CHAPTER THREE
Zeal for Your House Consumes Me
It was a casual, almost offhand remark; unscripted, though hardly inadvertent—not from a politician for whom public professions of faith had become a kind of verbal tic, a president whose most prosaic speeches were peppered with biblical allusions. It was the spontaneity of the remark, which, James Carroll noted, “came to him as naturally as a baseball reference,” that caused such a jolt. It was as though the world, having waited four anxious days for America’s response to the most heinous violation of its shores in half a century, was able to peel back the curtain of counselors and coaches who directed the president’s every move and, for a brief, fleeting moment, peer into the mind of the man himself.
I caught the statement on television and recognized immediately, along with millions of Americans and hundreds of millions around the globe, that the new century had just been branded for a generation or more.
“This crusade,” President Bush said, pausing for what seemed like an eternity. “This war on terrorism.” Pause. “Is going to take a while.”
Crusade.
The word hung in the air like an undetonated bomb, long enough for its myriad implications to come to mind; long enough, surely, for that one most devastating inference to be fully absorbed.
“Crusade” means “holy war;” it was the Crusades that originated the term. This is no simple word but an emblem for an era when the cross of Christ was brandished as a sword by one barbaric, theocratic empire against another barbaric, theocratic empire. As Carroll notes, the Crusades were not just a series of military campaigns, they were the defining event that shaped “a cohesive western identity precisely in opposition to Islam, an opposition that survives to this day.”
No doubt this is how a great many Americans—already brimming with religious fury—understood the term, as did a large swath of the Arab and Muslim world, which had been feeling edgy and discomfited by President Bush’s overt evangelical worldview ever since he had taken office. It certainly did not help matters that “Crusades” is rendered into Arabic as hurub as-salib—“The Wars of the Cross”—which is how the Arab press reported Bush’s statement: “this war of the cross … this war on terrorism …”
True, President Bush made a hasty about-face, going out of his way in the following weeks to assure Muslims around the world that he had no intention of launching a campaign against Islam. “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,” he declared, as his advisers stumbled over one another to explain that the word he had used was not meant in its historical sense. This was “crusade” with a lowercase c: an aggressive campaign against an idea or a movement, as in “a crusade against evildoers.”
But even as I accepted these excuses and explanations, I recognized how futile they were, not because I was incapable of forgiving a flub but because in that first, intuitive reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the man to whom the whole of the world was looking to provide meaning and context to what had happened (and what would happen in response) had, in a sudden, involuntary stumble, set the tone for the first great conflict of the new century. At the very least, Bush had ensured that henceforth “this war on terrorism,” which at that point had yet to be defined by anyone, would become synonymous with “this crusade.” In doing so, he not only gave Americans an apocalyptic lens through which to view the coming conflict with the Muslim world (though, in truth, many Americans needed no encouragement), he responded with precisely the cosmic dualism that those who carried out the attacks had intended to provoke. As bin Laden gleefully declared to a reporter a few days after the president’s comment, “Our goal is for our Muslim community to unite in the face of the Christian Crusade … Bush said it himself: Crusade… People make apologies for him; they say he didn’t mean to say that this was a Crusader war, even though he himself said it was!”
“The odd thing about this,” bin Laden continued, “is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.”
The connection between crusade and colonialism—and, more broadly, between Christianity and Western imperialism—has since been etched into the Arab psyche. In many Muslim majority states, it is still the principal frame of reference through which relations with Europe and North America are viewed. When, in September 2005, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten published a series of offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad—Muhammad wearing a bomb for a turban; Muhammad standing before two cowering, veiled women, brandishing a curved sword—leading to angry protests across Europe, a Muslim cartoonist responded with a caricature of his own: a Crusader knight, his breastplate emblazoned with Denmark’s national flag (a blood-red cross), perched on an armored horse, brandishing a pencil as a lance.
For Jihadists, the Crusades are not so much a historical event as they are an ideological construct—an enduring narrative whose final chapter is only now being written in the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, except it is no longer Europe but America that, as the locus of Christian imperialism in the twenty-first century, has “taken up the cross” in the eternal cosmic battle between Christianity and Islam. “This battle is not between al-Qa’ida and the U.S.,” bin Laden announced in October 2001. “This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders.”
