DESTRUCTION

AFTER HIS VICTORY, Pompey imposed harsh terms upon the defeated Hasmonean kingdom. The Jews would be allowed to rule Judaea, Idumea, Peraea, and Galilee, but in future the Yahwists of Samaria and the gentile inhabitants of the coastal plain, the Greek cities, the Phoenician coast, and the Decapolis would manage their own affairs. The people who had refused to convert to Judaism and been expelled from the country were now permitted to return. Aristobulus II was taken to Rome in chains, but Pompey rewarded his allies. Antipater had control of the army and was in charge of Judaea but had to report to the Roman legate in Damascus. Hyrcanus II was made high priest, which pleased those who still felt sympathy for the Hasmoneans. But Jerusalem had lost much of its political status: Pompey had razed its walls to the ground, and it was now merely the capital of a landlocked subprovince which was divided from Galilee by territory controlled by Samaritans and gentiles who had no reason to feel friendly toward their Jewish neighbors.

The Hasmoneans attempted to reassert their power. At one point Aristobulus actually escaped from his captors and managed to reestablish himself in Jerusalem, where he began to rebuild the walls. In 57 BCE, Gabinus, the Syrian legate, put down this insurrection and Aristobulus and his son Alexander were sent back to Rome. But Palestine was of strategic importance to the Romans, and they did not wish to antagonize their Jewish subjects unduly. Aristobulus’s other children were permitted to stay in Palestine, Hyrcanus remained high priest, and the Hasmoneans remained a potent presence in the country. Yet Antipater still held more power than anybody else. He was a shrewd ruler and respected by the Jews, even though his family were only recent converts to Judaism and, as Idumeans, were regarded as ethnically distinct. Antipater and his sons never forgot that they owed their position to Rome, however, and kept a careful eye on the turbulent politics of the empire, adroitly switching sides when a patron fell from power. Thus in 49BCE, when Pompey was defeated by Julius Caesar, Antipater had been prescient enough to back the winning side. Caesar rewarded him for his support by making him the full prefect of Judaea and allowing him to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. The port of Joppa and the Jezreel Valley were returned to the Jews and Antipater’s two sons were appointed tetrarchs (district commissioners) under him: Herod was made tetrarch of Galilee and Phasael tetrarch of Judaea. They had inherited their father’s political astuteness, which they sorely needed during these troubled years. On 15 March 44 BCE, Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome by a conspiracy of senators headed by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius. In the same year, Antipater was murdered by an old family foe. Herod and Phasael became clients of Cassius but continued to watch the developments in Rome very carefully. When Octavian, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son, and Mark Antony declared war on Brutus and Cassius, Herod and Phasael were ready to change sides again, if necessary. After the battle of Philippi, in 42 BCE, when Brutus and Cassius were defeated, Phasael and Herod were befriended by Mark Antony, who now controlled the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. Rome was about to embark on a new era of peace and prosperity and Herod and Phasael enjoyed its patronage.

Yet in 40 BCE the Romans temporarily lost control of Palestine, when the Parthians of Mesopotamia broke through their lines of defense, invaded the country, and installed the Hasmonean prince Antigonus in Jerusalem as their client. Phasael was taken prisoner and forced to commit suicide in captivity, but Herod was able to escape to Rome, where he impressed the Senate as a Jew who was capable of holding the country on Rome’s behalf. The senators named Herod King of the Jews, and in 39 BCE he returned to Palestine. He conquered Galilee with the help of Mark Antony, and laid siege to Jerusalem in 37, taking the city four months later after a horrible massacre. Thousands of Jews were killed in the narrow streets and the Temple courts where they had sought sanctuary, and Antigonus the Hasmonean was executed by Mark Antony at Herod’s request, even though this was the first time that the Romans had inflicted capital punishment on a subjugated king.

Once installed in Jerusalem as King of the Jews in Palestine, Herod was left in total control. The Romans withdrew, rightly judging that the province would be secure under his leadership. Despite his brutal conquest of Jerusalem, Herod had supporters among the Jews. The Pharisees were still opposed to the Hasmoneans and backed his claim. Herod also took the precaution of marrying Mariamne, a Hasmonean princess, which gave him a legitimacy of sorts in the eyes of Hasmonean supporters. In 36 BCE he appointed Mariamne’s younger brother Jonathan to the high priesthood, but this proved to be a mistake. The people burst into tears of emotion when the young Hasmonean donned the sacred vestments at Sukkoth and called out rapturously to him in the streets. Herod immediately had Jonathan murdered and replaced by a safe candidate of his own. Throughout his life, Herod was ruthless about eliminating any challenge to his rule. Nonetheless, he was a gifted king and was able to impose peace on his potentially unstable kingdom. There were no uprisings in Judaea until the very end of his reign.

It is a mark of his power that Herod was able to appoint and depose high priests at will without inspiring a revolution. We have seen that the office aroused strong passions, and hitherto high priests had held the post for life; under Herod, the high priest became a political appointee. Even so, the priesthood lost none of its luster. High priests were never regarded as mere political pawns. Herod found it necessary to keep the ceremonial robes of the high priest locked up in the citadel, releasing them only for the major festivals. As soon as the priest put on these sacred garments, he was enveloped in a celestial aura and was empowered to approach YHWH on the people’s behalf. The control of these vestments continued to be a matter of priority in Jerusalem, and only the emperor could authorize their permanent release to the priestly caste. The man who wore them assumed the mantle of divine power and could be a threat to the throne.

While Herod was a devout enough Jew after his own fashion, he was also happy to accommodate other religions in and around Palestine. Unlike the Hasmoneans, he did not interfere with the religious lives of his subjects, and he regarded the Hasmonean policy of forcing people to convert to Judaism as politically inept. Herod built temples to the Greek and Roman gods in gentile cities within and without his own kingdom, and when Emperor Octavian declared himself to be divine, Herod was one of the first people to build a temple in his honor in Samaria, which he renamed Sebaste, the Greek equivalent of the emperor’s new title, Augustus. By this time, Herod had switched allegiance yet again, after his patron Mark Antony had been defeated by Octavian at the battle of Actium. In 22 BCE, Herod began to build the city of Caesarea in honor of Augustus on the site of the old port of Strato’s Tower. The city contained temples in honor of Roman deities, an amphitheater, and a harbor that rivaled Piraeus. It was a gift to his pagan subjects. As a result, Herod, the Jewish king, was a respected figure in the pagan world: one of the last Greco-Roman honors to be accorded him was the presidency of the Olympic Games.

