The First Roman – Jewish War

The Romans entered Judean politics, ironically, by invitation of one Jewish faction that was in a power struggle with another. In 76 BCE Alexander Jannaeus, the last great king of the Hasmonean line, died. He was succeeded by his widow Salome Alexandra, who herself died in 67 BCE The royal couple’s two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, then fought each other for succession to the throne. Both Hyrcanus (usually called by scholars Hyrcanus II) and Aristobulus (usually called Aristobulus II) appeared before the Roman legate in Syria, each asking to be recognized as the ruler of Judea. Other Jews appeared as well, asking the Romans to reject the claims of both; by this time many Jews were thoroughly disillusioned with Hasmonean rule.

The Romans at first supported Aristobulus II, but when they realized he was a potential troublemaker, a suspicion amply confirmed by subsequent events, they transferred their support to Hyrcanus II. Aristobulus considered fighting the Romans, but, realizing the overwhelming might of Rome and the hopelessness of his situation, he surrendered in 63 BCE to the Roman general Pompey. The supporters of Hyrcanus opened the city of Jerusalem to the Romans. But that was not the end of the battle for Jerusalem. Although the city was in Roman hands, many of Aristobulus’s supporters garrisoned themselves in the Temple and refused to surrender. 

After a three-month siege and some fearsome fighting, however, the Temple fell to Pompey’s legions (63 BCE).

To punish the Jews for refusing to yield peacefully to Roman dominion, Pompey greatly reduced the territory under Jewish jurisdiction. The empire the Hasmoneans had created through war and struggle was dismembered at a single stroke. The high priest of Jerusalem now ruled only those areas populated by a heavy concentration of Jews, primarily Judea (the district around Jerusalem) and Galilee. Although these Jewish areas were not legally incorporated into the Roman Empire, they were now de facto under Roman rule.

Pompey Takes Jerusalem

Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem closed one chapter in Roman-Jewish relations and opened another. A hundred years earlier Judah the Maccabee had sought and obtained an alliance with the Romans, who were then just becoming the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. At that time, the Romans eagerly supported anyone who would help them weaken the power of the Seleucid kings of Syria. Judah’s successors followed the same strategy of seeking Roman support in their struggles for independence from the Seleucids.

Gradually, Rome’s power grew; her policy in the region, however, never wavered: Any power that might pose a threat to Roman interests was to be weakened. When the Jews were a useful ally against the Seleucids, they were embraced. When the Hasmonean state expanded, the Romans had no desire to see it become, in turn, a new threat to Roman interests. By the middle of the first century BCE, when the Romans at long last decided that the time had come to incorporate the eastern Mediterranean into their empire, the Jews were no longer allies but just another ethnic group that was to be brought into the inchoate imperial system.

Although the struggle for succession between Hyrcanus II and Aristobolus II and their appeals for Roman support provided the occasion for the Roman takeover of the Hasmonean state, we may be sure that in one way or another the Romans would have found a satisfactory excuse to exercise hegemony over the Jewish state.

The three decades (63 to 31 BCE) following Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem were extremely turbulent, not only for the Jews of Judea but for the entire Roman world, especially in the East. This was the period of the decline of the Roman republic, of the struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey, of Pompey’s death and Caesar’s ascension to sole power, of Caesar’s assassination (on March 15, 44 BCE), and of the struggle between the senate and Caesar’s supporters and later between Octavian (Augustus) and Mark Antony. The dust did not settle until the sea battle of Actium in Greece (31 BCE), where Octavian defeated Mark Antony and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. During the 20s BCE Octavian consolidated his power and assumed the name “Augustus.” He established a pattern of imperial administration that would endure for centuries.

As the Romans were changing their mode of government, so were the Jews. Under the Persian and the Hellenistic monarchies, the Jews had been led by high priests who wielded political as well as religious power. However, during the initial period of Roman rule after Pompey’s conquest of Jerusalem, the high priesthood lost virtually all its temporal powers and a new royal dynasty emerged that was not of priestly stock. Its opponents claimed that it was not even wholly Jewish! The Romans, for their part, were delighted to install a dynasty that owed its very existence to Roman favor and therefore could be counted on to provide loyal support.

The Reliability of Josephus Flavius (Yosef Ben Matityahu)

The vast bulk of what we know about this period derives from the testimony of an ancient Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus. Josephus was a complicated man, and his writings are not always easy to work with. As one scholar notes, “Sometimes the historian working with Flavius Josephus feels like a lawyer forced to build his case in court upon the testimony of a felon. While there may be some truth in what the witness says, the problem always is to separate it from self-serving obfuscation and outright lies.” Because so much rests on Josephus’s testimony, it is worthwhile to review certain aspects of his life and his works.

Josephus was a Jewish leader in the First Jewish Revolt (66–70 CE) who, in the end, surrendered to the Romans. In 67 CE Josephus was the commander of the Jewish revolutionary forces in Galilee. When the Romans arrived, Josephus and his forces fled to the fortress of Jotapata. After a siege of 47 days, the fortress was taken, and Josephus and some of his men took refuge in a nearby cave. When the Romans discovered them, Josephus’s companions argued that they should commit mutual suicide rather than be taken prisoners. But Josephus, remembering the “nightly dreams in which God had foretold to him the impending fate of the Jews and the destinies of the Roman sovereigns,” realized that God was on the side of the Romans and that surrender to the Romans was the only legitimate course of action. Since his comrades insisted on suicide, Josephus reluctantly agreed to draw lots with the rest, but as luck would have it, he drew one of the last. After the others had killed themselves, Josephus was left with only one companion and had no trouble convincing him that surrender was a wiser course than death. Upon emerging from the cave Josephus was taken to Vespasian; he predicted that the general would become emperor of Rome, the master of land, sea and the entire human race—a prediction that subsequently proved accurate. Josephus’s account of his surrender to the Romans is clearly a mixture of history, fantasy, apology and propaganda.

After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, Josephus was taken to Rome in the entourage of the Roman general Titus, Vespasian’s son. With his newly acquired Roman patrons looking over his shoulder, Josephus wrote his account of the rebellion, The Jewish War, completing it in the early 80s CE.

He wrote it originally in Aramaic, later translating the text into Greek; only the Greek version has survived. Josephus intended The Jewish War for an Aramaic-speaking audience, mostly Jews but also other Near Eastern peoples who were under—or on the verge of coming under—Roman domination. The book carries a dual message. To those who might contemplate revolt against Rome, The Jewish War advises “don’t.” Revolt against Rome is both impious and doomed to failure. To the Romans, the message is that the revolt was the work of various hotheads, fanatics and criminals within the Jewish community who in no way represented either Judaism or the Jews and who fomented rebellion for their own selfish and ignoble purposes.Josephus begins this book with the story of the Maccabean uprising (165 BCE).

The Maccabean victory established the Hasmonean dynasty, whose internal disputes led to Pompey’s entry into Jerusalem, which, in turn, set in motion the chain of events that led to the revolt of 66 CE The Jewish War ends with a vivid account of the fall of the last Jewish rebels at Masada.

About Jewish Antiquities a decade later, Josephus finished his second work,. This is a much more ambitious project, written in Greek and intended to present the entire scope of Jewish history to a Roman audience. Jewish Antiquities begins with the biblical account of creation and ends on the eve of the Jewish revolt. Hence, it overlaps with much of the material from The Jewish War. Written at a time when the war was less immediate and political fortunes in both Rome and Judea had dramatically shifted, Jewish Antiquities is far more nuanced than The Jewish War. Shortly after publishing Jewish Antiquities, Josephus went on to write two more tracts: Life, an autobiography that responds to charges of betrayal (true or not, we do not know) by a rival Jewish historian, and Against Apion, an apologetic tract.

Political considerations, self-justification, and apologetic tendencies are not the only factors that make Josephus difficult to use. Like most ancient historians, Josephus was a plagiarist. He freely appropriated the work of others, often without letting his readers know his sources. These sources themselves are often biased. His primary source for his discussion of Herod, for example, was the writing of Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod’s “official,” thus hardly unbiased, historian.

From Herod’s Death to the First Jewish Revolt

Herod’s death in 4 BCE released the accumulated passions and frustrations of the people who had been kept in check by his brutality. As Herod lay on his deathbed, two pious men and their followers removed the golden eagle that Herod had erected over the entrance to the Temple and hacked the bird to pieces. Immediately after Herod’s death, riots and rebellions broke out in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee and the Transjordan (Perea). The leaders of the riots had diverse goals. Some were simply venting their anger at a hated and feared regime; others were eager to profit from a period of chaos and disorder; still others dreamed of ridding themselves of Roman rule and proclaiming themselves king.

These riots illustrate the underside of Herodian rule. Herod’s high taxes and extravagant spending caused, or at least accelerated, the impoverishment of broad sections of the population. A clear sign of social distress was the resurgence of brigands—landless men who marauded the countryside in groups and were either hailed by the peasants as heroes (like Robin Hood) or hunted as villains. Brigandage had surfaced earlier, decades after Pompey’s conquest in 63 BCE Although Pompey himself had respected the Temple and the property of the Jews, the governors he left behind (Gabinius and Crassus) did not. They engaged in robbery and pillage; Crassus even plundered the Temple. Perhaps as a result of these depredations Galilee was almost overrun by brigands. In 47/6 BCE Herod routed and suppressed the brigands. Several years later, they resurfaced and Herod again suppressed them. Brigandage reemerged in the years after Herod’s death, especially, as we shall see below, in the period from 44 C.E. to the outbreak of the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. The impoverishment of the country and its consequent social distress were an unfortunate legacy of Herod the Great.

Roman-Jewish Relations

During the first half of the first century CE, the Romans used vassal kings to govern those areas of the eastern empire that, like Judea, were neither urbanized nor greatly “Hellenized” but were home to vigorous national cultures. Administration through a vassal king, a native aristocrat who could understand the peculiar ways of the population, was thought preferable to direct Roman rule. Thus, throughout eastern Asia Minor, northern Syria, and Palestine, native dynasts governed their territories in accordance with the wishes of the Romans. In accordance with this policy, after Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided among three of his sons. Antipas received Galilee and Perea; Philip, the Golan heights and points east. Archelaus became ruler of the largest and most important part of Herod’s kingdom—Judea. In 6 CE, however, the Romans deposed Archelaus for misrule and Judea, along with Idumea, Samaria and much of the Mediterranean coast, was annexed to the province of Syria. Henceforth Judea was administered by functionaries in the Roman civil service known as prefects or (after 44 CE) procurators. The rest of the country remained in the hands of Antipas and Philip for another 30 years, but then became the domain of Herod’s grandson Agrippa I. In 41 CE Agrippa I received from the emperor Claudius the kingship over Judea as well, thereby reigning over a kingdom almost as large as Herod’s own. Agrippa I died, however, three years later, in 44 CE

After Agrippa’s death, all of the Jewish portions of the country were governed by Roman procurators. For a few years, from the middle of the century until the end of the First Jewish Revolt in 70 CE, a small piece of Galilee was given to Agrippa’s son, known as Agrippa II, but otherwise, an overall change in Roman policy and administration was unmistakable. At the beginning of the first century, the land of Israel was governed by vassal rulers—men like Herod and his sons; by the middle of the century it was governed by Roman procurators (with the exception of Agrippa II). This same shift can be found elsewhere in the Roman East.

Judea, on the other hand, was governed by Roman prefects from 6 CE Of the six or seven Roman prefects who governed Judea following Archelaus’s deposition, most are bare names to us. Even Josephus has little to say about them. The exception is the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate (c. 26 to 36 CE). Pilate receives a negative assessment in the Gospels, in Philo, as well as in Josephus. According to the Gospels, Pilate massacred a group of Galileans (Luke 13:1) and brutally suppressed a rebellion (Mark 15:7), quite aside from crucifying Jesus. According to Philo, Pilate introduced into Herod’s former palace in Jerusalem some golden shields inscribed with the name of the emperor Tiberius. The Jews objected strenuously, because they felt that any object associated with emperor worship, not to mention emperor worship itself, was idolatrous and an offense to the Jewish religion. Previous Roman governors had respected Jewish sensitivities in this matter, but Pilate did not. After being petitioned by the Jews, the emperor ordered Pilate to remove the shields from Jerusalem and to deposit them in the temple of Augustus in Caesarea, a mixed Jewish-pagan city. Josephus narrates a similar incident (or perhaps a different version of the same incident) involving the importation of military standards (which of course contained images) into Jerusalem. The people protested loudly, saying they would rather die than see the ancestral law violated. Pilate relented and ordered the images to be removed. Ultimately, Pilate was removed from office when the Jews complained to his superiors.

When a procurator like Pilate was brutal or corrupt, the Jews could appeal to the governor of Syria or even to the emperor himself to remove the malefactor. But when the emperor was responsible for actions that were deleterious to the Jewish community, the Jews had nowhere to turn. This was the dilemma that confronted the Jews of both Alexandria and the land of Israel during the reign of the emperor Caligula (37–41 CE).

The Romans realized that Judaism was unlike the numerous other native religions of the empire; the Jews refused to worship any god but their own, refused to acknowledge the emperor’s right to divine honors, refused to tolerate images in public places and buildings, and refused to perform any sort of work every seventh day. Aware of these peculiarities, the Romans, following the practice of the Seleucids, permitted Jewish citizens to refrain from participation in pagan ceremonies; allowed priests of the Jerusalem Temple to offer sacrifices on behalf of, rather than to, the emperor; minted coins in Judea without images (even if many of the coins that circulated in the country were minted elsewhere and bore images); and exempted the Jews from military service and ensured that they would not be called to court on the Sabbath or lose any official benefits as a result of their Sabbath observances. In many of the cities of the East, the Romans authorized the Jews to create polituemata (singular, politeuma) autonomous ethnic communities, that allowed the Jews to govern their own communal affairs.

Riots in Alexandria

The mad emperor Caligula and his legate in Egypt withdrew, or attempted to withdraw, these rights and privileges. Riots erupted first in Alexandria—the “Greeks” (that is, the Greek-speaking population of the city, most of whom were not “Greek” at all) against the Jews. Exactly who or what started the riots is not clear. The root cause of the conflict, however, was the ambiguous status of the city’s Jews. On the one hand, the Alexandrians resented the Jewish politeuma and regarded it as a diminution of the prestige and autonomy of their own city. On the other hand, the Jews thought that membership in their own politeuma should confer on them the same rights and privileges the citizens of the city had. The result of these conflicting claims was bloodshed and destruction. Aided by the Roman governor of Egypt, the Greeks attacked the Jews, pillaged Jewish property, desecrated or destroyed Jewish synagogues and herded the Jews into a “ghetto.” The Jews were hardly passive during these events, and resisted both militarily and diplomatically. The most distinguished Jew of the city, the philosopher Philo, led a delegation to the emperor to argue the Jewish cause.

While in Rome Philo learned of another, even more serious, assault on Judaism by the state. Angered by the Jews’ refusal to accord him divine honors, Caligula ordered the governor of Syria to erect a colossal statue of the emperor in the Temple of Jerusalem. Whether something more than coincidence ties together the anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria with Caligula’s assault on the Temple is not clear, especially because of some uncertainty in the relative chronology of the two sets of events. In any case, the rights of the Jews of Alexandria and the sanctity of the Temple in Jerusalem were threatened simultaneously. 

The Roman governor of Syria, Publius Petronius, realizing that the execution of Caligula’s order to erect his statue in the Temple could not be accomplished without riots and a tremendous loss of life, procrastinated. In a letter to Caligula, Petronius explained that the matter should be delayed because otherwise it would interfere with the harvest; in a second letter, he asked the emperor to rescind his order outright. In the meantime, Agrippa II, who was a friend of Caligula’s, convinced the emperor to rescind his demand. Caligula did so but was angered when he received Petronius’s second letter, which indicated that Petronius had no intention of following the imperial order. In reply, Caligula ordered Petronius to commit suicide. Petronius received this ultimatum, however, only after he learned that Caligula had been assassinated. This brought to an end the potential troubles in the land of Israel. The troubles in Alexandria were settled by Claudius, Caligula’s successor, who ordered both the Jews and the Greeks to return to the status quo: The Jews were to maintain their politeuma, but were not to ask for more rights than was their due.

