Famine in Jerusalem

Come, then: take the fifth book of Josephus’s Histories in hand once more, and go through the tragedy of what was done at that time. [a] “For the well-off,” he says, “staying was just as ruinous: a man would be killed on the pretext of desertion, for the sake of his property. The rebels’ frenzy grew together with the famine, and both horrors blazed up more fiercely every day. Grain was nowhere to be seen openly. They burst into the houses and searched them. If they found some, they tortured the owners for having denied it; if they found none, they tortured them for having hidden it too carefully. The proof of having it or not was the wretched people’s own bodies. Those still holding together were taken to be well supplied with food; those already wasting away were passed by, for it seemed senseless to kill people who would soon die of want.

Many secretly traded all they owned for a single measure, of wheat if they happened to be richer, of barley if they were poorer. Then they shut themselves away in the innermost corners of their houses. Some, in their extreme want, ate the grain just as it was; others baked it, as need and fear allowed. No table was laid anywhere; they snatched the food from the fire still raw and tore it apart. It was a pitiful way to eat, and a sight to bring tears: the stronger took more than their share, and the weak wailed. Famine overpowers every feeling, but it destroys nothing so completely as shame; what at other times commands respect is in famine despised. So wives snatched the food out of their husbands’ very mouths, children out of their fathers’, and, most pitiful of all, mothers out of their infants’. While their dearest ones wasted away in their arms, they did not spare them, but took from them the drops that kept them alive. [b]

Even eating in this way they were not left unnoticed; the rebels were everywhere at hand to seize even these scraps. Whenever they saw a house shut up, they took it as a sign that the people inside were getting food. At once they smashed in the doors and rushed in, and all but squeezed the morsels back up out of their throats. Old men were beaten as they clung to their food, and women were dragged by the hair for hiding what was in their hands. There was no pity for gray hair or for infants: they lifted up the little children as they clung to their scraps and dashed them to the ground. Those who had got ahead of their rush and swallowed what was to be seized, they treated more cruelly still, as if they had been wronged. They devised terrible ways of torture in their search for food. They stopped up the genital passages of their wretched victims with bitter vetch and ran sharp rods into their anuses. A man suffered things horrible even to hear of, to make him confess to a single loaf or reveal a single hidden handful of barley meal. Yet the torturers themselves were not hungry. [c] It would have been less savage if need had driven them; they did it to keep their frenzy in practice and to lay in provisions for themselves for the days ahead. When people crept out by night as far as the Roman outposts to gather wild plants and grass, these men met them just as they thought they had escaped the enemy, and seized what they had brought. Often the victims begged them, calling on the most fearful name of God, to give them some share of what they had risked their lives to bring, but they gave them nothing at all. It was counted a mercy to have been robbed and not killed as well.”

To this, after other things, he adds: “With the ways out, every hope of rescue was cut off from the Jews. The famine deepened and devoured the people house by house and family by family. The rooftops were full of women and infants who had collapsed, and the lanes were full of the corpses of old men. [d] Children and young men, swollen with hunger, wandered about the marketplaces like ghosts and fell wherever their suffering overtook them. The sick had no strength to bury their kin, and those still sound shrank from it, both because of the number of the dead and because they did not know their own fate. Many fell dead on top of those they were burying, and many went out to the tombs before their fated hour had come. There was no lamenting in these disasters and no wailing: the famine overpowered every feeling. With dry eyes those slow in dying gazed at those who had gone to their rest before them. A deep silence held the city, and a night full of death. Yet the robbers were worse than all this. They broke into the houses, now no more than tombs, and plundered the dead; they tore the coverings off the bodies and went out laughing. They tried the points of their swords on the corpses, and to test their steel they ran through some who had been thrown down still alive. Those who begged them for the loan of a hand and a sword they scornfully left to the famine. Every one of the dying breathed his last with his eyes fixed on the temple, leaving the rebels alive behind him. [f] At first the rebels ordered the dead to be buried at the cost of the public treasury, since they could not bear the stench. Afterward, when they could not keep up, they threw them from the walls into the ravines. [g] As Titus went his rounds and saw the ravines full of the dead, and the thick putrid matter oozing from the rotting bodies, he groaned; and lifting up his hands, he called God to witness that this was not his doing.” [h]

