Despite Governor Gallus’s reluctance to inform his emperor of what had happened, news of the Roman retreat from Judea soon spread throughout the Middle East. The city of Damascus in the south of the province of Syria had a large Jewish minority of some ten thousand people among its population, but prior to this, the Gentile anger against Jews that had seen the wholesale slaughter of Jewish people in Judea, Galilee, Egypt, and other Syrian cities had not manifested itself in Damascus.
To enable the Roman authorities to keep an eye on them, the Jewish population of the city had been forced from their homes and concentrated in the open gymnasiums of Damascus, where the locals normally did their daily exercise, but otherwise they had been left unmolested. Word of Governor Gallus’s disastrous expedition changed that. In a rage for revenge for the loss of Roman troops and in particular the loss of Syrian-born legionaries, a number of whom would have had family and friends in Damascus, the Hellenic population of Damascus rose up against their Jewish neighbors, and in just an hour they rampaged through the gymnasiums and cut the throats of all ten thousand Jewish men, women, and children.
In Jerusalem, while extremists crowed that the Romans had been ejected from Jerusalem for good, moderates among the leading priests warned the people that the Romans would be back, and they must prepare for that day throughout the region. Two moderates, Joseph ben Gorion and Ananus, the former high priest, were popularly elected to head a new governing council in Jerusalem. This council organized stonemasons and work parties to resume construction of the Third Wall on the city’s northern perimeter, construction that been terminated more than twenty years earlier. The priest Josephus watched as a spirit of preparedness for an eventual return of the Roman army swept throughout the city, and young men now every morning undertook physical exercise in the open spaces of the city—they did it individually, not as a group, Josephus observed. He also heard the sound of hammer on anvil ringing throughout Jerusalem as men bent their backs to fashioning weapons, ammunition, and armor without being asked or told to do so.
The governing council also appointed generals to take charge of partisan efforts in different regions. Joseph and Ananus took care to appoint fellow moderates to these posts, keeping power out of the hands of men who had lately shone in the defeat of the Romans but who were not of the priestly class. John the Essene, a priest of the Jewish Essene cult, was sent to take command in Thamna, Lod, Joppa, and Emmaus. Joseph bar Simon was sent to Jericho. John bar Matthias was given command in the Acrabatene and Gophnitica toparchies. To control partisan affairs in all of Galilee, the governors appointed Josephus, giving him a pair of priestly subordinates.
Josephus strapped on a bronze cuirass—the type of molded upper body armor worn by Roman officers—and slung a belt containing a sword over his shoulder. Then, leaving his wife; mother; father, Matthias Sr.; and elder brother, Matthias Jr., at the family home in Jerusalem, Josephus hurried to Gamala, the strongest city in Jewish hands in his districts of Upper and Lower Galilee. From there he sent out a call for partisan volunteers for an army he intended to train along Roman lines.
Josephus had never served with the Roman army, but he had witnessed the comings and goings of Roman cohorts while growing up in Jerusalem and had a rudimentary knowledge of their structure. When he’d journeyed to Rome in AD 64 to advocate the freedom of Jewish prisoners, he had seen close up the City Guard’s freedmen soldiers, the haughty bearded imperial guardsmen of the German Guard, and Rome’s feared military policemen, the Praetorian Guard. On that trip, he had won an audience with the empress Poppaea Sabina through a Jewish actor friend who was one of her favorites. Not only had Josephus obtained the freedom of the Jewish prisoners via the influence of the empress, he had come back impressed by the military might he had seen.
Tens of thousands of Jewish men answered Josephus’s call. Choosing sixty thousand of the youngest and fittest as foot soldiers, he appointed six hundred of them to be his personal bodyguard. He put 240 others on the few horses he could acquire—the donkey being the most common mode of transport in Judea. Josephus divided his recruits into infantry units of ten, one hundred, and one thousand. Appointing officers over them, arming them with weapons accumulated in the revolt so far, he began training them to emulate the Roman legions by marching in formation and responding to orders conveyed by trumpet calls.
To lead partisan forces in Idumea, the Jerusalem governors appointed Jesus bar Sapphias, one of the members of the Great Sanhedrin, and Eleazar bar Ananias, chief of the Zealots and son of the former High Priest Ananias, who had been killed by Menahem and his Sicarii. The appointment of Zealot leader Eleazar seems to have been designed to get him away from the seat of power. Niger of Perea, governor of Idumea, was meanwhile instructed to follow the orders of Jesus and Eleazar.
While some of these appointees, such as Josephus, assiduously went about their appointed tasks, petty jealousies caused others to decide to do their own thing. The Samaritan peasant leader Simon bar Giora, who’d made a name for himself capturing Roman artillery in the Beth Horon Valley, returned to his native territory and with a band of armed peasants ravaged the Acrabbene toparchy on the border of Samaria and Judea, raiding outlying farm villas and villages and torturing his victims.
When the rebel leadership at Jerusalem sent forces to counter this banditry, Simon and his men escaped south to the fortress at Masada. There, young Sicarii commander Eleazar ben Ya’ir gave them sanctuary. Since taking the fortress, Ben Ya’ir and his men had raided the oasis town of Ein Gedi, north of Masada. Apart from its Jewish residents, this town housed seven hundred women and children who were apparently the de facto wives and illegitimate children of the Syrian troops of the 3rd Gallica cohort that the Sicarii had wiped out on taking Masada. Separating these women and children from the Jewish men of the town, Ben Ya’ir and his men had mercilessly massacred the lot because of their connection to the Roman army.
Meanwhile, the former governor of Idumea, Niger of Perea, angry that others had been appointed over him, decided to take back control of Idumea for himself. He allied with Silas the Babylonian, who’d also been overlooked when the rebel commands were handed out, and John the Essene, who was apparently then based at Joppa on the Mediterranean coast. This trio independently put together an army to take over Idumea, starting with the Idumean coastal city of Ascalon, south of Joppa, which remained in the hands of a small Roman garrison.
