If Jesus wanted an easy life on earth, he showed up at the wrong time. The Promised Land had become the Occupied Land. By the time Jesus opened his mouth to deliver his first sermon, in about AD 29, the nation of Israel had been occupied by invaders for nearly a century. Israel wasn’t even a nation anymore. It was just an assortment of county-sized provinces ruled by governors answering to a dictator 1,500 miles (2,400 km) away in Rome.
Some Jews were fine with this.
• Society’s elite had cozied up to the invaders, earning positions of power and prestige.
• Top Jewish leaders were handpicked by the Romans. That included the high priest—a position God said should be limited to descendants of Aaron.
• Jewish entrepreneurs, such as tax collectors, got rich by collaborating with the invaders.
Most Jews, however, hated the Romans—and hated any fellow Jews who cooperated with Rome.
More than anything, most Jews hungered for freedom. They wanted their country back. They wanted the glory of Israel revived. And they wanted God to deliver on his promise: “When the people cry to the Lord for help against those who oppress them, he will send them a savior who will rescue them” (Isaiah 19:20).
Even the most perceptive Jewish scholars of the time seem to have had no idea that the savior God would send was someone who would rescue them from sin, not from the Romans. Nor did they have a clue that the Romans would remain in their homeland for three more centuries, or that the resurrection of the Jewish nation would have to wait nearly 2,000 more years—until 1948, when the United Nations established Israel as a safe haven for Holocaust-surviving Jews.
EXPECTING THE MESSIAH AT ANY MOMENT
Time was ripe for God to once again step into Jewish history. Many observant Jews, if not most, believed it.
They believed it because of what they read in their Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament. Prophets several centuries before Jesus had described a future for the Jews that looked very much like the harsh life under Roman occupation. And these prophecies said that God would send an “anointed one” to save them.
Anointed one is a title. It refers to anyone in Bible times selected by God for the special purpose of saving his people. Kings, such as David, were called “anointed ones.” The Hebrew word for this title is Masiah, or Messiah. And the word translating this into the Greek language popular in Jesus’ day is Christos. In English, it’s Christ. So “Jesus Christ” wasn’t the Savior’s formal name. It was his name and title. Instead of Jesus, PhD, it was Jesus, Messiah.
Jews were praying for Christ to come and expecting him any day. Here are a few prophecies that led them to this belief:
• David’s kingdom is forever. “The Lord declares that he will make a house for you [David]—a dynasty of kings! For when you die and are buried with your ancestors, I will raise up one of your descendants…. Your house and your kingdom will continue before me for all time, and your throne will be secure forever” (2 Samuel 7:11–12, 16).
• David’s dynasty will be resurrected. “For the time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will raise up a righteous descendant from King David’s line” (Jeremiah 23:5).
• A child is born. “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light…. You will break the oppressor’s rod, just as you did when you destroyed the army of Midian…. For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His government and its peace will never end. He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David for all eternity” (Isaiah 9:2, 4–7).
When Jesus arrived, David’s dynasty had been dead for 600 years. But the Jews were expecting a political resurrection. They were in for a surprise. They got a king who said, “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), and who promised everlasting life in heaven rather than a prosperous life on earth.
Expecting a warrior, they got a pacifist. Expecting a new and improved Israel, they got the Kingdom of God. Expecting freedom from slavery to the Romans, they got freedom from slavery to sin and the judgment that follows.
Most Jews wouldn’t buy it. They couldn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah.
This is why the New Testament Gospel writers worked so hard to make the case for Jesus as Messiah—reporting his godlike miracles along with the many prophecies he fulfilled. The most famous prophecy is about God’s suffering servant, who would die for the sins of others: “The Lord laid on him the sins of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).
When asked bluntly if he was the Messiah, Jesus answered, “I Am” (Mark 14:62).
Iraqi invaders wiped Israel off the political map.
Actually, there were two Jewish nations and two Iraqi invasions. There was the kingdom of Israel in the northern half of modern-day Israel, and the kingdom of Judah in the southern half. Assyrians from what is now northern Iraq overran the northern Jewish country in 722 BC. And Babylonians, headquartered near what is now Baghdad, decimated Judah in 586 BC—leveling Jerusalem and exiling the survivors.
