When the Roman siege tightened around Jerusalem in 70 CE, wealth stopped meaning anything. Doeg ben Yosef was a rich man, and in the final weeks of the siege he stood in the streets offering a full measure of gold for a mouthful of bread. No one sold.
He starved to death with his gold still in his hands.
His wife's story is darker. She had been pious in the years before the war — each year, she weighed her infant son on a scale and brought that weight in gold as a yearly offering to the Temple. The Temple had loved her and fed on her devotion.
In the siege, the Temple was burning. Food was gone. The infant she had weighed in gold year after year became the only meat she could find. She ate her own child.
Gaster's Exempla (No. 69, 1924) preserves the story as a warning about what happens when a city falls. Lamentations 4:10 had already whispered it: The hands of merciful women have cooked their own children. The Churban — the destruction — was not only the collapse of walls. It was the collapse of every boundary a mother had believed she would never cross.
The sages told the story so that no generation would forget what siege actually costs. It is a warning and a grief folded into a single paragraph.