The fall of Jerusalem

Look at the shading. Jerusalem sits on a spur with the Kidron valley falling away to the east, the Hinnom to the south and round the west, and the Tyropoeon running down through the middle of the city itself. On three sides an attacker is looking up out of a ravine at a wall on the skyline.

Only the north approaches on the level. That is why the city had three walls on that side and one everywhere else, why Herod put his fortress at the northwest corner of the temple, and why every army that ever took Jerusalem, Babylonian or Roman, came at it from the north. The terrain is not background to this story. It is the reason the story goes the way it does.

It is also why the siege took five months rather than five weeks. When the assaults stalled, Titus stopped trying to break in and built a wall right round the city instead, about eight kilometres of it, which Josephus says the legions finished in three days. After that the famine did the work.

The siege itself is not in the Bible. The warning is, and it describes a Roman siege closely enough that the passage is worth putting beside the map.

An embankment thrown up, the city surrounded, hemmed in on every side, and not one stone left on another. That is a circumvallation wall and a levelling, named in order.

• Luke 19:41-44 Jesus weeps over the city and describes a siege: an embankment thrown up, the city surrounded and hemmed in on every side, and not one stone left on another.
• Luke 21:20-24 When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, know that its desolation is near. Those in Judea are told to flee to the hills rather than take shelter in the city.
• Mark 13:1-2 A disciple admires the stonework, and is told that not one stone will be left on another.

How to read that is a question this page does not settle. Readers who date the Gospels before AD 70 take these as prophecy; readers who date them after take them as written with the event in view. Both positions are held by careful people, and the passages say what they say either way.

The campaign comes from Josephus, and he is a complicated witness. He was a Jewish commander in Galilee who surrendered, went over to the Romans, and watched his own capital destroyed from the besiegers' camp. He wrote under Flavian patronage and he flatters his patrons. He is also unusually precise about engineering, distances and dates, and he is the only detailed account anyone has. Historians use him carefully rather than not at all. So does this page, and where he is being self-serving, the notes say so.

The walls are a separate problem. The plan laid over the sheet is a drawing, placed against the Temple Mount platform, whose Herodian retaining walls still stand and can be measured. Here is how firmly each line on it is actually known.

• The First Wall well tracedThe oldest circuit, round the Upper City and the southern spur, parts of it going back to the kings of Judah. Well traced on the ground, and never breached from outside during this siege: the defenders held it to the last and it had to be taken street by street.
• The Second Wall reconstructedA shorter circuit enclosing the northern suburb and the market quarter. Josephus describes it; the ground has given up only fragments, and its northern line is reconstructed rather than known. Titus took it about five days after the Third Wall, lost it to a counterattack, and took it again.
• The Third Wall disputedBegun by Agrippa I and finished hurriedly when the revolt came. Its line is the live argument in the archaeology of Jerusalem: this is the northern reading, following remains found in the 1920s, and others place it on the line of the present Old City wall some four hundred metres south. Either way it was the outermost defence, and it was the first thing to fall.