From sunset tonight to sunset on Tuesday, the Jews commemorate the a.d. 70 destruction of Jerusalem.

To put down a yearlong rebellion in Judea, the Romans set fire to Jerusalem’s temple, the holiest place on Earth, killing countless Jews. No biblical author wrote an eyewitness account of Jerusalem’s destruction, but several alluded to it.

Jesus Christ prophesied in Luke 21:20 of the Roman armies surrounding Jerusalem. The Apostle Jude wrote his epistle in a.d. 69 from Jerusalem; in verse 23, he references “snatching [people] out of the fire” (Revised Standard Version), alluding to the coming catastrophe.

Today at sunset begins the day this happened on the Hebrew calendar: the 9th of Av. This was the second time Jerusalem’s temple was destroyed. The first destruction by Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon in 586 b.c. happened on the same day. (The Bible states the first destruction happened on the 10th day—Jeremiah 52:12-13—but Jeremiah 6:4-5 imply the destruction started in the evening. Hebrew days start and end at sunset. Rabbinical authors claim the Babylonians set fire to the temple at the end of the 9th. The building was mostly consumed on the 10th.)

The 9th of Av (Tisha B’Av in Hebrew) is not a biblically commanded observance, but many Jews fast on this day. Congregants in synagogues read portions of the Prophet Jeremiah’s book of Lamentations, mourning over Jerusalem’s doom.

Lamentations is the most tragic—and beautiful—poetry of the Bible: “How lonely lies the city that once thronged with people! Once great among the nations, now she is like a widow! Once princess among provinces, she has become a vassal. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears running down her cheeks. Not one of all her lovers is there to comfort her. Her friends have all betrayed her; they have become her enemies” (Lamentations 1:1-2; Complete Jewish Bible).

The 9th of Av represents the day the Jews became “a people without a land.” The Jews became separated from their city for 1,900 years. Catastrophe has afflicted the Jewish people on and around that day for centuries.

• On Tisha B’Av, a.d. 135, Roman Emperor Hadrian defeated a Jewish uprising and then forbade Jews from living in the Holy Land.
• In 1290, King Edward i evicted all Jews from England.
• In 1492, on the 7th of Av, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain decreed all Jews in their realm had to convert to Catholicism or leave.
• In 1941, Heinrich Himmler received approval to start the Holocaust.
• In 1942, the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto, sending Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka.

Today marks the first Tisha B’Av since last year’s October 7 massacre. With the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in recent hindsight—with the threat of full-scale war against Iran and its proxies hovering—Tisha B’Av and all it commemorates is more meaningful than ever.

This day will be a tense time in the Middle East. Hamas launched the October 7 massacre on the Jewish celebration of the holy day Simchat Torah. Egypt’s Yom Kippur War gets its name from the holy day the invasion started on in 1973. Israel’s enemies have a history of attacking Israel on its Jewish religious days. Anonymous Western intelligence sources told Sky News Arabia on August 2 that Iran may be planning an attack on or around Tisha B’Av.

At the time of writing, nothing major has happened. But Israel is not taking any chances. The Israel Defense Forces Military Rabbinate issued a ruling that operational soldiers are forbidden to take part in the fast. Hezbollah evacuated its Beirut headquarters ahead of Tisha B’Av.

There are other reasons to note this day. In both instances of the destruction of the temple, it wasn’t happenstance; it was correction from God for the sins of the nation. The last four kings of Judah are described this way: “[H]e did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Kings 23:32, 37; 24:9, 20).

Jeremiah was the last prophet to warn Judah’s kings before the first temple’s destruction. Judah’s elites persecuted him for the message he brought (Jeremiah 26:11).

Judah at that time was steeped in idolatry and even child sacrifice, something so vile God says “neither came it into my mind” (Jeremiah 19:3-5). God also linked Jerusalem’s destruction with transgressing the Sabbath (Jeremiah 17:27). God through Jeremiah condemned Judah’s sex-crazed culture: “[W]hen I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses. They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour’s wife” (Jeremiah 5:7-8). False prophets misrepresented God’s name, claiming God was still with Judah despite their sins (Jeremiah 14:13-16).

