The Jewish Annotated New Testament (141 page)

It is possible that neither Rome nor the Jews initially expected the siege of Jerusalem to be as extensive as it was. Large numbers of pilgrims still came to Jerusalem in the spring of 70 to celebrate the Passover. Moreover, the Jews in the city were divided into three factions led by Simon bar Gioras, John of Gischala, and the priest Eleazar ben Simeon. When Roman troops surrounded the city, the factions combined under the command of bar Gioras. Late rabbinic accounts (
b. Git
. 56b;
Avot de R. Natan
A.4) suggest that Yo
ḥ
anan ben Zakkai received Vespasian’s permission to establish a school in Jamnia (Yavneh); according to Josephus, Yavneh was a Roman prison camp for those who left Jerusalem (
J.W
. 4.130, 444). Eusebius (
Hist. eccl
. 3.5) states that the Jerusalem-based church fled to Pella, across the Jordan.

In August 70, the Romans, engaging in military action of exceptional violence, burned down the Temple and reduced much of the city to rubble. By 73, they erased all pockets of resistance, including Masada. It is likely that Roman political needs prompted the strategy: Titus sought to gain the empire’s respect for himself and his father, Vespasian, since the latter needed evidence of military success to be able to portray himself as a benefactor of the Roman people. This need for popular acclaim accounts for Titus’s victory parade with its several hundred prisoners, the numerous monuments, including the famous Arch of Titus in Rome with its depiction of the Temple menorah and altar table, and the Judea Capta (“Captured Judea”) coins with the vanquished country depicted as a mourning woman. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed or sold as slaves; members of the ruling class disappeared from history. Rome transformed the annual half-shekel/two denarii Temple contribution, which had been paid by adult Jewish males into a special penal tax (the
Fiscus Judaicus
, the “Jewish treasury”) to be paid by all Jews, men and women alike, initially for the rebuilding of the temple of Jupiter in Rome (
J.W
. 7.218). To prevent further revolt, Rome stationed a legion in Jerusalem.

The destruction of the Temple, while a catastrophe, did not create universal Jewish despair. The Babylonians had destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BCE, but it was rebuilt, so there was every reason to expect a new temple to be erected. Moreover, it was standard Roman policy to allow temples to be rebuilt. The Jewish case became exceptional: most likely Rome refused to allow the Temple to be rebuilt because they did not want the population to have another rallying cry or centralized gathering point. The high priesthood, however, was now defunct, and Rome saw no need to appoint a new high priestly leader.

DIASPORA REVOLT

The years 115–117 witnessed an uprising of the Jewish populations in Cyprus, Cyrene, Asia Minor, and Egypt. It is possible that the Diaspora Jews, at least in part, rose up because their hope for the rebuilding of the Temple had collapsed. In 96, the elderly emperor Nerva, who succeeded the last of the Flavians, Domitian, may have planned to allow the rebuilding of the Temple. If so, the plan was stopped by Nerva’s successor, Trajan, whose father had, two decades earlier, fought under Vespasian in the initial battles against the Jews.

More than religious reasons may have motivated the revolt. Trajan himself, who expanded Rome’s borders in 115 by conquering Armenia and the western fringes of the Parthian empire, had overstretched his army on Rome’s eastern frontiers, thus making revolts in Rome’s older provinces possible.

According to the fourth-century church historian Eusebius, the revolt started in Cyprus. In Cyrene, the Jews destroyed the temples dedicated to Apollo, Artemis, Demeter, Zeus, and Isis. The Roman historian Cassius Dio, who like most ancient historians cannot be fully trusted with statistics, reports that the Jews killed 240,000 Greeks (Cassius Dio 68.32.1–3). When Lucius Quietus, the Roman general, stopped the revolt (hence probably the designation used in rabbinic texts for this uprising, the “War of Quietus”), Cyprus enacted legislation prohibiting Jews from living on the island, even in case of shipwreck. All record of the sizeable Egyptian Jewish community comes to an end after 117.

