Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea

by Seward, Desmond

  For Jews, a “good Samaritan” was an impossibility. Descended from foreign settlers who had come during the Babylonian captivity, the Samaritans had evolved a heretical form of Judaism, accepting only the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and building a rival temple on Mount Gerizim. They were disliked even more than the Galileans. “When the Jews are in trouble, they deny any connection with them, in which they are quite right,” says Josephus.5 “But if they see the Jews prospering, then they immediately say that they are Jews too.” A vicious feud existed between the two communities. Earlier in the century, the Samaritans had dragged corpses (or dead men’s bones) into the Temple at Jerusalem, so as to pollute it and prevent the celebration of the Passover, and in 52 CE they ambushed Jews who were going on pilgrimage up to the Holy City. Sometimes they kidnapped their Hebrew neighbors and sold them into slavery.6

  Josephus’s native province was the one called Judea, a land that in parts could be made extremely fertile, despite a shortage of water and some arid areas. Every scrap of decent soil was farmed; hillsides held terraces of tiny vineyards and olive groves and small patches of grain. Sheep and goats, needed for sacrificial purposes, grazed where they could. Here is Josephus’s terse account: “On the border of Samaria, the village of Anuath Borceos is the northern boundary of Judea. Measuring lengthwise, Judea’s southern region ends at a village near the Arabian frontier, which local Jews call Jar-dan. Across, it stretches from the river Jordan to Joppa. At its centre lies the city of Jerusalem, a city to which some people, not without reason, have given the name of ‘the country’s navel.’ Nor is Judea cut off from the sea, since it has a coastal area reaching as far as Ptolemais. It is divided into eleven districts, Jerusalem—the royal city—being the chief. . . . ”7

  In Pliny’s view, Jerusalem was the most splendid city of the East. Its population was regularly increased by pilgrims, the majority bringing prosperity. It stood on three hills, which was one reason why people spoke of “going up to Jerusalem.” (Even today, Jews still say they will “go up to Israel”—in modern Hebrew, aliyah—when they intend to settle there.) Amid arid country, stony and waterless, skirted by deep ravines, this was a site that made her almost inaccessible to enemies. The Upper City occupied the highest of the hills, separated from the others by a valley. Three walls of huge stone blocks surrounded the entire area, reinforced by a bastion every hundred yards. There were seven major gates, all fortified. Outside the walls were gardens and allotments, orchards and olive groves and, not very far away, beautiful woodland.

  Herod’s Palace stood on the summit of the northwestern hill at the west of the city, near the wall, marked out by three tall towers of white marble, which were named Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne. Its apartments were of dazzling luxury, with mosaic floors and jeweled furniture, most of the tables being of silver and gold; more than one of the dining rooms held couches for a hundred guests. It contained arcaded courtyards with lawns, groves and avenues of trees, ponds and canals flanked by rows of statues together with dovecotes, forming the only big gardens in Jerusalem. All this beauty would be burned and destroyed at the start of the war, a loss that Josephus acknowledged tormented him.

  There were several other royal palaces as well, not quite so spacious but furnished with no less opulence. The most important was that of the client king, Agrippa II, in the center of Jerusalem. It enjoyed particular prestige among the inhabitants because, even if his kingdom lay outside Judea, Agrippa was the son of the last Herodian ruler.

  The city’s equivalent of the Tower of London was the mighty fortress-barracks known as the Antonia Fortress, which had a massive square tower at each corner. This stood on the northeast, overlooking Bezetha, the New City that lay still further to the north. Inside, with courtyards, baths, and squares, “it was just like a town,” according to Josephus.8 Permanently occupied by a Roman garrison, the Antonia was the key to Jerusalem, because it guarded the Temple.

