Chapter 10

SMASHING GOD’S HOUSE

How Apocalyptic and Messianic Ideas Drove Political Action

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tries hearts.

PROVERBS 17:3, RSV

WHEN JESUS TRAVELED to Jerusalem to take part in the feast of Passover, he arranged a symbolically laden entry into the city, in which he rode on an ass. While his disciples strewed palm leaves in front of him, they cried slogans praising the return of the Davidic kingdom. Such a display infuriated the Temple authorities, who decided to move against the new sect. Jesus was arrested, and during his trial he was asked whether he claimed to be the Messiah. According to some accounts, Jesus uttered the fateful words “I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). His condemnation inevitably followed.

The fact that the authorities were so profoundly sensitive to any hint of insurgency can only be understood against the background of the previous 250 years, which had so popularized apocalyptic and messianic ideas. Whatever Jesus actually said or did, his followers knew precisely which scripts were being enacted and the appropriate biblical texts to cite in his support. When he invoked the Son of Man, he was echoing Daniel or 1 Enoch, and the cryptic narrative of the Wicked Shepherd in Second Zechariah decisively shaped accounts of his final weeks. Moreover, the spiritual revolution of the Crucible Years had created a near-perfect revolutionary religious and political ideology. It not only justified and demanded resistance to illegitimate authority, but also offered supernatural scenarios that gave the hope of inevitable victory.

Through the first century CE, political events moved toward catastrophe with what in hindsight looks like the inevitability of a mighty tragedy, which climaxed with full-scale revolution and civil war in the 60s. But although the Jewish nationalist movement ended in cataclysm, the underlying ideas survived and prospered, laying the foundation for new and world-changing religious structures.

JUST HOW THOROUGHLY the new religious synthesis was shaping political action may be seen from some sensational events that occurred in 4 BCE. That may also have been the date that Jesus was born.

In that year, the city of Jerusalem was, yet again, in a state of turmoil. On the basis of false rumors that King Herod the Great—the Roman client king of Judea—had died, revolutionary nationalists decided to strike a blow for Jewish independence and freedom, for the rebirth of a purified Jewish state. Two suicidally brave scholars, Mattathias and Judah, destroyed an imperial Roman eagle that Herod had ordered erected at the Temple gate. They proudly admitted to royal officials that they had done it, even though they faced death on the pyre. Basing themselves in the theories of martyrdom that had emerged in the previous two centuries, the men asked why should they not exult. “It was a glorious thing to die for the laws of their country; because the soul was immortal, and an eternal enjoyment of happiness did await such as died on that account.” Even so, the campaign they launched failed badly. Far from being dead, Herod was still sufficiently in control to strike forcefully at the perpetrators.1

Herod actually did die shortly afterward, preventing him from taking full revenge on his countless enemies, and there were high hopes of a new, less exploitative regime under his teenage successor, Archelaus. According to Josephus, “the people” assembled to demand that the new ruler implement a new regime, but Archelaus was terrified of the crowds flocking into the city for the Passover feast. He ordered his soldiers to attack protesters, reportedly killing three thousand in or near the Temple. The next major feast of Pentecost brought new disasters, as the city was flooded by “a great number of Galileans, and Idumeans, and many men from Jericho, and others who had passed over the river Jordan, and inhabited those parts.” The mob besieged the Roman garrison, leading to another bloody battle, in which the Jews were alarmingly undaunted by their Roman enemies. Chaos spread far afield, “with ten thousand other disorders in Judea,” as at least three (unrelated) popular leaders emerged to claim the role of messianic king. The Romans sought help from the governor of Syria, Quintilius Varus, who in turn called on his fierce Arabian allies. After the rising was suppressed, with extreme bloodshed, Varus crucified some two thousand rebels.2

The crisis of Varus’s War demonstrated the wild hopes and expectations that now drove political actions and the absolute and uncompromising views that inspired political activism. Historians tend to use events like Varus’s War, revolutionary moments of change and crisis, as key markers in the development of societies. In the Jewish case, the problem is that such outbreaks were so common and regular in this era as to appear the norm rather than the exception. What was new was the increasingly supernatural interpretations through which such events were understood.

