In August 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the surrounding elite resorts. Titus was emperor. Jerusalem and the Second Temple had fallen in 70. Masada fell in 73. The Italian peninsula was flooded with Jewish slaves, so many that the price of slaves collapsed.

Pompeii was a resort for Roman elites. Into that world came Jewish captives. Hebrew and Jewish names appear in the graffiti: Martha, Maria, Jesus. Someone scratched “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Josephus records that a descendant of Herod died in the eruption with his wife.

Contemporary Jews saw the catastrophe as divine payback. The Fourth Sibylline Oracle, almost certainly a Jewish text written shortly afterward, links the two disasters explicitly: a Roman leader would burn the Temple and slaughter the Jews … then fire would flash from the Italian earth, cities would burn, and men would know “the anger of the God of heaven.”

To many in the 1st century, the timing was no coincidence. Pompeii celebrated Rome’s destruction of Judea, housed its spoils, and was teeming with Jewish slaves. Then the city itself turned into a necropolis.

Rome destroyed the Temple in 70.

Nine years later, the mountain answered.