Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (12 page)

Spurred by the legions under his command, Vespasian halted his campaign in Judea and
hastened to Rome to stake his own claim to the throne. The haste, it seems, was unnecessary.
Long before he reached the capital in the summer of 70
C.E
., his supporters had taken control of the city, murdered his rivals, and declared
Vespasian sole emperor.

Yet the Rome that Vespasian now found himself ruling had undergone
a profound transformation. The mass civil unrest had given rise to a great deal of
consternation about the decline of Roman power and influence. The situation in distant
Judea was particularly galling. It was bad enough that the lowly Jews had rebelled
in the first place; it was inconceivable that after three long years, the rebellion
still had not been crushed. Other subject peoples revolted, of course. But these were
not Gauls or Britons; they were superstitious peasants hurling rocks. The very scale
of the Jewish Revolt, and the fact that it had come at a time of profound social and
political distress in Rome, had created something akin to an identity crisis among
the Roman citizenry.

Vespasian knew that to consolidate his authority and address the malaise that had
descended upon Rome, he needed to focus the people’s attention away from their domestic
troubles and toward a spectacular foreign conquest. A small victory would not do.
What the emperor required was an absolute pummeling of an enemy force. He needed a
Triumph: a fabulous display of Roman might replete with captives, slaves, and spoils
to win over his disgruntled citizens and strike terror into the hearts of his subjects.
And so, immediately upon taking the throne, Vespasian set out to complete the task
he had left unfinished in Judea. He would not simply quash the Jewish rebellion; that
would be insufficient to make his point. He would utterly annihilate the Jews. He
would wipe them from the earth. Devastate their lands. Burn their temple. Destroy
their cult. Kill their god.

From his perch in Rome, Vespasian sent word to his son Titus to march at once to Jerusalem
and spare no expense in bringing the rebellion of the Jews to a swift and decisive
end. What the emperor could not have known was that the rebellion was on the verge
of collapsing on its own.

Not long after Menahem was murdered and the Sicarii banished from Jerusalem, the rebels
began preparing for the Roman invasion they were certain was on the horizon. The walls
surrounding
the city were fortified, and preparations were made to gather as much military equipment
as was available. Swords and arrows were collected, suits of armor forged, catapults
and ballista balls stacked along the city’s perimeter. Young boys were hurriedly trained
in hand-to-hand combat. The whole city was in a panic as the rebels manned their positions
and waited for the Romans to return and reclaim Jerusalem.

But the Romans never came. The rebels were certainly aware of the devastation taking
place around them. Every day a horde of bruised and bloodied refugees poured into
Jerusalem; the city was bursting at its borders. But the Roman reprisals were thus
far focused solely on the countryside and major rebel strongholds such as Tiberias,
Gamala, and Gischala. The longer the rebels waited for the Romans to arrive in Jerusalem,
the more fractured and unstable the city’s leadership became.

Early on, a transitional government of sorts had been formed, made up mostly of those
among Jerusalem’s priestly aristocracy who had joined the rebellion, many of them
reluctantly. This so-called “moderate” faction was in favor of coming to terms with
Rome, if that was still possible. They wanted to surrender unconditionally, beg for
mercy, and submit once more to Roman rule. The moderates enjoyed a good deal of support
in Jerusalem, particularly among the wealthier Jews who were looking for a way to
preserve their status and property, not to mention their lives.

But an even larger and more vocal faction in Jerusalem was convinced that God had
led the Jews into war against Rome and that God would lead them to victory. Things
may have seemed bleak at the moment, and the enemy invincible. But that was part of
God’s divine plan. Did not the prophets warn that in the final days “the sown places
shall appear unsown and the storehouses shall be found empty” (2 Esdras 6:22)? Yet
if the Jews would only remain loyal to the Lord, then very soon they would see Jerusalem
clothed in glory. The trumpets would sound and all who heard
them would be struck with fear. The mountains would flatten and the earth would open
up to swallow God’s enemies. All that was required was faithfulness. Faithfulness
and zeal.

