School of War - Ep 30: Guy MacLean Rogers on The Jewish Revolt

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Guy MacLean Rogers, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Classical Studies at Wellesley College and author of For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews Against Romans, 66-74CE, joins the show to talk about the great uprising of the Jewish people against Rome—including moments that resonate to the present day, like the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the siege of Masada.  Times  • 02:20 Introduction • 04:21 The Jewish Revolt In Roman History  • 08:09 Flavius Josephus  • 13:41 Herod the Great  • 22:29 Little Causes, Big Revolt • 26:40 The Leadership Of Rebellion • 30:11 Jewish Strategy And Logistics • 35:03 Vespasian • 41:04 The Temple  • 50:01 The End of the Sacrificial Cult • 52:01 Destruction of the Temple • 56:00 The End Of The Revolt • 1:01:02 Josephus’ Speeches • 1:06:13 Could The Jews Have Won?

Let our wives die unabused, our children without knowledge of slavery. After that, let us do each other in ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding sheet. But first, let our possessions and the whole fortress go up in flames. It will be a bitter blow to the Roman that I know to find our persons beyond their reach and nothing left for them to loot. One thing only let us spare, our store of food. It will bear witness when we are dead to the fact that we perish perished, not through want, but because we chose death rather than slavery. These were the words at the Fortress Masada of Eliazar Benyere, delivered in the first century AD as recorded by the great historian Josephus,

himself a veteran of the Jewish revolt against Rome, of which this was understood simply the final major episode. Following this speech, by their own hands, the overwhelming majority of those at the fortress, over 900 men, women, and children were killed. How did their uprising against Rome begin? How was it fought? And was this famous, brave, gruesome, and amazing episode?

Really, its end. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave. situation in Iran. The people who not these buildings have. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Before we get to today's interview, I'd like to share a word from our sponsor, The Spectator. As the longest-running magazine in the world, the Spectator eschews identity politics in favor of intelligent conversation and thought. From the war in Ukraine to the ideological war in the classroom,

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And you'll get access to their amazing contributors, including Christopher Buckley, Christopher Caldwell, and Douglas Murray. Sign up today to get three months of the Spectator and get your free hat at Spectatorworld.com slash special offer. Use offer code S-O-W at checkout. Back to the episode. Hi, I'm Erin McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Guy Rodgers. He's the William R. Kenyon Jr. Professor of History and Classical Studies at Wellesley College.

And he is the author most recently of For the Freedom of Zion, the Great Revolt of Jews against Romans 66 through 74 C.E. Professor Rogers, thanks so much for joining the show. It's really my pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's a really fascinating book on a, I'm actually really excited about this conversation because this falls into the category of, you know, historical episodes of which I was. generally, I was generally familiar with their existence, but didn't actually know much about. And your book is such a rich introduction to the subject for someone like me. And I assume rich and valuable to those who are already somewhat immersed in it. But I have to ask you, you know, let's let's start by

kind of a framing question. Roman Empire was pretty big. Roman Republic was pretty big before it. Lots of vassal states, lots of dependent tribes, lots of troubles, lots of revolts. What really at the end of the day is the significance of the Jewish revolt in 66? Why so much attention here in your own career and why so much attention over the centuries when one considers that it was, but considered it objectively, it must be just sort of one of many such episodes that the Romans had to deal with over the course of their role? I think probably there's kind of a twofold answer to it, contemporary, and then one having to do with the modern world.

In the early Roman Empire, in fact, this was the largest revolt ever against Raul. It lasted the most years, and it involved the greatest sort of concentration of Roman forces to put a revolt down. And it kind of fundamentally changed the Roman state itself, because up until this time, basically Rome was ruled by a kind of combination of old, wealthy families. But out of this revolt came a kind of transition to the role of the new dynasty, the Flavians, who essentially used their victory over the Jews and the revolt as kind of the justification. for essentially taking over role of the Roman Empire.