Such polarizing rhetoric is not easy to dismiss. Much as the Crusades helped transform a fragmented Europe into a single corpus christianum by redirecting the violence of Europe’s warring princes toward a common foe, so do they now provide a fractured Muslim world with a symbol of unity and defiance against foreign aggression, both real and imagined. “Bush said, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with terrorism,’” bin Laden exclaimed. “[I say] either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam.”
The Crusades were the quintessential expression of cosmic war: a divine conflict thought to be taking place simultaneously on earth and in the heavens. On a purely material level, the Crusades functioned first and foremost as an expression of papal authority over external (Jews, Muslims) and internal (heterodox Christians, disobedient princes) enemies of the Church. The intricate web of papal indulgences, donations, subsidies, and taxes that funded the entire crusading enterprise—“the practical business of the cross,” as one historian calls it—created a wholly new financial relationship between the Church and the royals by centralizing wealth and military power in the hands of the pope. Those who took part in the campaigns were offered not only forgiveness of sins but also forgiveness of debts, immunity from prosecution, even promises of booty seized from Muslim lands.
At the same time, the Crusades were consciously conceived of as a new means of earning salvation from the Church. This was war as an act of piety; its purpose, as spelled out by Pope Urban II in 1095 during the Council of Clermont, the ecclesiastical gathering that initiated the First Crusade, was to grant forgiveness of sins to those who would fight against the Church’s enemies. “I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds … to destroy that vile race [the Muslims] from the lands of our friends,” Urban demanded of the priests, knights, and princes gathered in the small French town. “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.”
Urban was not the first pope to offer salvation to those who fought on behalf of the Church; similar promises had been made by Popes Leo IV and John VIII two hundred years earlier. In fact, the Crusades were part of a long and steady process of Christian militarization that had begun with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine around 313 C.E. Almost overnight, the provincial religion inspired by an itinerent Jew from the Galilee became an imperial religion, and the cross of Christ was turned into a banner of war. This sudden transformation radically altered the perception of Christians when it came to the notion of war and violence. The early followers of Jesus, living in a state of constant persecution and political weakness, had focused their ideas of war on the apocalyptic plane—Christ would one day return as “a warrior on a white horse,” his eyes “like a flame of fire,” his vestments “dripping with blood,” his tongue “a sharp-edged sword” with which he would “strike down the nations” with vengeance (Revelation 19:11–15). But with the merging of Rome and Christianity, the Church’s spiritual enemies became indistinguishable from Rome’s political enemies. By the time the first Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood. The chronicles of Raymond of Agiles, who rode with the knights of God during the First Crusade, bear witness to the almost unimaginable violence unleashed upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem: the Crusaders cut off the heads of Muslims and Jews, shot them with arrows, tortured them by casting them into fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet littered the cobblestoned streets. The Crusaders rode in blood up to their bridle reins, slashing their way through the bodies of the dead—men, women, and children—until they arrived at the Temple Mount, which they soaked in blood. “This day,” declared an exultant Raymond, “marks the justification of all Christianity and the humiliation of paganism; our faith is renewed.”
It may be difficult to reconcile the unrestrained bloodlust of these Medieval Christian soldiers with Jesus’s commandments to “love one’s enemies” and “turn the other cheek.” But that is because Christianity’s conception of cosmic war is derived not from the New Testament but from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The knights who raped and pillaged their way to the Holy Land, who, in the words of the Christian chronicler Radulph of Caen, “boiled pagan adults whole in cooking pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” were cosmic warriors walking in the path of the Lion of Judah, not the Lamb of God.
God, as conceived of in the ancient mind, was not a passive force in war but an active soldier. Central to biblical ideas about cosmic war was the belief that it is not human beings who fight on behalf of God, but rather God who fights on behalf of human beings. Sometimes God is the only warrior on the battlefield. When the Babylonians conquered Mesopotamia, they did so not in the name of their king but in the name of their god, Marduk, who was believed to have sanctioned, initiated, and commanded each battle. The same holds true for the Egyptians and their god Amun-Re; the Assyrians and their god, Ashur; the Canaanites and their god, Baal; and, most especially, the Israelites and their god, Yahweh.
