Biblical Views: A Crisis of Faith in the Wake of the Temple’s Destruction?

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There can be little doubt that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 C.E. wreaked havoc on the Jews of that time and place. There must have been great loss of life, limb, property and pride. Surely many were slaughtered, and the survivors—particularly women and children—must have suffered terribly.

The one witness to these events whose testimony has come down to us—the Jewish historian Josephus—speaks at length about the horror. This suffering began, he claims, even before the Temple burned: The besieged city starved to such an extent that a woman was driven to cannibalize her own young son (Jewish War 6.201–213). As the Temple burned, Josephus tells us, “No pity was shown for age, no reverence for rank; children and greybeards, laity and priests, alike were massacred” (6.271). As for numbers, Josephus says 97,000 were taken prisoner, and more than 1.1 million died (6.420).

Josephus’s reliability is notoriously questionable. How did he come by these numbers? Josephus was a Jewish priest and rebel who later switched allegiances. Readers may surely wonder if his intent was to maximize Jewish suffering in order to highlight Roman power. On the other hand, the account of cannibalism is taken right out of the Hebrew Bible: Lamentations 4:10, for instance, mourns a similar scenario, following the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.

Perhaps none of this really matters: It stands to reason that the suffering was catastrophic. Whatever the numbers, and with or without familial cannibalism, surely the suffering was widespread. Most historians of ancient Judaism describe the event as calamitous indeed.

But there is an interesting trope that appears in some scholarly descriptions of Jewish reactions to 70 C.E., a seemingly sensible surmise: the assertion that, in the wake of the Temple’s destruction, large numbers of Jews would have been driven to abandon Judaism altogether.¹

In response to claims of post-destruction mass desertion, I say this: Name two.

Of course, the fact that we can’t name any such apostates doesn’t—on its own—prove anything. It illustrates the larger problem we face: We just don’t know how the surviving Jews reacted to their trauma. The closest thing we have to a survivor’s testimony is Josephus, but he didn’t suffer the worst of it, for he was safely on the Roman side before the siege of Jerusalem. Yet he was on the Roman side only to a point: By all accounts, Josephus did not abandon Judaism. Josephus’s magnum opus, a massive history of Judaism from creation to his own day titled Antiquities of the Jews, begins and ends with assertions of God’s just care for the world and, in return, Jewish obligations back to God (1.1–23; 20.268). Even toward the end of his life, Josephus’s final completed work was an extended defense of Judaism—its beliefs and practices—against the calumnies of his Roman contemporaries (Against Apion). So we have the account of just one bona-fide survivor, and he didn’t lose faith.

Josephus’s loyalty does not prove that most surviving Jews remained committed to Jewish practice, belief or peoplehood. But it does point to the disparity between claims of mass apostasy and the lack of evidence to support such a claim. So the question isn’t really whether there was or wasn’t mass apostasy—for this cannot be known. The question is really why modern scholars suppose there must have been mass apostasy, even though we lack concrete evidence.

The reason for this is, I think, clear enough: Scholars who write about mass apostasy in 70 C.E. also speak of a modern crisis of faith, asking, “How to believe in God after such a catastrophe?” And it would not be incorrect to suppose—though we can’t always know for sure—that when modern Jewish scholars are thinking of a crisis of faith in the past, they are thinking of a crisis of faith in the present: the well-known presumption, held by many, that it remains a challenge for thinking people to believe in God after Auschwitz.

This is too big a question for a short column. It is, in fact, too big a question for a long column. But we don’t have to address this question head on. We can just wonder whether the modern predicament is at all relevant to an understanding of the ancient past.

How would ancient Jews have reacted to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.? The question, so phrased, answers itself: just as they did to the destruction of the First Temple. The modern theological crisis—for those who have one—is usually based on the idea that the events of the mid-20th century were so uniquely gruesome that the old paradigms can no longer hold. Perhaps that is true (though it should be said that plenty of people 078 continue to believe in God nevertheless). But my point is this: There’s little reason to believe that ancient Jews thought the events of 70 C.E. were theologically inexplicable. Ancient Jews had a ready-made theological explanation for the destruction of the Second Temple, as Biblical as that cannibalism motif: God was angry with the Jews, and so the Temple was destroyed. As the traditional Jewish liturgy puts it, “For the sake of our sins, we were exiled from our land.” This is precisely how Josephus explains the destruction. It is precisely how the rabbis later explain the destruction. And it is precisely how the Hebrew Bible explains the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.

I do not want to be misunderstood. My raising doubts about a theological crisis is not meant to minimize the extent of real suffering in the aftermath of 70 C.E. I just want to counteract these assertions of mass apostasy and theological crisis. Both of these are modern projections—and odd ones to boot. Is it really the way of the world that the defeated just give up their past and embrace the religion of those who conquered them? Aren’t ethno-religious conflicts intractable precisely because this is what doesn’t generally happen? Survivors of defeat don’t simply line up with their oppressors. To the contrary, they take comfort in the very fact of their survival—perceived, perhaps, as miraculous—and look forward to the day when the tables will turn once again in their favor. Modern rationalists may well assume that facts (such as a military defeat) would shatter a person’s religious faith or ethnic identity. But look around: We have plenty of reason to wonder whether this kind of rationalism is much in play even today. It was probably less so in 70 C.E.

Of course, this doesn’t prove there wasn’t mass apostasy after 70 C.E. But when we remember that we can’t even name two apostates, perhaps we should think again before presuming a mass flight from Judaism at that time.

There can be little doubt that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 C.E. wreaked havoc on the Jews of that time and place. There must have been great loss of life, limb, property and pride. Surely many were slaughtered, and the survivors—particularly women and children—must have suffered terribly. The one witness to these events whose testimony has come down to us—the Jewish historian Josephus—speaks at length about the horror. This suffering began, he claims, even before the Temple burned: The besieged city starved to such an extent that a woman was driven to cannibalize her […]