  “The Temple was the fortress protecting the city,” says Josephus, from whose description alone we know how it appeared to contemporaries. Begun by Herod the Great in 19 BCE on the site where Solomon’s Temple had once stood, this second Temple of Jerusalem would not be completed until 64 CE. The area it covered was larger than that of the Acropolis at Athens.9 Constructed of white stone, its halls (such as the Grand Sanhedrin’s Chamber) were paneled in marble or cypress and roofed with cedar. The Royal Portico, three aisles of Corinthian columns, was longer and higher than any cathedral. “It was clothed in plates of massy gold and at sunrise shone with such a fiery splendor that anyone who tried to look at it had to turn his eyes away, as if he had been trying to look into the sun itself,” notes Josephus.10

  To prevent the polluting of this holy place, no one suffering from diseases such as leprosy or gonorrhea, wearing dusty shoes, bearing a staff, or carrying parcels was allowed into the Temple complex by the guards. Beyond the massive fortified gateways, which held double gates plated in gold and silver, were four great courtyards laid out in succession: the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of the Women, the Court of the Israelites, and the Court of the Priests, each set slightly higher than the previous one and reached by steps. The enormous Court of the Goyim (gentiles), flanked by covered porticos with columns thirty-six feet high, was the meeting place for all Jerusalem. Another favorite area was the Portico of Solomon, which was entered by the Sushan gate and supported by a double row of columns; its two galleries overlooked the tombs of the Kedron Valley. The women’s court was fenced off with timber palisades. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin forbade gentiles and women from penetrating any further than the courts that bore their names.

  In the Court of Priests stood the altar of burnt offering, a pile of un-hewn rocks thirteen feet high and nearly fifty feet square, with stone horns at all four corners and channels for the blood of the offerings. Lowing and bellowing, oxen, calves, rams, lambs, and goats were tethered next to the altar, to eight cedar pillars. Starting with two lambs at dawn and ending with two more lambs at sunset, hundreds were sacrificed each day, between three ritual pauses that were marked by readings from scripture and a ritual drinking of wine, together with chanting accompanied by a harp, a pipe, a lyre, and bronze cymbals as well as by blasts from a ram’s horn (shofar) and a silver trumpet.

  After the animals’ throats had been cut with special knives by the officiating priests, they were gutted, skinned, and dismembered before being carried to marble tables, where they were ritually burned, clouds of priceless incense (prepared according to a secret recipe) mingling with the smoke. No less than seven hundred priests were always at work here, in silence. The blood was drained away by an elaborate cleaning system, water being supplied from thirty-four cisterns, filled by the winter rain from the nearby Pool of Siloam. Near the altar stood a great laver for ablutions whose water enabled the Levites, the priests’ assistants, to cleanse everything for the next offering.

  Above the courtyards stood the Sanctuary, which resembled a gigantic, freestanding, long gallery. Its great cedarwood door, studded with gold and surmounted by a golden vine with a cluster of grapes as tall as a man, was veiled by a Babylonian tapestry of blue, scarlet, and purple whose embroidery symbolized the heavens. In the first part of the “Holy House” stood the gold seven-branched candlestick—actually a lamp stand with seven lamps burning olive oil, representing seven planets—the gold altar for the incense of thirteen spices, and the gold table for the shewbread, which consisted of twelve consecrated, unleavened loaves that were renewed on every Sabbath. Its other, innermost part, veiled by a curtain, was the qadosh haqedoshim (Holy of Holies), which had once contained the Ark of the Covenant but was now entirely empty and in darkness, never entered except by the high priest on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

  Many people liked to come to the Temple every day, so that they could face the Sanctuary when they prayed the Shema Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord . . .”) or made the eighteen prostrations for the Shemone E
sreh (the Eighteen Benedictions), as was required of every Jew. A staff of 25,000 manned the Temple, not just priests and Levites, but treasurers and janitors, musicians and cantors. At their head was the anointed high priest, living embodiment of the Law, who on Yom Kippur donned a miter encircled by a gold crown and a gold-embroidered breastplate to enter the Sanctuary to beg God’s forgiveness for the sins of his nation, the only human being allowed to enter. He also officiated on every Sabbath and every new moon, and on festivals, in less dramatic robes.