Throughout the Bible, God is frequently presented as fighting on behalf of the Israelites, whose size and strength in battle are meaningless. “Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few” (1 Sam. 14:6). Often, all the Israelites need do is stand back and believe. Behold Moses, unwavering on the banks of the Sea of Reeds, Pharaoh’s chariots racing toward him: “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today,” Moses exhorts the trembling Israelites. “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” With a wave of his staff, the waters are driven back and the sea made dry as land. Even the Egyptians recognize the presence of Israel’s God on the battlefield. “Let us flee from the Israelites,” they cry, “for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.”
It is too late. Another wave of the staff and the sea returns to its flow. The whole of Pharaoh’s army is drowned. “Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore” (Ex. 14:30–31).
God’s divine intervention in battle can take many forms, from direct action—as when the Lord hurls “huge stones from heaven” upon the fleeing men of Gibeon so that “there were more who died because of the hailstones than the Israelites killed with the sword” (Josh. 10:11)—to the excitation of nature: the creation of hail, wind, or sandstorms; the spreading of famine or disease among the enemy.
Regardless of the form of intervention, what matters is the belief that God is actively present in the battle. God “travels along with Israel’s camp” (Deut. 23:14). He marches with his armies, personally commanding the forces on the ground, making strategic decisions as the fight rages around him. “Shall I go up against the Philistines?” David, the king of Israel, inquired of the Lord. “You shall not go up,” the Lord replied. “Go around to their rear, and come upon them opposite the balsam trees” (2 Sam. 5:19, 23).
The battle is God’s battle, the enemy is God’s enemy, the strategy is God’s strategy, the victory is God’s victory. Indeed, when it comes to war, there is little room in the Bible for human notions of justice and morality. Whatever God decrees is ethical and right. The only limits are God’s limits. “Now go and attack the Amalekites,” God orders Saul, Israel’s incipient king, “and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:3).
This act of “utter annihilation” (herem, in Hebrew), in which God commands the wholesale slaughter of “all that breathes,” is a recurring theme in the Bible. The Israelites thought of idolatry (the worship of foreign gods) as a virus that contaminated everything around it. Mere separation from the gods of foreign tribes was not enough to ensure purity. To truly rid the land of the idolatrous force and ensure the exclusive worship of Israel’s god, neighboring tribes had to be eradicated. “Anyone who sacrifices to any god but Yahweh shall be utterly destroyed” (Exod. 22:20). Yet even that was not enough to contain the virus. The enemy’s land, livestock, farms and fields, gold and silver had also to be destroyed, “lest they make you sin against me,” says the Lord (Exod. 23:33).
Hence the tale of the hapless Achan, narrated in the book of Joshua. After the fall of Jericho, when Israel had “devoted to destruction all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys” (Josh. 6:21), Achan secretly ferreted away some of the city’s loot for himself, burying it beneath his home. When discovered, Achan was not only forced to return the objects so that they could be destroyed, he himself, having been contaminated by the idolatrous force, was stoned to death, along with his wife, his children, and his children’s children. Their corpses, and all of Achan’s property and livestock, were dumped on a pyre and set on fire (Josh. 7:16–26).
Obviously, when confronting any biblical text, one must remember that these are not descriptions of historical events but rather theological reflections of events long since past. Archaeological evidence suggests that some of the tribes the Israelites claimed to have annihilated were actually absorbed into their nation. But the biblical ideal of cosmic war is exceedingly clear. It is “ethnic cleansing as a means of ensuring cultic purity,” to quote the great biblical scholar John Collins. It was, in fact, the principal means through which the nation was made. Follow the trail of blood left behind by Joshua’s armies as he systematically rid the Promised Land of foreigners:
Joshua took Makkedah, he utterly destroyed every person in it, he left none remaining; Then Joshua, and all Israel with him, passed on to Libnah, and struck it with the edge of his sword, and every person in it, he left none remaining; Next Joshua passed on to Lachish, and struck it with the edge of his sword, and every person in it. From Lachish Joshua passed on to Eglon, and every person in it he utterly destroyed, as he had done to Lachish; Then Joshua went up from Eglon to Hebron, he left none remaining; Then Joshua turned back to Debir, and all Israel with him, and utterly destroyed every person in it, he left none remaining; Thus Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, the lowland and the slopes, he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel had commanded, because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel (Josh. 10:28–42).
