History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  We have descriptions of Herod’s Temple in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews and his Jewish Wars,68 and in the Talmudic tractates Middot, Tamid and Yoma. These are supplemented by recent archaeology. To achieve the grandiose effects he desired, Herod doubled the area of the Temple Mount by building huge supporting walls and filling in the gaps with rubble. Around the vast forecourt thus created he erected porticos, and linked it all to the upper city by bridges. The sanctuary, at one end of the platform, was much higher and wider than Solomon’s (100 as opposed to 60 cubits), but since Herod was not of a priestly family and could not therefore enter even the inner court, he spent little on the interior, and the Holy of Holies, though lined in gold, was bare. Instead, cash was spent profusely on the exterior, gates, fittings and decorations being covered in gold and silver plate. Josephus says the stone was ‘exceptionally white’, and the glitter of the stone and the gleam of the gold—reflected many miles away in the bright sun—was what made the Temple so striking to travellers seeing it from afar for the first time.

  The prodigious platform, 35 acres in area and a mile in circumference, was more than twice the height as seen today from the bottom of the valley, for the lower courses of the great stone blocks are covered in the rubbish of centuries. Josephus says that some of these blocks were ‘45 cubits in length, 10 in height and 6 in breadth’, finished by imported craftsmen to an unusually high standard. The top 40 feet of the platform covered vaulted corridors and above them, on the platform itself, were the cloisters, with hundreds of Corinthian pillars 27 feet high and so thick, says Josephus, that three men with arms extended could hardly encompass them. So high was the edifice, he says, that if you looked down from the cloisters you felt giddy.

  Pilgrims from all over Palestine and the diaspora, converging on the city in hundreds of thousands for the great feasts, ascended the platform from the city by a vast staircase and the main bridge. The outer courtyard, within the walls, was open to everyone, and in its gates and cloisters money-changers swopped coins from all over the world for the ‘Holy Shekels’ used to pay Temple fees—it was these who attracted Jesus’ fury—and doves were sold for sacrifices. Within this, a wall and gate with stone-carved warnings in Greek and Latin, forbidding non-Jews to proceed any further on pain of death, enclosed the Court of the Women, with special corners for Nazarites and lepers, and within this was the Court of the Israelites for male Jews. Each of the inner courts was raised up, and entered by steps, and a higher flight of steps led up to the sacrificial area or Court of the Priests, and the sanctuary within it.

  Many thousands of priests, Levites, scribes and pious Jews worked in and around the Temple area. The priests were responsible for the rituals and ceremonies, the Levites were the choristers, musicians, cleaners and engineers. They were divided into twenty-four watches or shifts, and during the frantic activity of the big feasts were reinforced by men of priestly or Levitical birth from all over Palestine and the diaspora. The primary priestly duty was the care of the sanctuary. The Jews had taken from the Egyptians the notion of the perpetual altar-fire, and this meant keeping alight and constantly filling the many sanctuary lamps. Also from Egypt came the custom of regular incensing of the darkest and most secret parts. The Temple consumed 600 pounds of costly incense a year, made from a secret recipe by the priestly Avtina family, whose womenfolk were banned from using scent to avoid accusations of corruption. It was in fact made from ground-up sea-shells, Sodom salt, a special cyclamen, myrrh (camphor gum resin), frankincense (terebinth gum resin), cinnamon, cassiam, spikenard, saffron, gum balm and a mysterious substance called maalah ashan, which made the smoke rise impressively.

  Then there were the normal sacrifices, two lambs at dawn each day and another two at sunset, with thirteen priests needed for each. Ordinary male Jews could not enter the sanctuary, of course, but its doors were kept open during the service so they could see. Each service ended with a ritual drinking of wine, the reading of scripture, and the singing of hymns and psalms. The choristers were accompanied by an orchestra of a double-pipe, twelve-stringed harp, ten-stringed lyre, and bronze cymbals, while both the silver trumpet and the shofar or ram’s horn emitted blasts to mark stages in the liturgy. The sacrifice-rituals struck visitors as exotic, even barbarous, for most strangers came at feast-times when the quantities of sacrifices were enormous. At such times, the inner Temple was an awesome place—the screams and bellows of terrified cattle, blending with ritual cries and chants and tremendous blasts of horn and trumpet, and blood everywhere. The author of the Letter of Aristeas, an Alexandrine Jew who attended as a pilgrim, says he saw 700 priests performing the sacrifices, working in silence but handling the heavy carcasses with professional skill and putting them on exactly the right part of the altar.

  Because of the huge number of animals, the slaughter, bloodying and carving up of the carcasses had to be done quickly; and to get rid of the copious quantities of blood, the platform was not solid but hollow, a gigantic cleansing system. It contained thirty-four cisterns, the largest, or Great Sea, holding over two million gallons. In winter, they stored the rainfall and in summer additional supplies were brought by aqueduct from the Pool of Siloam to the south. Innumerable pipes conveyed the water up to the platform surface, and a multitude of drains carried off the torrents of blood. Aristeas wrote: ‘There are many openings for water at the base of the altar, invisible to all except those making the sacrifices, so that all the blood is collected in great quantities and washed away in the twinkling of an eye.’

  The Temple was a struggling mass of people at festival time, and the gates had to be opened from midnight onwards. Only the high-priest could enter the Holy of Holies, once a year on the Day of Atonement, but for festivals its curtain was rolled up so that male Jewish pilgrims, peering through the sanctuary gates, could see inside it, and the holy vessels were brought out for inspection. Each pilgrim offered at least one individual sacrifice—hence the vast number of animals—and this privilege was open to gentiles also. Herod’s Temple was world-famous and greatly esteemed, according to Josephus, and important gentiles offered sacrifices for pious reasons as well as to conciliate Jewish opinion. In 15 BC, for instance, Herod’s friend Marcus Agrippa made the grand gesture of offering a hecatomb (100 beasts).69

  The Temple was prodigiously wealthy, at any rate in between times of pillage. Foreign kings and statesmen from Artaxerxes to the Emperor Augustus presented it with vast quantities of golden vessels which were stored in special strong-rooms in its bowels. Jews from all over the diaspora poured money and plate into it, rather as they now contribute to Israel, and Josephus says that it became ‘the general treasury of all Jewish wealth’. Hyrcanus, head of the rich tax-collecting Tobiad family, for instance, ‘deposited there the entire wealth of their house’.70 But the main regular source of income was a half-shekel tax on all male Jews over twenty years of age.

  Herod was exceptionally generous to the Temple, for he paid for the entire new building work out of his own pocket. By downgrading the importance of the high-priest, who was a hated Sadducee, Herod automatically raised in importance his deputy, the segan, a Pharisee, who got control over all the regular Temple functions and ensured that even the Sadducee high-priests performed the liturgy in a Pharisaical manner. Since Herod was on reasonable terms with the Pharisees, he avoided conflict between the Temple and his government, as a rule. But this alliance broke down in his last months. As part of his decorative scheme, he set up a golden eagle over the main Temple entrance. The diaspora Jews were quite happy about this, but the pious Jews of the capital, Pharisees included, objected strongly, and a group of Torah students climbed up and smashed it to pieces. Herod was already sick, in his palace near Jericho, but he acted with characteristic energy and ruthlessness. The high-priest was removed from office. The students were identified, arrested, dragged down in chains to Jericho, tried in the Roman theatre there, and burned alive. With the smoke of this sacrifice to his wounded generosity and self-esteem still risin
g, Herod was taken by litter to the hot springs at Callirrhoe, where he died in spring 4 BC.

  Herod’s dispositions for his kingdom did not work because his legatees, his sons by his first, Nabatean wife Doris, were no good. Archelaus, to whom he left Judaea, had to be deposed by the Romans in 6 AD. Thereafter it was governed directly by Roman procurators from Caesarea, they being responsible in turn to the Roman legate in Antioch. The old king’s grandson, Herod Agrippa, was able, and in 37 AD the Romans gave him Judaea. But he died in 44 AD, leaving Rome no choice but to impose direct rule again. The death of Herod the Great, then, effectively ended the last phase of stable Jewish rule in Palestine until the mid-twentieth century.

  Instead there followed a period of great and rising tension. This was most unusual under Rome. The Romans ran a liberal empire. They respected local religious, social and even political institutions so far as this was consistent with their essential interests. It is true that the rare uprising was put down with great force and severity. But most of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples prospered under Roman rule and judged it to be far preferable to anything else they were likely to get. This was the view of the six million or more Jews in the diaspora, who never gave the authorities any trouble, except once in Alexandria under the impact of events in Palestine. It is likely that even in the Jewish homeland many, perhaps most, Jews did not see the Romans as oppressors or enemies of religion. But a substantial minority in Palestine became irreconcilable to the kittim (Romans) and from time to time were prepared to risk the ferocious penalties which inexorably followed violent defiance. There was a rising, led by Judas of Gamala, in 6 AD, in protest at the direct rule imposed after Herod the Great’s death. There was another, for similar reasons, when direct rule was restored following the death of Herod Agrippa in 44 AD, led by a man called Theudas who marched down the Jordan Valley at the head of a mob. There was a third in the time of Procurator Felix (52-60 AD), when 4,000 people mustered on the Mount of Olives in the expectation that the walls of Jerusalem would fall, like Jericho’s. Finally there were the great uprisings of 66 AD and 135 AD, which were on an enormous scale and convulsed the eastern empire. There is no parallel to this sequence of events in any other territory Rome ruled.

  Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society, like the Parthians, who gave the Romans constant trouble on the eastern fringe, rather as the Pathans and Afghans worried the British on the North-West Frontier of India. On the contrary: the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East. Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature. So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome.

