The End of the Siege

So Jerusalem was taken, in the second year of Vespasian’s reign, on the eighth of the month Gorpiaeus. It had been captured five times before, but this was the second time it was laid waste. Shishak king of Egypt, and after him Antiochus, then Pompey, and after them Sosius together with Herod took the city but preserved it. Before all of these, the king of Babylon conquered it and laid it waste, 1,468 years and six months after its founding. [a]

The man who first founded it was a Canaanite chieftain, called in his native tongue Righteous King, and such indeed he was. For that reason he was the first to serve God as priest, and the first to build the temple, and he called the city Jerusalem, which had before been called Salem. David, king of the Jews, drove out the Canaanite people and settled his own there, and 477 years and six months after him it was razed by the Babylonians. From King David, the first Jew to reign in it, to its destruction under Titus were 1,179 years; and from its first founding to its last capture, 2,177 years. Yet neither its antiquity, nor its vast wealth, nor its people spread over the whole inhabited world, nor the great glory of its worship was any help at all against its ruin. Such was the end of the siege of Jerusalem.