As we shall see, the biblical conception of cosmic war as an act of utter annihilation still lingers in the imaginations of a few radical, right-wing Jewish groups in modern-day Israel that hold fast to God’s command to cleanse the Holy Land of all “foreign” elements, no matter the cost. But at the turn of the first millennium C.E., in the turbulent landscape of first-century Palestine,* one group of religious nationalists pushed the biblical doctrine of cosmic war to its ghastly extreme. They were known as the Zealots.
The Zealots were not a formal religious group or political party. They were a loosely affiliated, heterogeneous movement of Jewish revolutionaries, centered in the Galilee—long a hotbed of radicals and rabble-rousers—who shared contempt for the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and a fierce opposition to the Temple authorities. Some Zealots were members of the priestly class; others raged against the priesthood. Some practiced prophecy and soothsaying, while others seemed wholly detached from all aspects of the Jewish religion. A few Zealots were pacifists, but the great majority believed in the unflinching use of violence against both the Roman occupiers and those Jews they termed “collaborators.” A great many Zealots were little more than roaming bands of outlaws and bandits. Yet despite their differences, what united all of these brigands and revolutionaries under the mantle of “Zealot” was an appeal to the biblical doctrine of zeal.
Best defined as “jealous anger,” biblical zeal implies an unwavering commitment to God’s rule, an uncompromising fidelity to God’s law, and, most crucially, the complete separation of God’s people from their neighbors. It is in the divine character of God that the doctrine of zeal finds its inspiration. “The Lord your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God,” the Bible says (Deut. 4:24). This is a God who tolerates no equal, abides no partner, accepts no portion but the whole. He demands absolute and unqualified devotion and reacts with uninhibited rage when receiving anything less. To worship the God of Israel with zeal is to burn with a similar, all-consuming jealousy—for his word, his law, and his eternal rule, on earth and in heaven.
The most celebrated model of biblical zeal is Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron (Moses’ brother). In those days, a plague festered among the Israelites as God’s anger burned against his Chosen People. In direct violation of God’s law, the Jews had been engaging in sexual acts with neighboring Moabite women, and even sacrificing to Moabite gods. In a jealous fit, God instructs Moses, as leader of the community, to take all the Jews who had violated their sexual purity and “impale them in the sun before the Lord, in order that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel” (Num. 25:4). But before Moses can follow through on God’s command, the young Phinehas decides to take up God’s call, on his own and without guidance.
Phinehas spies a Jew named Zimri leading a Moabite woman into his tent. He follows them inside, where, in an act of personal zeal, he thrusts his spear into their copulating bodies. All at once, the plague is lifted. “Phinehas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the Israelites,” God informs Moses, “by manifesting such zeal among them on my behalf that in my jealousy I did not consume the Israelites” (Num. 25:11). Far from being punished for the murder of a fellow Jew, Phineas is rewarded by God with “a covenant of peace.” Henceforth, he and his family will be granted perpetual priesthood, “because he was zealous for his God” (Num. 25:13).
Phinehas’s example of spontaneous, individual action as an expression of God’s jealous anger and as atonement for the sins of the Jewish nation became the model of personal righteousness in the Bible. When Elijah slaughtered the priests of God’s Canaanite rival, Baal, he did so because he was “zealous for the Lord” (1 Kings 19:10). When King Jehu massacred every inhabitant of Samaria, it too was to demonstrate his “zeal for the Lord” (2 Kings 10:15–17). Most pious Jews in the first century C.E. revered these biblical heroes and strove to emulate their zeal, each in his or her own way. But for the Zealots, zeal was more than just a doctrine. It was a symbol of collective identity and a call to collective action.
The origins of the Zealot movement can be traced to the year 6 C.E., when Rome called for a census to be taken of all of Syria and Palestine. It was customary for the Romans to conduct periodic registers of their citizens, along with their wives, children, slaves, and property, for the purpose of proper taxation. But this time, a small band of Jewish reactionaries from the Galilee decided to take a stand: They would not be counted. The land was not Rome’s to be parceled out and tallied. The land was God’s, and only God could claim ownership of it. To cooperate with the Roman census would be to acknowledge Rome’s dominion, and that would be an act of sacrilege: a violation of the first and greatest commandment, revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, to take no other god besides Yahweh (Exod. 20:3). Any Jew who deigned to be registered by Rome was in effect swearing allegiance to Rome instead of to God and was thus no longer a Jew. He was an apostate; he would be slated for death.
At first, these reactionaries congregated around a charismatic rabbi named Judas the Galilean, who, along with an obscure Pharisee named Zaddok (or Saddok), founded a new sect of Judaism that the first-century historian Flavius Josephus called the Fourth Philosophy (the first three philosophies being the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes). This sect—perhaps faction is a more accurate designation—distinguished itself from all other religio-political groups in first-century Palestine by focusing on a single, all-encompassing ideology: the sole rule of God. Members of the Fourth Philosophy pledged to serve no lord save the One Lord. God was their King, and his Kingdom, though enthroned in Jerusalem, encompassed the whole of the world.
This was not some future kingdom to be established at the end of time. The future was already here; God’s Kingdom had already arrived. All that was needed was to acknowledge this fact and begin acting upon it, which required not only the rejection of all earthly authorities but, as the Hebrew Bible demands, the removal of all gentiles, foreigners, and apostate Jews from the Promised Land: purification through destruction, just as the Lord had commanded when the Israelites had first set foot upon the Holy Land five hundred years earlier. Only when the Jews refused to be slaves to Rome could they rightfully call God their master. Only when the land was cleansed of foreigners would God’s reign on earth be realized. Redemption was at hand. A decision had to be made: to be with God or with Rome. There was no middle ground.
To emphasize their unconditional commitment to the sovereignty of God, the members of the Fourth Philosophy would not use or even touch a coin on which the image of Caesar was engraved. They would not walk through gates upon which were perched statues of Roman gods. They would touch no one outside of their group, and if they did, they cleansed themselves immediately. If they came upon an uncircumcised Jew, they would forcibly circumcise him; if they heard a Jew call anyone Lord except God, they would kill him on the spot.
Although it is unclear whether members of the Fourth Philosophy referred to themselves as Zealots, there is no doubt that they were the first revolutionary movement in Palestine to use the doctrine of zeal to unite the various economic, political, and religious grievances of the Jews for a single aim: the establishment of the rule of God. Zeal provided a familiar symbol, recognized by all Jews, around which a new collective identity could be formed—an identity beyond the control of the Temple authorities. Adherence to zeal set the members of the Fourth Philosophy apart from all other Jews in Palestine, whose acquiescence to Rome made them collaborators at best, apostates at worst. The example of the Bible’s zealous heroes became a sanction for the use of violence. Indeed, zeal in the name of God demanded violence, for it was the sacred duty of the Jews to maintain the purity of the land.
Convinced that God would reward their zeal, Judas and his tiny band of followers launched a reckless and ill-considered revolt against Rome. They knew that victory over the Roman empire was impossible, but they never wavered from their belief that, in Josephus’s words, “God would more surely assist them in their undertaking, if, inspired by such ideals, they spared no effort to realize them.” In any case, they were not concerned with victory. They were merely following God’s will.
It was a short-lived revolution. Judas’s rag-tag army was easily annihilated by the Roman legions, and Judas himself was killed in battle. His followers were captured and crucified en masse on the outskirts of the city—crucifixion being the standard Roman punishment for sedition.
But Judas the Galilean was not forgotten. Of the many charismatic revolutionaries who roamed Palestine at the turn of the first century, he is one of only a handful to be mentioned in the New Testament (Acts 5:37). By making opposition to Roman occupation a religious duty, and by being willing to resort to violence in order to bring about Israel’s liberation, Judas the Galilean created a model of resistance that would be revived a generation later by a more determined group of zealous revolutionaries, who, having learned a valuable lesson from the failure of Judas’s uprising, recognized that the best way to rid the Promised Land of the Roman abomination was not to attack Rome directly but to provoke Rome into attacking the Jews, thus forcing their fellow countrymen to war.
Through targeted assassinations and random acts of violence, these new, one could say reawakened Zealots (like their predecessors, united less by a cohesive political platform than by a shared sense of zeal for God) launched a new campaign of terror throughout Palestine. They abducted members of the Jewish aristocracy and held them for ransom. They slayed both Roman officials and Temple priests in broad daylight, on feast days and holidays, in markets and temples, in the midst of great crowds. Their main purpose seems to have been to prove that they could strike at will, that no one was safe. “More terrible than the crimes themselves was the fear they aroused, every man hourly expecting death, as in war,” Josephus wrote. Some even fomented Jewish pogroms in an attempt to create a siege mentality among the Jews, to convince them that war with Rome was inevitable, that it was decreed.
And yet, despite the murder and mayhem they unleashed upon Palestine, these pious revolutionaries remained enormously popular, particularly among the young. This was not a peasants’ revolt. The Zealots and their compatriots enjoyed widespread support among all classes in Palestine. Their leaders were urban intellectuals who longed for social transformation. A considerable number came from respectable families, and a few seem to have held important positions in society. These weren’t thugs or brutes; they were among the best and brightest of Jewish society.
What made the revolutionaries so popular and admired was not their opposition to Roman rule (a sentiment shared by practically every Jew in first-century Palestine) but rather how blatantly their uncompromising beliefs threw into relief the hypocrisy of the Temple priests. The priests acquiesced to Rome and sacrificed to its gods. The Zealots, when captured, would undergo the most gruesome torture and yet not deny God’s sovereignty. The Temple priests presided over a complex infrastructure of tithes and taxation, all to their own enrichment. The Zealots raided the Temple treasury and destroyed the logs of the moneylenders, making the collection of debts impossible and thus leveling the economic playing field in Jerusalem. The Temple priests, and in particular the High Priest, purchased their positions from Rome. Among the first actions taken by the Zealots after war with Rome had finally been declared, in 66 C.E., was to oust the entire priestly nobility from the Temple and draw lots to select who would be the High Priest. (The lot fell to an illiterate country peasant named Phanni, son of Samuel, from the village of Aphthia.) The point is that while the Temple may have had jurisdiction over the religious lives of all Jews, while it may have had sole authority to define the meaning and message of Judaism, it could not command the loyalties of a band of Jews whose very identity was constructed in opposition to the Temple.
Still, it would be inaccurate to think of the Zealot movement as a religious movement. This motley group of priests, brigands, and social revolutionaries functioned more as a primitive social movement, one focused as much on the liberation of Israel as on religious purity. Considering that most Jews in first-century Palestine would have framed their political and religious sentiments in the same language, the Zealots’ call for “the sole rule of God” would have been indistinguishable from the call for freedom from Roman occupation. As Josephus wrote, “They had an invincible love of liberty, for they held God to be their only lord and master.”
It took many years for the rebels to convince their fellow Jews in 66 C.E. to rise up against Rome. And though this revolt lasted longer than the revolt of Judas the Galilean (66–69 C.E.), it too was eventually quashed, and without mercy. The war fought against what the Rabbinate of the time referred to as the “Evil Kingdom” lasted all of three years.
When, in 70 C.E., the Romans recaptured Jerusalem, they razed the Temple and defiled its ashes. Anyone with ties to the rebellion was executed, down to the last child. Every Jew—including the Christian Jews—was forced out of the holy city into permanent exile. A small band of the most ardent revolutionaries escaped to the desert and hunkered down inside an impenetrable mountain fortress west of the Dead Sea called Masada. There they waited out a Roman siege for three long, agonizing years. When the Romans finally breached Masada’s walls, they found everyone inside the fortress dead. The last of the rebels—husbands, wives, children, nearly one thousand souls—had committed collective suicide, taking turns killing one another with knives and swords rather than surrender to Rome. Cosmic warriors do not surrender.
Masada today is a popular tourist destination. Its austere grandeur is unlike anything else in a land of austere grandeur. From the top of its isolated, flat rock precipice, one can see for miles across the briny waters of the Dead Sea. Every year, Israeli troops from the Army, Air Force, and Sea Corps are, after basic training, marched to the top of the fortress at Masada—the place where, two millennia ago, one thousand Jewish revolutionaries took their own lives and the lives of their wives and children rather than surrender their independence—and sworn into the Israel Defense Forces with the oath “Masada shall never again fall!”
The ceremony is symbolic, nothing more. Just as the past and the present meld into one in the Holy Land, so too do the sacred and the profane. But symbols are slippery; their meanings cannot be so easily controlled. For the Israeli soldier who stands atop Masada, this majestic place may be a symbol of heroism and national independence. But for a new movement of radical ideological settlers and Jewish cosmic warriors who have revived the Zealot ideal in modern-day Israel, Masada means something else entirely.