Chapter III: Jerusalem (4)

_7. Sieges of Jerusalem understood by the topography._--The capture of Jerusalem by David, the investment of it by Sennacherib, and the overthrow of it by Nebuchadnezzar have already been described. Time would fail me to go into detail concerning all the sieges that followed; and probably a brief treatment of two or three will be sufficient for the reader. We desire to show how much clearer the history becomes in the light of modern survey and investigation; and for this purpose a few examples are enough.

Jerusalem on three sides was protected by deep ravines, and an enemy, looking up, saw the brow of every hill surmounted by high walls. At first he might imagine the Tyropœon Valley was accessible from the south, since the dam or transverse wall was lower in position than the walls which it joined together; but no doubt the dam or wall was strongly built. Even if he could get within it, there was the Causeway in front and walls on either side, and he would only be in what Josephus calls a fortified ditch. The assailants of Jerusalem--who doubtless knew their business--always chose to assault it from the high ground north and north-west. The king’s palace, therefore, on Ophel was about the last place which an enemy could reach, and not until he had broken through two or three walls.

When Pompey advanced against Jerusalem (B.C. 64), the population was divided. The party of Hyrcanus opened the gates to him; but the party of Aristobulus retired to the Temple, breaking down the bridge which communicated with the city. This may have been an arch on the site of the present Wilson’s Arch. Pompey, having sent a garrison into the city itself, laid siege to the Temple, purposing to assault it from the north. He “filled up the ditch on the north side of the Temple.” That would be the artificial cutting at the north-west corner. He filled up the valley also, Josephus tells us (Wars, i. 7, 3), “and indeed it was a hard thing to fill up that valley, by reason of its immense depth, especially as the Jews used all the means possible to repel them from their superior station.” This is the valley which Warren found, crossing the present Haram area, falling away from the north side of the platform to a depth of 200 feet, and passing out into the Kedron north of the Golden Gate. Probably it was only partially filled up at this time. Pompey then erected towers upon the bank which he had made, and brought engines to bear; but it was not until the third month of the siege that he made himself master of the Temple.

In B.C. 37, Herod, like all preceding generals, pitched his camp on the north side (Josephus, Wars, i. 17, 9). The Jews in this warfare made mines--perhaps in the ground banked up by Pompey--and surprised the Romans by sudden sorties from below. But the first wall was captured in forty days--(Antiq. xiv. 16, 2. This was of course the wall which we know as the second)--and the Lower City being thus taken, the Jews retired into the Upper City and into the Temple. The Upper City was taken by storm after fifteen days more. But here the destruction ceased. Herod was going to reign in Jerusalem, and did not wish to do more damage than was inevitable in the capture of the city. He sought to save the Temple, and only some of the cloisters about it got burnt down.

Afterwards, to ingratiate himself with the Jews, Herod rebuilt the Temple, and enlarged the precincts of it. It would seem that Solomon’s palace had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar’s generals and never rebuilt. Herod’s own palace was in the High Town. The area formerly occupied by Solomon’s palace was now taken into the Temple precincts, the south-west corner was raised up from its low level and added also; and along this southern front was built a royal cloister, 100 feet high. To make an approach to this cloister from the west, Robinson’s Arch was erected, and if there was no viaduct from the western hill there must have been a staircase to ascend from the valley. On the north side also the Temple precincts were enlarged, by taking in the ground which Pompey had raised to a higher level. The Baris or castle in which Nehemiah had lived was reconstructed and strengthened, renamed Antonia, and connected with the Temple.

In another quarter Herod strengthened the city very much. The reader will have noticed that while it was a usual thing with assailants to attack the north wall, and take the Lower City as a preliminary to assaulting the Upper City, yet there was one spot where the Upper City might be approached at once from the outside. This was by the Valley Gate, and was owing to the fact that the second wall started from the Gennath Gate to go northward, whereas the wall of the Upper City was prolonged westward. Herod determined to strengthen this part of the city all the more because his own palace was in this part; so he built three strong towers, which he named Hippicus, Phasaelus, and Mariamne. Hippicus was at the outer angle; the base of it remains, and is the foundation of the north-west tower of the present citadel, which measures 45 feet square. Phasaelus remains, and is the one conspicuous object on the right hand as the traveller enters the Jaffa Gate. It is 70 feet by 56 feet, and is solid to the height of 60 feet; the stones are bevelled, like those round the Haram, and do not appear ever to have been disturbed. The site of Mariamne is less certain, but it probably corresponded with the third tower which we see marked in almost every plan of the so-called Castle of David.

The Jerusalem of Herod’s day was the Jerusalem which Jesus Christ would be familiar with.

In the year 43 A.D., Agrippa built a third wall, to enclose the suburban dwellings which had sprung up on the north. This third wall began at the tower Hippicus, went northward, and had a tower called Psephinus at its north-west angle, then passed eastward “over against” the monuments of Helena, queen of Adiabene (the so-called “Tombs of the Kings,” half a mile out, on the great north road), then passed by the caverns of the kings, bent southward at the tower of the north-eastern corner, and finally joined the old wall at the valley “called the Valley of Kedron” (Josephus, Wars, v. 4, 2). “The city could no way have been taken if that wall had been finished in the manner it was begun.” But Agrippa “left off building it when he had only laid the foundation, out of the fear he was in of Claudius Cæsar.” The wall was 10 cubits wide, and was afterwards raised as high as 20 cubits, above which it had battlements and turrets. In the course of the third wall, according to Josephus, there were ninety towers, as compared with sixty in the first; and the whole compass of the city was 33 furlongs. He also says that the ninety towers were 200 cubits apart; but this would make the third wall alone more than 5 miles in length, and so we judge that some mistake has crept into the text. Therefore we shall venture to take the present north wall of the city as representing Agrippa’s wall, notwithstanding that the entire circumference would then be less than 33 furlongs. There seems to be no sufficient evidence for going beyond the present wall. It is a wall which begins at the tower Hippicus, by the Jaffa Gate. The position of the great corner tower Psephinus seems to be indicated by the ruined castle called _Kalat Jalud_ (Giant’s Castle), just within the present north-west angle. The Damascus Gate is “over against” the so-called Tombs of the Kings, for a spectator standing at the Tombs would look down directly upon that gate. The “royal caverns” we may identify with the Cotton Cavern, the quarry whence the kings of Judah obtained the stone for the great buildings of the city. The entrance to them is in the face of the scarped rock, about 300 feet east of the Damascus Gate, and the city wall runs right across the entrance. At the north-east corner of the present wall we find the tower which Josephus assigns to that point--“the most colossal ruins after those at the north-west corner.” A trench cut in the rock at the foot of the eastern wall is deflected here, passes round the corner, and goes west; it does not go any further north as we might expect it to do if the wall ever extended further north. And then the wall from the north-east corner is brought southward and joins the Haram wall, the junction not being at the north-east angle of the Haram, but much nearer to the Golden Gate, at the deep valley which Pompey began to fill up. We have to bear in mind that this third wall had been built before the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, in A.D. 70.

Titus began by investing the city on the north and the west. The place he selected for his attempt on the outer wall was just west of the Pool of Hezekiah, because there the wall of the High Town was not covered by the second wall, and he thought to capture the third wall and then at once assault the first.

When Titus had taken the outer wall he encamped in the north-west part of the city between the second and third walls; and at the same time extended his line from the “Camp of the Assyrians” to the Kedron Valley. His attempt to storm the High Town at the uncovered portion of the wall failed because of the strength of Herod’s towers. He then made an attempt on the Temple platform from the north, but failed because the valley there was deep and the Temple was strongly fortified. He had hoped, when he took the Wall of Agrippa, to be able to assault Antonia from the north, without taking the second wall; but it now appeared to him that that castle might best be assaulted on the west. These considerations induced him to attack the second wall. After some effort, a breach was made, and the Romans entered the middle city. They were once driven out by the Jews, and kept out for a time; but by-and-bye they gained entrance again, and then, made wise by experience, they demolished the second wall, or the northern part of it, and so were able to keep their ground.

Antonia was now assaulted on its western side; but the business was difficult, and the struggle was long. The mounds which the Romans cast up were undermined by the Jews and destroyed. The mines, however, weakened the outer wall of the castle, and that fell also. The Romans were filled with hope; but the Jews had foreseen the event, and had run up another wall behind. The courage of the Romans was damped by the sight of this second wall. But a few days after, they scaled it by a night surprise, and at the same time forced their way into Antonia through the mine under the wall. The Jews, in a panic, rushed away into the Temple, where they were able to defend themselves as in a fortress. But fighting now took place daily, until at length the northern cloisters of the Temple were burnt down, the inner Temple was assaulted, and eventually the whole fabric was reduced to ashes.

The Jews were now crowded in the Upper City, and confined to that. Titus held a parley with them across the bridge above the Xystus--that is, at Wilson’s Arch--offering them terms. But they declined his conditions, and so the siege had to go on. The Ophel quarter was now plundered and burnt; and then a grand effort was made against the Upper City. Mounds were thrown up, and the assault was delivered simultaneously from several points--on the west, by Herod’s palace, on the north-west part of the town a little east of the tower Phasaelus, and on the north-east at the Xystus, which extended from Wilson’s Arch southward. The strong city at last fell, and its walls and buildings were razed to the ground.

We know that it rose again from its ashes, and has had an eventful history since; but it is not our purpose to follow its fortunes farther.

In seeking to understand the descriptions given by Josephus, writers have been much puzzled by his mention of a ravine “called the Kedron ravine.” It could not well be the Kedron Valley itself, or it would hardly be spoken of in this way; besides which, we are told that the eastern portion of Agrippa’s wall joined the old wall at the ravine called Kedron. This would be too indefinite a note of place if the wall and the ravine ran parallel with one another. Moreover, the north-east angle of the Temple cloisters was built over the said ravine, and the depth was frightful (Wars, vi. 3, 2). The depth was frightful at the angle, rather than at the eastern side. There could be no right understanding of the references, until Sir Charles Warren’s labours showed that a deep valley crosses the Haram north of the Golden Gate, and contains within it the Birket Israil. It was only a “so-called ravine” to Josephus, because the western portion had been filled up by Pompey, and the eastern mouth was cut across by the Wall of Agrippa. Warren’s discovery of this ravine, and demonstration of its depth, is a glorious instance of the value of excavation work in questions of Jerusalem topography.

[_Authorities and Sources_:--The Works of Josephus. “Siege of
Jerusalem.” Thomas Lewin. “Jerusalem, a Sketch.” Thomas Lewin.]