Yet Herod was equally careful to avoid offending the Jews, and he would not have dreamed of building a pagan temple in Jerusalem. As part of his ambitious building program—the largest ever accomplished by a minor ruler—he transformed the Holy City and made it one of the most important metropoleis of the east. Ever mindful of security, Herod’s first act was to build a massive fortress, begun in 35 BCE on the site of the citadel built by Nehemiah at the city’s most vulnerable point, north of the Temple Mount. Since he was still friends with Mark Antony, he called the new fortress Antonia after his patron. It was built on a precipitous rock, seventy-five feet high, whose steep slope was faced with polished slabs of stone to make it almost impossible to climb. The rectangular citadel rose sixty feet above this, with four towers rising from each corner, and was capable of housing a large garrison. But despite its formidable military appearance, the Antonia was as luxurious as a palace. It was surrounded by a deep moat called the Struthion, which separated the fortress from the new suburb of Bezetha that was developing in the north. Here he probably built the double reservoir that can still be seen today, near the Pool of Beth-Hesda excavated by Simon the Just.

Herod did not begin the real transformation of Jerusalem until about 23 BCE, when he had just won a good deal of respect in Palestine by his efficiency in providing food and grain for the people during the famine of 25-24. Many Jerusalemites had been ruined and were able to find employment as builders once work had begun in the city. Herod began by building a palace for himself in the Upper City on the Western Hill; it was fortified by three towers, which he named after his brother Phasael, his beloved wife Mariamne the Hasmonean, and his friend Hippicus. They all had solid bases, some fifteen meters high; the base of what is probably Hippicus can still be seen in the Jerusalem Citadel and is known as the Tower of David. The palace itself consisted of two large buildings, one of which was called Caesareum in honor of Octavian, which were joined by enchanting water gardens, where the deep canals and cisterns were lined with bronze statues and fountains. Herod seems to have also redesigned the streets of the Upper City into a gridded system, which made traffic and town planning easier. In addition, the Upper City had a theater and a hippodrome, though we do not know the exact location of these buildings. Every five years, games were held in honor of Augustus, which drew crowds of distinguished athletes to Jerusalem.

Under Herod, Jerusalem became an imposing and distinguished city, the home of about 120,000 permanent inhabitants. He rebuilt the city walls, but scholars still argue about their exact course. Josephus tells us that the First Wall surrounded the Upper City and the Lower City on the site of the ancient ’Ir David. The Second Wall provided an added line of defense and encircled the new commercial quarter extending from the Antonia to the old north wall built by the Hasmoneans.¹ There were other, humbler palaces in the Lower City, notably that of the royal family of Adiabene of Mesopotamia, who had converted to Judaism. They also built the large mausoleum outside the city walls which is known today as the Tomb of the Kings. Other decorated rock tombs also began to appear in the hills and valleys surrounding the walls, so that corpses did not contaminate the Holy City. They were often protected by a stone which could be rolled to cover the entrance of the cavelike sepulcher in the rock face. The most famous of these Herodian tombs can still be seen in the Kidron Valley, near the mausoleum of the Bene Hezir family. It consists of a memorial pillar and a nearby rock tomb which later pilgrims would call respectively the Pillar of Absalom and the Tomb of Jehoshaphat.

In about 19 BCE, Herod decided to rebuild the Temple. The people were naturally worried: would the king tear down the present buildings and find that he lacked the funds to continue? Would he be faithful to the prescriptions in the Torah? Herod’s buildings were often startlingly innovative, but the plan of the Temple had been revealed by God to Moses and David, and there was no room for originality. Herod was careful to allay these fears. The work did not begin until he had assembled all the materials, and he carefully reproduced the plan and dimensions of the old buildings. To ensure that the laity did not violate the forbidden areas, Herod had a thousand priests trained as masons and carpenters; they alone could be responsible for the Hekhal and the Devir. Herod himself never entered the building that would always be remembered as his masterpiece. Construction was planned in such a way that the sacrifices were not interrupted for a single day, and work on the Temple buildings was completed within eighteen months. This continuity of worship made it possible for Herod’s building to be called the Second Temple even though it was actually the Third.

Herod could not alter the size or shape of the shrine, but he could make the buildings more beautiful. The walls were covered with white marble, threaded with reddish and blue veins “like the waves of the sea.”² The doors of the Hekhal were covered in gold and decorated above with “golden vines from which depended grape clusters as tall as a man.”³ The doors were covered by a priceless curtain, woven with scarlet, blue, and purple linen thread and embroidered with the sun, moon, and planets.

Even though the Temple buildings had to remain quite small, Herod could satisfy his love of immensity by extending the Temple platform. This was a huge project that took some eighty years—Herod did not live to see the task finished—and employed eighteen thousand workmen. When completed, the platform covered an area of about thirty-five acres, many times its original size. Since the plaza now extended far beyond the crest of Mount Zion, it had to be supported by a massive substructure of vaults and piers. The new supporting walls, Josephus tells us, were “the greatest ever heard of”:⁴ some of the stones weighed between two and five tons. Since Herod did not want to extend the Temple platform to the east, the old eastern wall, which coincided with the city wall, remained in place. Henceforth that side of the Temple Mount was associated with Solomon, the first builder on Zion. The western supporting wall was the longest of these new constructions, measuring some 530 yards from the Antonia to its southern extremity At the foot of this western wall was the Lower Market, which belonged to the priests and was very popular with tourists and pilgrims. Shops were built right against the wall, covering the first three courses of stones. The city council buildings and the national archive were also located at the foot of the western wall. On the Temple platform itself, the supporting walls were surmounted on three sides by colonnaded porches in the Greek fashion, rather like the porticos on the Ḥaram al-Sharif today. The whole southern end of the platform consisted of a large pillared covered area, similar to the basilica in a Roman forum, which gave people shelter from the rain and shade in the summer. This Royal Portico was about the size of Salisbury Cathedral, six hundred feet long and soaring to one hundred feet at its highest point. Towering above the southern supporting wall, covered in gleaming white marble, it was an awe-inspiring sight. From a distance, the Temple Mount was a brilliant spectacle. The gold on the sanctuary “reflected so fierce a blaze of fire that those who tried to look at it were forced to turn away,” recalled Josephus. “It seemed in the distance like a mountain covered in snow, for any part not covered in gold was dazzling white.”⁵ It is not surprising that long after it had been destroyed, the rabbis would claim: “Whoever has not seen the Temple of Herod has never seen a beautiful building in his life.”⁶

The Western Wall—the western supporting wall of the Temple platform built by King Herod. When the Muslims restored the wall in the eighth century CE, their smaller stones at the top could not match the massive slabs used by Herod.

