Rome and Judea

Parthia

Between Pontus and the Caucasus lay the irregular mountains of Armenia, where, according to legend, Noah’s ark had come to rest. From the fertile valleys of these mountains roads ran that came from Parthia and Mesopotamia and ended at the Black Sea. For this reason empires contended for Armenia. Its people were of Indo-European stock, kin to the Hittites and Phrygians, yet they had never lost their long Eastern nose. They were a vigorous race, patient farmers and skilful craftsmen, with an extraordinary commercial sense; they made the best use of their hard soil and earned enough income to give their kings, if not power, at least luxury. Darius I in the Behistun inscription of 521 BC names Armenia as one of the satrapies of Iran. Later Armenia nominally recognized the suzerainty first of the Seleucids and then alternately of the Parthians and Romans, but its remoteness practically preserved for it the advantages of independence. Tigranes the Great, its most famous king (94–56 BC), conquered Cappadocia, added another capital named Tigranocerta to the first, Artaxata, and joined Mithridates in his revolt against Rome. When Pompey accepted his apologies, Tigranes gave the victorious general six thousand talents (twenty-one million six hundred thousand dollars in gold), ten thousand drachmas (six thousand dollars in gold) to every group of a hundred men, and fifty drachmas to every Roman soldier. In the time of Caesar, Augustus, and Nero, Armenia recognized Roman suzerainty. Under Trajan it was for a time one of the conquered provinces of Rome; nevertheless its culture remained Iranian and on the whole it inclined toward Parthia.

The Parthians, who from several centuries earlier had occupied the southern shore of the Caspian as subjects of the Achaemenid and then the Seleucid kings, were of Scythian-Turanian stock. In other words, racially they belonged to the peoples of southeastern Russia and Turkestan. About 248 BC one of the Scythian chieftains named Arsaces (Arshak) revolted against the Seleucid king, made the land of the Parthians independent, and established the Arsacid dynasty there. When Antiochus III was defeated by Rome in 189 BC, the Seleucid kings were too weakened to defend their territory against the Parthians, who were half-barbarian and daring. By the end of the second century BC the new Parthian empire had swallowed all Mesopotamia and Iran. Three capitals, according to the season, served as seats of the new monarchy: Hecatompylos in Parthia, Ecbatana in Media, and Ctesiphon on the lower Tigris. Opposite Ctesiphon stood Seleucia, the old Seleucid capital, which for centuries remained a Greek city in Parthian territory. The Arsacids preserved the Seleucid administrative organization but added to it a feudalism derived from the Achaemenid kings. The mass of the people consisted of serfs bound to the soil and agricultural slaves. Industry made little progress, but Parthian workmen produced beautiful steel and “the beer trade was very profitable.” Part of the country’s wealth came from commerce carried on along the great rivers; part came from the caravans that passed through Parthia between Asia and the West. From 53 BC onward, when the Parthians defeated Crassus at Carrhae, until 217 AD, when Macrinus bought peace from Artabanus (Ardavan), Rome fought repeatedly for control of these routes and of the Red Sea.

The Parthians were too rich or too poor to devote themselves to literature. Like every age, their nobles and aristocrats preferred the art of living to the living of art. The serfs were too illiterate, the craftsmen too busy, and the merchants too profit-minded to foster great art or write great books. The common people spoke Pahlavi and wrote on skins in the Aramaic script, which had now replaced cuneiform. Yet not a single line of Parthian literature has reached us. We know that both in Ctesiphon and in Seleucia they honored Greek theatrical art, for the head of Crassus was brought in while Euripides’ Bacchae was being performed and was given a role in the play. But the paintings and sculptures discovered at Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and Ashur were probably the work of Iranian artists. Their style was an unripe mixture of Greek and Eastern styles that later influenced art from China to Byzantium. A very lively carved relief showing a mounted archer suggests that if more works of Parthian art had survived we might have a better opinion of it. At Hatra near Mosul one of the Arab vassals of the Arsacid king, probably in 88 BC, built a palace of limestone with seven vaulted halls, all constructed in a powerful but barbaric style. Silverware and jewelry from the Arsacid period have survived.

The Parthians excelled in the art of personal adornment, which is pleasing to man. Both men and women curled their hair. The men carefully tended their twisted beards and wavy mustaches. They wore a tunic and loose trousers and over them a many-colored cloak. The women wore delicately embroidered garments and adorned their hair with flowers. Free Parthians hunted, ate and drank heavily, and rode on horseback whenever they could, never walking when they could ride. They were brave warriors and honorable enemies. They treated their prisoners well, left the path to high office open to foreigners, and gave refuge to refugees. But sometimes they mutilated the bodies of their enemies, tortured witnesses, and punished minor offenses with the lash. According to their means they took several wives, kept their women in veils and in the house, punished the infidelity of their wives severely, yet both husband and wife could almost freely divorce each other. When the Parthian general Surena set out with an army against Crassus he took two hundred concubines with him and a thousand camels to carry his baggage and equipment. On the whole the Parthians give us the impression that their degree of civilization was lower than that of the Iranians of the Achaemenid period; and that their nobles were nobler than the Romans. They tolerated diversity of religions and allowed Greeks, Jews, and Christians to practice their rites without restriction. They themselves had diverged from the customary Zoroastrian faith and worshiped the sun and the moon. They preferred Mithra to Ahura Mazda, almost as Christians would later prefer Jesus to Jehovah. The Magi, whom the last Arsacid kings had neglected, supported the overthrow of the dynasty.

At the death of Vologases IV in 209 AD his sons Vologases V and Artabanus IV disputed the throne. Artabanus won, then defeated the Romans at Nisibis. Three centuries of war between the two empires ended with a brief Parthian victory. In the plains of Mesopotamia the Parthian horsemen had the advantage over the Roman legions. But Artabanus himself soon perished in a civil war. His country was conquered by Ardashir or Artaxerxes of an Iranian feudal family, who in 227 proclaimed himself King of Kings and founded the Sassanid dynasty. Zoroastrianism was revived and Iran entered one of the great periods of its history.