POLITICAL PEACE SEEMED a distant dream. The last decades of the Hasmonean era were tempestuous, and the 60s BCE witnessed a perfect storm of political chaos. Salome Alexandra provided competent rule until her death in 67, but crisis followed. Her two sons by Jannaeus, Hyrcanus II and Aristoboulos II, contested the throne and the high priesthood, and each fought with the support of one of the main religious factions, the Pharisees or Sadducees. At one stage, the losing side provoked a full-scale Nabatean (Arab) invasion of Judea.³

This series of catastrophes opened the way to Roman invasion. The general Pompey was operating in the region, initially against the Pontic kingdom of Mithridates, and he reorganized the vestiges of the Seleucid Empire into a new Roman province of Syria. After such triumphs, his move into Judea came almost as an afterthought. In 63 BCE, he besieged and occupied Jerusalem, even entering the Temple’s Holy of Holies. Pompey dismembered the Hasmonean kingdom, severing coastal regions from its control and placing the Gentile region of Decapolis under separate rule. Hyrcanus II was made high priest and ethnarch (“ruler of the nation”), but not granted the more splendid title of king. Meanwhile, the non-Hasmonean warlord Antipater was a growing force at court. Under Alexander Jannaeus, he had originally served as governor of his home territory of Idumea, and he later gravitated toward the rising stars in the Roman elite, making himself a special favorite of Julius Caesar. In 47 Caesar made Antipater the first Roman procurator of the new province of Judea and poured honors on his family. Antipater’s historical reputation was soon eclipsed by that of his son, Herod the Great (74–4 BCE).4

The last gasp of Hasmonean power came in 40 BCE, with Antigonus, the son of Aristoboulos II. He made himself king, briefly, by agreeing to serve as a puppet of the Parthians, who duly invaded the country and briefly threatened to conquer the whole region. Antigonus deposed and mutilated his uncle Hyrcanus II, whom the Parthians carried off into Babylonian captivity. (Reputedly, Antigonus bit off his uncle’s ears.) That Parthian entanglement was too much for Roman warlord Marc Antony and his Herodian allies, who not only deposed Antigonus but killed him, perhaps by the degrading method of crucifixion. Herod, meanwhile, received the royal title as the gift of the Roman Senate, and he ruled from 37 to 4 BCE. In order to cement his position among the local population, he married a Hasmonean princess, though he later had her executed. In 30 BCE, he also executed Hyrcanus II, the last Hasmonean ruler, after persuading the Parthians to return him from exile.⁵

Roman power spread rapidly over the rest of the region, culminating in the annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE. At that point, Palestine was a critical component of their burgeoning imperial structure, especially given the repeated rivalries with the rising Parthian Empire to the east. While insisting on maintaining control of the country, the Romans acknowledged Jewish sensitivities by ruling through their faithful Herodian friends. Any direct Roman presence was as far as possible kept out of sight in order to minimize potential insults to the religion and the Temple. The Romans established their main administrative center at the nearby city of Caesarea Maritima rather than Jerusalem, and the Roman governor restricted his visits to the great city to times of special tension or danger, such as the major feasts. The Romans avoided making the imperial cult as visible as it was elsewhere, even though the Temple offered sacrifices for the emperor twice daily. Generally, these compromises achieved their goal.

Although Rome maintained order, and generally respected local traditions, the occupations served as a focus for local grievances and divisions. If the Jewish world had always been under foreign subjection, then presumably its people would have found the means to cope with this new situation. Under Roman rule, however, they had very recent memories of being part of an aggressive free state that developed its own empire. That recollection made its subject status that much harder to bear. Occupation added one more degree of fury to the troubled conditions that already existed in the land.6

HEROD RETAINED POWER because he knew how to exploit his ability to get along with successive Roman regimes. Even so, from the beginning, Herodian rule was driven by a sense of potential threat and instability. As king of Judea, Herod the Great thoroughly remodeled and rebuilt the country, constructing or expanding a series of fortresses, ports, and cities. This building boom transformed the landscape of Palestine, and his successors continued his efforts. Those activities partly reflected an all too real sense that volatile Jerusalem might at any time fall out of the dynasty’s control, so that the regime would need an extremely strong network of defensive positions from which to reconquer the land—hence the bastions at Antonia, in Jerusalem itself, at Samaria (Sebaste), at Machaerus, and at Caesarea Maritima. Beyond defense, those cities gave Palestine an excellent vision of the latest styles in Roman cities. Caesarea especially had its modern fortifications, but also its palace, its theater and amphitheater, its lighthouse tower, and its efficient systems for water supply and sewage disposal. Naturally, the city had a special devotion to Tyche (Fortune).⁷