SECOND JUDEAN REVOLT

In 132, revolt broke out again in Judea, once more prompted by Roman action. In 130, Hadrian decided to rebuild Jerusalem as a Roman colony. The name “Jerusalem” would be replaced by “Aelia Capitolina” (Cassius Dio 69.12.1–2). It is uncertain whether prohibition of circumcision by the emperor, attested around this time, was also a cause. With coinage inscribed “For the Freedom of Jerusalem,” the Jews rebelled under the leadership of Simon ben Kosiba. That some of the coinage ben Kosiba had minted records the name “Eleazar the priest” may suggest that he had appointed a new “high priest,” although the evidence is too scant for a definitive answer. Ben Kosiba became known in some later rabbinic traditions as “bar Kochba,” “son of a star,” based on a messianic interpretation of Numbers 24.17. His letters, preserved in a cache discovered in the Judean desert, reveal his religious fidelity; one Aramaic papyrus describes preparations for the celebration of the holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles, Booths).

Ben Kosiba’s military strategy, according to Cassius Dio (69.12.3), was to use underground hiding complexes; some of these have recently been excavated. Although ben Kosiba, like his predecessors in 66–70, minted coinage featuring Jerusalem, it is not clear if he ever captured the city.

The revolt was eventually suppressed by Julius Severus. Cassius Dio reports that

by intercepting small groups … and by depriving them of food and shutting them up he was able, rather slowly, to be sure, but with comparatively little danger, to crush, exhaust and exterminate them. Very few Jews in fact survived. Fifty of their most important outposts and 985 better known villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 were killed in the various engagements or battles. As for the numbers who perished from starvation, disease or fire, that was impossible to establish. (69.13.2–3)

Hadrian renamed Judea “Syria Palaestina” and took the unusual step of banishing Jews from what had once been the city of Jerusalem. Rabbinic sources suggest that some refugees escaped north to Galilee, which for the rabbis became the new center of Jewish life in the homeland.

JUDAISM AND JEWISHNESS

Shaye J. D. Cohen

Greek-speaking Jews in antiquity regularly referred to themselves as
Ioudaioi
. As an ethnogeographical term, best translated “Judeans,” it designates the members of the ethnic group inhabiting the district of Judea, or their descendants wherever they may be. It translates the Hebrew term
yehudim
, which appears in the Hebrew Bible in books of the exilic period (2 Kings, Jeremiah, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther). In the course of the last centuries BCE and the first century CE the ethnogeographical meaning of
Ioudaioi
receded, and a new religious meaning came to take its place. As a religious term, best translated “Jews,” it designates people of whatever ethnic or geographical origins who worship the God whose temple is (or, after 70 CE, had been) in Jerusalem. Modern translations, including the New Testament translation used in this volume, usually take
Ioudaioi
as a religious term (“Jews”) rather than as an ethnogeographical term (“Judeans”), although this translation is not always certain or correct. See “Ioudaios,” p.
524
. In contrast, Hebrew and Aramaic speaking Jews in the last centuries BCE did not usually call themselves
yehudim
(for example, that term appears in the Qumran scrolls very rarely and in rabbinic literature only seldom, and there almost always in the mouths of Gentiles). The term
yahadut
, Judaism, does not appear until the Middle Ages.

In addition to adopting the term
Ioudaioi
, Greek-speaking Jews also used the word
Ioudaïsmos
, which is broader than our English word “Judaism.” Greek
Ioudaïsmos
designates all the ways and manners, beliefs and mores, that make the
Ioudaioi
distinctive. In the conflict between the Hasmoneans and the Seleucid Greeks, the Jews had to consider exactly which beliefs and practices were essential to Jewish identity. Out of that clash came the word
Ioudaïsmos
, which appears for the first time in 2 Maccabees (written by a diaspora Jew in Greek ca. 100 BCE, referring to the events of the 160s BCE). Indeed, the main theme, explicit or not, of all of Graeco-Jewish literature is
Ioudaïsmos
, the distinctiveness of the Jews within their social and cultural environment.