The Hasmoneans

In 143 BC Simon Maccabeus, taking advantage of the quarrels among the Parthians, Seleucids, Egyptians, and Romans, detached Judea from the Seleucid king and made it independent. An assembly of the people appointed him general and high priest of the second Jewish state, which lasted until 70 AD. At the same time the office of high priest became hereditary in the Hasmonean family. Under the dynasty of priest-kings Judea returned to theocratic government. One of the characteristics of Semitic societies has been that spiritual and temporal powers were closely united in both family and state. These societies accepted no ruler except God.

Finding their country weak, the Hasmoneans tried for two generations to extend its borders by policy or force. By 78 BC they had conquered and annexed Samaria, Edom, Moab, Galilee, Idumea, Transjordan, Gadara, Pella, Gerasa, Raphia, and Gaza, thus giving Palestine the same extent as in the time of Solomon. The brave descendants of the Maccabees, heroes of Jewish religious liberty, imposed circumcision upon their new subjects by the sword. At the same time the Hasmoneans lost their religious zeal and yielded more and more to the pressure of elements inclined toward Greek culture and civilization, which provoked strong protests from the Pharisees. Salome Alexandra (78–69 BC), queen of Judea, reversed this trend and made peace with the Pharisees, but even before her death her sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II began a civil war over the succession. The two rivals submitted their dispute to Pompey, who in 63 BC stood at the head of his victorious legions in Damascus. When Pompey decided in favor of Hyrcanus, Aristobulus and his soldiers fortified themselves in Jerusalem. Pompey came to besiege the capital and took the lower quarters. But Aristobulus’s brothers strengthened the approaches to the Temple and held off the attack for three months. It is said that their piety finally caused their defeat, for when Pompey learned that they would not fight on the Sabbath he was able to prepare his siege works and catapults every Saturday without hindrance for the assault on the following day. During this struggle the priests continued to pray and offer sacrifice in the Temple. When the walls fell, twelve thousand Jews were massacred; some resisted, but not one surrendered. Many threw themselves from the walls with the intention of dying. Pompey ordered that the treasures of the Temple should not be touched, but he exacted ten thousand talents (three million six hundred thousand dollars) as war indemnity from the people. The cities conquered by the Hasmoneans passed from the Jewish state to the Romans. Hyrcanus II became high priest and nominally ruler of Judea, but in reality he was the assistant and agent of the Idumean Antipater, who had helped Rome. Independent kingship came to an end and Judea became part of the Roman conquered province of Syria.

In 54 BC Crassus, on his way to Ctesiphon to play the role of Pentheus there, plundered the Temple of Jerusalem, which Pompey had previously spared, and carried off about ten thousand talents from its treasury. When news came that Crassus had been defeated and killed, the Jews seized the opportunity to demand their freedom. Longinus, Crassus’s successor as governor of Syria, suppressed the revolt and sold thirty thousand Jews into slavery in 43 BC. In the same year Antipater died; the Parthians, who had swept into Judea from the desert, installed Antigonus, the last Hasmonean king, as their vassal ruler there. Antony and Octavian replied by appointing Herod, son of Antipater, king of Judea, and by lending financial aid to his Jewish troops at Rome’s expense. Herod drove out the Parthians, spared Jerusalem from plunder, sent Antigonus to Antony for execution, put to death all the Jewish officials who had supported Antigonus, and thus opened one of the most colorful reigns in history, which lasted from 37 to 4 BC.

Herod the Great

This man is the outstanding example of an age that produced so many intelligent but immoral, talented but unrestrained, brave but dishonorable men. Herod was a miniature Augustus of Judea. He replaced the tumult of liberty with the order of dictatorship. For the adornment of his capital he turned to Greek architecture and sculpture. He enlarged his country, made it prosperous, gained more by cleverness than by arms, married several times, was broken by the treachery of his children, and met every good fortune except happiness. Josephus describes him as a man of great physical courage, highly skilled, an excellent archer and javelin-thrower, and a powerful hunter who in one day captured forty wild beasts and “was a warrior against whom no one could stand.” He must also have possessed strength of character, for Herod always succeeded in silencing or buying off enemies who tried to discredit him before Antony, Cleopatra, or Octavian. From every crisis that arose between him and the triumvirs he emerged with wider powers and territory, until Augustus, who considered him “too great for so small a country,” added the Hasmonean cities of Palestine to his realm and said that he wished Herod might rule Syria and Egypt as well. This Idumean king was as generous as he was cruel. The benefits he conferred on his subjects were matched by the ill treatment he gave them.

Part of his nature consisted of hatred for those he had defeated or whose relatives he had destroyed, and part of a contemptuous hostility toward a people displeased by his harsh despotism and foreign origin. He had reached the throne with money and Roman support; and to the end of his life he remained the friend and vassal of a power against which his people plotted day and night to regain their freedom. The country’s limited economic resources suffered and could not meet the expenses imposed upon it by a luxurious court and an ambitious building program out of proportion to the national wealth. Herod tried in various ways to find means of calming his subjects, but without success. In years of scarcity he exempted the people from taxes, obtained Rome’s consent to a reduction of the tribute paid to the empire, and granted privileges to Jews settled abroad. He promptly relieved famine and other disasters, maintained order at home and security abroad, and developed the country’s internal resources. Brigandage was ended, trade was encouraged, markets and ports were further developed.

At the same time, because this king was given to moral license and showed cruelty in punishments, and when Aristobulus, grandson of Hyrcanus II and heir to the throne, was “accidentally” drowned in a bath during his reign, public opinion and feeling turned against him. The priests, whose power Herod had ended and whose leaders he himself appointed, plotted against him, and the Pharisees loathed his open intention of turning Judea into a country with Greek culture and way of life.

Herod ruled over several cities that were more Greek than Jewish in population and culture. Influenced by the refinement and variety of Greek civilization, and himself neither Jewish by descent nor by belief, he naturally sought cultural unity for his country and an imposing appearance for his state. For this purpose he promoted everything Greek—morals and customs, dress, ideas, literature, and art. He gathered Greek scholars around him and gave them high official posts. He made the Greek Nicolaus of Damascus his official counselor and historian. At great expense he built a theater and an amphitheater in Jerusalem and adorned them with buildings dedicated to Augustus and other pagans. He introduced athletic and musical contests in the Greek manner and gladiatorial combats in the Roman style. He adorned Jerusalem with buildings whose style seemed foreign to the nation and set up Greek statues in the public squares whose nudity, like that of the competitors in the games, horrified the Jews. He built a palace for himself, undoubtedly modeled on Greek examples, and filled it with gilded ceilings, marbles, and costly furniture, surrounding it with spacious gardens like those of his Roman friends. He also announced that the Temple built five hundred years earlier by Zerubbabel was too small and proposed to demolish it and build a larger one in its place. This statement and proposal offended the people. Despite their protests and fears he carried out his plan and built a great Temple that Titus later overthrew.

