Fields of Blood (28 page)

The
Jewish revolt had broken out in
Jerusalem in 66 after the Roman governor had commandeered money from the temple treasury. Not everybody supported it. The
Pharisees in particular feared that it would make trouble for diaspora Jews, but the new party of
Zealots (
kanaim
) thought that they had a good chance of success because the empire was currently split by internal dissension. They managed to drive out the Roman garrison and set up a provisional government, but the emperor
Nero responded by dispatching a massive army to
Judea led by
Vespasian, his most gifted general. Hostilities were suspended during the disturbances that followed Nero’s death in 68, but after Vespasian became emperor, his son
Titus took over the siege of Jerusalem, forced the Zealots to capitulate, and on August 28, 70, burned city and temple to the ground.

In the
Middle East, a temple carried such symbolic weight that an ethnic tradition could barely sustain its loss.
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Judaism owed its survival to a group of scholars led by
Yohanan ben Zakkai, leader of the Pharisees, who transformed a faith based on temple worship into a religion of the book.
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In the coastal town of
Yavneh, they began to compile three new scriptures: the
Mishnah, completed around 200, and the Jerusalem and
Babylonian
Talmuds, which reached their final form in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively. At first, most of the rabbis probably assumed that the temple would be rebuilt, but those hopes were quashed when the emperor
Hadrian visited Judea in 130 and announced that he would build a new city called
Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem. The following year, as part of his policy of uniting the empire culturally, he outlawed
circumcision, the ordination of rabbis, the teaching of the
Torah, and public Jewish gatherings. Inevitably, perhaps, there was another revolt, and the tough Jewish soldier
Simon bar Koseba planned his guerrilla campaign so skillfully that he held Rome at bay for three years.
Rabbi Akiva, a leading Yavneh scholar, hailed him as the messiah, calling him
Bar Kokhba (“Son of the Star”).
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But Rome finally gained control, systematically destroying almost a thousand Jewish villages
and killing 580,000 Jewish rebels, while countless civilians were either burned to death or died of hunger and disease.
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After the war, Jews were expelled from Judea and would not be permitted to return for over five hundred years.

The violence of this imperial assault profoundly affected Rabbinic
Judaism. Instead of allowing Jews to bring their more aggressive traditions to the fore, they deliberately marginalized them, determined to prevent any more catastrophic military adventures.
⁹⁷
In their new academies in Babylonia and
Galilee, they therefore evolved a method of exegesis that excised any adulation of chauvinism or belligerence. They were not particularly peaceable men—they fought their scholarly battles fiercely—but they were pragmatists.
⁹⁸
They had learned that Jewish tradition could survive only if Jews learned to rely on spiritual rather than physical strength.
⁹⁹
They could not afford any more heroic messiahs.
¹⁰⁰
They recalled Rabbi
Yohanan’s advice: “If there is a seedling in your hand and you are informed ‘King Messiah has arrived,’ first plant your seedling and then go forth to greet him.”
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Other rabbis went further: “Let him come, but let me not see him!”
¹⁰²
Rome was a fact of life, and Jews must come to terms with it.
¹⁰³
The rabbis scoured their biblical and oral traditions to show that God had decreed Rome’s imperial power.
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They praised Roman technology and instructed Jews to make a blessing whenever they saw a gentile king.
¹⁰⁵
They devised new rules forbidding Jews to bear arms on the
Sabbath or to bring weapons into the House of Studies, because violence was incompatible with Torah scholarship.

The rabbis made it clear that instead of being an inflammatory force, religious activity could be used to quell violence. They either ignored the bellicose passages of the
Hebrew Bible or gave them a radically new interpretation. They called their exegetical method
midrash
—a word derived from
darash:
“to investigate; go in search of something.” The meaning of scripture was not, therefore, self-evident; it had to be ferreted out by diligent study, and because it was God’s word, it was infinite and could not be confined to a single interpretation. Indeed, every time a Jew confronted the sacred text, it should mean something different.
¹⁰⁶
The rabbis felt free to argue with God, defy him, and even change the words of scripture to introduce a more compassionate reading.
¹⁰⁷
Yes, God was often described as a divine warrior in the Bible, but Jews must imitate only his compassionate behavior.
¹⁰⁸
The true hero was no longer a warrior but a man of peace. “Who is the hero of heroes?” asked the
rabbis. “He who turns an enemy into a friend.”
¹⁰⁹
A “mighty” man did not prove his mettle on the battlefield but was one “who subdues his passions.”
¹¹⁰
When the prophet
Isaiah had seemed to praise a soldier “who thrusts back his attacker to the gate,” he was really speaking of “those who thrust a parry in the way of Torah.”
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The rabbis described
Joshua and David as pious Torah scholars and even argued that David had had no interest in warfare at all.
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When the Egyptian army drowned in the
Sea of Reeds, some of the angels had wanted to sing
Yahweh’s praises, but he had rebuked them: “My children lie drowned in the sea, and you would sing?”
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The rabbis acknowledged that there were divinely ordained wars in their scriptures. They concluded that the campaigns against the
Canaanites had been “obligatory” wars, but the
Babylonian rabbis ruled that because these peoples no longer existed, warfare could no longer be compulsory.
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The Palestinian rabbis, however, whose position in Roman
Palestine was more precarious, argued that Jews were still obliged to fight sometimes—but only in self-defense.
¹¹⁵
David’s territorial wars had been “discretionary,” but the rabbis pointed out that even kings had to ask permission of the
Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing body, before taking the field. Yet they concluded that because the
monarchy and Sanhedrin were no more, discretionary wars were no longer legitimate. They also interpreted a verse in the
Song of Songs in such a way as to discourage mass uprisings that could lead to gentile reprisals: “I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, by the hinds of the field, not to stir my love, nor rouse it, till it please to awake.”
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Israelites must not take provocative action (“to stir love”); there must be no mass migrations to the Land of Israel and no more rebellions against gentile rule until God issued a directive (“till it please to awake”). If they remained quiet, God would not permit persecution, but if they disobeyed, they would, “like the hinds of the field,” be fair game for gentile violence.
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This abstruse piece of exegesis effectively put a brake on Jewish political action for over a millennium.
¹¹⁸