All of this must have come as quite a shock to Jews who believed what God had told Abraham: “I will give the entire land of Canaan [now called Israel]… to you and your descendants. It will be their possession forever” (Genesis 17:8).
The trouble is that the Jews didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. The contract God made with Jews in the time of Moses required them to obey God’s laws. But the Jews didn’t. Century after century, they disobeyed, while God patiently continued warning them. After the Jews ignored generations of warnings delivered by various prophets, they finally got what the contract said they’d get: “The Lord will bring a distant nation against you…. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy. For the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other” (Deuteronomy 28:49, 63–64).
The Jews never fully recovered.
Eventually, the Iranians came to their rescue. Actually, they were Persians living in what is now Iran. The Persians crushed the Babylonian Empire about 50 years after Jerusalem fell, and then freed Babylon’s political prisoners. Some Jews returned to their homeland and started rebuilding the cities. But the Jews still weren’t free. The Persians ruled them.
Next came Alexander the Great and his Greek army, marching through the Jewish homeland in 332 BC on his way to conquer Egypt. The Jews didn’t even try to resist. By that time, Alexander had already scattered the Persian army and was well on his way to establishing the largest empire the world had ever seen—stretching some 3,000 miles (4,800 km) from Greece to the border of India. It was there in India that Alexander apparently picked up a bug that stoked a fever, killing him at age 33. His generals then divvied up the empire.
One of those generals left a successor: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who so provoked the Jews that they revolted and won their independence for about a century. Antiochus provoked them by remodeling the Jewish Temple into a temple for Zeus. And he ordered the Jews not to practice their religion. Under threat of execution, Jews weren’t allowed to
• circumcise their boys, a ritual that ushered them into the Jewish faith;
• read their Bible;
• treat the Sabbath as a holy day of worship and rest; or
• refuse to eat pork, a nonkosher food that Jewish law said they should never eat.
Many Jews chose death rather than abandon their faith and adopt Greek religion and culture. Antiochus often made the dying hard. Once, he built a huge copper pot, which he used to cook seven Jewish brothers who refused to bow to an idol. The youngest boy was age seven.
In retaliation for such crimes, one Jewish family—the Maccabees—organized an army of guerrilla fighters. Within about three years, the Jews had fought off their oppressors, who were headquartered in what is now Syria.
JEWISH MONKS PREPARE THE WAY FOR THE LORD
“Prepare in the desert the way for the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3 NCV).
One group of Jews decided to do just that. They moved to the desert, where they waited for the Messiah.
They took ritual baths every day to keep themselves pure. That way, when the Messiah showed up, they’d be ready instantly to join his army and help drive out the Romans—as holy minutemen.
“All the children of righteousness are ruled by the Prince of Light and walk in the ways of light,” they wrote on one of their scrolls, titled War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. “But all the children of falsehood are ruled by the Angel of Darkness and walk in the ways of darkness.”
These fanatical Jews considered themselves “Sons of Light” who would one day ride into battle with the Messiah’s army and defeat the “Sons of Darkness,” a tag they put on all godless people in the world, especially Romans.
Ironically, the Sons of Darkness defeated the Sons of Light. The Romans destroyed the desert settlement in AD 68 while crushing a nationwide Jewish revolt.
These isolationist Jews were called Essenes, a name most often translated as “pious ones.” When the Jewish nation temporarily won its independence in 167 BC, the war leaders took over—appointing themselves as kings and priests. In disgust, a group of suddenly unemployed priests moved 14 miles (22 km) east of Jerusalem, where they built a community called Qumran, near the Dead Sea. There, they preserved copies of sacred Jewish writings—including copies of the Bible discovered in 1947 that were 1,000 years older than the scrolls that scholars had used to produce the King James Version of the Bible. Scholars now use these Dead Sea Scrolls to help create new Bible translations.
