by Baker, Simon
A ROMAN PROVINCE
Some 120 years before the revolt of the Jews against Rome, Judaea was a small monarchical state ruled by a dynasty of high priests, populated mainly by Jews and centred on the holy city of Jerusalem. Previously, Judaea had been part of the Persian empire, and then part of the Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies and, later, Seleucids. The latter took their name from one of Alexander the Great’s Greek generals, Seleucus, who founded the new monarchy, and they ruled from the capital city of Antioch in Syria. With time the Seleucids came to encompass smaller kingdoms further south, such as Judaea. Eventually, however, the authority of the Seleucids, like that of the Persians, diminished, and Judaea next fell under Rome’s sphere of influence. Between 66 and 63 BC the general Pompey extended Roman control in the east by installing, in the place of Alexander the Great’s successors, client-kings loyal to Rome. The expansion brought Rome great opportunities for exploitation. She inherited both extraordinary wealth and, through the appropriation of Greek works of art, the cultural sophistication of the old Hellenistic world. But there was an even greater prize to be won. The Roman settlement of the east created a critical buffer zone between the Roman empire and her one great rival empire lying in modern-day Iran/Iraq: Parthia.
With the passing of a decree in Rome, Pompey made Syria a Roman province to be ruled directly from the capital, but in Judaea, instead of direct rule, he installed a client-ruler loyal to Rome. The most famous of these kings was Herod the Great. Under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, however, the system of provincial administration across the empire changed. Some provinces were still governed as they had been during the republic: consuls or praetors, after they had served a year in office in Italy, were given the command of a province for between one and three years. The great change, however, was that Augustus took the provinces that bordered the non-Roman world into his own care. These ‘imperial provinces’ each received a garrison of Roman legions and each was governed by a deputy especially appointed by the emperor. Syria thus became an imperial province, and by AD 6, after the expulsion of the client-ruler Archelaus, so did Judaea. Thus it remained, with one reversal of policy, until the troubles of AD 66.
Because Judaea was a smaller province, its administration was the responsibility not of a legate, who was usually a senior senator, but of a procurator. The procurator of Judaea came from the more junior order of knights, and both he and his staff were based in the Graeco-Roman city of Caesarea on the coast. Here, surrounded more by Gentiles than Jews, he lived in one of the luxurious palaces built by Herod the Great. Again in contrast to the larger province of Syria, there was no Roman legion in Judaea; there were just 3000 auxiliary troops made up of five infantry units and one cavalry unit, each five hundred strong and drawn mostly from the local population. But for successful administration of Judaea the Romans relied on the locals in other ways too.
Politically, Rome did not govern Judaea on a day-to-day basis. Some towns and villages were run as they traditionally had been, by a small group of elders; others, in the Greek style, elected councils and magistrates. Rome depended on them not only for the smooth management of the province, but also, more importantly, for the execution of the key contract between province and emperor. In return for relative peace, protection and the freedoms associated with being part of the great commonwealth of Rome, the people of Judaea, as in all provinces, collected and paid taxes. This was the cornerstone of the pax Romana, the fundamental basis of running an empire. There was a tax on the produce of the land, and also a poll tax. The procurator of Judaea, as both governor and financial officer, was charged with collecting both. However, because the bureaucracy of the Roman empire was so small in proportion to the vast territory it controlled, the Roman procurators needed help in tax-gathering. In Judaea, as in many parts of the empire, they turned to the local élite.
The more lucrative direct taxes were collected by the Jewish high priests and a council of rich Jerusalemite Jews; the indirect taxes were collected by wealthy local businessmen.2 In practice, only the wealthy could be tax-gatherers. The right to collect taxes was sold at auction, and the successful bidder was required to pay to the procurator a significant sum in advance, with the expectation that he would earn more money through the conscientious execution of his task. This same wealthy élite provided the magistrates in many towns and local councils. Consequently, with a small bureaucratic staff, a small garrison, and dependence on the local élites for the collection of taxes, successful rule in Judaea depended not on Roman force or power, but on the passive compliance of the provincials. Roman administration was, in reality, a delicate balancing act. However, it was an act that time and again the Romans got wrong.
