Titus held a conference with his officers and the seasoned generals who had come to assist him to discuss strategies to defeat the Jewish people. Many suggestions were offered, but Titus found them all unsatisfactory. At last, Titus said, “I have the solution. This is what we must do. We shall build a wall around the entire city, putting it under a total siege. In this way, we need not fight them. Their food is gone—starvation will defeat them. In addition, if we don’t fight them, they will begin fighting among themselves, and do to themselves, what we wish to be done to them.”

All the officers and generals agreed to Titus’ plan, and they immediately began its implementation. They closed all roads leading to the city, to prevent the Jews from attacking. They set up watchposts manned by guards day and night at all the city gates to prevent people from leaving the city to collect grass to eat.

As the days passed, the famine in the city intensified. Even the Zealots were weakened. The death toll climbed so rapidly that there was no longer any place to bury the dead. The alleys were littered with corpses. Some threw their dead relatives into the cisterns. At times, while disposing of their relatives in this way, they too would fall in alive, and remain to die with their relatives. Others dug graves in their yards and lay in them to await inevitable death. 

Jerusalem became a living graveyard, eerily quiet, with no moaning or mourning. The hunger had dried up all tears and silenced all cries. Houses turned into mass graves. When a house became full of bodies, it was sealed, and the next house was used. Later, some resorted to throwing corpses over the city wall into the Kidron Valley below.

Titus had been correct. If not for the famine, Jerusalem could never have been defeated. 

The Romans built new ramps against the Antonia fortress in the month of Sivan. The Zealots attempted to burn the rampworks as they had done in the past, but the hunger took its toll. They went limp, and were unable to burn the ramps. The Romans hauled the battering rams up the ramps unchallenged and battered the wall. But the stones would not budge. At the beginning of the month of Tammuz, in the middle of the night, the Romans made their way into the fortress. The Jews retreated into the adjacent complex, the Holy Temple.

On the seventeenth of Tammuz, the wall between the Antonia Fortress and the Holy Temple was breached. By this time, there were no remaining priests who did not suffer from wounds that made them unfit for Temple service. Besides, there were no sheep available. For the first time in all the years of war with Rome, the daily sacrifice was interrupted.

Titus ordered the battering rams to be set up against the inner western Temple wall. These walls had been built by Herod. The stones were about four feet thick, four feet high, and varied in length. The battering rams battered furiously against the walls, but were unable to impact them. Instead, on the eighth day of Av, they set fire to the gates. The gates were wooden, plated with intricately designed silver. The fires melted the silver, and then burned the wooden gates. The Romans dashed in and threw torches onto the roof of the Temple that still remained. The roof caught fire and trapped the Jews inside the Temple court. 

The last battle took place in the morning of the ninth of Av. A Roman soldier threw a torch through a Temple window. The fire spread rapidly and before long, the inner court caught fire. The Romans ran in with torches to add to the blaze.

The trapped Jews were huddled around the Altar. The Romans flung spears and arrows at them, slaying every Jew they met, sparing no one. Soon the entire Temple area was covered with corpses. A stream of blood flowed across the Temple floor and down the eastern steps. 

Before the fire consumed the Temple, Titus and his men entered the Holy of Holies. Drunk with victory, he cursed the G-d of Israel. He unrolled a Torah scroll and committed a grievous sin upon it. He then took his sword and slashed the curtain. Miraculously, blood spouted forth. Titus shouted, “I have killed the G-d of Israel.” The Romans plundered the Temple of all its valuable golden vessels, and then the Temple was consumed by fire, besides the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the Kotel Hamaaravi — from which the Presence of G-d has never departed.

For the rest of that day and into the following day, the tenth of Av, the flames rose to the very heavens. The shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying were echoed by the surrounding hills. Over one million Jews died during these months of siege and destruction, and almost 100,000 were taken captive to Rome to be sold as slaves. The Talmud documents how one group of Jews chose to die, rather than to live a life of forced immorality and other sins. 

The Romans celebrated their victory over Jerusalem in a special victory parade in Rome. Each participant in the parade carried some of the spoils of war. Silver, gold, including the holy vessels of the Temple, and other valuable objects were displayed before the cheering Roman citizens. The parade passed under the Victory Arch which had been constucted for the occasion. Depicted on the arch in stone relief is the scene of Jewish captives carrying the holy Menorah. The Arch can be seen to this day.  

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The information in this chapter was drawn primarily from Josephus, Chapter 88, “Tishah B’av,” Artscroll Publications, and “A Time to Weep,” CIS Publications.