What was the population of Jerusalem at the time of the destruction of the Temple?
The population of Jerusalem in Second Temple times was about a million; this can be derived from the numbers of people killed or sold into slavery at the time of the destruction of the Temple, as given by Josephus (Wars 6:420) and Tacitus (5:13). The Talmud (Tosefta Pesachim 4:3) says that on one Passover during the reign of Agrippa the people who wanted to participate in the sacrifice couldn’t all get onto the Temple Mount, and that 1.2 million lambs were sacrificed that year; this number of lambs (“twice the number of those who went out of Egypt”) would imply that a very large number of people came to Jerusalem for the festival.