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of these events was the refusal of the Jews even to consider rebellion against the empire. In Alexandria, the Jews took up arms only in self-defense and only with reluctance—at least this is what Philo tells us. The Jews directed their fighting against their enemies, not against the emperor or the Roman Empire. In the land of Israel itself, when Caligula’s edict to erect a statue of himself in the Temple became known, the Jews assembled before Petronius en masse and declared that he would have to kill every one of them before they would allow the Temple to be desecrated. But the Jews did not threaten rebellion. Instead, in anticipation of Mahatma Gandhi in India in the 20th century, they offered passive resistance. Because Petronius was an ethical man with a conscience, he was convinced by these mass demonstrations not to carry out his assignment. Even a governor with less moral fiber might have been persuaded by these tactics: Pontius Pilate removed the golden shields from Jerusalem after the Jews protested, declaring that they would rather be killed than allow the images to remain in the Temple. At no point in either story do “brigands” or revolutionaries make an appearance.

Agrippa I

Despite the success of this policy of passive resistance, the years after Caligula’s reign saw the growth of violent resistance to Roman rule. Caligula’s madness seems to have driven home the point that the beneficence of Roman rule was not secure, and that the only way to ensure the safety and sanctity of the Temple was to expel the Romans from the country and to remove those Jews who actively supported them.

This process might have been prevented had Agrippa I been blessed with as long a reign as his grandfather, Herod the Great. Instead, Agrippa I ruled for only three years (41–44 CE). Despite his short reign, he was a popular king; both Josephus and rabbinic literature have only nice things to say about him. In some respects he resembled his grandfather. He was a wily and able politician. He sponsored pagan games at Caesarea and bestowed magnificent gifts on Beirut, a pagan city. But, unlike Herod, he was not criticized for these donations, for in other respects he was Herod’s superior. He lacked Herod’s brutality. Whereas Herod refrained from flouting traditional Jewish laws in the Jewish areas of his domain, Agrippa was conspicuous for observing them. In the political sphere, he tried to attain a modest degree of independence from Rome. He even began the construction of a new wall on the northern side of Jerusalem; had it been completed, Josephus says, the city would have been impregnable during the Jewish revolt that erupted in 66 CE

Had Agrippa reigned a long time, perhaps the disaffected elements in Judea would have been reconciled again to foreign dominion. On Agrippa’s death in 44 CE, however, Judea once again became the domain of the Roman procurators. There was no longer a Jewish authority who, despite ultimate subservience to Rome, could satisfy Jewish nationalist aspirations.

Moreover, the procurators after 44 CE were incompetent and insensitive at best, corrupt and wicked at worst. A country that, even in the face of Caligula’s assault on its religious sensitivities, had maintained peace was brought to rebellion after little more than 20 years of rule by the Roman procurators who followed Agrippa I. Josephus narrates a long string of minor incidents, disturbances, riots, assassinations and lootings, which, in retrospect, were forerunners of the Great Revolt against Rome. The participants in these incidents probably never realized that they were preparing the way for war. Nevertheless, various elements in the population were expressing their frustrations with the status quo, and the procurators were using the power of their office for fun and profit.

In the fall of 66 CE, after Gessius Florus (who would be the last of the procurators) had stolen money from the Temple treasury (for overdue taxes, he claimed), a particularly violent riot led to the massacre of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. The governor of Syria intervened, but even he failed to restore the peace. He was forced to withdraw from Jerusalem, suffering a major defeat. The Jews of Judea had rebelled against the Roman Empire.
 
Before recounting the story of this rebellion and its disastrous consequences, let us pause to look at the religious atmosphere generally and the social texture of Palestine in the first century CE.