  Deeply respected, the high priest was a species of Jewish pope or caliph. He alone could summon the Sanhedrin. However, because Judea was a theocracy administered by an infidel colonial power, the high priest often faced political challenges, and it was not uncommon for him to be deposed after only a brief period by the Roman procurator. As a result, there were always several former holders of the office, each treated with honor, who were known collectively as “the high priests.” In his Vie de Jésus, Ernest Renan compares them to “a miniature college of cardinals grouped around the Temple, living for politics, not too impressed by excessive religious zeal and even a bit suspicious of it, turning very deaf ears indeed to the various demands made by holy men or would-be reformers, since they did very well out of things as they were.”11

  Four times a day, seven silver trumpets sounded three times from the Temple to proclaim the sacrifice and the ritual pauses. In the evening, the trumpets summoned men and women to prayer. On the evening before Passover they sounded six times, preceded by the haunting wail of the shofar, the ram’s horn. Intended to praise God (and not to bewilder Satan, as some non-Jewish sources have suggested, since the concept of Satan did not exist in Judaism), the blowing of the shofar was also used to announce the Sabbath and the holy days of Israel, as on the evening in September before Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish new year.

  The Temple dominated Jerusalem. When a breeze blew on a hot day, her steep, narrow streets and stairways were filled with the odor of burnt flesh and incense wafting down from the Court of Priests, a smell known in other ancient cities but not on such an all-pervading scale. Thoroughfares were blocked by herds of animals being driven up for sacrifice. During such religious holidays as Passover, the city must have been so densely packed by pilgrims as to resemble modern Mecca. What Romans and other foreigners must have found odd was the absence of the statues that filled their own streets. The Jewish religion forbade any physical likeness of their god. For every Jew, the Temple of Jerusalem was the center of the universe and the gateway to heaven. Only here might sacrifices be offered to the one true God. For Josephus, who belonged to a priestly family, the Temple was the focus of all power and influence until he was in his mid-thirties. It also appealed to the poet in him. “When strangers first saw it from a distance, it looked like a mountain covered in snow,” he recalled wistfully, “since it was so wonderfully white where it was not clad in gold.”12

  Clearly, the young Josephus was very much a man of Jerusalem and of the Temple.

  1

  A Young Nobleman

  “With a pedigree like mine, of which I give details taken from the public archives, I can well afford to ignore anyone who tries to say something derogatory about my family.”

  JOSEPHUS, VITA, 6

  JOSEPHUS WAS BORN in 37 or 38 CE, most probably at Jerusalem, during the first year of the reign of Gaius Caligula. (As the emperor of the Roman Empire, Caligula was supreme ruler of Judea, which had been acquired for Rome by Pompey during his conquest of the Near East a hundred years earlier.) “Beyond all question, my family is an aristocratic one, since it traces its descent from a very long line of priests,” he writes. “Every race has different requirements for men to prove that noble blood flows in their veins, but with us [Jews] membership of the priesthood is the evidence which is required for proof of an illustrious ancestry.”1

  He often reminds his readers that he is a priest. Yet 18,000 priests were available to offer sacrifice at the Temple, every one of whom could claim unbroken male-line descent from Aaron, the brother of Moses and the first high priest, although the majority might never be called on to officiate. There was a big gap, however, between the upper priesthood, into which he was born, and the lower—between influential magnates and obscure peasant farmers who tilled the land with their own hands.

