The 9th of Av 3830. A day of desolation. The cooling bodies, of those who were not already long dead of starvation, filling every street, sometimes piled as many as four or five high, were so numerous that the dying did not even have their own place to fall and tumbled into a grave made up of other people. For three days, without rest or seemingly any pause, the Romans had murdered. Peace would come only for lack of more victims. There were sobs of the fallen and those whimpering and forlorn whom the Romans could not even be bothered to kill; these sounds were accompanied by the gasps of pain of the dying and their final passing gave rise to a brief note of peace.
As the days passed the initial frenzy of the Romans’ fury had passed until the massacres started to have all the gusto of a bored scribe or clerk. Their arms wearied from chopping down defenceless pilgrims: old men, the women and children, as by the end of the day, the scribe tires of holding his reed pen. Lazily but with implacable determination and resignation to a now tedious task the murders continued. All around was the sound of sudden screams which reached his ears and now the Romans hacked with a lack of discrimination so as to almost appear disinterested in their work.
None had been spared, the killing continued long after all had been assumed already killed. Those who had come to Jerusalem in celebration only months before had been only celebrating an early and bloody death.
The amount of blood issuing from the holy Temple was not to be believed, heaps of bodies seemed strewn like empty wine-skins while their blood carpeted the white marbles stones all the way down to the bottom of the sanctuary steps. The number of bodies grew deeper into the Temple and the most bodies were found carelessly clustered around the altar and piety had neither protected them nor prevented the Legionary’s arm.
The peak of chaos, lawless anarchy, disobedience and blasphemy and been reached and had manifested as Roman swords. With the mass death and the destruction of the city, the series of ritualised obscenities and dark satires which had been performed in the city in the name of its defence and that of the Jewish people, had come to a close and the curtain had come down on this fateful and awful chapter.
These are the stories they told but now none are alive who remember the day we lost our temple and lost our city: Great and Holy Jerusalem. How anyone lived to tell this tale cannot be known except perhaps the Romans didn’t quite find everyone’s hiding place, yet for those that hid and survived: to live to see such sights it might have been better to die.
