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The Starving Died from the Smell of Roasting Goats

Outside Jerusalem the enemy roasted goats west of the wall so the starving inside died from the scent of meat they could not reach.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Thistles Before Goats
  2. Bread That Costs a Life
  3. Streets That Held Every Age
  4. What Hunger Remembers

The first deaths were quick. Steel found throats in alleys and courts. Bodies of lad and elder lay where they fell, mixed on the open stones as if age had stopped mattering the moment the wall cracked (Lamentations 2:21).

The Starving Died from the Smell of Roasting Goats Click for full size

The slower deaths waited for the nose.

West of the city, beyond the reach of the starving, the enemy set goats over fire. Fat spat. Smoke climbed. The wind, which had once carried temple incense, now carried meat. Inside the walls, bellies that had forgotten bread still knew the smell of roast. Men and women who could no longer stand still turned their faces toward that scent the way plants turn toward light. Then they broke open from within.

The verse later named it without mercy: those killed by the sword were better off than those killed by hunger, ruptured from the produce of the field (Lamentations 4:9).

Thistles Before Goats

The older siege had used a thinner cruelty. In the days of the First Temple, thistles grew wild outside the wall. The enemy boiled them until the bitter green released a smell that promised food to people who had none. Cooking thistles takes a long time. The scent hangs. Inside Jerusalem, bodies with nothing left to burn still answered that promise. Longing alone finished what the sword had spared.

When the Second Temple fell under later iron, thistles were not enough. The enemy brought goats. They roasted them deliberately on the western side so the wind would work for them. The field produce became animal flesh. The rupture stayed the same. Hunger sharpened by nearness kills differently from hunger alone. The midrash keeps both pictures under one line of Lamentations so no generation can claim its famine was only abstract.

A child who had not spoken for days opened his mouth at the goat smell and did not close it again.

Bread That Costs a Life

Those still strong enough to move left the streets of corpses and tried the wilderness paths for grain. "We bring our bread at the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness" (Lamentations 5:9). Bread was no longer a kitchen word. It was a raid. A man went out for a crust and might not return. A woman returned with flour on her hands and blood on her hem.

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel later set that cry against older trembling. The wilderness generation grew impatient on the road (Numbers 21:4). Daniel said his spirit was distressed within him (Daniel 7:15). Isaiah felt his loins fill with trembling (Isaiah 21:3). Jeremiah, the scroll's traditional voice, named the peril of bread itself. If those earlier figures broke under a fraction of the oppression of the four kingdoms, the generation under all four at once had no shame left in its wail.

Comparison did not comfort the living. It only measured the weight.

Streets That Held Every Age

Jeremiah had warned before the stones fell. Wrath would pour on the baby in the street and on the gathering of youths, on men and women, on the elderly whose days were already short (Jeremiah 6:11). When the day came, lad and elder truly lay together on the ground. Young women and young men fell by the sword. The prophet's overflow became the city's floor plan.

Survivors stepped over bodies to reach the western wall's shadow and still caught the goat smoke. Sword and famine divided the dead by speed, not by justice. One fell in a single blow. One fell by inches, following a smell. Both filled the same street. Compassion, the verse said, had not been shown (Lamentations 2:21). The city learned that sentence by walking it.

What Hunger Remembers

Night after night the roasts continued west of the wall. Guards laughed when the wind turned. Inside, people stopped asking whether death would come and began asking only which kind. Some begged for a clean edge of iron. Others sealed their nostrils with rags and still tasted fat on the air.

When the midrash later sat with Lamentations 4:9, it refused to leave the line as poetry. It put thistles in one siege and goats in the next so the word "ruptured" would keep a kitchen smell forever. The sword remained the quicker mercy. The field's near produce remained the longer knife.

In the morning the streets held both kinds of dead, and the wind still smelled like supper no one would eat.

A father who still had strength dragged a cousin toward the gate and turned back when the goat smoke thickened. Better a clean death later, he thought, than another night of the nose betraying the stomach. His cousin slapped him for the thought and then wept because the slap had used the last of his heat.