Varied Judaism

Judaism at the time was a remarkably varied phenomenon. Above all, Judaism was a belief in the God of Moses, who created the world, who chose the Jews to be his special people and who rewarded and punished his people in accordance with their loyalty to him. Judaism was also the practice of the laws and rituals that Moses had commanded in God’s name, most conspicuously the rituals of circumcision, Sabbath and prohibited foods. The Jews vigorously debated among themselves the precise meaning and content of their beliefs and practices, but all, or almost all, were in agreement over the general outlines.

Judaism during this period was different from, or at least was not identical to, the religion of pre-Exilic Israel. Judaism in this period was a “book religion”; at its center was the recitation and study of a collection of sacred writings, the most important of which was the Torah (Instruction) of Moses. By this time, many Jews had added two other categories of sacred literature to the Torah: the Prophets and the Writings. These three groups of writings together constitute the Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians and the Tanakh by Jews. Pre-Exilic Israel, by contrast, did not have such a sacred book; to be sure, it preserved in written form many sacred traditions, but it was not a “book religion.” Pre-Exilic Israelites communicated and communed with God through the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple and through the revelations of the prophets. By Hellenistic times, however, and certainly by the first century of our era, the institutional access to God through the Temple and the charismatic access to God through the prophets were being supplemented, and to some degree supplanted, by new forms of piety, especially the regular prayer and study of scripture.

The institutional home of this new piety was the synagogue (assembly or gathering) or proseuche (prayer-house), which is first attested in Egypt in the third century BCE By the first century of our era, there were synagogues not only in every Diaspora settlement but also throughout the land of Israel. Archaeological remains of synagogues from this period have been discovered at Masada, Herodium, Gamla and various Diaspora sites.

Pre-Exilic Israelite religion focused on the group, the community and the clan; first-century CE Judaism, by contrast, focused on the individual Jew. First-century Judaism enjoined the individual Jew to sanctify his (or her) life through the daily performance of numerous rituals. Sanctity was not restricted to the Temple; God’s presence was everywhere, and the Jew was to be continually mindful of this fact. Every moment was an opportunity for the observance of the commandments, the sanctification of life and subservience to God. Not only were the people of Israel collectively responsible to God, but each individual Jew was as well. The cult of the Temple, therefore, was supplemented by a religious regimen that focused on the individual rather than the group.

Prophecy too no longer was what it had been. Many Jews believed that prophecy had ceased, or at least had so transformed itself that it no longer had the prestige and the authority it had commanded when the classical prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah of the eighth and sixth centuries BCE spoke. Those Jews who continued to see heavenly visions and hear heavenly voices no longer saw and heard them in the manner of their predecessors. The new literary genre, called by modern scholars apocalypse (revelation), assigned a much greater role to complex symbolic visions and angelic intermediaries than did biblical prophecy. Apocalyptic thinking was dominated by a sense that the world was in the throes of a final crisis that would be resolved by the immediate arrival of the end of time. Not only were the style and the atmosphere of apocalypse different from those of biblical prophecy, but much of its content was different as well. In pre-Exilic Israel, the Israelites believed that God rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked in this world, and did so by rewarding or punishing either the actor himself or his children. By the first century CE, this doctrine had been rejected, and replaced by the idea that every individual received his or her just deserts from God either in this world or in the world to come. Elaborate theories were developed about the rewards and punishments that awaited people after death or at the end of time, or both. Then there would be a resurrection of the dead and a final judgment, and the nation of Israel, the plaything of gentile kingdoms in this world, would finally receive its due; God would send a redeemer, either a human being or an angel, who would restore Israel’s sovereignty. The nations of the world would then recognize the Lord and accept the hegemony of the Jews. These new ideas were widely accepted in society, even though apocalyptic literature was so esoteric that it could be appreciated only by a few.