Pilgrims could enter the Temple courts in one of two ways. They could either climb the imposing staircase leading up to the Royal Portico, or cross two bridges which spanned the street at the foot of the western supporting wall. Once on the platform, visitors found that an intricate arrangement of courts, each one more holy than the last, led to the central sanctity of the Devir. (See diagram.) First pilgrims entered the Court of the Gentiles, which was open to everybody. It was separated from the Court of the Israelites (for male Jews in a state of ritual purity) by an elegant balustrade. Notices warned foreigners not to proceed further, on pain of death. Beyond the barrier was the Court of the Women, a screened-off area with a raised gallery which enabled the women to watch the sacrifices in the altar court. Next came the Court of the Levites and finally the Court of the Priests, which contained the great altar of sacrifice.

This gradual approach to the inner sanctum reminded pilgrims and worshippers that they were making an aliyah (ascent) to a wholly different order of being. They had to prepare themselves by undergoing various rites of purification which heightened this sense by putting them at some distance from their normal lives. They were about to enter the separate sphere of their holy God, and for the duration of their visit they had to be in the same state of ritual purity as the priests. In particular, they had to be cleansed of any contact with death, the greatest impurity of all, which it was impossible to avoid in daily life: one could inadvertently step on the site of an ancient grave without realizing it. But any of the great changes of life, such as childbirth, were also impure, not because they were considered dirty or sinful but because the God they were about to approach was beyond such alteration and pilgrims had symbolically to share this immutability if they were to be in the place where he was. If pilgrims could not be purified by the local priest before leaving home, they would have to wait in Jerusalem for seven days before going up to the Temple Mount. They had to refrain from sex during this period, and on the third and seventh day, they would be ritually sprinkled with water and ashes and take a ritual bath. This enforced wait was a time of spiritual preparation and self-scrutiny. It reminded pilgrims of the interior journey they must make as they “ascended” to the ultimate reality and entered a wholly different dimension.

When they finally climbed up to the Temple platform with the animal that they were taking for sacrifice in the Altar Court, pilgrims felt that they had stepped into a more intense mode of existence. The whole of reality was somehow condensed into this segregated space. By this time, the symbolism of the Temple appears to have changed: it was now experienced as a microcosm of the entire universe. Josephus, who once served in the Temple as a priest, explained its cosmic imagery. The Court of the Gentiles was still associated with Yam, the primal sea, which stood over and against the ordered world of the sacred, a perpetual challenge to be borne in mind and overcome. The Hekhal, on the contrary, represented the whole of the created world; its curtain symbolized the four elements and the “whole vista of the heavens”; the lamps on the great candlestick stood for the seven planets, and the twelve loaves of shewbread recalled the signs of the Zodiac and the twelve months of the year. The incense altar with its thirteen spices “from sea and land (inhabited and uninhabited) signified that all things came from God and for God.”⁷ Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 BCE to c. 41 CE), who came once to Jerusalem as a pilgrim, was also familiar with this symbolism.⁸ A Platonist, he also pointed out that the furniture of the Hekhal represented the heavenly archetypes and made those Ideals, which lay beyond our experience, intelligible and visible.⁹ The layout and design of the Temple Mount thus traced the path to God. You passed from the ordinary mundane world into the marginal realm of chaos, the primal sea, and the Goyim to the ordered world that God had created, but you saw it in a different way. The world was now revealed as leading inexorably to God; one journeyed through life on earth to the divine, just as the high priest walked through the Hekhal to the ultimate reality, which lay beyond and gave meaning to the whole. This, of course, was symbolized by the Devir, separated from the Hekhal and the visible world by yet another veil. The Devir was empty because it stood for something that transcended our senses and concepts: “Nothing at all was kept in it,” Josephus tells us; “it was unapproachable, inviolable, and invisible to all.”¹⁰

The utter separateness of the holy God was emphasized by the fact that only the priests could draw near to the heart of the Temple’s sanctity. Josephus explains that the vestments of the high priest also had cosmic significance: his tunic symbolized heaven and earth and the upper garments the four elements. This was fitting, since the high priest officiated in the Hekhal as the representative not only of the “whole human race but also for the parts of nature, earth, water, air, and fire.”¹¹ But when he entered the Devir on Yom Kippur, the high priest changed into white linen garments, the dress of the angels, who were also mediators between the celestial and the mundane spheres. Sacred space could still yield a powerful experience of a presence which transcended all anthropomorphic expression. The rituals of preparation, the ascent of the Mount, and the graded sanctity of the courts and Temple buildings all helped worshippers to feel that they had entered into and been enveloped by another dimension that existed alongside normal life and yet was utterly distinct from it. The degrees of sanctity were similar to the platforms on a Mesopotamian ziggurat; they made the level surface of the Temple Mount a symbolic sacred mountain leading to the divine realm at the “summit” of the Devir. The imagery of the Temple presented worshippers with a landscape that threw into stronger relief the real meaning of the mundane world which lay at the heart of existence. The whole of life—including the destructive forces of Yam—could yield access to the hidden sanctity of the Devir.

During Herod’s reign, more pilgrims were drawn to Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine and the diaspora than ever before: between 300,000 and 500,000 would be likely to assemble for the great feasts of Passover, the harvest festival of Weeks or Pentecost, and Sukkoth.¹² Despite the emphasis on purification, these festivals were not gloomy, somber affairs. Pilgrimages gave families the chance to take a vacation together. During the long journey to Jerusalem, pilgrims would eat and drink wine together at night, joke, laugh, and sing popular songs. When they arrived in Jerusalem, festivities really got under way. Pilgrims would put up in private homes or in the synagogues of the city. Some preferred to camp in the hills and valleys outside. They had to bring a special pilgrimage tithe to spend in Jerusalem, which did not have to be put to pious use. You could buy red meat, wine, or some other treat. In this relaxed atmosphere, new friendships were formed and pilgrims came away with an enhanced sense of Jewish solidarity: the bonds of charity were thus strengthened alongside the cultic bond to God.¹³

The festivals themselves were also a time of rejoicing. There was still a holiday atmosphere during the eight days of Sukkoth, as the people camped in their leafy booths all over the city. Passover was an especially popular festival. Each family group would sacrifice a paschal lamb in the Temple and eat it together that evening in a festive supper that recalled the liberation of their people from Egypt. A particularly vibrant festival was the Feast of the Water Drawing, which symbolically united the upper and lower worlds. Israelite cosmology now conceived of the earth as a capsule surrounded by water: the upper waters were male, while the dangerous, subterranean waters were female, like Tiamat: they cried out to be united. As Jerusalem was at the “center” of the world, it was a place where all the levels of existence could meet. Once a year, the “stoppers” to the underworld were symbolically opened and the upper and lower waters mingled, while the people rejoiced. Later the rabbis would say that whoever had not experienced this festival had never known joy in his life.¹⁴ It recognized the power of primal chaos, which needed to invade the world to ensure the vitality, creativity, and fruitfulness of the coming year.

