No people in history has fought so tenaciously for liberty as the Jews, nor any people against such odds. From Judas Maccabee to Simeon Bar Cocheba, and even into our own time, the struggle of the Jews to regain their freedom has often decimated them, but has never broken their spirit or their hope.
When Herod the Great died the nationalists, spurning the pacific counsels of Hillel, declared a revolt against Herod’s successor Archelaus, and encamped in tents about the Temple. Archelaus’ troops slew 3000 of them, many of whom had come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival (4 B.C.). At the following feast of Pentecost the rebels gathered again, and once more suffered great slaughter; the Temple cloisters were burned to the ground, the treasures of the sanctuary were plundered by the legions, and many Jews killed themselves in despair. Patriot bands took form in the countryside, and made life precarious for any supporter of Rome; one such band, under Judas the Gaulonite, captured Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. Varus, governor of Syria, entered Palestine with 20,000 men, razed hundreds of towns, crucified 2000 rebels, and sold 30,000 Jews into slavery. A delegation of leading Jews went to Rome and begged Augustus to abolish the kingship in Judea. Augustus removed Archelaus, and made Judea a Roman province of the second class, under a procurator responsible to the governor of Syria (A.D. 6).
Under Tiberius the troubled land knew a moment’s peace. Caligula, wishing to make the worship of the emperor a unifying religion throughout the Empire, ordered all cults to include a sacrifice to his image, and bade the Jerusalem officials to install his statue in the Temple. The Jews had compromised, under Augustus and Tiberius, by sacrificing to Yahveh in the name of the emperor; but they were so averse to setting up the graven image of a pagan in their Temple that thousands of them, we are told, went to the governor of Syria and asked to be slain in cold blood before the edict should be carried out.49 Caligula eased the situation by dying. Impressed by Herod’s grandson Agrippa, Claudius made him king of nearly all Palestine (41); but Agrippa’s sudden death released another outburst of disorder, and Claudius restored the procuratorial rule (44).
The men whom his mercenary freedmen chose for this office were mostly incompetents or scoundrels. Felix, made procurator by his brother Pallas, “governed Judea,” says Tacitus, “with the powers of a king and the soul of a slave.”50 Festus ruled more justly, but died in the attempt. Albinus, if we may believe Josephus, plundered and taxed assiduously, and made a fortune by releasing criminals from jail for a consideration; “nobody remained in prison but those who gave him nothing.”51 Florus, says the same friend and admirer of the Romans, behaved “like an executioner rather than a governor,” despoiled whole cities, and not only stole on his own account, but connived at other robberies if allowed to share the loot. These reports retain some odor of war propaganda; doubtless the procurators complained that the Jews were a very troublesome people to oppress.
Bands of “Zealots” and “Dagger-men” (Sicarii) were formed in protest against this misrule. Their members, pledged to kill any disloyal Jew, mingled in street gatherings, stabbed their appointed victims from behind, and disappeared in the chaos of the crowd.52 When Florus took seventeen talents ($61,200) from the Temple treasury, an angry mob collected before the shrine and cried out for his dismissal; some youths went about with baskets begging alms for him as suffering from poverty. Florus’ legions dispersed the assemblage, plundered hundreds of homes, and slew the occupants; the leading rebels were scourged and crucified; on that day, says Josephus, 3600 Jews were slain.53 The old or well-to-do Hebrews counseled patience, arguing that revolt against so powerful an empire would be national suicide; the young or poor accused them of connivance and cowardice. The two factions divided the city and nearly every family; one seized the upper part of Jerusalem, the other the lower, and each attacked the other with every weapon at hand. In 68 a pitched battle was fought between the groups; the radicals won, and killed 12,000 Jews, including nearly all the rich;54 the revolt had become a revolution. A rebel force surrounded the Roman garrison at Masada, persuaded it to disarm, and then slaughtered every man of it. On that day the gentiles of Caesarea, the Palestinian capital, rose in a pogrom that slew 20,000 Jews; other thousands were sold into slavery. In one day the gentiles of Damascus cut the throats of 10,000 Jews.55 The enraged revolutionists laid waste many Greek cities in Palestine and Syria, burned some of them to the ground, and killed and were killed in great number. “It was then common,” says Josephus, “to see cities filled with dead bodies . . . unburied, those of old men mixed with infants, and women lying among them without any cover.”56 By September of 66 the revolution had won Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine. The peace party was discredited, and most of its members now joined in the revolt.
Among them was a priest named Josephus, then a young man of thirty, energetic, brilliant, and endowed with an intellect capable of transforming every desire into a virtue. Commissioned by the rebels to fortify Galilee, he defended its stronghold, Jotopata, against Vespasian’s siege, until only forty Jewish soldiers remained alive, hiding with him in a cave. Josephus wished to surrender, but his men threatened to kill him if he tried it. Since they preferred death to capture, he persuaded them to draw lots to fix the order in which each should die by the hand of the next; when all were dead but himself and one other, he induced him to join him in surrender. They were about to be sent to Rome in chains when Josephus prophesied that Vespasian would be emperor. Vespasian released 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 legions brought the defenders to a belated and fanatical unity. Tacitus reckons that 600,000 rebels had gathered in the city. “All who were capable of serving appeared in arms,” and the women were not less martial than the men.57 Josephus, from the Roman lines, called upon the besieged to surrender; they branded him as a traitor, and fought to the last. Starving Jews made desperate sorties to forage for food; thousands of them were captured by the Romans, and were crucified; “the multitude of these was so great,” Josephus reports, “that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses were wanting for the bodies.” In the later stages of the five-month siege the streets of the city were clogged with corpses; ghouls wandered about despoiling and stabbing the dead; we are told that 116,000 bodies were thrown over the walls. Some Jews swallowed gold pieces and slipped out from Jerusalem; Romans or Syrians, capturing them, slit open their bellies, or searched their offal, to find the coins.58 Having taken half the city, Titus offered what he thought were lenient terms to the rebels; they rejected them. The flaming brands of the Romans set fire to the Temple, and the great edifice, much of it of wood, was rapidly consumed. The surviving defenders fought bravely, proud, says Dio, to die on Temple grounds.59 Some killed one another, some fell upon their own swords, some leaped into the flames. The victors gave no quarter, but slew all Jews upon whom they could lay their hands; 97,000 fugitives were caught and sold as slaves; many of them died as unwilling gladiators in the triumphal games that were celebrated at Berytus, Caesarea Philippi, and Rome. Josephus numbered at 1,197,000 the Jews killed in this siege and its aftermath; Tacitus calculated them at 600,000 (A.D. 70).60
Resistance continued here and there till 73, but essentially the destruction of the Temple marked the end of the rebellion and of the Jewish state. The property of those who had shared in the revolt was confiscated and sold. Judea was almost shorn of Jews, and those that remained lived on the edge of starvation. Even the poorest Jew had now to pay to a pagan temple at Rome the half shekel that pious Hebrews had formerly paid each year for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem. The high-priesthood and the Sanhedrin were abolished. Judaism took the form that it has kept till our own time: a religion without a central shrine, without a dominant priesthood, without a sacrificial service. The Sadducees disappeared, while the Pharisees and the rabbis became the leaders of a homeless people that had nothing left but its synagogues and its hope.