On Mount Moriah they leveled an area of more than sixty thousand square meters. Around it they built porticoes whose roofs were of cedar wood “wonderfully carved.” These roofs rested on several rows of Corinthian columns. Each of these columns was of a single block of marble so large that three men with outstretched arms could hardly embrace it. In the main court were the booths of the money-changers who exchanged foreign coins from Iran for the currency accepted in the sanctuary. There were also stables from which anyone could buy an animal for sacrifice; and rooms and porticoes where teachers and their pupils gathered to study Hebrew and the divine law; in addition there was the clamor of beggars, which is inevitable in the East. From this “outer Temple” several steps led to an inner space surrounded by a wall into which no non-Jew might enter; this was the “Court of the Women” where “pure men entered with their wives.” After this area the worshipers ascended another flight of steps and passed through doors covered with silver and gold plates to the “Court of the Priests,” where the altar stood in the open air and the sacrifices offered to Jehovah were burned upon it. Other steps led from bronze doors twenty-five meters high and eleven meters wide, above which was a magnificent golden vine, to the Temple itself, which was open only to the priests. The whole structure was of white marble and its façade was covered with gold. Inside it was divided into two parts by a curtain embroidered in blue, purple, and scarlet. In front of the curtain stood the seven-branched golden candlestick, the altar of incense, and the table on which the “shewbread” of unleavened loaves was placed by the priests before Jehovah. Behind the curtain was the Holy of Holies which, in the first Temple, had contained a golden censer and the Ark of the Covenant, but in Herod’s Temple, as Josephus relates, there was “nothing at all.” No human foot entered there except once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and then only the high priest. The construction of this historic building took eight years, but its decoration took eighty. It was just completed when Titus’s legions arrived.

The people took pride in possessing so great a Temple, which ranked among the wonders of the Augustan age. Its splendor led them to overlook with indulgence the Corinthian columns of the porticoes and the golden eagle that, despite the prohibition of carved images in the Jewish faith, stood at the entrance of the Temple as a symbol of Roman power, the enemy and ruler of Judea. Jews who traveled also told stories of the completely Greek buildings that Herod erected in other cities of Palestine. They related how he had spent the people’s money and the gold that, according to rumor, had formerly been hidden in David’s tomb, to create a great harbor at Caesarea and to give gifts to foreign cities such as Damascus, Byblus, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Antioch, Rhodes, Pergamum, Sparta, and Athens. It was clear that Herod wished to become the idol of the Greco-Roman world rather than merely the king of the Jews. Yet the Jews lived by the strength of their religion and the firm conviction that sooner or later Jehovah would deliver them from their rival and oppressor. The victory of the Greek spirit over Hebrew culture in the person of their ruler was a sign of misfortune and calamity equal to the tortures of Antiochus. Plots were laid against Herod’s life, but he discovered them, arrested the plotters, tortured and executed them, and in some cases destroyed their entire families. Almost everywhere he set spies upon the people and himself, disguised, listened at doors and punished the slightest hostile word.

Herod succeeded in foiling all the plots of his enemies, but he fell victim to the plots of his wives and children. He took ten wives; at one time he had nine of them together. He had fourteen children. His second wife Mariamne was the granddaughter of Hyrcanus II and sister of Aristobulus, both of whom Herod had put to death. Josephus says that “she was a chaste woman but sometimes sharp-tempered and behaved imperiously toward her husband, for she saw him so infatuated with her that he seemed her slave. She also wished to disgrace her mother-in-law and sister-in-law on account of their low birth and spoke of them with contempt, especially as a very strong hatred reigned among the women of the royal family.” Herod’s sister convinced him that Mariamne was plotting to poison him. Herod summoned Mariamne before his own court and the court condemned her. Mariamne was executed. When Herod doubted her guilt he went mad for a time with grief and remorse, constantly spoke her name, sent his servants after her, wandered into the desert, “was bitterly afflicted,” and they brought him back to the palace with fever and distracted mind. Mariamne’s mother joined others in a plot to depose him. Suddenly Herod recovered his senses and had the plotters put to death. A little later Antipater, the son of his first wife, convinced him that Alexander and Aristobulus, the two sons of Mariamne, were plotting another conspiracy. Herod referred the matter to a council of one hundred and fifty members and this council, in 6 BC, condemned the two young men to death. Two years later Nicolaus of Damascus persuaded Antipater himself to plot to take his father’s place. Herod ordered Antipater brought before him and “wept over the misfortunes he had suffered at the hands of his children.” In a moment of pity he ordered that Antipater should merely be imprisoned.

Meanwhile the aged king was breaking under grief and disease. He suffered from dropsy, ulcers of the stomach, fever, convulsions, and difficulty in breathing. After escaping so many attempts on his life he tried to commit suicide but was prevented. When he learned that Antipater had tried to bribe the guards to escape from prison he had him put to death. Five days later he himself died in 4 BC at the age of sixty-eight, hated by all his people. His enemies said that “he stole the throne like a fox, ruled like a tiger, and died like a dog.”

Law and Prophets

According to Herod’s will his kingdom was divided among the three sons who survived him: Philip received the eastern part called Batanea, with the cities of Bethsaida, Capitolias, Gerasa, Philadelphia, and Bostra. To Herod Antipas went Perea (Transjordan) and in the north the district of Galilee including Esdraelon, Tiberias, and Nazareth. Archelaus received Samaria, Idumea, and Judea. The last section included many famous cities such as Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheba, Gaza, Gadara, Emmaus, Jamnia, Joppa, Caesarea, Jericho, and Jerusalem. In several cities of Palestine the Greeks were dominant and in others the Syrians. The story of the pigs of Gadara indicates that non-Jews lived in that city. These non-Jews formed the majority in all the coastal cities except Joppa and Jamnia and also in the “Decapolis,” the ten cities of the Jordan. In the interior almost all the villages were Jewish. The tragic fate of Palestine resulted from this racial division, yet Rome did not dislike this racial division.

To understand the disgust that paganism and the moral laxity of pagan society aroused among devout Jews, we need only recall the Puritans of England. For the Jews religion was the source of law, country, and hope. In their eyes to allow religion to disappear and be swallowed up in the conquering current of Greek customs and culture would have been national suicide. This mutual hatred between Jew and Gentile, which among this people kindled a kind of racial fever, political excitement, and periodic war, arose from this. Moreover the Jews of Judea despised the people of Galilee as ignorant apostates, while the Galileans regarded the people of Judea as slaves imprisoned in the net of the Law. There was also constant strife between the people of Judea and the Samaritans, for the latter claimed that Jehovah had not chosen Zion as His seat but had chosen Gerizim; and they accepted only the five books of Moses and rejected the other sacred writings. These sects, despite all their differences, were united in their hatred of Roman power, which exacted a heavy price for the peace it imposed and which they did not greatly desire.

At that time Palestine had a population of about two and a half million, of whom perhaps one hundred thousand lived in Jerusalem. The language of the majority was Aramaic; the priests and scholars understood Hebrew. Officials, foreigners, and most writers used Greek. The majority of the people were peasants who cultivated the land, irrigated it, and kept orchards, vineyards, and flocks. In the time of Jesus, Palestine produced enough wheat to export a little. Its dates, figs, grapes, olives, wine, and oil were of fine quality and much sought after throughout the Mediterranean world. The old religious command to let the land lie fallow one year was always observed. Many trades were hereditary and in general organized in guilds. Jewish public opinion honored the worker, and most scholars trained their hands as well as their tongues. The number of slaves was smaller than elsewhere. Retail trade flourished but there were not many wealthy Jewish merchants. Josephus says: “We are not a nation of traders. We live in a country (eastern Judea) that has no sea market and does not incline to foreign trade.” Financial operations did not develop greatly until Hillel, perhaps at Herod’s suggestion, abolished the law of Deuteronomy (15:1–11) which required the cancellation of debts every seven years. The Temple itself was a national bank.

In the Temple area the Hall of Gazith was the meeting place of the Sanhedrin or Great Council of the Elders of Israel. This institution probably dated from the time of Seleucid rule about 200 BC to replace the first council mentioned in the Book of Numbers (11:16) that assisted Moses. This council, originally chosen by the high priest from among the priestly aristocracy, in the period of Roman domination added an increasing number of Pharisees and also several scribes to its membership. These seventy-one men, over whom the high priest presided, claimed supreme authority over all Jews in the world and everywhere devout Jews recognized their authority, but the Hasmoneans, Herod, and Rome accepted their power only when the Jewish Law was violated by a Jew of Judea. These seventy-one could pass sentence for religious offenses, but the execution of the sentence depended on confirmation by the civil authority.

In this assembly, as in most assemblies, two opposing groups contended for priority: one was a conservative group led by the high priests and Sadducees, the other a liberal group led by the Pharisees and scribes. Most of the high-ranking clergy and upper classes belonged to the Sadducees, so named because their founder was called Zadok. They were nationalists in politics and traditionalists in religion; they supported the application of the written Torah, the written Law, but did not accept the additional oral traditions and liberal interpretations of the Pharisees. They doubted the survival of the soul and were content with the good things of this earth.

The Pharisees (derived from Perushim, meaning separatists) were so called by the Sadducees because they said that the Pharisees (like good Brahmins) separated themselves from those who neglected the requirements of ritual purity and thus fell into ritual impurity. These Pharisees were in reality the continuators of the way and custom of the Hasidim, the saints of the Maccabean period, who supported the very exact observance of the Law. Josephus, himself a Pharisee, describes them thus: “A group of Jews who consider themselves more religious than others and express the laws with greater precision.” For this purpose they added to the written Law of the five books oral traditions, interpretations, and rulings that the recognized teachers of the Law had made and given. In their opinion these interpretations were necessary to clarify the obscure points of the Law of Moses, to specify their application to particular cases, and sometimes to modify their literal sense in order to reconcile them with the needs and conditions of new life. At the same time they were strict and tolerant of the opinions of others; they sometimes mitigated the laws, as Hillel did in the matter of interest on loans, yet they wanted the oral tradition to be observed as fully as the written Torah. In their view only this complete obedience could save the Jews from dissolution and absorption into other faiths. The Pharisees had come to terms with Roman domination and sought their consolation in the hope of a spiritual and bodily survival. They lived simply, condemned luxury, often fasted, gladly bathed, and showed themselves conscious of their own virtue. Yet they were the embodiment of the spiritual force of Jewish customs and culture, won the support of the middle classes, and gave their followers a rule and discipline that preserved them from dispersion when misfortune came. After the destruction of the Temple (in 70 AD) the priests lost their influence, the Sadducees disappeared, the synagogue took the place of the Temple, and the Pharisees, through the rabbis, became the teachers and shepherds of a people that was scattered but not conquered.