The Temple remained the pivot of Jewish spirituality during Herod’s reign, but some of the Jews were beginning to explore other paths to God. We have seen that some had started to bypass the Temple in mystical flight to the Reality it symbolized, especially in the diaspora. Jews also congregated in synagogues and meeting places, where they could study the Torah and enter the spiritual realm without traveling to Jerusalem.¹⁵ Even in Palestine, some Jews had begun to experience God in the community of the faithful. Thus the Pharisees were still devoted to the Temple. In Herod’s day, the school of Shammai urged Pharisees to segregate themselves more strictly than ever from the pagan world: they should not eat with gentiles, speak Greek, or accept gifts from gentiles. This was partly designed to enhance the purity of the Temple, which had long depended on the support of pagan rulers. But the exclusive community envisaged by Shammai also mirrored the ancient sacred geography, which had placed the gentiles beyond the reach of holiness.

Shammai’s rival Hillel was also concerned with purity and segregation, but he also stressed the importance of charity. During the Hasmonean period, the ideal of compassion seems to have got lost. After the trauma of Antiochus Epiphanes, the emphasis had been on the purity of Jerusalem and its Temple and not on the social concern which had always been regarded as an essential concomitant of the Zion cult. Now Hillel’s Pharisees saw deeds of charity and loving-kindness as the most important mitzvoth of the Torah: they could be as effective an atonement as sacrifice in the Temple.¹⁶ Some of the Pharisees would form special fraternities, whose associates (chaverim) pledged themselves to live perpetually in the state of ritual purity that was necessary for Temple worship. It was a symbolic way, perhaps, of living continually in God’s presence in their own homes and making their tables as sacred as the great altar in the Court of the Priests. When the chaverim ate together, their meals of fellowship became sacred occasions, like the meals of the priests who ate the sacrificial victims.¹⁷ This type of piety made each home a temple and brought the sacred reality of Jerusalem into the humblest house.

Similarly, by the end of Herod’s reign the Qumran sect also regarded their community of true Israelites as a new, spiritual temple. They would have no truck with the contaminated Temple in Jerusalem, but in their self-imposed exile, the sectarians would go into the dining room as into a sacred shrine. They also lived like the priests who were the constant denizens of the Temple: before eating, they would bathe in cold water and dress in linen loincloths just as the priests did when they ate the sacrificial meat. The prayers of the group were regarded as a substitute for sacrifice. But this was only a provisional arrangement. The sectarians looked forward to the day when, led by two messiahs—one priest and one layman—they would fight the forces of darkness in a final war to liberate Jerusalem. Then the Holy City would be reclaimed and God would rebuild the Temple. The Qumran sectarians called themselves the Evionim: the Poor. They alone were the true inhabitants of Zion, which had always been seen as a haven for the poor and humble. When they looked forward to this New Jerusalem, they used terms and phrases that were customarily applied to God:

I will remember you, O Zion, for a blessing;
with all my might, I love you;
your memory is blessed forever.¹⁸

In the Torah, Jews had been commanded to love YHWH alone with all their might; he was the only source of blessing, and his memory alone was blessed forever. The use of these phrases in the Qumran hymn was not accidental: the sectarians were precise and jealous monotheists. But the divine never revealed itself to humanity directly, and for centuries Jerusalem had been one of the primary symbols that had enabled Jews to experience the inaccessible God. For the Qumran sectarians, Zion was inseparable from the peace, blessing, and salvation that were integral to an experience of God, and despite the sad state of the earthly city under Herod, it was still a most sacred and religious value.

But Qumran was an expression of the more militant forms of Judaism that were beginning to surface in Palestine. Throughout the Greco-Roman world, people were beginning to nurture dreams of nationalistic nostalgia. Temples were restored and old myths revived, especially those with a “resistance” motif. Hence the apocalyptic visions of Qumran revived the ancient myths of combat which had led to the foundation of a Temple, the building of a city, and the creation of right order. Similarly, the ordinary Jewish worshipper saw the great festivals as celebrating the sacredness of the nation and the homeland. Passover was a festival of national liberation; the harvest festival of Weeks (Shavuoth) reminded Jews that the land belonged to YHWH alone—not to Rome. Sukkoth, which recalled the nation’s years in the desert, was also the anniversary of the dedication of the Temple. When they congregated in such vast numbers before their God in the national shrine, feelings ran high, though Herod was such a powerful ruler that they did not dare to express them until 4 BCE, when they heard he was on his deathbed.

The occasion was significant. Herod had recently erected a golden eagle, the symbol of Jupiter and imperial Rome, over the Temple Gate. He had gone too far. When the news came that Herod was actually dying, Judas and Matthias, two respected teachers, hinted to their disciples that this was a splendid opportunity to bring the eagle down. Any such action was very dangerous, but what a glorious thing it would be to die for the Torah of their fathers! Accordingly, the young men climbed up onto the roof of the Royal Portico, lowered themselves down on stout ropes, and hacked the eagle down with axes. But they had been premature. Galvanized into action by sheer rage, Herod rose from his bed, postponed his death, and sentenced the young men and their teachers to death. When he died a few days later, his mortal agony was said to have been a punishment for the execution of these holy “martyrs.”¹⁹ It should be noted that this was a limited protest. There was as yet no attempt—nor even, possibly, the will—to assassinate Herod or dispense with Roman hegemony. The cause of this demonstration was the pollution of the Temple, and its sole objective was to get rid of this defilement. This would continue to be the case. As long as a ruler left the Temple alone, the Jews were prepared to tolerate him, but any threat to the Temple from any source could lead to violence, bloodshed, and fearful reprisals.