One flashpoint was citizenship. Being a Roman citizen brought with it certain protections from magistrates. St Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia in southeast Turkey, was famously about to be flogged in public after his arrival in Jerusalem in AD 58 stirred up a riot. At the last minute, he was saved from punishment for the simple reason that he was a Roman citizen and as such had the right to a trial in Rome. Jesus provoked a similar reaction in Jerusalem, but because he was not a Roman citizen, he was handed over for crucifixion, even though he had done no wrong. The reality of the pax Romana was that it was often easier for Roman officials to put the preservation of order before justice and the protection of the weak against the strong. The tie of citizenship to the Roman commonwealth was then a highly desired prize from which many in Judaea were excluded.3 Yet Roman administration was far from sensitive to this fact.
When, in AD 63, Jews gathered in Caesarea to protest en masse over systematic discrimination against them, they clashed with the local Greek citizens and a riot broke out. The Roman procurator, Marcus Antonius Felix, responded with extreme repression and sent in the army. To make matters worse, Felix was a Greek as were many of the locally recruited soldiers. As a result, it was the Jews who were violently attacked. Many of them were killed and their property plundered. The fracas, which lasted for days, caused such a controversy that it was given a court hearing before the emperor Nero in Rome. Crucially, Nero, a philhellene, found in favour of the Greeks, and the procurator was deemed not guilty. The Jews were outraged by the verdict.4
An even greater source of tension was religion. To the Jews there was only one lord over Judaea, and that was God – Yahweh. Nonetheless, the Jews accommodated the divine Roman emperor by agreeing to sacrifice twice a day to both him and the Roman people.5 In the Gospels Jesus himself acknowledged that Caesar and God could coexist. But once again the Romans crossed the line of what the Jews could tolerate. In AD 26 the Roman prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, ordered military standards to be displayed in Jerusalem, to which the Roman soldiers would offer sacrifices. Such a display ran contrary to the Jewish Torah, the ancient book of laws central to Judaism, which decreed that there could be no graven images of a pagan deity in the Holy City. Only after five days of protest did Pilate give in and agree to take the standards down. In his desire to promote emperor worship in Judaea, however, the next emperor was determined to go much further.
In AD 38 Caligula ordered Publius Petronius, the legate of Syria, to march on Jerusalem and erect cult statues of himself not just in the city; the emperor wanted one to be put in the Temple enclosure itself. In the face of protest, came the order from Rome, objectors were to be executed and the rest enslaved. In Jerusalem, Galilee and Tiberias diehard protesters gathered in their thousands to confront the soldiers and the carts carrying the imperial marbles. Week after week they told the commander that the whole Jewish race would have to be killed before a statue of the emperor would be allowed to stand in Jerusalem. Petronius was faced with a dilemma: either to put the obstructing Jews to death, or to put his own life on the line by disobeying Caligula’s orders. He chose the latter and returned to Antioch, expecting an early demise. Fortunately for Petronius, by the time the imperial order for his execution arrived from Rome Caligula had already b
een murdered, and the more conciliatory Claudius proclaimed emperor in his place. For the time being, the fire was subdued, but it was far from extinguished.
Similarly, the economic reality of Roman occupation continued to smoulder. Perhaps the greatest source of tension between Romans and Jews was money. In the republic, Roman administration of a province was synonymous with the extortion, fleecing and exploitation of provincials. ‘Words cannot describe how bitterly we are hated among foreign nations owing to the wanton and outrageous conduct of the men whom we have sent to govern,’ wrote the senator Cicero in 66 BC.6 Laws passed by Julius Caesar and Augustus to curb the excesses of Roman governors and grasping soldiers had tackled the problem of corruption, although many cases now went unreported. In Judaea, according to the Gospels, a consensus was reached and advocated by Jesus. When he told the Pharisees in Jerusalem to ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,’ Jesus was acknowledging the acceptable coexistence of taxes paid to Rome and taxes paid to the Jewish Temple. Similarly, when Roman soldiers approached John the Baptist for guidance, his reply did not challenge their presence in Judaea, but recognized it on the following terms: ‘Do not extort money and do not accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.’7 Nonetheless, his answer assumes that the occupying forces, more often than not, did find ways to extort.