The Essenes weren’t just isolationist scrollworms. They were end-time fanatics. But “end time” for them didn’t mean the end of humanity. It meant the end of evil. They expected a heaven-sent warrior to defeat evil and set up something close to heaven on earth. And they had plenty of Bible passages to back them up, including:
• Earth-shaking leader. “Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot—yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. And the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him…. The earth will shake at the force of his word, and one breath from his mouth will destroy the wicked” (Isaiah 11:1–2, 4).
• Foreigners be gone. “For in that day,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, “I will break the yoke from their necks and snap their chains. Foreigners will no longer be their masters. For my people will serve the Lord their God and their king descended from David—the king I will raise up for them” (Jeremiah 30:8–9).
• Living in perfect peace. “In that day the wolf and the lamb will live together…. The baby will play safely near the hole of a cobra…. Nothing will hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for as the waters fill the sea, so the earth will be filled with people who know the Lord” (Isaiah 11:6, 8–9).
Unfortunately for the Essenes, they didn’t live to see this wonderful era of peace. The utopia that many prophets describe still seems to wait somewhere in the future. Tragically for these Essenes—who had devoted their lives to waiting for the Messiah—they missed him by less than a day’s walk.
But the newly liberated Jewish nation never did resurrect the glory of ancient Israel—perhaps in part because they didn’t follow the ancient form of government, with a king from David’s family and priests from Aaron’s family. Instead, leaders of the revolt created their own dynasty of combo rulers: priest-general-king. Three in one. A religious leader, a military leader, and a political leader—a multipurpose ruler one halo shy of deity. They called their dynasty the Hasmoneans, after the oldest leader’s tribal name. But in the years that followed, they fought among themselves for the right to rule—brother killing brother.
This new system of government and religion upset many Jews. Some, who considered themselves the legitimate priests, left Jerusalem. They set up their own monklike community 14 miles (22 km) east of Jerusalem, in the Judean badlands at Qumran near the Dead Sea. Believing that God would soon send a messiah to restore Israel, they spent their time waiting—passing time by copying sacred Jewish writings that became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jewish Bible scholars known as Pharisees hated the new system, too. They staged a riot when the priest-general-king Alexander Janneus tried to act in his self-appointed capacity as priest by leading a worship service during the annual Feast of Tabernacles. Pharisees and their supporters pummeled him with lemons. A sourpuss, Alexander responded in his self-appointed capacity as general. He called in the troops, who killed some 6,000 protestors. This prompted a revolt that took Alexander nine years to quell.
In the process, he captured 800 Pharisee leaders—and crucified them. A Jew crucifying fellow Jews. This wasn’t just a torturous death; it was a religious statement. Jews considered people crucified as cursed of God: “Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23 NIV).
After Alexander Janneus died, his wife ruled the country and appointed one of their two sons, Hyrcanus II, as high priest and heir to the throne. He took over as king when his mother died. But his brother, Aristobulus II, wasn’t happy about it. He seized control and demoted his brother, ordering him to serve only as high priest.
Civil war erupted. Rome had been a friend to the family, so the brothers called on a Roman general to arbitrate the dispute.
Bad decision.
For two centuries before the rise of Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, the once-modest village of Rome had been in the process of building an empire—one enemy or opportunity at a time. The Romans had already swallowed up all of Italy and its offshore islands—Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica—along with parts of Africa, Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, and Syria. All of these regions were forced to play host to occupying forces and to pay tribute to Rome: money, crops, and other supplies.
In a lapse of judgment, the feuding Jewish brothers apparently expected the
WHO’S WHO OF TROUBLED TIMES
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), young Greek king who conquered much of the Middle East and spread Greek language and culture throughout the nations.
Alexander Janneus (ruled 103–76 BC), Jewish Hasmonean leader who declared himself the Jewish king, general, and high priest—three in one; crucified fellow Jews who opposed him.
Antigonus (ruled 40–37 BC), Hasmonean son of Aristobulus II; temporarily snatched the Jewish homeland back from Herod the Great; Herod later defeated Antigonus, with Roman help, and executed him.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes (ruled 175–163 BC), Syrian ruler who forced Jews in Israel to stop practicing their Jewish religion, sparking a successful Jewish war for independence.
Antipater (ruled Judea 47–43 BC), father of Herod the Great; he was an Arab leader in what is now southern Israel until Caesar made him ruler of Judea, a region including Jerusalem.
Aristobulus II (ruled 67–63 BC, died 49 BC), Jewish Hasmonean who stole political power from his brother, Hyrcanus II, until the Roman general Pompey arrived and exiled Aristobulus to Rome.
Hasmoneans (ruled 167–63 BC), a dynasty of Jewish leaders from the Maccabean family; they led Jews in a successful guerilla war of independence against Antiochus IV Ephiphanes and then ruled the Jewish homeland for a century.
Herod Antipas (ruled 4 BC–AD 39), son of Herod the Great and governor of Jesus’ homeland of Galilee throughout Jesus’ lifetime; he executed John the Baptist.
Herod the Great (ruled 37–4 BC), appointed by the Romans as king of the Jewish homeland. Insanely protective of his power, he executed many in his own family and ordered the slaughter of Bethlehem baby boys in an attempt to kill Jesus.
Herod Philip (ruled 4 BC–AD 34), son of Herod the Great and governor of what are now parts of Syria and Jordan.
Hyrcanus II (high priest 79–40 BC, died 30 BC), high priest during the Hasmonean Dynasty and early Roman rule; executed by Herod the Great.
Maccabees. See “Hasmoneans.”
Mark Antony (about 82–30 BC), Roman general who recommended Herod to become king of the Jews; lost civil war against Octavian, who became Caesar Augustus; committed suicide with his lover, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt.
Phasael (ruled 46–40 BC), brother of Herod the Great; appointed by his father, Antipater, as ruler of Jerusalem.
Pilate (ruled about AD 26–37), governed the Roman province of Judea, the territory surrounding Jerusalem; ordered the crucifixion of Jesus.
Pompey (106–48 BC), Roman general who first invaded the Jewish homeland and put a local Arab ally, Antipater, in charge of the region.
Romans to kindly help them out of this jam and then go back home. They were half right.
A Roman general named Pompey was only too happy to bring some military muscle into the Jewish homeland. He arrived in 63 BC, siding with Hyrcanus. He captured Jerusalem and exiled Aristobulus to Rome, along with his family and many supporters. Pompey restored Hyrcanus to his role as high priest and then declared him a prince—not a king—who was now subject to Rome.
Romans had come to stay.
Jewish people did have one more king to come—their last king of the homeland. Unfortunately, he was an Arab by race. Not a Jew.
Herod was the son of a ruler from Idumea, a small region in what is now southern Israel. The people living there were Arabs descended from Jacob’s brother, Esau.
Though Herod wasn’t a Jew by race, he was a Jew by conversion—forced though it was. Decades before Herod’s time, self-liberated Jews of the Hasmonean Dynasty ordered the Idumeans to convert to the Jewish religion or die.
Herod’s father, Antipater, was the ruler of Idumea—and a gifted survivor by nature. Naturally, he decided that his family would convert. He made a similar survival choice decades later, after Julius Caesar defeated Pompey in a civil war. Antipater switched loyalties from loser Pompey to winner Caesar. In return, Caesar made him governor of the Jewish homeland. Hyrcanus retained his job as high priest and as a prince with about as much political mojo as today’s crown prince of England—whose mojo would fit in a tea bag.
Antipater the Arab gave important jobs to his two oldest sons: Herod became governor of Galilee; Phasael ruled Jerusalem. At the time, Herod was 25—just one year older than Alexander the Great had been when he marched through the Jewish homeland. Herod seems to have had the same fire in his soul and would eventually share Alexander’s superlative title, becoming known as Herod the Great.
A ruthless leader, Herod quickly placated Galilee, though it was a famous hole-in-the-wall populated by lawbreakers. His leadership skills didn’t escape notice in Rome, where the senate was on the lookout for foreign rulers capable of pacifying and running distant provinces. When his father was assassinated, Herod become the dominant leader of the region—though not yet a king.
