the columns of smoke shifted slightly, bending around the man on the rooftop.

Below Vitas, a woman holding a baby shielded her eyes to look upward against the bloodred sun, straining to see the source of the ominous wail. The movement woke her baby, and it cried for milk. But the breasts that had once fed the child had long since been dry. The woman leaned over the baby, and her tears formed splotches on the soot that covered her child’s face.

As the child continued to wail, it was as if the man on the rooftop had peered into the woman’s heart. “I hear a great cry, like that of a woman giving birth to her first child. It is the cry of Jerusalem’s people gasping for breath, pleading for help, prostrate before their murderers! Therefore, you prostitute, listen to this message from the Lord!”

The glow of the sun from behind the columns of smoke that had begun to dance to the wailing prophecies seemed so supernatural that none spoke above whispers.

“This is what the sovereign Lord says: Because you have worshiped detestable idols, and because you have slaughtered your children as sacrifices to your gods, this is what I am going to do. I will gather together all your allies—these lovers of yours with whom you have sinned, both those you loved and those you hated—and I will strip you naked in front of them so they can stare at you.”

The figure on the roof bent in half, coughing out smoke and blood. When he rose, somehow he found the strength to add vigor to his cry. “I will punish you for your murder and adultery. I will cover you with blood in my jealous fury. Then I will give you to your lovers—those many nations—and they will destroy you. They will knock down your pagan shrines and the altars to your idols. They will strip you and take your beautiful jewels, leaving you completely naked and ashamed. They will band together in a mob to stone you and run you through with swords. They will burn your homes and punish you in front of many women. I will see to it that you stop your prostitution and—”

“Silence that man!” The roar came from an elderly Sadducee, a once-wealthy man whose upper city mansion had been plundered by starved rebels searching for grain. He needed no reminder of the Hebrew prophecies, needed no reminder that Jerusalem had become a Babylon prostitute hated by God.

The old man’s roar of anger seemed to be the catalyst that shifted the earth itself from its near-reverent anticipation of the apocalypse about to fall upon the Temple and the rest of the city.

The silence was completely broken.

The winds picked up, rising from the valleys. The soldiers outside the walls began to move their armor, swords, and spears in readiness, a dull clinking sound that was ominous because of its familiarity to the people trapped inside the walls.

The high keening of the man on the roof reached one of the chambers of Antonia, where the Roman general Titus paused as he lifted water from a basin to his face. This was the son of an emperor, soon to be emperor himself, a man who was Rome personified, the Rome of seven hills, of the ten horns of the ten provinces, the Rome that was the great beast who had almost died in the civil wars after its head, Nero, was cut off.

Yet the Beast had survived, with other heads to replace Nero. Titus and his legions were ample proof that the Beast had returned—and was about to destroy its prey.

For Vitas, the words of the man on the roof and the wailing death cries below were so set apart from the cacophony of all the other death cries of the previous months that he shivered. As if the presence of the God that the Jews claimed as theirs had brushed against his soul.

Then enraged shouting drowned out the wail of the madman on the roof.

At the outer gates of the Temple, where Roman guards were posted, hundreds of Jewish men had begun a furious, desperate raid to force a way out of their trap.

Some of the soldiers were caught unawares, but most relied on instinct and years of training. They closed ranks and locked their tall shields together, forming a wall that withstood the attack.

Titus immediately dispatched a message for his elite cavalry to assist the troops.

The rest of the city was aware of the drama only from what noise of warfare reached them. It almost drowned out the solitary figure on the roof, yet in the occasional lulls of fighting, his prophecies descended from on high. “Do you see these buildings? I assure you, they will be so completely demolished that not one stone will be left upon another!”

Less than fifty yards from the man, outside the Temple’s inner wall, soldiers on horses charged Jews armed with broken spears and flaming torches. The screams of the horses joined the screams of the men.

“The time will come when you will see what Daniel the prophet spoke about: the sacrilegious object that causes desecration in the holy place!”

Vitas wondered if the man spoke from divinely inspired prescience. Or was that man, like so many other Jews, so familiar with Scripture that he was simply gasping out prophecies of doom that all of them recognized but had ignored until far, far too late?

More shouting, screaming. The Jews could not withstand the disciplined charge of the Romans and retreated again to the inner court. One of the gates to the inner court had caught fire, and the Roman soldiers tried to put it out.

“How terrible it will be for pregnant women and for mothers nursing their babies in those days!”

Vitas groaned. It had been reported by refugees that the week before, a woman had roasted her own baby and devoured half of it.

“And pray that your flight will not be in winter or on the Sabbath. For that will be a time of greater horror than anything the world has ever seen or will ever see again!”

From their vantage point, Titus saw enough to be satisfied that the outer gates would hold. He motioned for his elite to withdraw.

In the quiet that followed, an archer appeared on the balcony, one Titus had sent for earlier. Titus and Vitas and the archer stared at the man on the rooftop, his silhouette a dark form against the smoke.

“And they will see the Son of Man arrive on clouds of heaven with power and great glory!” The man on the roof knew his listeners would recognize this imagery as God’s way of declaring judgment; again and again their prophets had used the phrase in the centuries before.

The archer lifted his bow. Drew aim.

Titus put out a hand. “I’ve changed my mind. Let him speak to those gathered below.”

Vitas could guess why. During the last weeks, the Jews had inflicted such degradations upon themselves that Titus had openly said on more than one occasion that the imminent fall of the city was not because of Roman power but because of divine hand. What if this man was speaking on behalf of that presence? It would invite divine disfavor to shoot the messenger.

“The sun will be darkened; the moon will not give light. The stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of heaven will be shaken!”

Shaken indeed,
Vitas thought. How else to describe the indescribable? What other images to convey the horror as the foundation of the entire Jewish world began to collapse?

He understood enough of Jewish culture to know the source of those metaphors. The stars had been fixed forever. It was as unthinkable that the points of light which had been above the Jews since creation might shift without warning as it was to comprehend the sun and moon without light. And equally as unimaginable that the world’s great empire would plunge into death throes and then survive as that the city once considered unassailable would be on the verge of a destruction of such utter and implacable violence.

Titus sent the archer away, and when the two of them were alone again, he spoke to Vitas not as a general but as a friend who had endured much with him.

“As Jerusalem falls, I fulfill my duty to my father and Rome,” Titus said. “But I betray the woman I love.”