The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  the ungodly said: Our life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man there is no remedy; neither was there any man known to return from the grave. . . . For the breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart; which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, as a mist dispersed by the beams of the sun. . . . Come on, let us enjoy the good things that are present ... let no flower of the spring pass us by; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered; let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place.39

  These epicureans reason falsely, says the author; they hitch their wagon to a falling star, since pleasure is a vain and transitory thing.

  For the hope of the ungodly man is as chaff swept away by the wind, and as thin hoar-frost scattered by the tempest; it passeth as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day. But the righteous shall live forever, and the care of them is with the Most High. Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom, and a diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord.40

  The reign of evil will be brought to an end, according to the apocalyptic books, either by the direct intervention of God himself or the earthly coming of his son or representative, the Messiah or Anointed One.II Had not the prophet Isaiah, a century back foretold him?

  For unto us a child is born, a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called . . . the mighty God, the Prince of Peace.41

  Many Jews agreed with Isaiah (XI, 1) in describing the Messiah as an earthly king who would be born of the royal house of David; others, like the authors of Enoch and Daniel, called him the Son of Man, and pictured him as coming down from heaven. The philosopher of Proverbs and the poet of the Wisdom of Solomon,42 perhaps influenced by Plato’s Ideas or the Stoic anima mundi, saw him as incarnate Wisdom, the first-begotten of God, the Word or Reason (logos) that would soon play so great a role in Philo’s philosophy. Nearly all the apocalyptic authors thought that the Messiah would triumph speedily; but Isaiah in a remarkable passage had conceived him as

  despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows ... he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities . . . and with his stripes we are healed. The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all. . . . He was taken from prison and from judgment, and was cut off out of the land of the living. . . . He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.43

  All, however, agreed that in the end the Messiah would subdue the heathen, free Israel,44 make Jerusalem his capital, and win all men to accept Yahveh and the Mosaic Law.45 Thereafter a “Good Time” would come of happiness for the whole world: all the earth would be fertile, every seed would bear a thousandfold, wine would be plentiful, poverty would disappear, all men would be healthy and virtuous, and justice, good fellowship, and peace would reign over the earth.46 Some seers thought that this joyful age would be interrupted, that the powers of darkness and evil would make a last assault upon the happy kingdom, and that the world would be consumed in chaos and conflagration. In the final “Day of God” the dead would rise and be judged by the “Ancient of Days” (Yahveh), or by the “Son of Man,” to whom absolute and everlasting dominion would then be given over a renovated world, the Kingdom of God. The wicked would be cast down headlong and speechless “into Hell,”47 but the good would be received into unending blessedness.

  Essentially the movement of thought in Judea was parallel with that in the pagan theology of the time: a people that had once thought of the future in terms of its national destiny lost its trust in the state and thought of salvation in spiritual and individual terms. The mystery religions had brought this hope to many millions in Greece, the Hellenic East, and Italy; but nowhere was the hope so earnest, or its need so great, as in Judea. The poor or bereaved, the oppressed or scorned of the earth, looked for some divine redeemer of their subjection and their suffering. Soon, said the apocalypses, a savior would come, and in his triumph all just men would be lifted up, even out of the grave, into a paradise of eternal bliss. Old saints like Simeon, mystic women like Anna daughter of Phanuel, passed their lives about the Temple, fasting, waiting, praying that they might look upon the Redeemer before they died. A great expectation filled the hearts of men.

  VI. THE REBELLION

  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 wel
l-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.

  VII. THE DISPERSION

  The flight or enslavement of a million Jews so accelerated their spread through the Mediterranean that their scholars came to date the Diaspora from the destruction of Herod’s Temple. We have seen that this Dispersion had begun six centuries before in the Babylonian Captivity, and had been renewed in the settling of Alexandria. Since fertility was commanded and infanticide sternly forbidden by Jewish piety and law, the expansion of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes; Hebrews still played a very minor role in the commerce of the world. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, Strabo, with anti-Semitic exaggeration, reported that “it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by it.”61 Philo, twenty years before the Dispersion, described “the continents . . . full of Jewish settlements, and likewise the . . . islands, and nearly all Babylonia.”62 By A.D. 70 there were thousands of Jews in Seleucia on the Tigris, and in other Parthian cities; they were numerous in Arabia, and crossed thence into Ethiopia; they abounded in Syria and Phoenicia; they had large colonies in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna; they were only less numerous in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, Thessalonica. In the west there were Jewish communities in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, even in Horace’s native Venusia. All in all we may reckon 7,000,000 Jews in the Empire—some seven per cent of the population, twice their proportion in the United States of America today.63