Then Rome made the mistake of releasing Antigonus, the exiled son of Aristobulus, one of the feuding brothers of the defunct Hasmonean Dynasty. This young man had inherited his father’s violent craving for power, and he rallied support for his cause from among the Parthian Empire in what is now Iran and Afghanistan. In 40 BC, Antigonus drove Herod out of Jerusalem and captured Herod’s brother Phasael, who committed suicide rather than endure torture and mutilation. Antigonus also cut off the ears of Hyrcanus, the high priest, a mutilation that disqualified him from serving any longer as high priest.
Herod sailed to Rome, where he appealed for help in taking back the Jewish territory for Rome—and, more important, for himself. Mark Antony remembered how Herod had pacified rough and tough Galilee. So at Antony’s recommendation, the senate declared Herod king of Judea. Herod raised an army of mercenary troops, and with Roman reinforcements, he took back Jerusalem then captured and executed Antigonus, the rebel leader.
In appreciation, Rome expanded Herod’s kingdom, giving him most of what are now the livable parts of modern-day Israel, along with Roman provinces in present-day Syria and Jordan.
Herod quickly secured his hold on power by eliminating potential rivals. These included 45 nobles who had supported the rebel leader, along with most of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high council that managed Jewish affairs a bit like a combined Supreme Court/Congress.
To retain his hold on power, Herod later ordered the execution of many people he considered threats, including family members he thought were plotting a coup. These included
• Hyrcanus, the now-earless former high priest and last remaining leadership link to the ruling family of Jews from the Hasmonean Dynasty;
• Mariamne, his wife, who was also the granddaughter of Hyrcanus;
• Mariamne’s mother and brother;
• his two sons by Mariamne; and
• a third son by another wife.
All this family slaughter led Caesar Augustus to crack an alliterative pun: “I would rather be Herod’s pig (bys, in Rome’s preferred language of Latin) than his son (buios).”
It was a solid one-liner, sure to draw a laugh from anyone who knew the Jews. Herod, who was at least a marginally practicing Jew, wouldn’t have ordered a pig slaughtered, because pork wasn’t kosher. Yet he slaughtered his own sons.
Vicious though he was, Herod tried to endear himself to the masses. He built wonderful facilities throughout his kingdom, including entire cities, such as the harbor town of Caesarea, and aqueducts to bring water into cities such as Jerusalem. But his most memorable project was the Jerusalem Temple, which he expanded and remodeled beyond even what King Solomon, in all his glory, had been able to accomplish.
Still, most Jews never did warm up to Herod. They considered him an outsider teamed up with the Romans against them. And they thought the same of Herod’s sons, who inherited much of the kingdom.
Herod died in 4 BC, perhaps just a couple of years after Jesus was born. Herod left a will that split his kingdom among three of the sons he hadn’t killed.
Rome accepted Herod’s wishes but demoted all three men. One got to keep the title of king, but he ended up with just a part of the Jewish homeland. The other two sons got diminished titles, reducing their status to that of governors.
• Herod Archelaus (ruled 4 BC–AD 6) became king of Judea, the Roman province surrounding Jerusalem. He managed to upset the Jews so much that Rome fired him a decade later and replaced him with a series of Roman governors, including Pilate, who became infamous for ordering the crucifixion of Jesus.
• Herod Antipas (ruled 4 BC–AD 39) served Rome by governing Galilee and Perea as tetrarch, a title less prestigious than king.
• Herod Philip (4 BC–AD 34) served as tetrarch over several small provinces—Gaulanitis, Trachonitis, Batanea, and Auranitis—in what is now Syria.
By the time Jesus stepped into this scene by launching his ministry in about AD 29, the Jews were fed up from nearly a century of Roman occupation—more than 60 years of that under the rule of Herod and his family.
They ached for freedom to live as Jews led by fellow Jews in a sovereign Jewish nation.
They thought all they needed was a divine spark—a bold savior with the anointing, spirit, and power of God. Someone like King David, who would rally the nation and lead them to victory.
Instead, they were sent Jesus, who would lead them to God.