The most extreme Jewish sect were the Essenes. They traced their asceticism back to the Hasidim. Their name may derive from the Chaldean word for “bathers,” and their rites and practices may derive from the theories of piety that circulated throughout the world in the first century BC; it is possible that some Brahman, Buddhist, Persian, Pythagorean, and Cynic ideas that reached the commercial crossroads of Jerusalem influenced them. This sect, numbering about four thousand in Palestine, was organized with strict discipline, observed the written and oral Law with fervent precision, and lived together as celibates and almost as monks; in the oasis of Engedi in the desert west of the Dead Sea they cultivated the land. They lived in houses belonging to the community, ate their meals together in silence, chose their leaders by public vote, pooled their property and income in a common treasury, and followed the Hasidic maxim: “What is mine and what is thine is thine.” Josephus says: “Many of them lived more than a century because their food was simple and their life regular.” Each wore a white linen garment, carried a small mattock to bury his excrement in the earth, then washed himself like a Brahmin, and considered evacuation on the Sabbath a sacrilege. Only some Essenes married and lived in the cities, but they followed Tolstoy’s rule that they approached their wives solely for the purpose of procreation. The members of this sect avoided every sensual pleasure and sought absorption in God through meditation and prayer. They hoped that through asceticism, self-control, and contemplation they could acquire magical powers and foresee the future. Like many of their contemporaries they believed in angels and demons. They attributed diseases to the domination of evil spirits and tried to drive them out with magical formulas and incantations. Some parts of the “Kabbalah” were taken from their “secret doctrine.” They awaited the coming of a Messiah who would establish God’s communal and egalitarian kingdom (Malkhut Shamayim) on earth. Only those whose life in this world had been based on purity would enter that kingdom. They were ardent pacifists and refused to make instruments of war. Nevertheless, when Titus’s legions attacked Jerusalem and the Temple, the Essenes joined the other Jews and fought almost to the last man. As Josephus describes their customs and sufferings the reader feels himself in a Christian atmosphere:

Although they were tortured and tormented, burned, and had pieces of their bodies torn off, and every possible evil was inflicted on them to force them to blaspheme their lawgiver (Moses) or eat forbidden food, they refused and would not flatter their tormentors or shed tears. Rather, in the midst of suffering and pain, they smiled to show contempt for their executioners and died with joy; as if they expected to regain their souls.

The Great Expectation

The Jewish literature that has reached us from this period is almost entirely religious. To a traditional Hebrew, just as making an image of God and any pictorial decoration of His temples was an insult to the sacred, so writing philosophy or literature for any final purpose except the praise of God and the glorification of the Law seemed wrong. Of course there were many exceptions, among which we may mention the beautiful story of Susanna. This story is about a beautiful Jewish woman who is accused of unchastity by two Jewish elders who had failed in their purpose, and is cleared by the skillful cross-examination of a youth named Daniel. Even this love story found its way into some versions of the Book of Daniel the Prophet.

The Book of Joshua son of Sirach, known as the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, may belong to this period. This work belongs to the Apocrypha, the hidden or unauthorized writings that the Jews did not accept as part of the Old Testament. The book is full of beauty and wisdom and should not have been omitted from the collection that includes Ecclesiastes and Job. In chapter 24 of this book, as in chapter eight of Proverbs, we encounter the idea of the Logos, the incarnate Word: Wisdom says, “The Lord created me as the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth was.” Between 130 BC and 40 AD a Jewish Alexandrian—or several Jews inclined toward Greek culture and customs—published a book called the Wisdom of Solomon whose aim, like that of Philo, was to harmonize Judaism and Platonic philosophy. This book called upon Jews who had turned to Greek culture and customs to return to the Law, and its prose had the originality of the prose after Isaiah the Prophet. A less important work is the Psalms of Solomon, whose date of composition is about 50 BC, and which is full of the prophecy of the coming of a savior for the people of Israel.

The hope of deliverance from Roman domination and from earthly sufferings through the coming of a divine redeemer appears almost everywhere in the Jewish literature of that time. Many of these works took the form of revelations or inspirations whose purpose was to make the past intelligible and forgivable by showing that it was a prelude to a triumphant future that God revealed to a seer. The Book of Daniel, written about 165 BC to comfort the people of Israel in the face of the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, was still circulated among Jews who did not believe that God would leave them long under pagan rule. The Ethiopian Book of Enoch, probably written by several authors between 170 and 66 BC, took the form of visions granted to one of the elders of the Law who, according to Genesis (5:24), “walked with God.” This book spoke of the fall of Satan and his angels to earth and the consequent entry of evil and suffering into human life, then the salvation of mankind by a Messiah, and the coming of the kingdom of God. About 150 BC certain Jewish writers began to publish Sibylline oracles in which various Sibyls or women prophets appeared as defenders of Judaism against paganism and foretold the final victory of the Jews over their enemies.

The idea of a divine savior probably came from Iran and Babylon to western Asia. The Zoroastrian faith presented all history and all life as a war between the holy forces of light and the evil forces of darkness and held that at the end a redeemer named Saoshyant or Mithra would come to judge mankind and establish justice and peace forever. To many Jews Roman domination was part of the temporary victory of evil. They condemned the greed, treachery, extreme violence, and idolatry of the “foreigners’” civilization and the atheism of the Epicurean world. In the Wisdom of Solomon it is written:

The pagans said: Life is short and full of trouble, and there is no remedy for death, nor has anyone returned from the grave. ... The breath in our nostrils is like smoke, and a little spark is the beating of our heart; when it is extinguished, our body will turn to ashes and our spirit will vanish like light air, our name will be forgotten and our life will pass like the trace of a cloud, like mist dispersed by the rays of the sun. ... Come, let us enjoy the good things that exist. ... Let us not miss the flowers of spring; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither; and let us leave everywhere a sign of our joy.

The author says these Epicureans reason wrongly. They hitch their wagon to a falling star, for pleasure is something vain and fleeting.

In reality the hope of the pagans is chaff that the wind drives away, mist that the storm scatters; it passes like the memory of a banquet that lasts only one day. But the just man lives forever, and the Almighty watches over him. Therefore he will receive from the hand of the Lord a kingdom of glory and a diadem of beauty.

According to the books of revelation, the reign of evil would end either by the direct intervention of God Himself or by the coming to earth of His son or representative, the Messiah or Anointed One. Did not Isaiah the Prophet foretell this a century earlier?