  Their number, dress, diet, circumcision, poverty, ambition, prosperity, exclusiveness, intelligence, aversion to images, and observation of an inconvenient Sabbath aroused an anti-Semitism that ranged from jokes in the theater and slurs in Juvenal and Tacitus to murders in the street and wholesale pogroms. Apion of Alexandria made himself the chief mouthpiece of these attacks, and Josephus answered him in an incisive pamphlet.III

  After the fall of Jerusalem Josephus sailed to Rome with Titus, and accompanied the conqueror of his people in a triumphal procession that exhibited captive Jews and Jewish spoils. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship, a pension, an apartment in his palace, and profitable lands in Judea.65 In return Josephus took Vespasian’s family name Flavius, and wrote The Wars of the Jews (ca. 75) to defend the actions of Titus in Palestine, to exonerate his own defection, and to discourage further revolt by showing forth the might of Rome. In his later years (ca. 93), feeling more keenly his isolation, he wrote The Antiquities of the Jews to regain the good will of his people by giving gentiles a more favorable view of Jewish achievements, customs, and character. His narratives are clear and forceful, and his account of Herod the Great is as engaging as Plutarch, but his bias and his aims impair his objectivity. The Antiquities required many years and exhausted the author’s strength; the last four of the twenty books were written by his secretaries from his notes.66 Josephus was still but fifty-six when the work appeared, but he was already worn out by a life of adventure, controversy, and moral solitude.

  With their characteristic resilience the Jews gradually rebuilt their economic and cultural life in Palestine. Amid the siege of Jerusalem an aged pupil of Hillel, Johanan ben Zakkai, fearful lest the carnage should destroy all teachers and transmitters of the oral tradition, escaped from the city, and set up an academy in a vineyard at Yabne, or Jamnia, near the Mediterranean coast. When Jerusalem fell Johanan organized a new Sanhedrin at Jamnia, composed not of priests, politicians, and rich men, but of Pharisees and rabbis—i.e., teachers of the Law. This Bet
Din or Council had no political power, but most Palestinian Jews recognized its authority in all matters of religion and morals. The patriarch whom the Council chose as its head appointed the administrative officers of the Jewish community, and had the power to excommunicate recalcitrant Jews. The stern discipline of the Patriarch Gamaliel II (ca. 100) welded into unity first the Council, then the Jews of Jamnia, then the Jews of Palestine. Under his leadership the contradictory interpretations of the Law transmitted by Hillel and Shammai were reviewed and voted on; those of Hillel were for the most part approved, and were made binding upon all Jews.

  Since the Law was now the indispensable cement of scattered and stateless Jewry, the teaching of the Law became the chief occupation of the synagogue throughout the Diaspora; the synagogue replaced the temple, prayer replaced sacrifice, the rabbi replaced the priest. Tannaim—expositors—interpreted one or another of the orally transmitted laws (Halacha) of the Jews, usually supported it with scriptural quotation, sometimes added to it, and illustrated it with stories, homilies, or other material (Haggada). The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph. At the age of forty (ca. A.D. 80) he joined his five-year-old son at school, and learned to read. Soon he could recite the whole Pentateuch by heart. After thirteen years of study he opened his own school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, his courage and humor, even his lusty dogmatism, brought him many students. When, in 95, word came that Domitian was planning new measures against the Jews, Akiba was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to make a personal appeal to the Emperor. While they were in Rome Domitian died. Nerva heard their plea favorably, and ended the fiscus Iudaicus—the tax laid upon Jews for rebuilding Rome. On his return to Jamnia Akiba set himself the lifelong task of codifying the Halacha; his pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (ca. 200) completed the undertaking. Even in this classified form the Halacha remained part of the oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation by scholars and professional memorizers—living textbooks of the Law. Akiba’s methods were as absurd as his conclusions were sound; he derived liberal principles from a weird exegesis in which every letter of the Torah, or written law, was held to have a mysterious meaning; perhaps he had observed that men will accept the rational only in the form of the mystical. From Akiba came that painstaking organization and exposition of theology and ethics which passed down through the Talmud to Maimonides, and ultimately to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers.