Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (5 page)

For the next hundred years, the Hasmonaeans ruled God’s land with an iron fist. They
were priest-kings, each sovereign serving as both King of the Jews and high priest
of the Temple. But when civil war broke out between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus
over control of the throne, each brother foolishly reached out to Rome for support.
Pompey took the brothers’ entreaties as an invitation to seize Jerusalem for himself,
thus putting an end to the brief period of direct Jewish rule over the city of God.
In 63
B.C.E
.,
Judea became a Roman protectorate, and the Jews were made once again a subject people.

Roman rule, coming as it did after a century of independence, was not warmly received
by the Jews. The Hasmonaean dynasty was abolished, but Pompey allowed Hyrcanus to
maintain the position of high priest. That did not sit well with the supporters of
Aristobulus, who launched a series of revolts to which the Romans responded with characteristic
savagery—burning towns, massacring rebels, enslaving populations. Meanwhile, the chasm
between the starving and indebted poor toiling in the countryside and the wealthy
provincial class ruling in Jerusalem grew even wider. It was standard Roman policy
to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them
dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. By aligning their interests
with those of the ruling class, Rome ensured that local leaders remained wholly vested
in maintaining the imperial system. Of course, in Jerusalem, “landed aristocracy”
more or less meant the priestly class, and specifically, that handful of wealthy priestly
families who maintained the Temple cult and who, as a result, were charged by Rome
with collecting the taxes and tribute and keeping order among the increasingly restive
population—tasks for which they were richly compensated.

The fluidity that existed in Jerusalem between the religious and political powers
made it necessary for Rome to maintain close supervision over the Jewish cult and,
in particular, over the high priest. As head of the Sanhedrin and “leader of the nation,”
the high priest was a figure of both religious and political renown with the power
to decide all religious matters, to enforce God’s law, and even to make arrests, though
only in the vicinity of the Temple. If the Romans wanted to control the Jews, they
had to control the Temple. And if they wanted to control the Temple, they had to control
the high priest, which is why, soon after taking control over Judea, Rome took upon
itself the responsibility of appointing and deposing (either directly or indirectly)
the high priest, essentially
transforming him into a Roman employee. Rome even kept custody of the high priest’s
sacred garments, handing them out only on the sacred festivals and feast days and
confiscating them immediately after the ceremonies were complete.

Still, the Jews were better off than some other Roman subjects. For the most part,
the Romans humored the Jewish cult, allowing the rituals and sacrifices to be conducted
without interference. The Jews were even excused from the direct worship of the emperor,
which Rome imposed upon nearly every other religious community under its dominion.
All that Rome asked of Jerusalem was a twice-daily sacrifice of one bull and two lambs
on behalf of the emperor and for his good health. Continue making the sacrifice, keep
up with the taxes and tribute, follow the provincial laws, and Rome was happy to leave
you, your god, and your temple alone.

The Romans were, after all, fairly proficient in the religious beliefs and practices
of subject peoples. Most of the lands they conquered were allowed to maintain their
temples unmolested. Rival gods, far from being vanquished or destroyed, were often
assimilated into the Roman cult (that is how, for example, the Canaanite god Baal
became associated with the Roman god Saturn). In some cases, under a practice called
evocatio
, the Romans would take possession of an enemy’s temple—and therefore its god, for
the two were inextricable in the ancient world—and transfer it to Rome, where it would
be showered with riches and lavish sacrifices. Such displays were meant to send a
clear signal that the hostilities were directed not toward the enemy’s god but toward
its fighters; the god would continue to be honored and worshipped in Rome if only
his devotees would lay down their arms and allow themselves to be absorbed into the
empire.

As generally tolerant as the Romans may have been when it came to foreign cults, they
were even more lenient toward the Jews and their fealty to their One God—what Cicero
decried as the “barbarian superstitions” of Jewish monotheism. The Romans
may not have understood the Jewish cult, with its strange observances and its overwhelming
obsession with ritual purity—“The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred,”
Tacitus wrote, “while they permit all that we abhor”—but they nevertheless tolerated
it.

What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict
devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable
superiority complex. The notion that an insignificant Semitic tribe residing in a
distant corner of the mighty Roman Empire demanded, and indeed received, special treatment
from the emperor was, for many Romans, simply incomprehensible. How dare they consider
their god to be the sole god in the universe? How dare they keep themselves separate
from all other nations? Who do these backward and superstitious tribesmen think they
are? The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering
how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws
to the victors.”

For the Jews, however, this sense of exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance
or pride. It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign
presence in the land he had set aside for his chosen people. That is why, when the
Jews first came to this land a thousand years earlier, God had decreed that they massacre
every man, woman, and child they encountered, that they slaughter every ox, goat,
and sheep they came across, that they burn every farm, every field, every crop, every
living thing without exception so as to ensure that the land would belong solely to
those who worshipped this one God and no other.

“As for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,”
God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You
shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites,
the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy
20:17–18).

It was, the Bible claims, only after the Jewish armies had “utterly destroyed all
that breathed” in the cities of Libnah and Lachish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir,
in the hill country and in the Negeb, in the lowlands and in the slopes—only after
every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of
Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.

And yet, a thousand years later, this same tribe that had shed so much blood to cleanse
the Promised Land of every foreign element so as to rule it in the name of its God
now found itself laboring under the boot of an imperial pagan power, forced to share
the holy city with Gauls, Spaniards, Romans, Greeks, and Syrians—all of them foreigners,
all of them heathens—obligated by law to make sacrifices in God’s own Temple on behalf
of a Roman idolater who lived more than a thousand kilometers away.

How would the heroes of old respond to such humiliation and degradation? What would
Joshua or Aaron or Phineas or Samuel do to the unbelievers who had defiled the land
set aside by God for his chosen people?

They would drown the land in blood. They would smash the heads of the heathens and
the gentiles, burn their idols to the ground, slaughter their wives and their children.
They would slay the idolaters and bathe their feet in the blood of their enemies,
just as the Lord commanded. They would call upon the God of Israel to burst forth
from the heavens in his war chariot, to trample upon the sinful nations and make the
mountains writhe at his fury.

As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God’s chosen people to Rome for some
coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was
an insult to God. It was a blight upon the entire land.

It had to be wiped away.

King of the Jews

In the years of tumult that followed the Roman occupation of Judea, as Rome became
enmeshed in a debilitating civil war between Pompey Magnus and his erstwhile ally
Julius Caesar, even while remnants of the Hasmonaean Dynasty continued vying for the
favors of both men, the situation for the Jewish farmers and peasants who harrowed
and sowed God’s land steadily worsened. The small family farms that for centuries
had served as the primary basis of the rural economy were gradually swallowed up by
large estates administered by landed aristocracies flush with freshly minted Roman
coins. Rapid urbanization under Roman rule fueled mass internal migration from the
countryside to the cities. The agriculture that had once sustained the meager village
populations was now almost wholly focused on feeding the engorged urban centers, leaving
the rural peasants hungry and destitute. The peasantry were not only obligated to
continue paying their taxes and their tithes to the Temple priesthood, they were now
forced to pay a heavy tribute to Rome. For farmers, the total could amount to nearly
half their annual yield.

At the same time, successive droughts had left large swaths of the countryside fallow
and in ruin as much of the Jewish peasantry
was reduced to slavery. Those who managed to remain on their wasted fields often had
no choice but to borrow heavily from the landed aristocracy, at exorbitant interest
rates. Never mind that Jewish law forbade the charging of interest on loans; the massive
fines that were levied on the poor for late payments had basically the same effect.
In any case, the landed aristocracy expected the peasants to default on their loans;
they were banking on it. For if the loan was not promptly and fully repaid, the peasant’s
land could be confiscated and the peasant kept on the farm as a tenant toiling on
behalf of its new owner.

Within a few years after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, an entire crop of landless
peasants found themselves stripped of their property with no way to feed themselves
or their families. Many of these peasants immigrated to the cities to find work. But
in Galilee, a handful of displaced farmers and landowners exchanged their plows for
swords and began fighting back against those they deemed responsible for their woes.
From their hiding places in the caves and grottoes of the Galilean countryside, these
peasant-warriors launched a wave of attacks against the Jewish aristocracy and the
agents of the Roman Republic. They roamed through the provinces, gathering to themselves
those in distress, those who were dispossessed and mired in debt. Like Jewish Robin
Hoods, they robbed the rich and, on occasion, gave to the poor. To the faithful, these
peasant gangs were nothing less than the physical embodiment of the anger and suffering
of the poor. They were heroes: symbols of righteous zeal against Roman aggression,
dispensers of divine justice to the traitorous Jews. The Romans had a different word
for them. They called them
lestai
. Bandits.

“Bandit” was the generic term for any rebel or insurrectionist who employed armed
violence against Rome or the Jewish collaborators. To the Romans, the word “bandit”
was synonymous with “thief” or “rabble-rouser.” But these were no common criminals.
The bandits represented the first stirrings of what would become a nationalist resistance
movement against the Roman occupation.
This may have been a peasant revolt; the bandit gangs hailed from impoverished villages
like Emmaus, Beth-horon, and Bethlehem. But it was something else, too. The bandits
claimed to be agents of God’s retribution. They cloaked their leaders in the emblems
of biblical kings and heroes and presented their actions as a prelude for the restoration
of God’s kingdom on earth. The bandits tapped into the widespread apocalyptic expectation
that had gripped the Jews of Palestine in the wake of the Roman invasion. One of the
most fearsome of all the bandits, the charismatic bandit chief Hezekiah, openly declared
himself to be the messiah, the promised one who would restore the Jews to glory.

Messiah
means “anointed one.” The title alludes to the practice of pouring or smearing oil
on someone charged with divine office: a king, like Saul, or David, or Solomon; a
priest, like Aaron and his sons, who were consecrated to do God’s work; a prophet,
like Isaiah or Elisha, who bore a special relationship with God, an intimacy that
comes with being designated God’s representative on earth. The principal task of the
messiah, who was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, was to rebuild
David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah
at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome. Indeed,
the day would come when these angry bands of peasant gangs would form the backbone
of an apocalyptic army of zealous revolutionaries that would force the Romans to flee
Jerusalem in humiliation. In those early years of the occupation, however, the bandits
were little more than a nuisance. Still, they needed to be stopped; someone had to
restore order in the countryside.