At the head of this camp was a coalition of peasants, lower-class priests, bandit
gangs, and recently arrived refugees who came together to form a distinct revolutionary
faction called the Zealot Party. Poor, pious, and antiaristocratic, the members of
the Zealot Party wanted to remain true to the original intention of the revolt: to
purify the Holy Land and establish God’s rule on earth. They were violently opposed
to the transitional government and its plans to surrender the city to Rome. This was
blasphemy. It was treason. And the Zealot Party knew well the punishment for both.

The Zealot Party took over the Temple’s inner courtyard, where only the priests were
permitted, and from there unleashed a wave of terror against those they deemed insufficiently
loyal to the rebellion: the wealthy aristocracy and upper-class Jews; the old Herodian
nobles and the Temple’s former leadership; the chief priests and all those who followed
the moderate camp. The leaders of the Zealot Party set up their own shadow government
and drew lots to determine which of them would be the next high priest. The lot fell
to an illiterate country peasant named Phanni son of Samuel, who was dressed up in
the high priest’s gaudy vestments, placed before the entrance of the Holy of Holies,
and taught how to perform the sacrifices while the remnants of the priestly nobility
watched from a distance, weeping at what they perceived to be the desecration of their
holy lineage.

As the bloodshed and internecine battles between rival groups continued, even more
refugees began to flood into the city, adding fuel to the fires of factionalism and
discord that threatened to engulf all of Jerusalem. With the moderates silenced, there
were now three principal camps vying with one another for control over the city. While
the Zealot Party, which consisted of about twenty-five hundred men, held the inner
court of the Temple, the outer courts fell into the hands of the former leader of
the rebellion in Gischala,
a well-to-do urbanite named John, who had barely escaped the Roman destruction of
his city.

At first, John of Gischala threw in his lot with the Zealot Party, with whom he shared
a devotion to the religious principles of the revolution. Whether John himself could
be called a zealot is difficult to say. He was undoubtedly a fierce nationalist with
a deep hatred of Rome at a time in which national sentiment and messianic expectation
were inextricably linked. He even melted down the sacred vessels of the Temple and
turned them into implements of war with which to fight the armies of Rome. But a fight
over control of the Temple ultimately forced John to break with the Zealot Party and
form his own coalition, which consisted of some six thousand fighting men.

The third and largest rebel camp in Jerusalem was led by Simon son of Giora, one of
the bandit leaders who fought off the initial assault on Jerusalem by Cestius Gallus.
Simon had spent the first year of the Jewish Revolt scouring the Judean countryside,
plundering the lands of the wealthy, setting slaves free, and earning a reputation
as the champion of the poor. After a brief stay with the Sicarii in Masada, Simon
came to Jerusalem with a massive personal army of ten thousand men. At first, the
city welcomed him, hoping he could rein in the excesses of the Zealot Party and clip
the wings of John of Gischala, who was becoming increasingly authoritarian in his
conduct. Although Simon was unable to wrest the Temple from either of his rivals,
he did manage to seize control over most of the upper and lower city.

Yet what truly set Simon apart from the rest of the rebel leaders in Jerusalem is
that, from the very beginning, he unabashedly presented himself as messiah and king.
Like Menahem before him, Simon dressed himself in kingly robes and paraded about the
city as its savior. He declared himself “Master of Jerusalem” and used his divinely
anointed position to begin rounding up and executing the upper-class Jews whom he
suspected of treason. As a result, Simon son of Giora ultimately came to be recognized
as the supreme
commander of the fractured rebellion—and just in time. For no sooner had Simon consolidated
his authority over the rest of the rebel groups than Titus appeared at the city gates,
with four Roman legions in tow, demanding Jerusalem’s immediate surrender.

All at once, the factionalism and feuding amongst the Jews gave way to frantic preparations
for the impending Roman assault. But Titus was in no hurry to attack. Instead, he
ordered his men to build a stone wall around Jerusalem, trapping everyone inside and
cutting off all access to food and water. He then set up camp on the Mount of Olives,
from which he had an unobstructed view of the city’s population as they slowly starved
to death.