Priests without a house to serve counted the dead by streets instead of by courses. They had no incense left that could cover the west wind. When they tried to bless bread that was not there, the blessing hung in the air like another cruel smell. Hunger made even sacred words feel heavy.

JerusalemFamineSiegeTempleDestructionLamentationsHungerWar
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Eikhah Rabbah 4:12Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

Eikhah Rabbah, the midrash on Lamentations, expounds the verse, "Those killed by sword were better off than those killed by hunger, for those would bleed, ruptured from the produce of the field" (Lamentations 4:9). The plain sense is grim: death by the sword is swift, while death by famine is a slow wasting. The Sages press the strange phrase about being "ruptured from the produce of the field" and read into it the actual experience of the besieged in two destructions.

During the destruction of the First Temple, the midrash says, the starving of Jerusalem would die from the scent of thistles. The thistles growing wild had to be cooked a long while before they could be eaten at all. When the enemy outside the walls boiled them, the smell drifted into the city, and the famished, whose bodies had nothing left, would be undone by that aroma of food they could not reach. The longing itself killed them.

In the later destruction of the Second Temple, the midrash continues, there were no thistles to be had. What did the enemy do then? They brought goats and roasted them to the west of the city, so that the scent of roasting meat carried over the walls. The smell infused the starving residents, and they died of it, just as the verse said, "ruptured from the produce of the field." The Sages thus hear in a single line of Lamentations a precise and terrible portrait of how hunger, sharpened by the nearness of food, claimed those whom the sword had spared.

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Eikhah Rabbah 5:9Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

This teaching comes from Eikhah Rabbah, the classical midrashic commentary on the Book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and reads its grief into the wider sweep of Israel's history. The verse under study is the cry, "We bring our bread at the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness" (Lamentations 5:9), a portrait of a people so besieged that even gathering food risks death.

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel builds an argument by comparison across the generations. He observes that the earlier ancestors broke down even when they tasted only a fraction of the suffering that the four kingdoms (the successive empires that would oppress Israel) were destined to inflict. He gathers a chain of witnesses to that smaller measure of distress. Of the wilderness generation it is written, "and the soul of the people grew impatient on the way" (Numbers 21:4). Daniel confessed, "my spirit was distressed within me" (Daniel 7:15). Isaiah declared, "therefore my loins were filled with trembling" (Isaiah 21:3). And Jeremiah, the traditional author of Lamentations, voiced this very verse about risking life for bread.

The force of the midrash lies in its closing kal vachomer, an argument from the lesser to the greater. If those earlier figures, who endured only a portion of the oppression, were brought to trembling and impatience, then the later generation, situated in the full grip of all four kingdoms at once, has all the more reason for its anguish. The midrash thus reads the present sorrow as the heaviest link in a long chain of tested endurance.

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Eikhah Rabbah 2:24Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

Eikhah Rabbah is the classical midrash on the book of Lamentations, the scroll read on the ninth of Av that mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. This passage takes up (Lamentations 2:21), "Lad and elder lay on the ground in the streets, my young women and my young men fell by the sword. You killed on the day of Your wrath, You slaughtered, had no compassion." The midrash dwells on the opening image of young and old alike struck down where they fell, lying together in the open streets of the ruined city.

To explain why the catastrophe spared no age, the sages reach back to the warning the prophet had given long before the fall. They cite (Jeremiah 6:11), where the prophet, overwhelmed, declares: "I am filled with the wrath of the Lord; I am too weary to contain it. Pour onto the baby in the street and onto the gathering of youths, for men and women alike will be captured, the elderly with those whose days are numbered." Jeremiah had foretold a judgment that would fall upon every generation at once, the infant in the street, the bands of young men, husbands and wives, the aged whose days were already few.

The midrash reads the verse in Lamentations as the fulfillment of that prophecy. Because Jeremiah had said the wrath would be poured upon the baby in the street and upon the gathering of youths, therefore in the day of destruction lad and elder truly "lay on the ground in the streets." The poet's lament is not a fresh complaint but the realization of a warning that had gone unheeded, the prophetic word made terribly literal in the streets of Jerusalem.

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