We can begin to trace the idea of Judaism to Josephus’s
Against Apion
, completed around 100 CE. This short work, a kind of supplement to his
Jewish Antiquities
, is a defense of Judaism and Jewish history—Josephus himself calls it an
apologia
(2.147). In the first three-quarters of the book, Josephus proves the falsehood of various slanders spread by Graeco-Egyptian writers against the Jews of Alexandria. The last quarter of the book is a panegyric on the constitution established by Moses, emphasizing its beauty, harmony, and perfection (2.145–296). This panegyric is the only work of Jewish antiquity that aims to give a précis of Judaism and Jewishness.

In this text Judaism first and foremost is a system of
laws
. The laws cover all aspects of life (2.173) and have endured unchanged since they were given by Moses (2.156); all Jews everywhere know and observe the laws (2.175–178); the laws inculcate the virtues of justice, temperance, endurance, and concord (2.170); the point of the laws is the worship of God (2.164–67, 188–90); in fact the political system established by Moses might rightly be called a
theocracy
(2.165; a word that Josephus may have coined). Second, Judaism is a
philosophy
teaching that God knows all, governs all, and has created all; God is uncreated and immutable; God cannot be represented in any material form; God is the beginning, middle, and end of all things (2.190–92). Third, at the heart of Jewish worship is the
temple
: “one temple for the one God” (2.193). Fourth, the laws teach kindness to foreigners so that “all who desire to come and live under the same laws with us” are to receive a gracious welcome, because affinity is established “not only by birth but also by choice in the manner of life” (2.210). In other words, the laws permit what we would call
conversion to Judaism
.

For all of its rhetorical and apologetic exaggerations, the portrait of Judaism in this text is remarkably consistent with the portraits that emerge from other Graeco-Jewish texts (e.g.,
Ep. Arist
.; 2 Macc; 4 Macc; Philo,
Hypoth
.) and from references to Jews and Judaism in the writings of Greek and Latin authors. Let us look at these four points: laws, philosophy, temple, and conversion.

The observance of three laws in particular characterized the Jews of antiquity: circumcision, abstention from work on the Sabbath, and abstention from eating pork. Anyone in antiquity who knew anything about the Jews knew that Jewish men are circumcised. The Jews were not the only people in the ancient world who practiced male circumcision, but beginning in the second century BCE, circumcision became particularly associated with them, probably because the Jews themselves began to see circumcision as a sign of difference vis-à-vis the Greeks. No Jewish community in antiquity admitted uncircumcised males to membership.

Anyone who knew anything about the Jews knew that the Jews do not do any work every seventh day. Ancient cultures had holidays and festivals, good-luck days and bad-luck days, but no one else had a regularly recurring holy day like the Jewish Sabbath. Outsiders were contemptuous that the Jews devoted one-seventh of their lives to idleness. If a general wanted to attack Jerusalem, for instance, all he had to do was to attack on the seventh day, when the foolish Jews would not fight—or at least so ran a historiographical commonplace.

Anyone who knew anything about the Jews knew that the Jews do not eat pork. Every people and society had (and has) its own food taboos, but the Jewish abstention from pork struck outsiders as particularly odd. The essayist Plutarch (
Quaest. conv
. 4.5) records a conversation of scholars debating why the Jews abstain from pork: Is it because they venerate the pig or detest it? Plutarch leaves the matter open. (But see Lev 11.7–8 and Deut 14.3–8 for dietary laws.)

Some outsiders knew that the Jews believed that their distinctive laws derive from a sacred book attributed to Moses. Josephus is not the only Jewish writer to emphasize the regular study of the laws; the Dead Sea community emphasized continuous regular study of sacred texts, and some other sources suggest weekly study of the Torah in synagogue on the Sabbath. Prayer to God was also a regular part of these services. (See “The Synagogue,” p.
519
.)