By the middle of the third century CE, the
Roman Empire was in crisis. The new
Sassanian dynasty in
Persia had conquered Roman territory in
Cilicia,
Syria, and
Cappadocia; the
Gothic tribes in the Danube basin continuously attacked the frontier; and Germanic warrior bands
harried
Roman garrisons in the
Rhine Valley. In a short span of sixteen years (268–84), eight emperors were assassinated by their own troops. The economy was in ruins, and local aristocracies fought for power in the cities.
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Rome was eventually saved by a military revolution, led by professional soldiers from the frontier region, which transformed the Roman
army.
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Aristocrats no longer filled the top positions, the army doubled in size, and legions were broken up into smaller, more flexible detachments. A mobile cavalry force, the
comitatus,
supported the garrisons on the borders, and for the first time Roman citizens were taxed to finance the army. By the end of the third century, the
barbarians in the
Balkans and northern
Italy had been repulsed, the
Persian advance had been halted, and Rome had recovered its lost territory. The new Roman emperors were no longer of noble birth: Diocletian (r. 284–305) was the son of a freedman of
Dalmatia, Galerius (r. 305–11) a former cattle
herder in Carpathia, and Constantius Chlorus (r. 305–06) an undistinguished country gentleman from
Nis. They centralized the empire, taking direct control of taxation instead of leaving it to the local nobility, and most significantly, Diocletian shared power with three co-emperors by creating the
tetrarchy
(“rule of four”):
Maximian and Constantius Chlorus governed the western provinces, and Diocletian ruled in the east with Galerius.
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The third-century crisis brought
Christianity to the attention of the
imperial authorities. Christians had never been popular; by refusing to take part in the civic cult, they seemed suspicious and easily became scapegoats at times of social tension. According to
Tacitus,
Nero had blamed Christians for the great fire of Rome and put many to death—these people may be the
martyrs seated near God’s throne in the book of
Revelation.
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The
North African theologian
Tertullian (c. 160–220) complained: “If the
Tiber rises to the walls, if the
Nile fails to rise and flood the fields, if the sky withholds its rain, if there is earthquake or
famine or plague, straightway the cry arises: ‘The Christians to the lions!’ ”
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But it was not customary for an agrarian ruling class to interfere with the religious lives of its subjects, and the empire had no standard policy of persecution. In 112, when
Pliny, governor of Bithynia, asked the emperor
Trajan how he should treat Christians who were brought before him, Trajan replied that there was no official procedure. Christians should not be actively hunted out, he advised, but if they came before the courts for some reason and refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods, they should be
executed for defying the imperial government. Christians who did die in this way were venerated in their communities, and the
Acts of the Martyrs, which told the stories of their deaths in lurid detail, were read aloud in the liturgy.

Yet against all odds, by the third century Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with. We still do not really understand how this came about.
¹²⁴
It has been suggested that the rise of other new religious movements in the empire had made Christianity appear less bizarre. People were now seeking the divine in a human being who was a “friend of God” rather than in a holy place; secret societies, not unlike the Church, were mushrooming throughout the empire. Like Christianity, many of these had originated in the eastern provinces, and they too required a special initiation, offered a new revelation, and demanded a conversion of life.
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Christianity was also beginning to appeal to merchants and artisans like Paul, who had left their hometowns and taken advantage of the
Pax
Romana to travel and settle elsewhere; many had lost touch with their roots and were open to new ideas. The egalitarian ethic of Christianity made it popular with the lower classes and slaves. Women found the Church attractive, because the Christian scriptures instructed husbands to treat their wives considerately. Like
Stoicism and
Epicureanism, Christianity promised inner tranquillity, but its way of life could be followed by the poor and illiterate as well as by members of the aristocracy. The Church had also begun to appeal to some highly intelligent men, such as the
Alexandrian
Platonist
Origen (185–254), who interpreted the faith in a way that interested the educated public. As a result of all this, the Church had become a significant organization. It was not
religio licita,
one of the approved traditions of the empire, so could not own property, but it had ejected some of its wilder elements, and like the empire itself, it claimed to have a single rule of faith; it was multiracial, international, and administered by efficient bureaucrats.
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