The new ideas, rituals and institutions that gradually emerged were adopted in their most extreme forms by various pietistic groups, but they also had an impressive impact on broad reaches of the population. The evidence for “popular religion,” either in the land of Israel or the Diaspora, is very meager, but the literary evidence of Josephus, Philo and the New Testament shows that popular piety included the study of Scripture and the participation in synagogue services on the Sabbath; observance of the Sabbath, the dietary prohibitions and various other rituals; separation from pagans and anything connected with pagan religious ceremonies; and pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem for the festivals. Many Jews of Jerusalem, rich and poor alike, believed in the ultimate resurrection of the dead. This is demonstrated by their practice of reburial. A year or so after depositing a corpse in a temporary grave, they would dig up the bones, carefully arrange them in a special box known as an ossuary and place the ossuary in a cave or some other safe location. Thus the dead would be ready for the resurrection; all the bones were united safely in one place, awaiting reassembly. In the Diaspora, the most conspicuously observed rituals, to judge from the testimony of pagan writers, were circumcision, the Sabbath and the dietary prohibitions (notably the avoidance of pork).

“Popular religion,” at least in the land of Israel, also contained a strong element of the “magical” and the “miraculous.” Magic brought divine activity into direct and immediate contact with humans. Teachers and holy men of all sorts roamed the countryside, preaching repentance and performing “miraculous” cures. Jesus spent much of his time exorcising demons and performing faith healings, but he was hardly unique in this respect. Holy men, who often modeled themselves to some extent on the prophet Elisha, answered the immediate needs of the populace, which was more concerned about good health and abundant harvests than about salvation and redemption.

The Course of the First Jewish Revolt

With this background, let us turn to the course of the war itself. In the fall of 66 C.E., no one knew that a war between the Jews and the Romans was imminent. Some revolutionaries, perhaps, were dreaming of a final conflict, but even they had no way of knowing precisely when the conflict would erupt or what form it would take.

The spark was provided by the procurator Florus when he seized 17 talents from the Temple treasury as compensation, he said, for uncollected back taxes. This act was not significantly worse than the depredations and misdeeds of previous procurators, and the riot it provoked was not significantly worse than the riots that had erupted during the tenures of previous procurators.

This riot, however, was the first act of a war, because it came at the end of a period of almost 20 years of unrelieved tension and lawlessness. When Florus brutally suppressed the riot, the people responded with even greater intensity, with the result that Florus had to flee the city.

At this point various revolutionary factions stepped forward. It is difficult to determine the interrelationship of all these groups. Some scholars argue that the anti-Roman forces formed a single “war party,” which for purposes of convenience can be called “Zealots” after its most distinctive constituent group. Others argue that no single “war party” ever existed and that each of the groups and figures had a distinctive history. The diverse groups shared a common willingness to fight the Romans, but differed from each other in many other respects, which explains why they spent so much time fighting each other. The latter interpretation is much more plausible than the former.

At the outbreak of the war, an aristocratic priestly revolutionary party, led initially by Eleazar, son of the high priest Ananias, seems to have controlled the revolution. Eleazar suspended the daily sacrifice in the Temple that had been offered for the welfare of the emperor and the Roman Empire. This act was tantamount to a declaration of war. As if to emphasize the point, Eleazar and his supporters turned on the Roman garrisons Florus had left in the city after his retreat and besieged them.

Whether the aristocratic priestly revolutionaries were truly committed to the revolution, or were merely playing for time in the hope of forestalling the emergence of more radical and more dangerous elements, is debated among scholars. Josephus seems to give contradictory answers: Although they probably began as revolutionaries who deeply resented the Roman diminution of their prestige and prerogatives, when they were faced with the opposition of other revolutionary groups whose primary targets were the Jewish aristocracy, it is likely the priestly revolutionaries began to hope for a peace agreement with the Romans.

In any event, these priestly revolutionaries were soon eclipsed by another group, the Sicarii, led by one Menahem. In the fall of 66 C.E., the Sicarii entered Jerusalem. In addition to attacking the Roman forces that remained in the city, the Sicarii also attacked the Jewish aristocracy. They looted the homes of the well-to-do and massacred many of the nobility. The most prominent of their victims was Ananias the high priest, the father of Eleazar, who had led the priestly revolutionaries. The priestly group, headquartered in the Temple, fought back and killed the Sicarii leader, Menahem. Menahem’s followers then fled to Masada, one of Herod’s great fortresses in the Judean wilderness. There they remained for the rest of the war, doing nothing to help the struggle. Other bands of fighters, however, were already, or would soon become, active in Jerusalem.