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called ... Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Many Jews agreed with Isaiah (11:1) in describing the Messiah as an earthly king born in the royal house of David. Others, like the authors of the books of Enoch and Daniel, called him the Son of Man and showed him coming from heaven. The philosopher of Proverbs and the poet of the Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps under the influence of the Platonic idea or the “world soul” of the Stoics, knew him as incarnate reason, the first creature of God, and the Word or Reason (Logos), which would soon play a great role in the philosophy of Philo. Almost all the writers of the revelations thought that the Messiah would soon be victorious, but Isaiah in one remarkable passage imagined him thus:

Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ... yet he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows ... and he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities ... and with his stripes we are healed. ... And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ... he was taken from prison and from judgment ... he was cut off out of the land of the living ... and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Nevertheless all agree that at the end the Messiah would subdue the unbelievers, deliver Israel, make Jerusalem his capital, and bring all peoples to accept Jehovah and the Law of Moses. After that a “time of happiness” of bliss for all the world would come. The whole earth would become fertile, every seed would yield a thousandfold, wine would abound, poverty would disappear, all men would be healthy and righteous, and justice, benevolence, and peace would reign on earth. Some of the prophets believed that this happy age would be interrupted, the powers of darkness and evil would make their last assault on the kingdom of bliss, and the world would perish amid disorder and a great fire. Finally on the “day of God” the dead would rise and be judged by the “Ancient of Days” (Jehovah) or by the “Son of Man,” to whom absolute and eternal power over a renewed world, the “kingdom of God,” would be given. The wicked, with bound tongues and heads, would be cast “into hell,” but the righteous would attain endless bliss.

In principle the intellectual movement in Judea kept pace with the intellectual movement in the pagan theology of that time: a people that had once staked its future on its national destiny had now lost confidence in the state and thought of individual and spiritual salvation. The mystery religions had given such hope of salvation to millions in Greece, the Hellenistic East, and Italy, but nowhere was this hope taken as seriously or the need for it felt as acutely as in Judea. The poor or the deprived, the oppressed or the despised on earth looked to a divine redeemer who would free them from bondage and suffering. The revelations told that a savior would soon come and with his victory all the righteous, even from the grave, would rise and go to a paradise that would be the abode of eternal bliss. Aged saints like Simeon and wise women like Anna the daughter of Phanuel spent their lives in the Temple with fasting, patience, and prayer, hoping to see the redeemer with their own eyes before they died. Hearts were filled with a great expectation.

The Revolt

No people in history has fought for freedom with the stubbornness of the Jews, and no people has faced a power so vastly superior to itself. From Judas Maccabeus to Simon Bar Kokhba, and even to our own day, the Jewish struggle to regain their freedom has often been accompanied by heavy losses, yet it has never broken their courage or their hope.

When Herod the Great died, the nationalists, who despised Hillel’s pacifist counsels, rose against Archelaus, Herod’s successor, and encamped under tents around the Temple. Archelaus’s forces killed three thousand of them, most of whom had come to Jerusalem for the Passover (4 BC). At the feast of Pentecost the same year the rebels gathered again and were again massacred horribly. The porticoes of the Temple were burned and destroyed, the treasures of the sanctuary were plundered by the Roman legions; and many Jews in despair killed themselves. Bands of patriots formed in the villages and made life dangerous for those who supported the Romans. One of these bands under the command of Judas the Galilean captured the fortress city of Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. Varus, the governor of Syria, entered Palestine with twenty thousand troops, razed hundreds of cities to the ground, crucified two thousand rebels, and sold thirty thousand Jews into slavery. A delegation of Jewish leaders went to Rome and asked Augustus to abolish the kingship of Judea. Augustus deposed Archelaus and made Judea a second-class conquered province of Rome with a procurator responsible to the governor of Syria (6 AD).

Under Tiberius this troubled country enjoyed a period of peace and calm. Then Caligula, who wished to make the worship of the emperor the single religion throughout the empire, ordered all established religions to include sacrifice to his image among their rites; and he commanded the officials of Jerusalem to set up his statue in the Temple. Under Augustus and Tiberius the Jews had made the compromise of offering sacrifice to Jehovah in the name of the emperor; but they were so horrified at the idea of setting up the statue of a pagan in the Temple that, it is said, thousands of them went to the governor of Syria and asked to be killed before this innovation was carried out. Caligula’s death settled the matter. Claudius, influenced by Agrippa, grandson of Herod, made him king of almost all Palestine (41), but Agrippa’s sudden death created another crisis and Claudius restored the procuratorial regime.

Those whom the emperor’s freedmen chose for this office were often unfit or vicious. Felix, whose brother Pallas had made him procurator, ruled Judea, according to Tacitus, “with the power of a king and the spirit of a slave.” Festus governed with greater justice but lost his life in the attempt. Albinus, if we accept Josephus’s account, plundered and taxed to excess and grew rich by taking money for releasing criminals from prison, so that “finally no one remained in prison except those who had nothing to give him.” The same friend and admirer of the Romans says that Florus “behaved more like an executioner than a governor,” plundered whole cities, and not only stole himself but shared in the robberies of others if they gave him a share. It seems that these reports had to some extent the character of war propaganda. No doubt the procurators complained that the Jews were a people very difficult to keep obedient.

Bands of “Zealots” and “Sicarii” (dagger-men) were formed in protest against this misgovernment. The members of these bands, sworn to kill every Jew who broke his covenant, mingled with the crowds in the streets, stabbed from behind those they had marked, and then disappeared in the throng. When Florus took seventeen talents (61,200 dollars) from the Temple treasury, the angry crowd of common people gathered before the sanctuary and with loud cries demanded his dismissal. Some young men went around with baskets collecting alms for him as if he were a beggar. Florus’s legions dispersed the crowd, plundered hundreds of houses, and put their inhabitants to the sword. The leaders of the rebels were bound and crucified. According to Josephus three thousand six hundred Jews perished that day. The older or wealthier Hebrews urged patience, arguing that revolt against so powerful an empire meant national suicide; but the young or the poor accused them of cowardice and collusion with the government. This division caused strife among the people and almost within every family. One group occupied the upper part and another the lower part of Jerusalem and each attacked the other with whatever weapons it could find. In 68 a fierce battle took place between them. The radicals won and killed twelve thousand Jews, almost all the wealthy; the revolt had become a revolution. “A force of rebels besieged the Roman garrison at Masada, disarmed its men, and then massacred them to the last man. That day the non-Jews of Caesarea, the capital of Palestine, carried out a prearranged massacre and plunder that resulted in the killing of twenty thousand Jews; thousands more were sold into slavery. In one day alone the non-Jews of Damascus cut the throats of ten thousand Jews.” The revolutionaries, their anger now aflame, destroyed several Greek cities in Palestine and Syria, burned some to the ground, and killed and were killed in great numbers. Josephus says: “To see cities full of unburied corpses ... the bodies of the old mixed with those of children and women lying naked, was a common sight.” By September 66 the revolution had engulfed Jerusalem and almost all Palestine. The peace party had lost credit and most of its members were joining the rebels.