  Therein lay the difficulty with the Jews. They had an older culture than the Greeks. They could not match the Greeks artistically and in some other ways, but their literature was in various fields superior. There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. Yet the Greeks, who controlled the cultural policies of the Roman empire, afforded no recognition at all to the Hebrew language and culture. It is a remarkable fact that the Greeks, who were so inquisitive about nature, and so quick to pick up foreign technology and artistic skills, were quite incurious about alien languages. They were in Egypt for a millennium but never bothered to learn anything except trading demotic; Pythagoras was apparently the only Greek scholar who understood hieroglyphics. They had exactly the same blindness towards Hebrew, Hebrew literature and Jewish religious philosophy. They ignored it and knew of it only from inaccurate hearsay. This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension.

  In a way, the relationship between Greeks and Jews in antiquity was akin to the dealings between Jews and Germans in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, though the comparison should not be pushed too far. Greeks and Jews had a great deal in common—their universalist notions, for example, their rationalism and empiricism, their awareness of the divine ordering of the cosmos, their feeling for ethics, their consuming interest in man himself—but in the event their differences, exacerbated by misunderstandings, proved more important.71 Both Jews and Greeks claimed and thought they believed in freedom, but whereas with the Greeks it was an end in itself, realized in the free, self-governing community, choosing its own laws and gods, for the Jews it was no more than a means, preventing interference with religious duties divinely ordained and unalterable by man. The only circumstances in which the Jews could have become reconciled to Greek culture was if they had been able to take it over—as, in the form of Christianity, they eventually did.

  Hence it is important to grasp that the apparent Jewish revolt against Rome was at bottom a clash between Jewish and Greek culture. Moreover, the clash arose from books. There were then only two great literatures, the Greek and the Jewish, for Latin texts, modelled on the Greek, were only just beginning to constitute a corpus. More and more people were literate, especially Greeks and Jews, who had elementary schools. Writers were emerging as personalities: we know the names of as many as 1,000 Hellenistic authors, and Jewish writers too were beginning to identify themselves. There were now great libraries, state as well as private—the one in Alexandria had over 700,000 rolls. Greek was the literature of international civilized society, but the Jews were far more assiduous at copying, circulating, reading and studying their own sacred texts.

  Indeed, in many respects Hebrew literature was far more dynamic than Greek. Greek texts, from Homer onwards, were guides to virtue, decorum and modes of thought; but the Hebrew texts had a marked tendency to become plans for action. Moreover, this dynamic element was becoming more important. It was propagandist in intent, polemical in tone and thoroughly xenophobic, with particular animosity directed towards the Greeks. The stress on martyrdom, as a consequence of the Maccabee struggles, was notable. A typical work, by a Jew called Jason of Cyrene, originally in five volumes, survives in an epitome called the Second Book of Maccabees. Though employing all the rhetorical devices of Greek prose, it is an anti-Greek diatribe as well as an inflammatory martyrology.

  Even more important than the martyr stories was the new literary device of apocalyptic, which from Maccabee times filled the vacuum in Jewish consciousness left by the decline of prophecy. The word means ‘revelation’. Apocalyptic texts attempt to convey mysteries beyond the bounds of normal human knowledge or experience, often using the names of dead prophets to add authenticity. From the second century BC onwards, again under the stress of the Maccabee crisis, they concentrate overwhelmingly on eschatological themes: they carry the Jewish obsession with history into the future and predict what will happen at ‘the end of days’, when God winds up the historical period and mankind enters the era of summation. This moment will be characterized by great cosmic convulsions, the final battle of Armageddon and, as one of the Qumran scrolls puts it, ‘the heavenly host will give forth in great voice, the foundations of the world will be shaken, and a war of the mighty ones of the heavens will spread throughout the world’.72 These events are characterized by extreme violence, by absolute divisions between good (pious Jews) and evil (Greeks, later Romans) and by hints of imminence.

  Of these works the most influential was the Book of Daniel, dating from early Hasmonean times, both because it found its way into the canon and because it became the prototype for many others. It uses historical examples, from Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian times, to whip up hatred against pagan imperialism in general, and Greek rule in particular, and it predicts the end of empire and the emergence of God’s kingdom, possibly under a heroic liberator, a Son of Man. The book vibrates with xenophobia
and invitations to martyrdom.

  The apocalyptic books could be and were read at various levels of reality. To moderate-minded pious Jews, the majority in all probability, who had tended to accept, since the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, that their religion could be practised—was, perhaps, best practised—under a reasonably liberal foreign rule, Daniel promised not a restoration of the historic, physical kingdom, like David’s, but a final event of an altogether different kind: resurrection and personal immortality. What particularly struck the Pharisees was the assertion at the conclusion of the Book of Daniel that, at the end of days, ‘the people shall be delivered…. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’73 This notion of Daniel’s was reinforced by the so-called Ethiopic Book of Enoch, written early in the first century AD, which speaks of ‘the last day’ and the ‘day of judgment’, when the ‘elect’ would be favoured and come into their kingdom.