God raised up ancient Israel to represent Him (Exodus 19:5-6); He gave the nation His law (Deuteronomy 4:6-8). God promised to spare Jerusalem upon repentance (Jeremiah 17:24-25).

Tisha B’Av reminds us what the people chose.

The same lesson is relevant for the second temple’s destruction. Josephus, a defeated Jewish general, acted as the Romans’ interpreter during the siege of Jerusalem. When he was sent over, the defenders of the city tried to kill him. As he dodged their projectiles, he gave a speech similar to Jeremiah’s: “[H]earken to me, that you may be informed how you fight not only against the Romans, but against God Himself. … You have not avoided so much as those sins that are usually done in secret; I mean thefts and treacherous plots against men and adulteries. You are quarreling about rapines and murders, and invent strange ways of wickedness. Nay, the temple itself is become the receptacle of all, and this divine place is polluted by the hands of those of our own country” (Wars of the Jews).

Today, Israel fights an existential war against radical Islam. Nothing justifies what Hamas or any terrorist group has done to Israel. And nothing negates the heroism of the Israeli soldiers on the front lines.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United States Congress on July 25 that Israel is fighting “for the forces of civilization.” But what kind of civilization is the modern State of Israel an example of?

Tel Aviv is Israel’s most populous metropolitan center. Israel’s Foreign Ministry calls it the “gay capital of the Middle East.” An estimated 25 percent of the approximately 500,000 people in Tel Aviv proper are homosexuals. The Israeli government lauded Tel Aviv’s pride parade in 2017 as being “the largest-ever pride parade in Asia.” In Leviticus 18:22, God calls homosexuality an “abomination.”

The Nova Music Festival, where Hamas murdered and abducted so many on October 7, was marketed as a “psychedelic trance event.” It was for all intents and purposes a drug-fueled meat market. In his article “A Sign of Worse to Come,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote:

Is that an appropriate event to be holding, especially on a holy day?

I am not suggesting that anyone deserved the demonic brutality Hamas inflicted. Nobody does! But these young people certainly did not have God’s protection. They were carousing on a Sabbath and on a sacred holy day that they should be keeping! Hamas preyed on that—motivated by Satan the devil.

In 2022, the Israeli government reported 15,720 abortions. Like the ancient Israelites, modern Judah seems to have few qualms in legalizing child sacrifice, despite the Bible’s laws protecting the unborn (Exodus 21:22-23). The Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook lists Israel’s population as 9,402,617. Assuming a woman has only one abortion a year, that means roughly 1 in every 598 Israeli women has an abortion each year.

Synagogues around the world will read Lamentations today. Jeremiah wrote in response to what he saw in society: “Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens. We have transgressed and rebelled: thou hast not pardoned” (Lamentations 3:40-42).

God has not pardoned because the people have not repented. He inspired another prophet to write: “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:1-2).

October 7 was a horrific tragedy. But the solution is not more weapons, more money or a reset of the Palestinian peace process. The solution—as Jeremiah, Isaiah and many biblical prophets proclaimed—is repentance toward God. “For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men. To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High, To subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not” (Lamentations 3:31-36).

Immediately after October 7, Italy projected an image of the Israeli flag over the Arch of Titus, a Roman monument commemorating the conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple. Its front displays Roman soldiers carting off the temple’s menorah.

There may be many people metaphorically waving the Israeli flag in support of Israel, but like the Arch of Titus, underneath that foundation is the history of Tisha B’Av—thousands of years of problems resulting from a lack of repentance.

The solution to the destruction of the temple, to October 7, to all of mankind’s curses, lies in learning the lesson of Tisha B’Av: There can be no solution without sincere, meaningful repentance toward God.