Among them was a rabbi named Josephus who at that time was a young man of thirty, energetic, handsome, and so intelligent that he could turn every wish into ability. When he was commissioned by the rebels to help defend Galilee he defended the fortress city of Jotapata stubbornly against the siege of Vespasian until only forty Jewish soldiers who had hidden with him in a cave remained alive. Josephus wanted to surrender but his men threatened to kill him if he did so. Since they preferred death to captivity, Josephus persuaded them to draw lots to decide the order in which each would be killed by the next. When all were dead and only he and one other remained, Josephus persuaded the other to surrender with him. They were about to be chained and sent to Rome when Josephus prophesied that Vespasian would become emperor. Vespasian freed him and gradually accepted him as a useful adviser in the war against the Jews. When Vespasian left for Alexandria, Josephus accompanied Titus to the siege of Jerusalem.

The approach of the Roman legions created a late and extraordinary unity among the defenders of the city. Tacitus relates that six hundred thousand rebels had gathered in the city. “Everyone who could bear arms took them up,” and the women were no less warlike than the men. Josephus, from the Roman lines, called upon the besieged to surrender; they called him a traitor and fought to the last man. The Jews, suffering from famine, made several desperate sorties to obtain food; thousands of them were captured by the Romans and crucified. Josephus says: “Their number was so great that there was not space enough for the crosses, and the crosses were not enough for the men.” At the end of the fifth month of the siege the streets of the city were filled with corpses; carrion birds were everywhere and stripped the dead and tore out their entrails. It is said that one hundred and sixteen thousand bodies were thrown over the walls. Some Jews swallowed gold coins and secretly left Jerusalem; the Romans or Syrians captured them, slit open their bellies or searched in their excrement to find these coins. When half the city had been taken Titus offered the rebels what he considered moderate terms; the rebels rejected them. Then bands of Roman incendiaries set fire to the Temple and this vast building, most of which was wooden, burned rapidly. Dion says the surviving defenders fought bravely and proudly, glorying in dying among the ruins of the Temple. Some killed one another, some threw themselves upon drawn swords, and others cast themselves into the flames. The conquerors gave no quarter and massacred all the Jews who fell into their hands. Ninety-seven thousand fugitives were captured and sold into slavery; many of them, against their will, took part as gladiators in the victory games held at Berytus, Caesarea Philippi, and Rome and perished there. Josephus estimates the number of Jews killed during this siege and afterward at one million one hundred and ninety-seven thousand, and Tacitus at six hundred thousand (70 AD).

Scattered resistance continued until 73 AD, but the destruction of the Temple essentially marked the end of the revolt and the end of the Jewish state. The property of those who had taken part in the revolt was confiscated and sold. Judea was almost completely emptied of Jews, and those who remained lived in famine and misery. Even the poorest Jews were now required to pay the half-shekel that the pious Hebrews had formerly paid every year for the maintenance of the Temple of Jerusalem to a non-Jewish temple in Rome. The office of high priest and the assembly of rabbis (Sanhedrin) were dissolved. Judaism took the form it has preserved to this day: a religion without a holy place, without a centralized and dominant priestly organization, and without a sacrificial cult. The Sadducees disappeared, while the Pharisees and rabbis became the leaders of a people that was scattered but not conquered.

The Dispersion

The flight or enslavement of a million Jews accelerated their dispersion throughout the Mediterranean world to such an extent that their scholars have dated the beginning of the Diaspora from the destruction of Herod’s Temple. We have seen that this dispersion began six centuries earlier with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and was renewed during the settlement in Alexandria. Because procreation was a religious duty in Jewish law and abortion was strictly forbidden, the spread of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes. The Hebrews still played a very limited role in world commerce. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem Strabo, with anti-Jewish exaggeration, relates that “it is difficult to find a place in the habitable world that this tribe has not entered and made its own.” Philo, twenty years before the “Dispersion,” says: “The continents … are full of Jewish settlers … also … the islands and almost all Babylon.” About 70 AD thousands of Jews lived in Seleucia on the Tigris and in other cities of Parthia; there were many in Arabia and from there they had penetrated into Ethiopia; they were numerous in Syria and Phoenicia; they had strong settlements in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, and Smyrna; and only in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, and Thessalonica were they fewer. In the West, in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, and even in Venusia, the birthplace of Horace, there were Jewish communities. Altogether there may have been seven million Jews in the Roman Empire, about seven percent of its total population and twice the present proportion in the United States.

Their number, dress, manner of eating, custom of circumcision, poverty, ambition, prosperity, unique spirit, intelligence, hatred of images, and strange customs aroused a kind of anti-Semitism that ranged from theatrical jokes and the insults of Juvenal and Tacitus to murder in the streets and mass slaughter. Apion of Alexandria was the chief spokesman of these attackers, and Josephus replied to his attacks in a sharp and bitter treatise.

After the fall of Jerusalem Josephus sailed to Rome with Titus and accompanied the triumphal procession in which Jewish captives and their spoils were displayed. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship, a pension, a house in the imperial palace, and estates in Judea. In return for these favors Josephus took the family name of Vespasian, Flavius, and wrote the Jewish War (75 AD) to defend Titus’s actions in Palestine, to justify his own desertion to the enemy, and to discourage future revolts by displaying the power of Rome. In the last years of his life (about 93 AD), feeling more keenly his loneliness and isolation, he wrote another work called The Antiquities of the Jews to present a more favorable view of Jewish customs, character, and brilliant history to the Gentiles and thus win the goodwill of his own people. Josephus’s narratives are clear and strong and his account of the life of Herod the Great is as attractive as Plutarch’s writings, but his partisan tone damages the objectivity and realism of the work; the arrangement of The Antiquities required years of labor and exhausted the author’s strength. The last four books of this twenty-volume work were written by his secretaries from his notes. When this work was published Josephus was over fifty-six years old, but as a result of a life full of adventures, controversy, and spiritual loneliness he was worn out.

