Like Vespasian, the great general Severus, decided on siege rather than attack. So he steadily cut off supplies and provisions and also barbarously put to death all prisoners of war. There was no Josephus to give us vivid details of this campaign, so we only know its general result. The three great outlying fortresses on the frontier were first mastered. The next battle took place on the field of Jezreel. One by one the Jewish fortresses fell. The whole Judean army was now concentrated in Bethar where the decisive battle must be waged. It was the Jerusalem of this war. Severus resolved to starve it out. For one year the Jews bravely held out against the finest army of the age. At last some Romans found a way into Bethar through a subterranean passage which some Samaritans, it is said, betrayed. Then followed an awful carnage in which Roman horses "waded to the nostrils in Jewish blood." More than half a million souls were slain and thousands more perished by fire and hunger. Yet so great were also the Roman losses that Hadrian in his message of the campaign to the Roman senate, significantly omitted the formula, "I and the army are well." In the year 135 Bethar fell and tradition places it on the same date so disastrous in Jewish annals--the 9th of Ab. The Roman soldiers kept up a war of extermination against the scattered bands that still held out. Many who had taken refuge in caves were brutally massacred. All the Jews throughout the Roman Empire were made to feel the weight of Hadrian's anger in heavy taxation. As though wantonly to mark its complete desolation, the plow was passed over Jerusalem. North of it was built a Roman city--Aelia Capitolina. On the Temple Mount was erected a shrine dedicated to Jupiter, with the vindictive purpose of obliterating the very name of Jerusalem. (And it _was_ forgotten--for one hundred and fifty years.) No Jew dared enter that city under penalty of death. But all this was but preliminary to his real punishment of those who were called rebels only because they failed. Keener sighted than Vespasian, who blotted out the Nation but tolerated the Faith, Hadrian saw that there was only one way to crush the Jew; that was by crushing his religion. To that abortive purpose he now devoted himself with all the inhumanity of a Pharaoh. To the cruel but cowardly Tinnius Rufus, who had fled at the first alarm, that task was entrusted. Judaism was proscribed. Obedience to its Law was declared a capital crime. Should they commit physical or spiritual suicide was the dilemma that now faced Israel. Was ever a people reduced to such straits? Law and Life.