Herod had killed his beloved wife Mariamne in 29 BCE, and three of his sons shortly before his death, because he believed—in both cases, with reason—that they were plotting against him. Herod had kept his three surviving sons, Archelaus, Philip, and Antipas, on such a tight rein, delegating no power, that he had no idea which of them was capable of taking his place. When he died, he left two wills, so the fate of his kingdom was left to Augustus, who summoned the three sons to Rome. But on the eve of their departure, as the pilgrims poured into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, passions were still running high about the recent deaths of the holy martyrs. Local Jews staged a demonstration of mourning, which filled the city with the sound of weeping and lamentation. The pilgrims quickly caught the mood of rage, fear, and grief. Finally, finding he could not control the mob, Archelaus sent his troops into the Temple courts just after the first paschal lambs had been sacrificed. Three thousand people were killed. Yet again the shrine had been desecrated, but this time not by a pagan symbol but by Jewish troops shedding Jewish blood. Five weeks later, while Archelaus was in Rome, there was another riot in Jerusalem during the pilgrim festival of Pentecost, and Sabinus, prefect of Syria, had to send a legion into Judaea. When it arrived in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of local Jews and pilgrims barricaded the streets and attacked the Roman soldiers. Sabinus could contain the mob violence only by setting fire to the porticoes on the Temple Mount. Afterward the Romans crucified two thousand of the rebels around the city walls.²⁰

There were also other disturbances in other parts of Palestine, and this must have convinced the Senate that Herod was irreplaceable as King of the Jews. Archelaus returned to Judaea as the mere ethnarch of Judaea; Antipas and Philip were made tetrarchs of Galilee, Peraea, and the other northern regions. They were successful district commissioners and managed to hold on to their positions for many years. But Archelaus pursued such ruthless policies toward both Jews and Samaritans that he was deposed and banished in 6 CE. Henceforth Judaea was ruled by Roman prefects, who made the new city of Caesarea their capital—a safe and respectful distance from the turbulent sanctity of Jerusalem. There was unrest in Galilee during the first days of this Roman occupation, but it would be a mistake to imagine that the whole of Jewish Palestine was passionately opposed to Rome. This would never be the case. Some Jews had sent a deputation to Augustus after Herod’s death specifically asking him to send a Roman governor to Palestine: the Pharisees in particular were still opposed to any form of Jewish monarchy. The Roman occupation of Palestine was not ideal, but Rome was no worse and a good deal better than some of the other empires which had ruled the Jews in the past. With a few sad exceptions, most of the Roman officials did their best to avoid offending the Jews’ religious sensibilities and tried to cooperate with the high priest. For their part, the high priests were also anxious to keep the peace. They kept a careful lookout for troublemakers, not because they were sycophantic quislings but because they did not want Jews to die as pointlessly as they had in the riots that followed Herod’s death. It was now essential that the high priests be men of caliber; in 18 CE, Caiaphas took office and became the ablest high priest of the Roman period.

But not even Caiaphas could control the angry mob when the Temple was violated again in 26 CE by the new prefect, Pontius Pilate, who had provocatively sent his troops into Jerusalem under cover of darkness with standards sporting the portrait of Caesar. These had been raised aloft in the Antonia, a stone’s throw from the Devir. When the Jews woke up to this abomination the next day, old fears that dated back to Antiochus Epiphanes surfaced once again, and an angry mob marched all the way to Caesarea and camped around Pilate’s residence. Usually the Jews of Judaea were too divided to mount a solid front, but a threat to the Temple produced instant unity. Yet it did not lead to violence on this occasion. Perhaps the Jews had learned a hard lesson in 4 BCE. This time they resorted to passive resistance. For five days they simply lay outside Pilate’s house until he summoned them to the amphitheater of Caesarea, telling them that he was now ready to give them an answer. As soon as the crowd had assembled, Pilate gave a sign to his troops, who appeared on all sides with swords drawn. If he had thought to scare the Jews into acquiescence, Pilate was badly mistaken. As one, the Jews fell to the ground and bared their necks, crying that they would rather die than break their laws. Pilate was astonished and realized that he would have to give in.²¹ The offending standards were removed from the Antonia, and peace was restored, though the incident had made the Jews of Judaea even more fearful for the Temple’s safety.

Four years later the Temple was threatened again. A small procession, headed by a man riding on a donkey, came down the Mount of Olives, through the Kidron Valley, and into Jerusalem. There were cries of “Hoshannah!” and “Save us, Son of David!” Some people cut down branches and waved palm shoots. Word went around that the young man was Jesus, a prophet from Nazareth in Galilee. As he drew near to the city, it was said that Jesus wept: Jerusalem would not accept him, and in the not-too-distant future it would suffer a fearful punishment. The Holy City would be surrounded by its enemies and razed to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered. Not one stone would be left standing. Then, as if to give point to his words, Jesus entered the city and made straight for the Temple. He made a whip of short cords and drove out the money-changers and vendors of sacrificial pigeons from the Court of the Gentiles. “Does not scripture say: My house will be called a house of prayer?” he demanded. “You have turned it into a robber’s den.”²² It was the week before Passover, and Jesus spent a lot of time preaching in the Temple courts. He foretold that Herod’s magnificent Temple would shortly be laid waste. “You see those great buildings?” he asked his disciples. “Not a single stone will be left on another: everything will be destroyed.”²³ Mark, author of the earliest of the four gospels that describe Jesus’s life, tells us that as soon as the chief priests heard about Jesus’s demonstration in the Court of the Gentiles, they were resolved to get rid of him. Any threat to the Temple, especially during the crowded and emotional festival of Passover, was likely to lead to violence, which, in turn, could result in dreadful reprisals. Jesus was a risk that the Jewish people could not afford.

What did Jesus mean by his provocative outburst in the Temple? We can only speculate, since the gospels do not give us much information. Jesus had already acquired a following in the small towns and villages of Galilee, where he had worked as a healer and an exorcist. The people called him a prophet. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be the Messiah—our sources are ambiguous; he certainly made no attempt to raise an army to drive the Romans out of Palestine, as other would-be messiahs had attempted to do in the country regions after Herod’s death. Zechariah had foretold that the Messiah would be a humble ruler and would come to them riding on an ass. Perhaps Jesus’s procession into the city had been a demonstration, showing the people that in God’s Kingdom, Jerusalem would be ruled by the Poor, not by a militaristic king like Herod. Jesus evidently believed that the Day of YHWH was at hand. Like other apocalyptic seers, he foresaw the return of the Twelve Tribes to Israel and claimed that they would be ruled by twelve of his disciples.²⁴ It was also generally thought that after his final victory, YHWH would build a new Temple in Jerusalem, where he would be worshipped by all the nations. When he drove out the money changers and pigeon-sellers, Jesus was not protesting against the commercial abuse of sacred space. Such vendors were essential to the running of any temple in late antiquity and would have occasioned no outrage. Instead, Jesus was probably making another prophetic gesture to demonstrate the imminent End when Herod’s beautiful Temple would be replaced by a shrine not made with human hands. There was nothing startlingly original about Jesus’s pronouncements, but during the feast of national liberation the authorities might well have feared that they could inspire a demonstration against Rome.

Caiaphas would have been as familiar with the apocalyptic implications of Jesus’s gestures as anybody else in Judaea. But he could not allow provocative talk about the Temple so soon after Pilate’s attempted violation had brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe. On the first day of the festival he had Jesus arrested but let his disciples go free—a sign that he did not regard him as a major political threat. At his trial, Jesus was accused of vowing to destroy the Temple, but the witnesses could not agree and the charge was dropped. Caiaphas managed to get a conviction on a charge of blasphemy, however, and, since the Jews did not have the authority to inflict capital punishment, Jesus was sent to Pilate for sentencing. Pilate had Jesus scourged, condemned him to death by crucifixion, and forced him to carry his cross from the Praetorium through the streets of Jerusalem to a hill outside the city walls called Golgotha: the Place of the Skull (Latin: Calvarius). There Jesus was executed together with two bandits. Victims of crucifixion could linger for hours, but Jesus died quite quickly. As the Sabbath was approaching, his friends were anxious to bury him before sundown, so Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish governing council), got permission from Pilate to inter the body in his own tomb. This was one of the new cavelike sepulchers cut into the hillside conveniently near Golgotha. Jesus was buried hastily, the stone was pushed into place, and his friends resolved to come back to anoint the body properly after the Sabbath.

That should have been the end of the matter. But soon there were rumors that Jesus had risen from the dead. It was said that the women had found the tomb empty when they arrived there early on Sunday morning. Some of his disciples and relatives had visions of Jesus, walking, talking, and eating as though he were alive. Many people believed that the righteous would be raised from the dead on the Day of the Lord. Had Jesus been raised in advance of this imminent event? Perhaps he had been the Messiah, the forerunner of the coming redemption? Finally, during the festival of Weeks, while the disciples were praying together in a room in Jerusalem, they felt that they had been possessed by the spirit of YHWH and were convinced that this was the start of the new age foretold by the prophets when God’s presence would be felt more immediately than ever before. The members of the Jesus sect seemed to demonstrate this Presence: they performed miracles of healing, spoke in strange tongues, prophesied, and had visions. The idea that a man who had suffered the shameful death of crucifixion had been the Messiah was astonishing, but the sect soon attracted new converts and was eventually accepted as an authentic Jewish movement by the Sanhedrin at the behest of the distinguished Pharisee Gamaliel.²⁵ Certainly Jesus’s disciples did not think that they had founded a new religion: they continued to live as fully observant Jews and went every day in a body to worship in the Temple. Like the sectarians at Qumran, they called themselves the Evionim, the Poor: they gave their possessions away and lived a communal life, trusting in God for subsistence like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.²⁶ Theirs was an attractive piety which was admired by many of their fellow Jews. Soon, they believed, Jesus would return in glory and it would be clear to everyone that the Kingdom of God had finally arrived.

The Garden of Gethsemane on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, where Jesus prayed in agony before his arrest, was one of the earliest places venerated by the Christians of Jerusalem: most of the first Christian sacred sites were located outside the city walls.

The movement spread to nearby cities and towns. There was a large assembly or church in Jerusalem and others in Lydda, Joppa, Caesarea, Galilee, and Damascus. The Jerusalem church was led in these early days by three of Jesus’s leading disciples—Peter, James, and John—who were known as the “Pillars.”²⁷ A particularly important member was Jesus’s brother James, who was known as the Tzaddik, the Righteous Man. He had not been a follower of Jesus during his lifetime, but after the crucifixion he had been one of the first to see his risen brother in a vision; he would become a dominant member of the church, and by 50 CE would be its leader. James was held in high regard in Jerusalem. He lived a peculiarly austere life and was so scrupulous about ritual purity that, it was said, he was allowed to wear the priestly robes and to pray in the Court of the Priests. He also had good relations with the Pharisees and was respected by the Qumran community. James the Tzaddik shows how well integrated the Jesus sect was with Jewish religious life in Jerusalem. Far from abandoning the Torah, James and the Jerusalem church were committed to observance of every single mitzvah. Not one syllable of the law could pass away. The followers of Jesus were expected to go beyond the Torah’s prescriptions and become perfect Jews: if the Torah said “Thou shalt not kill,” they must not even get angry; if the Torah forbade adultery, they must not even look lustfully upon a woman.²⁸ Their duty was to live as exemplary Jews, worshipping in the Temple daily, until Jesus returned.

But in about 36 CE, it seems that some members of the Jesus movement clashed with mainstream Jews about the Temple. The Jerusalem community included some Greek-speaking Jews from the diaspora, who appear to have felt at a disadvantage among the Judaeans.²⁹ Their leader was Stephen, a charismatic speaker whose preaching gave great offense in the city. Like Jesus, he was hauled before the Sanhedrin and accused of speaking against the Torah and the Temple. The speech that Luke, who is traditionally held to be the author of the Acts of the Apostles, puts on Stephen’s lips is almost certainly not historical, but it may reflect a tendency that later became common in the diaspora churches and had its roots in this early conflict. Luke makes Stephen dwell on the number of times God had revealed himself to his people outside Jerusalem: in Mesopotamia, Haran, Egypt, Midian, and Sinai. Even Solomon had realized that God could not dwell in a man-made building.³⁰ Stephen so enraged the Sanhedrin that they rushed him outside the city and stoned him to death. Then, Luke says, they turned their wrath on the rest of the church. But not, apparently, on the “Pillars” and the original Palestinian followers of Jesus.³¹ It was probably only the Hellenes, the Greek-speaking Jews, who had to flee the city, taking refuge first in the countryside and then founding churches in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch.

It was at Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians” because of their assertion that Jesus had been the Christos, the Anointed One, the Messiah.³² The Antiochan Christians were joined in about 40 by another diaspora Jew who had originally been fanatically opposed to the Christian movement but had been converted by an overpowering vision of Jesus while traveling to Damascus to persecute the church there. Paul of Tarsus quickly became one of the Christian leaders of Antioch. He had an entirely different conception of Christianity from the Pillars of Jerusalem. In the last chapter we saw that during this period many people in the Greek world were beginning to find their ancestral traditions constricting. We know very little about Paul’s early life, but it seems as though he was one of the people who were looking for something new. He had studied Torah under Gamaliel and joined the Pharisee sect, but had come to experience the Torah as a burden that was destructive of his personal liberty. It could not bring him salvation, peace, and union with God.³³ After his vision on the road to Damascus, Paul came to believe that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s primary revelation to the world. The death and resurrection of Jesus had opened a new phase in salvation history. Jew and gentile alike could now enter the New Israel by means of the initiatory rite of baptism, which incorporated them mystically into Christ. There was, therefore, no need for Christians to observe the dietary laws, to keep themselves separate from the Goyim, or to practice circumcision, because these were the marks of the old covenant, which had now been superseded. All who lived “in Christ” were now sons of God and children of Abraham, whatever their ethnic origin.

