How Crowded Was Jerusalem Before the Temple Fell

The Book of Lamentations opens with a city that has become a ghost of itself. "How does the greatly crowded city sit alone?" (Lamentations 1:1). The very first question the book of grief asks is about population: where did everyone go? The Rabbis of the midrash answered that question by first making sure you understood how many people you were mourning.

Rabbi Shmuel's teaching in Eikhah Rabbah 1:2, a midrashic commentary on Lamentations compiled around the 5th century CE, opens with a number that stretches the imagination. Jerusalem had twenty-four thoroughfares. Each thoroughfare had twenty-four streets. Each street had twenty-four market streets. Each market street had twenty-four store streets. Each store street had twenty-four courtyards. Each courtyard had twenty-four houses. And each courtyard, he says, produced twice the number of people who left Egypt in the Exodus.

If you try to multiply that out, the number becomes astronomical. The Rabbis were not giving a census figure. They were making a theological point in the language of mathematics: the city that fell was not small. What was destroyed was not a village or an outpost. Jerusalem was the most populated, most alive, most teeming place in the world. And then it was alone.

The Merchant With Two Hundred Camels of Pepper

To prove that the city was as crowded as claimed, Eikhah Rabbah tells a story. A traveling merchant was heading to Jerusalem carrying two hundred camel-loads of pepper, a load so enormous it could supply a large city's spice trade for a year. He stopped first at Tyre, a prosperous coastal city, and met a tailor sitting near the gate. The tailor asked to buy a small amount. The merchant refused: he was looking for a single buyer who could take the whole stock.

The tailor told him he'd only find such a buyer in Jerusalem. The merchant went on.

When he arrived at Jerusalem's gates, the first tailor he encountered was too busy to stop cutting. The second was too busy sewing. A third finally looked up and said: "If I can purchase it all, fine. If not, I'll find you someone who can." He led the merchant through the city, courtyard after courtyard, until they reached a place where a kor of dinars sat waiting. The buyer counted the coins, told the merchant to check whether the currency was valid in his homeland, and the deal was made.

The next morning, the merchant went for a walk in the marketplace. A friend ran into him. Did he have any pepper to spare? Just a hundred dinars' worth, for a feast that day? The merchant explained he'd sold everything the night before. The friend went to the buyer. The buyer had already sold it forward to a tailor. The tailor directed the friend to a certain residence. The people in the first line got one ounce each. The people in the second line got half an ounce. The people in the third line got nothing at all: there was no trace left to smell.

Two hundred camel-loads of pepper, absorbed into the city overnight, passing through so many hands that by morning there was not enough left for a feast. That is what "the greatly crowded city" meant.

What King Solomon's Sacrifice Reveals

The Rabbis press the point with a second kind of evidence. To count Jerusalem's population from the outside is impossible. But the number of Temple offerings provides a measure. At the dedication of the First Temple, Solomon slaughtered a peace-offering of twenty-two thousand cattle and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep (I Kings 8:63). The Mishnah records that a bull required twenty-four priests to process it properly; a ram required eleven. Working backward from the number of animals and the number of priests needed, a rough estimate of the city's population emerges from the sacrificial ledger.

For the Second Temple, a different calculation: King Agrippa, trying to estimate Jerusalem's population, asked the priests to set aside one kidney from each Passover offering. The Eikhah Rabbah reports they collected six hundred thousand pairs of kidneys, twice the number of Israelites who left Egypt. And each Passover offering had at least ten registrants. Rabbi Hiyya taught that groups often reached forty or fifty people per animal. Bar Kappara said groups of one hundred were not unheard of.

One Passover, the crowd was so dense on the Temple Mount that an elderly man was crushed by the press of the pilgrims. That festival was remembered ever after as the Passover of the crushed.

The City That Made People Young

How did a city sustain such numbers generation after generation? The Rabbis had an answer for that too. In Jerusalem, a man married off his son at the age of twelve, to a woman already of childbearing age. He then married off his grandson at twelve. The cycle compressed so tightly that a man of twenty-six could already have grandchildren. The verse they cited was (Psalms 128:6): "May you see the children of your children." In Jerusalem, you could.

This is not demography. It is the Midrash doing what it always does: reading the devastation of Lamentations backward, filling in everything the city once contained so that the loss becomes comprehensible. The city that sits alone in the opening verse of Lamentations was not always alone. It was once so full that a single merchant's stock of pepper vanished overnight, and so teeming with life that a man could become a great-grandfather before he turned thirty.

The question "how does the greatly crowded city sit alone" is not rhetorical. It is the question grief always asks, stunned by the distance between what was and what is. The Rabbis answered it by first refusing to let you forget how crowded it had been.