Revolutionary ardor also spread outside Jerusalem. In Caesarea and in many other cities of Palestine and Syria, Jews and pagans attacked one another. The hostility toward pagans and paganism that motivated the revolutionaries in Jerusalem seems also to have motivated Jews throughout the country. The pagans, for their part, gave vent to the same animosities that had exploded in the anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria 30 years earlier.

The Roman governor of Syria, Cestius, went to Judea to restore order, but after entering Jerusalem he decided that he was not strong enough to take the Temple from the revolutionaries. In the course of his withdrawal, his troops were beset by the Jews and had to abandon much of their equipment.

After the defeat of Cestius, the revolutionaries, led by the priestly revolutionary party, assigned generals to each district in the country. Most of the commissioned generals were priests. Their task was to prepare the country for war, in anticipation of either negotiations or hostilities with the Romans. The general about whose activities we are best informed is, of course, Josephus. He was sent to Galilee, where he spent the next six months feuding with local leaders, trying to impose his rule on a fractious population that had little desire to fight the Romans. He fortified several key locations, raised and trained an army, brought local brigands into his employ, and intimidated the cities of the district (notably Sepphoris, which supported the Romans, and Tiberias, which was divided).

Josephus had had no military or administrative experience, and was not temperamentally suited to cooperative leadership; it is no surprise that he ultimately failed in his mission. With the appearance of the Roman army, led by the Roman general Vespasian, in the summer of 67 C.E., Josephus’s army all but disappeared, and the Romans had little difficulty in subduing the district. Only one location gave them trouble, the fortress of Jotapata, a hilltop town fortified by Josephus, which became the refuge for the remnants of Josephus’s army, such as it was. It held out for almost seven weeks before falling to the Roman assault. Josephus himself was captured and delivered his prophecy to Vespasian, as noted above. Galilee was now pacified.

The revolutionaries in the Golan congregated at Gamla, but after some fierce fighting, that fortress too was taken. The entire northern part of the country was once again brought under Roman rule.

After taking a winter break, Vespasian resumed operations in the spring of 68 C.E. and by early summer had pacified the entire countryside; Jerusalem alone (and some isolated fortresses, notably Masada) remained in the hands of the rebels.

A Respite in the War Is Wasted

Everything seemed prepared for an immediate attack on Jerusalem, but during the summer of 68 CE Vespasian learned of the emperor Nero’s assassination. The death of the reigning emperor meant that Vespasian’s commission as general had expired; accordingly, he discontinued his military activities. In the summer of 69 CE, Vespasian had himself proclaimed emperor. He left Judea and returned to Rome in order to establish his own imperial power. By the end of the year he had succeeded. Some months later, in the spring of 70 CE, Vespasian once again turned his attention to Judea.

The two-year hiatus should have been a great boon to the revolutionaries in Jerusalem, allowing them time to organize their forces, fortify the city and lay away provisions. But the opposite was the case. As the refugees entered Jerusalem from the countryside, internecine strife intensified. The party of Zealots now emerged, consisting for the most part of Judean peasants. They turned against the aristocratic priests, who until that point had been in charge of the war, and appointed a new high priest by lot. The Zealots enlisted support from the Jews of Idumea, country peasants like themselves who could be counted on to hate the city aristocracy.

At first, the Idumeans supported the Zealots in their attacks on the aristocracy, but after a while even they, says Josephus, were disgusted by the excesses of the Zealots and withdrew.

Thus 68 CE was spent in fighting between the aristocratic (or “moderate”) revolutionary groups and the more radical proletarian ones. The latter triumphed. In 69 C.E. the radical revolutionaries themselves fell to attacking one another. John of Gischala, supported by his contingent of Galileans, turned on his former allies the Zealots and ultimately succeeded in ousting their leader and bringing them under his control. But a new revolutionary faction then emerged, led by Simon bar Giora, a native of Gerasa (a city of the Transjordan). Like the Zealots, he had a radical social program and drew much of his support from freed slaves. The intense fighting among these various groups had disastrous consequences. Large stocks of grain and other provisions were destroyed. When the Roman siege began in earnest in 70 CE, a famine soon ensued.