The Jews, with their special power of resilient recovery, gradually rebuilt their economic and cultural life in Palestine. During the siege of Jerusalem one of Hillel’s pupils, Johanan ben Zakkai, fearing that the massacre of the religious scholars might destroy all the transmitters of tradition, fled from the city and founded a school in a vineyard at Jabneh or Jamnia near the Mediterranean coast. When Jerusalem fell he established a new assembly (new Sanhedrin) at Jabneh whose members were not high priests, politicians, or wealthy men but Pharisees and rabbis, scholars of the Law. This “Beth Din” or council had no political power, but most Jews of Palestine recognized its authority in all religious and moral questions. The patriarch or nasi whom the council elected as president appointed the administrators of the Jewish community and had the power to excommunicate rebellious Jews. Strict discipline under the patriarchate of Gamaliel II (about 100 AD) and his successors first in the council, then among the Jews of Jamnia, and finally among all the Jews of Palestine brought order. Under his leadership the contradictory interpretations of the Law transmitted by Hillel and Shammai were reviewed and standardized. Most of Hillel’s interpretations were approved and from that time onward were binding on all Jews.

Since the Law was now the sole factor uniting the scattered and stateless Jews, the teaching of the Law became the chief occupation of the synagogue throughout the period of the Diaspora; the synagogue took the place of the Temple, and prayer replaced sacrifice while the rabbi replaced the Temple priest. The Tannaim, the expounders, interpreted each law of the Torah that had come down to them by oral tradition (Halakhah), usually basing them on the traditions of the scribes, and sometimes adding a story or sermon (Haggadah) to make them clearer. The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph. At the age of forty (about 80 AD) he joined his five-year-old son in school and learned to read. Soon he could recite all five books of Moses by heart. After thirteen years of study he himself opened a school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, energy and humor, and even the stubborn rigidity of his beliefs attracted many students. When, in 95, news came that Domitian was preparing a new action against the Jews, Akiva was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to carry a personal message to the emperor. While they were on their way to Rome Domitian died. Nerva listened favorably to their words and put an end to the “Jewish tax” (Fiscus Judaicus), the levy that had been imposed on the Jews for the rebuilding of Rome. After returning to Jamnia Akiva resolved to devote the rest of his life to codifying the Halakhah (oral laws). His pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (about 200) completed his work. Even in this codified form the Halakhah remained part of the oral tradition and was transmitted from generation to generation by teachers and those whose profession was to memorize it—the living books of the Law. As reasonable as Akiva’s conclusions were, his methods seemed unreasonable. On the basis of a strange interpretation in which every letter of the Torah or written Law had a symbolic meaning he drew liberal principles. Perhaps he had realized that people would not accept a rational matter except in the form of a symbolic one. The origin of that organization and difficult explanations of theology and ethics that reached Moses Maimonides through the Talmud and in the final stage were transmitted to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers was Akiva.

At the age of ninety, when he had become weak and reactionary, Akiva again found himself in the midst of revolution as in his youth. In the years 115–116 the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose again against Rome. The massacre of non-Jews by Jews and vice versa again became the order of the day. According to Dion, 220,000 were killed in Cyrene and 240,000 in Cyprus. These figures are incredible but we know that Cyrene never recovered from this destruction and for several centuries afterward no Hebrew was allowed into Cyprus. The revolts were suppressed, but the surviving Jews kept alive their hope in a Messiah who would rebuild the Temple and establish them triumphantly in Jerusalem. Roman folly revived the revolt. In 130 Hadrian announced that he wished to erect an altar to Jupiter on the site of the Temple; in 131 he issued an edict forbidding circumcision and public teaching based on the Jewish Law. The Jews, under the leadership of Simon Bar Kokhba, who claimed to be the Messiah, made their last effort in ancient history to revive their country and regain their freedom (132 AD). Akiva, who had spent his whole life preaching the preservation of peace, sanctioned the revolution by accepting Bar Kokhba as the promised redeemer. For three years the rebels fought bravely against the legions. Finally they were defeated through lack of food and supplies. The Romans destroyed 985 places in Palestine and killed 580,000 people. It is said that the number who perished from hunger, disease, or fire was even greater. Almost all Judea was turned into a desert. Bar Kokhba himself fell while defending Bethar. So many Jewish captives were sold into slavery that the price of a slave fell to that of a horse. Thousands, to avoid capture, hid in underground passages; one by one they died of hunger and in the end the living ate the bodies of the dead.

Hadrian, determined to crush the vitality of Judaism that always revived, not only forbade circumcision but also prohibited the observance of the Sabbath and the celebration of all Jewish festivals and the public performance of all these rites and ceremonies. A new per capita tax, heavier than the previous one, was imposed on all Jews. In Jerusalem Jews were allowed to go to the ruins of the Temple to lament only on one fixed day of the year. Aelia Capitolina, a non-Jewish city, was built on the site of Jerusalem with shrines to Jupiter and Venus, with gymnasiums, theaters, and baths. The council of Jamnia was dissolved and declared illegal; at Lydda a less important council without powers was allowed to be formed, but public teaching of the Law was forbidden and the penalty was death. Several rabbis were executed for disobeying this command. Akiva, now ninety-five years old, was determined to continue teaching his pupils; he was imprisoned for three years but even in prison he taught. He was tried and condemned, and it is said that as he died he repeated the Jewish creed: “Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Although Antoninus Pius moderated Hadrian’s edicts, the Jews did not recover from the consequences of the catastrophe of Bar Kokhba’s revolt for three centuries. From that time onward the Jews entered their own Middle Ages; they abandoned every secular study except medicine, rejected Greek culture and customs in every form, and sought peace and unity only in the rabbis, the mystical poets, and their Law. No other people has ever had to deal with so long an exile and so hard a fate. The Jews, driven from their holy city, were forced first to surrender it to the pagans and then to the Christians. They were scattered throughout all the conquered provinces and beyond them; condemned to poverty and humiliation, and viewed with suspicion even by philosophers and saints, they withdrew from public affairs and devoted themselves only to private study and worship; they memorized the words of their scholars with devotion and prepared themselves at least to write these words down in the Talmuds of Babylon and Palestine. Judaism hid itself in fear and darkness while its successor, Christianity, set out to conquer the world.