At the time, Ascalon had a population of some fifteen thousand people, mostly Gentiles. Herod the Great had built public baths and fine colonnaded public areas in the city at his own expense, even though the thriving little metropolis was more Greco-Roman than Jewish. In the twentieth century, archaeologists would uncover examples of the statuary that adorned the city forum during this period—statues of Apollo, a war god, and Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, both of whom had been favored deities of Rome’s first emperor Augustus, as well as a statue of Pax, goddess of peace, with an olive branch in her hand. She was a favored deity of Vespasian.24
Ascalon was important to the Romans because this ancient Canaanite and Philistine port was a safe haven for the fleets of vital cargo ships carrying grain from Egypt to Italy every spring and summer. Those ships “coasted” from Alexandria to Italy’s ports, following the Mediterranean coastline all the way, and should a storm brew, they sought the safety of the nearest port. Ascalon was conveniently located between Egypt and Syria on this route. The city’s importance to Rome was such that when, in 6 BC, Judea became a Roman sub-province answerable to the proconsul of Syria, Ascalon separately reported to the proconsul in Antioch, not to Rome’s Judean procurator in Caesarea.
The rebels had a double interest in Ascalon. It offered rich pickings in terms of arms and booty and was the last Roman-occupied city south of Caesarea. So, the three go-it-alone partisan leaders put together a force of twenty thousand of “the most hardy” rebels, then marched on the city at the double.25
Ascalon was well protected against attack. The high, thick city wall curved inland from the coast in a half-moon shape that eliminated corners. At the seafront, the city sat on a high precipice, with a ramp ascending the cliff face from the dock to a single seaward entry gate. The city’s six-hundred-man Roman garrison was made up of 480 Syrians of a cohort of the 3rd Gallica Legion and a squadron of auxiliary cavalry, which Josephus tells us were mounted archers—Syria provided the Roman army with several wings of mounted archers, who were armed with a powerful and accurate composite bow as well as the standard cavalry broadsword.
In charge of the Ascalon garrison was the 3rd Gallica cohort’s Centurion Antonius. We know little about him other than the fact he possessed fine military strategic skills, which he was about to demonstrate. The centurion would have been on high alert for weeks ever since receiving news of the fate of the Jerusalem and Masada garrisons, and although the partisan force that descended on Ascalon moved rapidly across the coastal plain, he was ready for it, closing the city’s narrow gates. Leaving his legionaries stationed around the curve of the city walls, Antonius took his cavalrymen out and lined them up before the city as the attackers advanced from the northeast.
Excitedly, the thousands of partisans swarmed up to the waiting Roman cavalry, which stood its ground, then charged. Soon, the Jews were being driven back by Antonius’s sword-wielding riders. Leading from the front, two of the rebel leaders, Silas the Babylonian—the only rebel with any military experience—and John the Essene were both quickly cut down. Panic then set in among their leaderless men. Rebels at the front turned and tried to flee in panic, trampling comrades who were pressing up from behind.
Throwing away their weapons, rebels ran in all directions. On the flat plain, there was nowhere to hide. Roman cavalrymen chased down fleeing partisans and herded them back to the city as prisoners. There, the Jews were stripped and then run through by the swords of Antonius’s legionaries. Out on the plain, other cavalrymen hunted down and bunched together terrified partisans, then “killed them easily with their arrows,” according to Josephus.26
The slaughter lasted until nightfall, when the Romans’ arms ached from all the killing and they could lift them no longer. Josephus says that ten thousand Jews were killed by Antonius and his few hundred men that day, while the Romans suffered nothing more than several wounded. The surviving Jewish commander, Niger of Perea, led wounded survivors to an Idumean village called Sallis in the foothills of the Judean Mountains—identified by some scholars as the village of Kefar Shihlayim—where they took refuge as Antonius and his cavalry withdrew.
Niger and his rebels spent some days recovering before Niger sent out a call for reinforcements. When thousands of fresh fighters arrived, he led them back toward Ascalon. Centurion Antonius had been expecting this and lay in wait for the rebels with both infantry and cavalry, ambushing Niger’s force as they came though several narrow hill passes. Rebels who escaped this ambush onto the plain were mown down by the waiting Roman cavalry. A further eight thousand Jewish partisans were killed in these engagements.
Niger and a few of his men escaped to a village Josephus calls Bezedeh, which is likely to have been today’s Beit Guvrin, due east of Ascalon and seven miles further inland from Kefar Shihlayim. Beit Guvrin is renowned for its caves, and in the second century it would become the Roman military base of Eleutheropolis. Here, Niger and his companions took refuge in a town watchtower, which was apparently made of wood.
The Romans pursued these last rebels, and, surrounding the Bezedeh tower, Antonius and his men set fire to it. As the tower burned furiously, the Roman troops withdrew, expecting no one to survive the inferno. They returned to Ascalon, unaware that there was a network of caves beneath the tower. Three days later, relatives sifting through the burned-out tower wreckage looking for Niger’s body to give it a decent burial heard Niger calling for help from beneath the ground—like a voice from the grave. Niger, the sole survivor of his rebel force, had escaped into a cave beneath the tower and survived the fire, only to be trapped beneath the wreckage. Amid cries that Niger’s preservation was a miracle and he had been chosen by God to lead his people, he was hauled out.
This ended rebel efforts to take Ascalon from its Roman garrison. The city would remain in Roman hands for the remainder of the revolt. But the disastrous campaign to take Ascalon was not the end of Niger’s career as an influential rebel commander. Jerusalem would before long feel the heat of his passion for power.