In fact, for most ordinary Jews throughout the province, the burden of Roman taxes and other financial exactions chafed from the start. As the years of foreign rule passed, the notion promoted by Jesus of an acceptable Roman administration in Judaea only became harder to stomach. For many peasants, good agricultural land was in short supply. Its possession, or lack of it, sharply divided regional groups in Palestine and Judaea then as today. While the coastal plain had rich soil and rivers to water it, the upland massif of Judaea was rocky and dry, its soil thin. As a result, it was hard enough to make a living, find the land rent, feed a family and pay one’s dues to the Temple and tithes to the priests without having to dig even deeper for Caesar when the tax collectors came calling.8
But the money-gatherers were unwelcome for another reason. The men who toured the villages of Judaea and relieved the poor of their money were not even Romans. Jewish peasants paid up to a Jewish élite thriving under Roman patronage and tax-collecting contracts. Consequently, the issue of taxes cut a sharp divide in Jewish society. Pax Romana enriched some and slowly killed others.
The seeds of these political and economic tensions were sown when Rome took control of Judaea in 63 BC. From that time on they only grew and grew. By AD 66 Judaea was a time bomb. To set it off, all that was needed was someone to press the button. In May of that year Gessius Florus, the Roman procurator, duly obliged.
OUTBREAK
In its last years, the rapacious regime of the emperor Nero needed money, and lots of it. The burden of heavier taxes and forced levies hit the provinces hard. Gaul and Britain suffered; in Africa six landlords who owned half the land of the province were put to death; now Judaea too was about to feel the pinch.9 One way or another Judaea was going to help make up the shortfall between revenue and Nero’s profligate expenditure. Florus announced that the emperor required the massive sum of 400,000 sesterces. He was even prepared to take it from the funds of the Temple treasury, and declared that units of Roman soldiers were going to come to Jerusalem to get it. Since those funds were made up of the sacred dues paid by ordinary Jews for sacrifices to God, Florus’s threat amounted to stealing of the most outrageous kind. The Jews in the Holy City were furious.
Gessius Florus was the archetypal greedy Roman governor. He delighted in impoverishing the Jews, boasted about his crimes, and lost no opportunity of turning a profit through extortion and robbery. Indeed, he saw it as a sport.10 At least this was the view of Joseph ben Mattathias who witnessed the events. Josephus (his Roman name) was a twenty-nine-year-old priest and scholar, scion of an aristocratic Jewish family that could trace its origins in part to an influential dynasty of priests, known as the Hasmoneans, who had ruled Judaea when the Romans first arrived. He had studied the teachings of the three most prominent Jewish sects, and when he could not decide which one to join, he later claimed to have spent three years living with an ascetic hermit meditating in the desert. After some years carrying out his priestly duties in Jerusalem, he then travelled on a diplomatic mission to Rome, where he remained for two years. By May AD 66, perhaps laden with Roman sympathies, he had returned to Jerusalem, only to find it in the crisis provoked by Florus. It was a crisis that would engulf him and change his life for ever. From this point on he became the eyewitness historian of the revolt of the Jews against Rome.
True to his word, Florus in Caesarea ordered his soldiers to take seventeen talents (435 kilograms or nearly 1000 pounds) of silver from the Temple treasury. From this one action all the tensions between the Romans and Jews erupted. Stealing from the very place where King David had founded the Holy City, where King Solomon had built the first Temple, and where the Jews returning from captivity in Babylon had built the second Temple was the greatest violation of their race and history. The Temple was the ultimate symbol of Jewish identity. But Florus couldn’t have cared less. In a spirit of reasserting Roman power, he gladly gave the order for the Gentile soldiers to force their way into the most holy of places, upturn the sacred objects, push aside the swarms of priests and protesters who stood in the way, and seize the money.