Paul’s arresting revisionist interpretation of the gospel gained adherents in the diaspora not because it could be proved rationally nor because it was consistent with the historical facts of Jesus’s life and death. Paul’s view of Jesus appealed because it was so profoundly in tune with other religious developments in the Greco-Roman world at this time. As the American scholar Jonathan Z. Smith explains, there was a spiritual shift in late antiquity which was beginning to transform the old Temple cultus by giving the cosmos a human shape instead:

Rather than a city wall, the new enclave protecting men against external, hostile powers will be a human group, a religious association or a secret society. Rather than a return to chaos or the threat of decreation, the enemy will be described as other men or demons, the threat of evil or death. Rather than a sacred place, the new centre and chief means of access to divinity will be a divine man…³⁴

Smith traces these changes in Egypt in the story of Thessalos the Magician; he looks forward to the cult of the holy man in Syria during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. But we have also seen that this tendency had already appeared in Palestinian Judaism: the Pharisees and the Qumran sect had regarded their religious association as a new temple. Now the Christians were beginning to make the transition from Temple to divine man. Instead of the old rituals of pilgrimage and purification, the new Christian rites of passage would be conversion, initiation, and identification with the man Jesus, who had achieved divine status when he was raised by God from the dead.³⁵ Paul would teach Christians that Jesus was the locus of salvation; he would rescue them not from primal chaos but from the demonic powers of sin and death.

This assertion would seem blasphemous to many Jews as well as to the Pillars and their followers in Jerusalem. They found it shocking to think that the divine could be experienced in a mere man. But, as we have seen, the sacred always manifests itself in something other than itself. Considered objectively, a city or a temple was just as unsuitable a vehicle of the divine as a human being. Any symbol of the sacred, be it a building, a city, a literary text, a law code, or a man, is bound to be inadequate. The essential paradox at the heart of the religious quest is that the sacred manifests itself in the profane, the absolute in the relative, the eternal in the temporal. Indeed, like forms of Indian mysticism, Christianity would find the shock of this contradiction redemptive: the divine shows its love and also its sovereign freedom in adapting itself to an inferior mode of being.³⁶ The real mystery is that the sacred can be manifest at all. Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus illustrated what conversion would mean to many of the early Christians. It represented a reversal, a turning of old sacred values on their head, which many people were beginning to find liberating.

Henceforth Christianity would not be rooted in a particular place. The new Christian hero was not James the Tzaddik in the Jerusalem Temple but Paul the traveler, who had no abiding city in this world and is shown perpetually on the move. Still, the severance from Jerusalem was painful. There was a bitter clash between Paul and the mother church after James discovered that the Christians of Antioch were not eating kosher meat and were consorting freely with the Goyim. A compromise was reached whereby Paul was put in charge of the gentile mission. The prophets had always looked forward to the gentile nations coming to pay homage to YHWH in Jerusalem in the messianic age. Paul was now able to point out to the Pillars that the Goyim were indeed beginning to arrive in his churches. They manifestly possessed the Spirit as fully as the Jewish Christians, so was it appropriate for James to turn them away by making unrealistic demands about circumcision and observance of the whole of the Torah? In return for autonomy in the gentile mission, Paul promised that his converts would help the Evionim, the Poor of Jerusalem. Throughout his mission, Paul gave this collection for the Jerusalem church top priority. It was an important symbol of continuity, a way for his converts to express their spiritual debt to Judaism and a fulfillment of the ancient prophecy.³⁷ The gentiles really were bringing gifts to Jerusalem, so the final redemption must truly be at hand.

But when Paul actually arrived in Jerusalem with the money during the festival of Weeks, 58 CE, his presence in the Temple caused a riot and he was arrested by the Romans for causing a disturbance. He was accused of bringing one of his gentile converts past the balustrade and into the Court of the Israelites.³⁸ It is most unlikely that Paul had contravened the Law in this way, because one of his guiding principles was to be “all things to all men” and to cater to people’s religious sensitivities. Yet he did believe that the old barriers had come down and that the gentiles were no longer strangers in the Kingdom of God. Not only had the Torah been abrogated by the resurrection of Christ, the old sacred geography which had relegated the goyim to the margins of holiness had also been revoked. As Paul explained to his Ephesian converts, Jesus had “broken down the barrier which used to keep [Jews and Gentiles] apart” and therefore “you are no longer aliens or foreign visitors; you are citizens like all the saints, and part of God’s household.” Indeed, the Christians now formed a spiritual temple and were “being built into a house where God lives.”³⁹ Similarly to the Qumran sectarians, Paul’s Christians believed that God now dwelt on earth in the community of the faithful. Like other people in late antiquity, the Christians were beginning to bypass the earthly Temple and felt that they had already entered into the spiritual reality—the “heavenly Jerusalem”—which it symbolized.⁴⁰ But for those Jews who still believed that the Temple on Mount Zion provided the most certain means of access to God, this was blasphemous. Paul’s very presence in the Temple in 58 was felt as a threat, and, like Jesus and Stephen before him, Paul lost his freedom and ultimately his life because he had jeopardized the sanctity of Zion. Eventually, Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul was sent to Rome as a prisoner, since he had claimed his right as a Roman citizen to be tried by Caesar himself. Like the Jewish reformers at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, Paul, the rootless man of late antiquity, wanted to be a citizen of the world, not a son of Jerusalem. We do not know Paul’s ultimate fate. Legend has it that he died during the persecution of the Emperor Nero in 64, yet long after his death, the churches that he had founded in the Diaspora remained true to his Christian vision, and one day, ironically, these gentile Christians would make their own claim to Jerusalem.

