and they will dash you and your children within you to the ground, and they will not leave a stone upon a stone in you, because you did not discern the time of your being inspected.’”​—Luke 19:41-44.

In the holocaust that followed, 1,100,000 of Jerusalem’s “children” perished. As for the thoroughness with which these predictions of the city’s destruction were fulfilled, only three towers and a portion of the western wall remained standing. Josephus writes: “All the rest of the fortifications encircling the City were so completely levelled with the ground that no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited.”