Stirred up by Jewish nationalists and radicals, there was uproar throughout Jerusalem. When news reached Caesarea that the city was up in arms, Florus dashed off to Jerusalem himself with both an infantry and a cavalry unit to restore order and make sure that he received the money. As he entered the city, some jokers went around mimicking beggars and acting as though they were collecting for the impoverished Roman procurator. Now it was Florus’s turn to be angry. He set up a dais in a public space and began an open-air tribunal to bring to justice those who had insulted him. Local leaders formed a line between the Roman leadership and the crowds of angry protesters. Among the moderate priests were Josephus and the high priest Hanan. Apologizing to Florus on behalf of the people of Jerusalem, they desperately tried to calm the crowd and restore order. However, their pleas made no impact. The reality was that the pro-Roman priestly élite was hopelessly exposed. On the one hand, to have tried to bring the culprits before Florus would have resulted in further riots; yet on the other hand, to have sided with the nationalists risked bringing Roman disfavour and an end to their privileges. So at the open-air meeting they compromised and simply begged Florus to forgive the few agitators and extremists for the sake of the many innocent and loyal subjects of Rome. His response, however, only fanned the flames: he sent in the cavalry.
The Roman suppression of protesters in the Upper Market quickly escalated into something much worse. Houses were plundered, over 3000 innocent people were killed, and the instigators of the riot were crucified as a lesson to others. When the Jews plucked up the courage to protest – this time at the massacre – a second bloodbath took place. Once again, the moderates in the Jewish élite were caught in the middle, so they made the traditional signs of supplication: they threw themselves on the ground, covered their heads with dust, tore their clothes and begged the insurgents to stop. They were, they said, only giving the Romans the excuse to plunder further. Once again, the procurator resorted to force. Two more cohorts were drafted in from Caesarea and the soldiers clubbed the protesters to death. When the cavalry pursued those trying to escape, they chased them to the gates of the Antonia Fortress. Here, in the desperate congestion, many were crushed to death and others were beaten to an unrecognizable pulp.11 With each day full of disasters, the authority of the local leaders and priests collapsed, and popular opinion swung dramatically in favour of the nationalists and armed resistance.
Spoiling for a fight, the nationalists organized retaliation. They barricaded the streets, isolated and hemmed in pockets of outnumbered Roman soldiers
, and then, using spears, slingshots and loose bricks and tiles, they attacked, driving Florus and most of his Roman cohorts out of the city. While Florus limped back to Caesarea, the solitary Roman cohort left behind was soon slaughtered. Action was needed, but none of the Roman measures taken had any effect. King Agrippa, the clientruler of territories partly in Galilee and partly to the north and east of the Sea of Galilee, was called upon. Perhaps he would have more influence over the outraged Jews in Jerusalem. Supervision of the management of the Temple, including the appointment of the High Priest, had been delegated to him by the emperor for over a decade. But when Agrippa entered the Holy City and addressed the hostile crowds, he too was stoned and driven out.12
News of the successful resistance in Jerusalem spread across the entire province. In fortress after fortress across Judaea, Roman guards were murdered and Jewish rebels took control. To restore order, the emperor of Rome and his senatorial advisers turned to Gaius Cestius Gallus, the newly appointed legate of Syria. Perhaps the full might of a Roman legion and numerous other troops would succeed where the meagre auxiliary forces of Judaea had failed. In mid-October AD 66, with 30,000 troops at his side, Gallus marched from Antioch to Jerusalem with the aim of quashing these rebels in a quick, decisive confrontation. But he was the wrong man for the job. A politician more accustomed to the pleasures of provincial peace than the realities of war, Gallus not only failed to take the city, but on his retreat was caught in a desperate trap. This was to prove the moment when a rebellion in a small province of the empire was transformed into war with the superpower of Rome.