The Jews had become even more defensive about their Temple since Pilate’s time, because its holiness had been seriously imperiled yet again. In 41, Emperor Gaius Caligula had given orders that his statue be erected in the Jerusalem sanctuary. When Petronius, the legate of Syria, arrived at the port of Ptolemaïs to carry out this difficult task, he had been confronted by “tens of thousands of Jews” with their wives and children massed on the plain in front of the city. They refused to give an inch in the ensuing negotiations, even though Caligula threatened that the entire population would be taken into captivity if they continued to resist. Yet again the Jews resorted to nonviolent methods, neglecting to harvest their crops, which meant that it was impossible for the Romans to collect the annual tribute. Some believed that God would step in to save them, and, indeed, he appeared to do so when the emperor was assassinated in Rome before he could carry out his threats.⁴¹

To appease the Jews, Caligula’s successor, Claudius, appointed Herod’s grandson Agrippa King of Jewish Palestine, and Jerusalem flourished under his brief rule. Agrippa expanded the Upper and Lower Markets in the Tyropoeon Valley and planned a third city wall around the northern district of Bezetha. His death in 44 was a severe blow. His son Agrippa II was too young to rule, so Claudius sent a new Roman governor to Judaea, but this time with the lower rank of procurator. The young King Agrippa II retained a high position in the government. There were signs of unrest in Palestine. A prophet called Theudas persuaded about four hundred people to follow him into the desert, where God would bring deliverance and liberate the Jews from Rome. Another prophet rose up under the procurator Felix (52–59), promising that he would drive the Romans from Jerusalem. Neither prophet attracted much of a following, and the Romans were able to crush them without much difficulty. Feelings could still explode during the national festivals. Thousands of Jews were trampled to death in the Temple courts at Passover during the procuratorship of Cumanus (48–52), when one of the soldiers on guard on the portico roof exposed himself and made obscene gestures to the crowds of pilgrims below. But despite these disturbances, Jerusalem continued to flourish. There were extremists who resorted to terrorism in the Holy City in a desperate attempt to end Roman hegemony, but during these years a modus vivendi with Rome seemed to have been established. In 59, King Agrippa II was allowed to take up residence in the old Hasmonean palace: Herod’s palace was now used as the residence of the procurator when he visited Jerusalem. The Temple was finally completed, and eighteen thousand workers were employed paving the city streets. Jerusalem had been granted a certain autonomy: Agrippa and the high priest governed the city jointly and cooperated amicably with the procurator in Caesarea.

But in 60, Rome began to appoint men of lesser caliber as governors of Judaea. Alibinus (60–62) was said to have taken bribes from the Jewish bandits who terrorized all who cooperated with Rome, and Gessius Florus (64–66) continued this practice. When riots broke out between the Jewish and Syrian residents of Caesarea, Florus found that he needed more cash and took the fatal step of commandeering money from the Temple treasury. Instantly the city exploded into violence, and the Jews fought the Roman cohorts in the streets. When he failed to restore order, Florus withdrew, asking for help from Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria. Gallus arrived in Palestine in mid-November prepared for war. He encamped on Mount Scopus and advanced on the northern suburb of Bezetha, but then, for some unexplained reason, he withdrew to Emmaus, hotly pursued by Jewish partisans. There his legion was defeated and the Jews killed more than five thousand Roman soldiers.

During this crisis, the Jews were engaged in their own internal struggles. The rebels did not command universal support. Many of the rural aristocracy as well as Jews in such towns as Sepphoris and Tiberias were opposed to the war against Rome. The Saducees, too realistic to imagine that the Jews could defeat the might of Rome, had abandoned their dream of Jewish independence. Many of the Pharisees were more concerned with religion than politics and realized that the Jews of the Diaspora would be seriously jeopardized by a Jewish revolt against Rome. King Agrippa tried to persuade the rebels to make peace: did they imagine that they were stronger than the Gauls, the Germans, or the Greeks, who had all been forced to submit to the power of the Roman empire? Josephus himself defected to the Roman side, convinced that the rebels had embarked on a suicidal cause. But a new, radical party of Zealots arose to oppose the moderates. They believed that Rome was in decline and that the Jews had a good chance of success. Had not the Maccabees shaken off foreign control and established an independent Jewish kingdom? They regarded those Jews who wanted to make peace as traitors to Zion and would not allow them to take part in the Temple liturgy. Only a small percentage of the Jewish population of Palestine supported the Zealots, and there was dissension even within their own ranks. Some of the more extreme withdrew to the fortress of Masada by the Dead Sea and took no further part in the war for the city. The Zealots were still fighting one another in Jerusalem after the defeat of Cestius Gallus, when it was clear that war with Rome was inevitable.

It was probably at this point that the Jewish Christians decided to leave Jerusalem. There had been occasional signs of strain between their church and the Jewish establishment. James the Pillar had been executed, and in 62, James the Tzaddik himself had been condemned to death by the high priest for “breaking the law,” even though eighty Pharisees protested to Rome on James’s behalf and died with him. The leadership of the Jerusalem church now passed to Simeon, Jesus’s cousin. He led his community to Pella in Transjordan: Jesus had foretold the destruction of Jerusalem, and the Christians knew that the city was doomed. Other Jews were resolved to fight to win. While they waited for Rome to avenge the defeat they had inflicted on Gallus, the Jewish residents of Jerusalem hastily built the Third Wall, which had been planned by Agrippa I, around Bezetha.

The Jews were unlucky that Rome dispatched its ablest general to quell the Jewish revolt. In 67, Vespasian arrived in Palestine and began systematically to defeat the pockets of resistance in Galilee. In 70, however, Vespasian was made emperor and returned to Rome, leaving his son Titus in charge of the Jewish war. Titus promptly began the siege of Jerusalem in February of that year. By May he had broken through the new northern wall, and a week later he demolished the Second Wall around the markets. The fighting now centered around the Temple itself. In late July the Romans captured the Antonia and began to bombard the Temple courts. The last sacrifice was offered on 6 August. But still the Jews did not give up. Many of the Zealots continued to believe that because God dwelt in the city, it could not fall. One prophet insisted that at the eleventh hour God would intervene miraculously to save his people and his Temple.⁴²

And so, when the Roman troops finally broke into the inner courts of the Temple on 28 August, they found six thousand Jewish Zealots waiting to fight to the death. The Greek historian Dio Cassius (d. 230) says that the Jews defended themselves with extraordinary courage, deeming it an honor to die in the defense of their Temple. Right up to the end, they observed the purity laws, each fighting in his appropriate place and, despite the danger, refusing to enter forbidden areas: “The ordinary people fought in the forecourt and the nobility in the inner courts, while the priests defended the Temple building itself.”⁴³ Finally they saw the Temple catch fire, and a terrible cry of horror arose.⁴⁴ Some flung themselves onto the swords of the Romans, others hurled themselves into the flames. But once the Temple had gone, the Jews gave up. They showed no interest in defending the Upper City or continuing the struggle from other fortresses nearby. Some asked leave to go out into the desert in the forlorn hope that this new exodus would lead to a new national liberation. The rest watched helplessly as Titus’s officers efficiently demolished what was left of the Temple buildings, though, it was said, the western wall of the Devir was left standing. Since this was where the divine Presence had been thought to rest, Jews drew some consolation from this.⁴⁵ But it was poor comfort. For centuries the Temple had stood at the heart of the Jewish world, and it was central to the Jewish religion. Once again it had been destroyed, but this time it would not be rebuilt.