Jotapata (siege of AD 67)

A fortified town in Galilee, today the site of Yodfat. Josephus writes that it stood on a precipice surrounded by ravines so deep that the eye could not reach the bottom, and that it could be approached only from the north. In AD 67 it was defended by Joseph, son of Matthias, and Vespasian besieged it for 47 days. According to Josephus the defenders hung wet clothes on the walls to make the Romans believe they had water to spare, and poured boiling oil on them. After the capture the Romans killed, as Josephus reports, forty thousand people, and Vespasian ordered the town razed. The commander of the defence hid, surrendered and, in the camp outside the town, foretold the throne to the general. The place appears in the Vespasian episode, in the chapter “The Prisoner from Jotapata”.