The Quran

Preface

إِن أَحسَنتُم أَحسَنتُم لِأَنفُسِكُم ۖ وَإِن أَسَأتُم فَلَها ۚ فَإِذا جاءَ وَعدُ الآخِرَةِ لِيَسوءوا وُجوهَكُم وَلِيَدخُلُوا المَسجِدَ كَما دَخَلوهُ أَوَّلَ مَرَّةٍ وَلِيُتَبِّروا ما عَلَوا تَتبيرًا

Yusuf Ali

If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil, (ye did it) against yourselves.¹ So when the second of the warnings came to pass, (We permitted your enemies) to disfigure your faces,² and to enter your Temple³ as they had entered it before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power.⁴

This is a parenthetical sentence. If anyone follows God’s Law, the benefit goes to himself: he does not bestow a favour on anyone else. Similarly evil brings its own recompense on the doer of evil.
The second doom was due to the rejection of the Message of Jesus. “To disfigure your faces” means to destroy any credit or power you may have got: the face shows the personality of the man.
Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.C. was complete. He was a son of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, and at the date of the destruction of Jerusalem, had the title of Caesar as heir to the throne. He ruled as Roman Emperor from 79 to 81 A.C.
Merivale in his Ramans Under the Empire gives a graphic account of the siege and final destruction (ed. 1890, 7:221-255). The population of Jerusalem was then 200,000. According to the Latin historian Tacitus it was as much as 600,000. There was a famine and there were massacres. There was much fanaticism. The judgment of Merivale is: “They” (the Jews) “were judicially abandoned to their own passions and the punishment which naturally awaited them.” (7:221).