  From the time of his great-great-great-grandfather Simon the Stammerer, Josephus’s male forebears had belonged to the first of the twenty-four courses or lines of priestly descent from Aaron that are listed in the book of Deuteronomy. Records of their descent, originally oral but by now written down, were kept at a kind of genealogical office at Jerusalem. The males in this line married only the daughters of other priests. The first course (mishmeret) was that of Jehoiarib, “most eminent of their clans.” Although by ancient convention Judea’s great nobles were the heads of a few priestly families who had the symbolical right of providing wood for the Temple’s burnt offerings, in Josephus’s time they needed to be rich in addition. Yet as religious leaders they were losing ground to the new class of scribes, by now the real defenders of the Law, whose emphasis on spirituality and study of the scriptures had begun to play no less important a part in Jewish life than the hallowed ritual at the Temple.

  Josephus had another claim to be regarded as a patrician. “I am of royal blood on the female side,” he informs us.2 He was descended from the Maccabee kings through his great-great-great-grandmother, the Stammerer having married a sister of Jonathan, who had been the first Maccabee high priest. The later Maccabees were cruel and impious and had outraged the more devout Jews. Even so, Josephus took an obvious pride in his illustrious ancestry.

  Although the Torah stipulated that priests should not be landowners, his family had a large estate outside Jerusalem. From childhood he was accustomed to luxury, as a member of Judea’s small land-owning class, who enjoyed “having their hands kissed in the market place,” who went “clad in purple and lawn,” whose women dressed in silk. They lived in big mansions at Jerusalem, built with blocks of fine stone, decorated with frescoes and mosaics—one excavated during the 1970s covered 600 square meters—and they were fond of throwing spectacular parties. They never resided in the countryside, which they avoided.3 Besides employing stewards to administer their estates, they hired bands of armed servants to enforce their wishes and were brutal in dealing with inferiors.

  The Judean aristocracy had emerged only during the past century, under the Herods or still more recently. In a country where the harvest was dependent on an uncertain rainfall, their wealth had been acquired by lending money to peasants in bad years and seizing their holdings when they defaulted. In addition, just as the prophet Amos had written long ago, they manipulated the price of wheat so that “we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes” (Amos, viii, 6). Understandably, they were unloved by the tenants they gained in this way and hated by even the peacefully minded among the poor because of their greed, corruption, and ostentation. Throughout Judea there was deep hostility between the classes.

  Even if the Romans’ land tax and poll tax were no greater than anywhere else in the empire outside Italy, the added burden of tithes and the Temple tax reduced most Judeans to a state of misery. When drought, locusts, or cattle disease brought plague and famine, tax gatherers and landowners showed no mercy, so that after every bad harvest many people despaired. Some joined the ubiquitous bandit gangs who lived in caves; some relied on their kindred for food and shelter. Others migrated to the cities and begged for assistance from the charities run by devout Jews. In Greek cities, especially those on the coast, there was an increasingly savage animosity toward Jewish beggars from the countryside, which would soon find expression in pogroms.

  Josephus informs us that his father, Mattathias, was highly thought of in Jerusalem because of his “upright character,” although his popularity may have been restricted to members of his own class. Almost certainly a Pharisee, Mattathias was deeply religious and
a close friend of a particularly distinguished high priest, Joshua ben Gamala, which shows that he was accustomed to moving in the capital’s most influential circles. In later years Joshua would become an ally of Josephus who—as will be seen—referred to him with obvious admiration.

  As high priest, Joshua dominated the Sanhedrin during his short term. A species of senate, the Sanhedrin was an assembly of seventy that was made up of the “princes of the priests” (the heads of the twenty-four courses), together with the most reputable scribes and other leading men. Its function was to supervise religious practice and maintain standards, so that it controlled every aspect of day-to-day life—it even had its own police force. The most powerful institution in Judea, the Sanhedrin was answerable only to the procurator, with whom it always did its best to cooperate, often in the face of gross provocation. Although Josephus does not say so, it is possible that his father was a member of this august body.

  Joshua ben Gamala was genuinely benevolent. He set up a system for providing education in every district and town of Judea, under legislation that made it obligatory for parents to send their children to school at the age of five and proscribed punishments for lazy or truant pupils. He also encouraged the foundation of schools that made secondary education available to boys of outstanding intelligence.4