The famine that ensued was horrible. Entire families perished in their homes. The
alleys were filled with the bodies of the dead; there was no room, and no strength,
to bury them properly. The inhabitants of Jerusalem crawled through the sewers searching
for food. People ate cow dung and tufts of dry grass. They stripped off and chewed
the leather from their belts and shoes. There were scattered reports of Jews who succumbed
to eating the dead. Those who attempted to escape the city were easily captured and
crucified on the Mount of Olives for all to see.

It would have been sufficient for Titus to simply wait for the population to perish
on their own. He would not have needed to unsheathe his sword to defeat Jerusalem
and end the rebellion. But that is not what his father had sent him there to do. His
task was not to starve the Jews into submission; it was to eradicate them from the
land they claimed as their own. Thus, in late April of 70
C.E
., as death stalked the city and the population perished by the hundreds from hunger
and thirst, Titus rallied his legions and stormed Jerusalem.

The Romans threw up ramparts along the walls of the upper city and began bombarding
the rebels with heavy artillery. They constructed a massive battering ram that easily
breached the first wall surrounding Jerusalem. When the rebels retreated to a second
interior wall, that, too, was breached and the gates set on fire. As the flames slowly
died down, the city was laid bare for Titus’s troops.

The soldiers set upon everyone—man, woman, child, the rich, the poor, those who had
joined in the rebellion, those who had remained faithful to Rome, the aristocrats,
the priests. It made no difference. They burned everything. The whole city was ablaze.
The roar of the flames mixed with screams of agony as the Roman swarm swept through
the upper and lower city, littering the ground with corpses, sloshing through streams
of blood, literally clambering over heaps of dead bodies in pursuit of the rebels,
until finally the Temple was in their sights. With the last of the rebel fighters
trapped inside the inner courtyard, the Romans set the entire foundation aflame, making
it seem as though the Temple Mount was boiling over at its base with blood and fire.
The flames enveloped the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the God of Israel,
and brought it crashing to the ground in a pile of ash and dust. When the fires finally
subsided, Titus gave orders to raze what was left of the city so that no future generation
would even remember the name Jerusalem.

Thousands perished, though Simon son of Giora—Simon the failed messiah—was taken alive
so that he could be dragged back to Rome in chains for the Triumph that Vespasian
had promised his people. Along with Simon came the sacred treasures of the Temple:
the golden table and the shewbread offered to the Lord; the lampstand and the seven-branched
Menorah; the incense burners and cups; the trumpets and holy vessels. All of these
were carried in triumphal procession through the streets of Rome as Vespasian and
Titus, crowned with laurels and clad in purple robes, watched in silent resolution.
Finally, at the end of the procession, the last of the spoils was carried out for
all to see: a copy of the Torah, the supreme symbol of the Jewish religion.

Vespasian’s point was hard to miss: This was a victory not over a people, but over
their god. It was not Judea but Judaism that had
been defeated. Titus publicly presented the destruction of Jerusalem as an act of
piety and an offering to the Roman gods. It was not he who had accomplished the task,
Titus claimed. He had merely given his arms to his god, who had shown his anger against
the god of the Jews.

Remarkably, Vespasian chose to waive the customary practice of
evocatio
, whereby a vanquished enemy had the option of worshipping its god in Rome. Not only
would the Jews be forbidden to rebuild their temple, a right offered to nearly every
other subject people in the empire; they would now be forced to pay a tax of two drachmas
a year—the exact amount Jewish men once paid in shekels to the Temple in Jerusalem—in
order to help rebuild the Temple of Jupiter, which was accidentally burned down during
the Roman civil war. All Jews, no matter where in the empire they lived, no matter
how loyal they had remained to Rome, no matter if they had taken part in the rebellion
or not—every Jew, including women and children, was now forced to pay for the upkeep
of the central pagan cult of Rome.

Henceforth, Judaism would no longer be deemed a worthy cult. The Jews were now the
eternal enemy of Rome. Although mass population transfer had never been a Roman policy,
Rome expelled every surviving Jew from Jerusalem and its surrounding environs, ultimately
renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and placed the entire region under direct imperial
control. All of Palestine became Vespasian’s personal property as the Romans strove
to create the impression that there had never been any Jews in Jerusalem. By the year
135
C.E
., the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents.