Caught in a dilemma, Josephus at first argued that suicide was an offence against God. The argument only provoked his audience of rebels to violence. They rushed at him with their swords raised, shouting and threatening him. Again Josephus, ‘turning like an animal at bay to face each assailant’, tried all manner of persuasion: ‘. . .he called one by name, glared like a general at another, shook hands with a third, pleaded with a fourth until he was ashamed.’25 It was no use. Eventually Josephus agreed to the mass-suicide pact. However, he suggested a particular method.
To avoid offending God, lots were to be drawn. Then, beginning with the person who drew the short straw, every third man was to be killed by the man next to him. So began the horrific sight of Jew cutting the throat of fellow Jew. As the lifeless bodies of rebels dropped to the ground, one man was consistently passed over and remained standing. Being a scholar and perhaps well versed in mathematics, Josephus, it seems, had devised the count in such a way that he would always be one of the two survivors. Although the story later inspired a maths problem known as the ‘Josephan count’, we will never know whether Josephus had used luck or judgement. What is clear is that he now seized his opportunity. He turned to his fellow survivor and desperately tried to convince him to abandon the suicide pact. It must have taken all his powers of persuasion not to be killed for going back on his word after so many had just been murdered, but both men surrendered.
Josephus later put his survival down to the will of God. However, this escape was far from the end of his troubles. The commander of Galilee, the young appointee of Hanan and the Temple authorities in Jerusalem, had failed in his task to resist Rome. He was now a prisoner of Vespasian. Galilee was as good as lost, and Josephus himself faced imprisonment, a long, pathetic journey to Rome and possible execution. Yet the fortunes of Vespasian, Titus and even Josephus were now about to be transformed. With that change of circumstance, the stakes of the war in Judaea were about to be raised.
REVERSALS OF FORTUNE
To raucous jeers from the crowds of Jewish prisoners in the streets of Jotapata, and to a barrage of insults, jabbing elbows and calls for his death from the Roman soldiers, Josephus was dragged out of his hiding place and frogmarched to Vespasian’s camp. According to Josephus, it was his noble bearing that now made the general’s son, Titus, take pity on him. Indeed, he claimed that it inspired the Roman to reflect on the captive’s extraordinary reversal of fortune and ask his father to spare Josephus’s life. The reality was perhaps more prosaic. Josephus was not to receive special treatment because of his noble demeanour. The fate awaiting him was that of hundreds of leaders of Rome’s vanquished foreign enemies before him: Josephus would be taken to the metropolis, paraded in chains at a triumphal procession, then perhaps ritually executed in the Forum. Before all this could happen, though, he took one of the greatest single gambles of his entire life.
Josephus asked if he could have a private audience with Vespasian and Titus. Having been granted his request, he held his nerve and delivered the words that would make or break him. He told them he came as a messenger of God. There was no point in sending him to Nero, he said, because that man would soon no longer be emperor. The future emperors of Rome, he prophesied, were standing before him. Vespasian must have guffawed at such a preposterous suggestion; emperors of Rome had, after all, always come from a single dynasty of the aristocracy. Perhaps he even grew angry in the belief that Josephus was mocking both Rome and him, an ordinary Roman who had risen through the ranks. He certainly suspected that the scholar and priest was saying anything to save his skin.26
In truth, Josephus had taken the messianic prophecy in the Book of Numbers that a saviour would arise from Israel and applied it not to a Jew, but to a Roman. When an officer present asked why, if Josephus was so adept at prophecy, he had not predicted that the town would fall and that he would be captured, Josephus replied that he had. Vespasian’s interest was sufficiently pricked by this extraordinary conversation to check on Josephus’s prophecy. A messenger soon came back confirming it: Jotapata had fallen on the forty-seventh day, just as Josephus had predicted. It is reasonable to imagine that Titus and his father spied an opportunity. Perhaps this man could somehow be useful to them after all. As far as Josephus was concerned, the gamble had paid off. He was not just safe, but his fortunes had once again taken a rapid u-turn. He was given gifts, clothing and shown every kindness. Although he was still a prisoner, he was now a prized, talismanic one.
As for Vespasian and Titus, their minds soon returned to the more practical matters of war. The campaign of terror in Judaea and Galilee had only just begun. At Tarichaeae, in the kingdom of the Roman client-king Agrippa, 6000 Jews were massacred as Titus made a dramatic amphibious assault on the unfortified part of the city from a lake. After it was taken, Vespasian discriminated between civilian and insurgent, in order to avoid outraging the local population with mass executions and thus make peace-keeping operations easier for Agrippa in the future. However, he broke his promise on the advice of his staff, who feared further insurgency. ‘Expediency must be preferred to conventional morality,’ was their message.27 The Jews he had set free were later rounded up in a theatre and 1200 of the old and infirm were slaughtered. The 6000 strongest were sent to Greece to work as slaves on Nero’s planned canal in the Isthmus of Corinth. Some 8500 of Agrippa’s subjects were returned to him, and the remaining 30,400 were sold into slavery. Similarly, at Gamala the Romans repaid Jewish resistance by putting 4000 Jews to the sword; the remaining 5000 insurgents had already jumped to their deaths in a deep ravine.
While Vespasian surged south, ‘liberating’ the coastal cities on his march to Judaea, Titus focused on mopping up remaining pockets of resistance in Galilee. In the last conflict of the campaign in AD 67 a surprise lay in store for the Roman general. John of Gischala had been busy rallying and training peasant armies in the Golan Heights and in his home town. Most of these Titus easily crushed. However, when Titus prepared to storm Gischala, John pleaded with him not to attack the town on the Sabbath, but to wait a day. After agreeing to the brief respite, Titus took the town, only to discover that John had vanished. Once again, the rebel leader had made a theatrical, last-minute escape. This time, however, his destination was more predictable: Jerusalem.
In fact, the Holy City was the refuge of every resistance fighter who escaped death or enslavement at the hands of the Roman legions. The result of their arrival in Jerusalem threw the direction of the war into crisis. Many brought with them only bad news. Galilee was lost, they said, and now the Romans were making a slow but unstoppable sweep south. Others, however, violently disagreed. When John and his band of followers rode into Jerusalem they spread their belief that the defeat of the Romans was utterly achievable, that the Jews could still beat them.28 While the clash of opinions intensified and entrenched the Jewish factions, there was one group caught in the eye of the storm.
The leadership of the war under Hanan and the Temple authorities, cried the nationalist leaders in accusation, had brought only failure after failure. Had the Jewish resistance proved so weak, so ineffectual because the moderate priests wanted all along to surrender the city and Judaea to Rome? With time the argument of the extremist factions only gained momentum; by the end of the year their patience had run out. John’s followers first imprisoned and then massacred the moderates. Then they turned their firepower on Hanan and the religious élite. John’s faction denounced them as traitors, expelled them from the Temple, then took control of both it and its funds. Soon the Temple complex had become a battleground, and by December Hanan and three other leaders from the priestly élite were dead. With their deaths, wrote Josephus, the fall of Jerusalem began.29