When the Roman siege tightened around Jerusalem, starvation became a weapon more terrible than any sword. Doeg ben Josef was a man of means — he offered a full measure of gold for a single loaf of bread. No one could sell him any. There was no bread left in the city. He died of hunger with gold in his hands and nothing in his stomach.
But the true horror of the siege was what it did to his wife. She had been a woman of extraordinary piety. Every year, she would weigh her only child on a scale and bring the equivalent weight in gold as an offering to the Temple. Her son was her treasure, and she honored God through him with the most generous devotion imaginable.
Then the famine consumed everything. The streets of Jerusalem were littered with the dead. The living stumbled past corpses too numerous to bury. And this woman — this mother who had once measured her child's worth in gold offerings to the Temple — was driven by starvation to an act so monstrous that the Rabbis could barely bring themselves to record it. She devoured her own child.
The Rabbis told this tale not to horrify, but to testify. This was what the destruction of the Temple meant. This was the cost of the siege. The most devoted mother in Jerusalem was reduced to the most unthinkable act — a fulfillment of the terrible prophecy in (Deuteronomy 28:53), that in the siege, Israel would eat the flesh of its own children.