After some other remarks, Josephus goes on: “I cannot keep back what my feelings bid me say. I believe that if the Romans had been slow to come against these criminals, the city would have been swallowed up by a chasm, or overwhelmed by a flood, or would have shared the thunderbolts of the land of Sodom. For it had produced a generation far more godless than those who suffered such things. It was by their madness that the whole people perished with them.” [i]

And in the sixth book he writes as follows: “The number of those who perished in the city from famine was beyond counting, and their sufferings beyond telling. In every house, if the mere shadow of food appeared anywhere, there was war, and the dearest loved ones came to blows, snatching from one another the wretched means of life. [j] No one would believe that even the dying had nothing: the robbers searched people as they breathed their last, in case anyone was hiding food in the fold of his clothes and pretending to die. Gaping with hunger, they stumbled about like mad dogs and reeled along, battering at the doors like drunken men, and in their helplessness bursting into the same houses two or three times in a single hour. Need put everything between their teeth. They gathered things not fit even for the filthiest of beasts and brought themselves to eat them. In the end they did not keep their hands off belts and shoes, and they stripped the leather from their shields and chewed it. Some even lived on scraps of old hay, for some gathered the fibers and sold the smallest weight of them for four Attic drachmas. [k]

But why should I speak of the famine’s shamelessness toward lifeless things? I am about to tell a deed of it such as has never been recorded among Greeks or barbarians, horrible to speak of and unbelievable to hear. For my part, so as not to seem to later generations a teller of marvels, I would gladly have passed over this calamity, if I did not have countless witnesses among my own contemporaries. Besides, I would be paying my country a cold kindness if I toned down the account of what it suffered. There was a woman named Mary, daughter of Eleazar, who lived beyond the Jordan, from the village of Bathezor, which means House of Hyssop. She was distinguished for her family and her wealth, and she had fled to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude and was shut up there in the siege. [m] The tyrants had plundered the rest of her property, everything she had packed up and brought into the city from Perea; and what was left of her valuables, and whatever food she could contrive, their bodyguards carried off, bursting in every day. A terrible rage came over the poor woman, and by constantly abusing and cursing the plunderers she tried to provoke them against herself. But no one killed her, either in anger or in pity. She was weary of finding food for others, and by now finding any was impossible anywhere. The famine was eating through her bowels and marrow, and her rage burned hotter than the famine. Taking anger and necessity as her counselors, she turned against nature itself. She seized her child, a baby still at the breast, and said, ‘Poor little one, in war and famine and civil strife, for whom shall I keep you? With the Romans there is slavery, even if we live to come under them; famine is outrunning slavery; and the rebels are crueler than both. Come, be food for me, an avenging fury to the rebels, and to the world a tale, the one thing still lacking to the calamities of the Jews.’ As she said this she killed her son. Then she roasted him, ate half, and covered up the rest and kept it. At once the rebels were there. Catching the smell of that unholy cooking, they threatened to cut her throat on the spot if she did not show them what she had prepared. She told them she had saved a fine portion for them too, and uncovered what was left of her child. Horror and stupefaction seized them at once, and they stood rooted at the sight. But she said, ‘This is my own child, and the deed is mine. Eat, for I too have eaten. Do not be softer than a woman or more tender-hearted than a mother. But if you are so pious, and turn away from my sacrifice, then I have eaten for you, and let the rest stay for me too.’ [n] At that they went out trembling, cowards for this once, and barely willing to leave even this food to the mother. At once the whole city was filled with the horror of it; each man pictured the deed before his eyes and shuddered as though he had dared it himself. The starving longed for death, and counted those happy who had gone before they could hear or see such evils.”

Such were the wages of the Jews’ lawlessness and impiety against the Christ of God. [o]