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THE DESTRUCTION OF THE LAND
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The fact that everything was predicted so long in advance serves as evidence of the Hand which hold the reins of history and molds it according to His will.
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After the fall of the Second Temple and Jerusalem, the other cities and towns of the land of Israel were still standing. In the hearts of those living outside the capital there still lay a glimmer of hope that the country might recover from the devastating blow of the invaders. They hoped that the battles and the slaughter would now cease; then they might be allowed to return to a modicum of normal life, even if it must be under the rule of the Roman eagle.
A short while after the destruction, when Hadrian rose to power, there was even a glimmer of hope that the Jews might be allowed to rebuild their Temple. The prophecy in Deuteronomy, however, precluded any such good fortune:
And he (the enemy) shall besiege you in all your gates, until your high and fortified walls come down, wherein you laid your trust, throughout all your land; and he shall besiege you in all your gates throughout all thy land which the L-rd, your G-d has given you. (ibid. 52)
Heaven had already resolved that there would be no cessation of hostilities. Not only the capital, Jerusalem, would be sacked and razed; every Jewish settlement in the Holy Land was to be blotted out of existence. There was no hope for the Jews' returning to even a semblance of normal life in the soil of Israel, as the verse continues: "...and you shall be plucked from off the land to which you are going to possess it." (ibid. 63)
This is, indeed, what happened. The revolt of Bar Kochba began in the year 120. Rather than rescuing the nation from the dominion of the Roman empire, it served to once again bring the full, crushing weight of the iron eagle down upon the remnant of the People of Israel in the land of Judah.
Following the fall of Betar, the southern portion of the country was devastated. In the years that followed, Heaven manipulated affairs so that the north, the beautiful mountains and valleys of the Galilee, was also laid waste completely.
The Romans conquered vast territories. Their empire covered 1,600,000 square miles at its height, approximately 120 C.E. The Roman eagle held sway over 88,000,000 souls. Nonetheless, it was not their policy to exile the peoples over whom they were victorious from their native lands.
There was only one exception: the People of Israel, the nation that was warned over one thousand years previously that not obeying the Creator would result in exile. This was the one nation which the Romans drove out of their homeland and scattered over the face of the known world.
When they first attacked the Land of Israel, the Romans did not intend to treat it any differently than its other vassal states. Their plans did not include laying the country waste, nor exiling the native citizens. Their goals were only to subjugate the local governing body to the empire, to exact taxes, and to encourage the spread of the "enlightened" culture of Rome.
However, Heaven had decreed otherwise. Titus and the Roman Empire were pawns in the hands of the Creator. When the People of Israel sinned and did not mend their ways, He manipulated the world's affairs through them so that the warnings recorded in the Torah would indeed materialize and become historical fact.
The fact that everything was predicted so long in advance serves as evidence of the Hand which hold the reins of history and molds it according to His will. A combination of critical factors and "coincidences" meshed in such a manner that the original rebellion escalated into the full blown war which Heaven had threatened to bring in retribution for Israel's misdeeds. It was this war which brought the destruction of the Holy Temple once again.
The events which followed defied logic. Despite the widespread loss of life when the first rebellion was put down, in 120 C.E. the survivors undertook another attempt at the southern fortress-city of Beitar, under the leadership of Bar Kochba.
The Romans did their utmost to put down the uprising. This was one of the most difficult wars fought by the legions of the mighty Roman Empire. Hadrian called his general Sextus Julius Severus from Britian, and troops were brought from as far as the Danube. The Roman army amassed against Beitar was much larger than that commanded by Titus sixty years earlier, when Jerusalem fell. Nonetheless, Roman losses were great.
After three years of laying siege to the city, the Romans were prepared to accept defeat and withdraw their forces from the region. The Jewish defenders of Beitar rejoiced. At last, there seemed to be a prospect for peace for the battered Jewish nation. The enemy was willing to discuss terms of a pact. The survivors of Israel were heartened; at least a portion of their precious homeland would not be totally razed.
Then, at the last moment, the situation was completely reversed. The Samaritans, with whom Bar Kochba had signed a peace pact against the wishes of the sages of Israel, betrayed the Jews. They disclosed to the Romans that there was a secret tunnel to the city through which they might deliver a fatal blow to the forces safely entrenched within the city.
As a result of the treachery, hundreds of thousands of Jews were slain. Beitar was razed to the ground, and the final attempt to throw off the yoke of the Roman eagle was cruelly snuffed out. According to the Roman historian, Cassius Dio, fifty fortified towns and 985 villages razed.
After Bar Kochba, the concentration of those Jews who remained in Israel was in the north of the Holy Land, in the Galilee. These survivors lost hope of rebellion, and gave into the demands of the conquerors.
It was during this period that an additional attack on the People of Israel arose from within: the burgeoning movement of the followers of Jesus. When the emperors of Rome converted to the new religion and began to persecute all those who refused to follow their example. Many Jews were slain in sanctification of G-d and His Torah during this period; others fled to foreign lands in an attempt to escape religious persecution.
So it was that the Land lost the last of its Jewish population. With no one to cultivate the land, much of it became desolate, just as the Torah had predicted. The main schools of religious study were closed for a lack of students, the land became overrun by wild animals and vegetation to the point that it was no longer habitable.
These developments could not have been foreseen by the human mind. The fact that they fulfilled the prophecies of the Torah demonstrates once again that He who wrote the Torah is He who manipulates our lives according to His will. Only He could have possibly foreseen and foretold the course that history would take one thousand three hundred years after His words were recorded in the Torah and given to His people at Sinai.
Just as the prophecies of retribution were fulfilled, so, too, are the promises of Heavenly protection and blessing for the People of Israel.
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