Herod’s efforts created a whole new material landscape. When John’s gospel reports Jesus’s doings on the Sea of Tiberias, that name was anything but ancient, referring as it did to a city that Herod Antipas had constructed around 20 CE, in honor of the emperor Tiberius. (Antipas was the son of Herod the Great, and brother of Archelaus.) The world simply looked physically different from what it had been a few decades earlier, promoting a sense of rapid change and dislocation. The new material world even suggested the potential for re-creating the whole world afresh.8

Beyond being an organizational genius, Herod the Great was a capricious tyrant, whose career was bloody and paranoid even by the standards of Hellenistic monarchies. He killed multiple members of his family, and in the final year of his life he was in the process of trying (and eventually executing) his son Antipater for alleged treason. Palace intrigues need not have a wider public impact, but Herod’s growing paranoia and mental illness were becoming a scandal among other rulers and were well known to any educated member of the Jewish elite. The hatred he aroused is evident from this pseudoprophetic tirade in the Testament of Moses, which is not subtle in its references to Herod:

And an insolent king shall succeed them, who will not be of the race of the priests, a man bold and shameless, and he shall judge them as they shall deserve. And he shall cut off their chief men with the sword, and shall destroy them in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are. He shall slay the old and the young, and he shall not spare. Then the fear of him shall be bitter unto them in their land. And he shall execute judgments on them as the Egyptians executed upon them, during thirty and four years, and he shall punish them.9

Adding to the complexity of the situation was the half-foreign nature of Herod’s family. When the Hasmoneans conquered Idumea (Edom) and enforced conversion to Judaism, one of those converts was Antipater, who married a Nabatean woman. Their child was Herod the Great, and he was therefore of mixed ethnic and religious background. Only someone with those dubious credentials would have been so fanatically determined to prove his Jewish authenticity, which was best symbolized by his rebuilding the Temple on a phenomenal scale.¹⁰

In truth, however, Herod’s own background made him a highly appropriate ruler for the remarkably diverse land that he ruled. At the height of his power, Herod ruled not only most of the modern areas of Israel/Palestine, but also much of what today would be called Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. These realms had extensive Gentile and pagan populations, not just in the lands beyond Palestine proper. With its pagan temples and baths, a city like Ptolemais/Akko was virtually a Diaspora city for Jews. Another potent symbol of the Gentile presence was the thriving Greek city of Sepphoris, which was rebuilt by Herod Antipas and which boasted a theater, bathhouses, and mosaic floors. In tribute to the emperor Augustus, the city was briefly renamed Autocratoris, and it would likely have supported a sacrificial cult to that ruler. Although it stands just a few miles from Nazareth, it is never mentioned in the New Testament itself. However accessible one community might be from another—Nazareth from Sepphoris, say—the de facto walls were very high, dividing people by language, dress, custom, faith, and (above all) the mode of eating and drinking. Palestine in this era was a patchwork of these microcultures, which were separated by so little and so very much. During times of tension and crisis, one never needed to look far to find behaviors and symbols that could outrage and infuriate and ultimately provoke open warfare.¹¹

THE MAP OF Herodian possessions might imply that the Jews had maintained and expanded their empire from Hasmonean days, but of course they had not. The Romans had no interest in identifying any one ruler with the Jewish people, if only to prevent him becoming a national leader, and they indiscriminately expanded Herodian power over Jewish, Samaritan, and Gentile populations. (The dynasty retained its power until the end of the first century CE.) Even so, the map of where Herodian power expanded does give some sense of the wider sphere of influence extending beyond Jerusalem. Herod simply could not rule solely as Jewish monarch, although at the same time, he could never ignore that fundamental dimension of his power.12

Throughout his rule, Herod had to manage a nearly impossible balancing act, ruling at once as a Jewish king, but also a Mediterranean monarch, who had to support the public symbols and spectacular performances that that entailed. The kingly honor of Herod and his descendants obliged them to maintain the appropriate range of shows, games, and public works, all with their extensive pagan accoutrements. The Herodian regime perfectly epitomized the conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable values and traditions to be found within the Jewish realm. That was nowhere more apparent than in the Roman eagle mounted at the entrance to the Temple, which faithful Jews viewed as at best a symbol of blasphemous arrogance, at worst an idol.¹³