When the Roman legions surrounded Jerusalem and cut off every supply route, the famine inside the walls became unspeakable. People chewed leather. They ate grass from between the stones. The wealthy offered fortunes for a single loaf of bread and found no one willing to sell.
Doeg ben Josef was one of the richest men in the city. He offered a full measure of gold — enough to buy a house in peacetime — for a handful of food. No one would take it. Gold meant nothing when there was nothing left to buy. He died of starvation with his fortune untouched beside him.
His wife, driven mad by hunger and grief, committed the most horrifying act recorded in the siege narratives. She killed and consumed her own child — the same child whose weight in gold she used to bring as a yearly offering to the Temple. The infant who had once been measured against precious metal was now devoured by the mother who had cherished him above all things.
The Talmud in Yoma (38b) and Lamentations Rabbah preserve this account not as sensationalism but as a fulfillment of the curse in (Deuteronomy 28:56-57), which warned that during a siege, even the most tender and delicate woman would turn against her own children. The prophets had foretold exactly this. The destruction of the Temple was not merely a military defeat. It was the unraveling of the natural order itself — a world where mothers became what no mother should ever become.