So this was a major, major event in the Roman world itself. And there's more that I can say maybe a little bit later about some of the military and theological implications of it, which I think a lot of people have sort of overlooked. But if you look carefully at the evidence, the evidence suggests that the Spasian, the Roman emperor and his sons, Titus and Domitian, really kind of saw this as a religious war in a way. And they saw their victory as a victory of Rome's gods over the Jewish God. So that has huge, huge implications. So that's kind of the contemporary world. And then there's the modern world. And actually, although I wish it was not the case, but unfortunately, every day, anyone who's at all in tune with what's going on in the Middle East and specifically in Jerusalem will understand that the status of the temple mount, and the buildings that were once there that were built by,

and renovated by Herod the Great and his Jewish successors in Judea are really still contested to this day. And I've been going to Israel myself since the 1980s, and I would say, if anything, the amount of intensity surrounding the temple and the temple mount, and of course, the Al-Oxom mosque, is increasing all the time. So it's rare, actually, for ancient historians to deal with material that the story, in some sense, isn't over about. Most of our, most of the wars that we talk about, the Peloponnesian War,

the Pudic Wars, they're sort of fixed in a certain way. There can be different interpretations, but, but the story of the Jewish revolt in its aftermath is not over. So that's why I would say that this, this story has, has legs to it in a way that others don't. So you mentioned through Cydides, reading your book, I have to say the book are books that, it most reminded me of, or Donald Kagan's history of the Peloponnesian War, and you face, you know, a similar challenge or opportunity, depending on how you want to look at it, of having a sort of dominant source that just stands astride, the story, and the material. So before we get to the events of the war itself, tell us a bit about, and I may mangle this a bit,

but Yosef Ben Metat Yahoo, Flavius Josephus, Josephus. Tell us about Josephus. Good. So Josephus was a Jewish priest and scholar, writer, and war general in the first century, probably born around 37. C.E. grew up, descended from nobility in Judea. He claims in some of his later writing to have been kind of of a precocious youth studied all of the different what we would call philosophies within Judaism. And although he never exactly identifies with one of the groups or the others, it's pretty clear that he was sort of most sympathetic with the worldview of the people who in his works and in the Gospels, which would be more familiar, I think, to most people are called the Pharisees. So he was this young guy who was very well connected, came from a well-known family,

who when the revolt broke out in 66, was given a military command in the northern part of what is today Israel, in the two Galilee's in Gamala, and was sent up there to sort of organize the defense and tried to scrape together an army. I mean, he tends to kind of exaggerate his success in doing that, but eventually served as the commander when the Romans besieged, one of the largest towns, a hilltop fortress called Utopida in 67,

which he gives a very detailed account of the siege of, probably the most detailed account of a siege, of a siege of any place in the early Roman Empire by an insider and notoriously survived the siege by hiding in a cave when most of the rest of the defenders of Yotapita were killed by the Romans or enslaved and then went over to the Roman side and spent the rest of the war after he was kind of freed by Vespasian trying to convince his fellow Jews to give up the war. And then eventually after Jerusalem was besieged and conquered by Vespasian son Titus, Josephus went to Rome and started writing about the war itself and came up with this hypothesis

about how all the bad things that happened, including the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, happened because of the sins, the transgressions of some Jews. So that's kind of his take on it. And so, yeah, I kind of agree with your premise, actually. You know, I mean, it's impossible to sort of talk about the Peloponnesian War

without understanding who Thucydides is, what his methodology is. And definitely you need to wrestle with Josephus and in his worldview in order to try to work your way back to what actually happened during the first century in that region and why the war broke out, what its course was and what its outcome was. Let's, let's, we'll come to, I hope all those questions here in just a minute, but before we, we get to those, you know, the period we're talking about is the period of just extraordinary political complexity to those of us who live, you know, in the year of 2022 in the West and modern states, or at least a parent complexity compared to a parent simplicity. Maybe there's more to it than that. And, you know, what I have in mind is in particular something that I think I first learned from reading what Black's grand strategy of the, of the parents complexity of the, of the Roman Empire, which in this early phase of the empire before sort of widespread annexation, these incredibly complicated sort of vassal relationships and, you know, systems, agents, and proxies, which presumably in Rome people had a relatively holistic view of, but must have seemed different, actually, to the people living through them. Spend a minute talking about how Roman rule actually to the revolt.

And, you know, it's probably worth you. you spent a bit of time in the book on him, but let's linger a bit on this colorful, sort of psychopathic, but in your strongly argued view, effective Jewish leader, Herod, Herod the Great. Right. So, yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, basically in Judea itself and during the early first century C, what we're looking at is a situation where the Romans attempted, to rule through this family of Herod.

I mean, Herod actually had been made king as far back as 40 BCE by the Roman Senate. It took him a few years to really seize hold of that throne. And it was kind of confirmed by Octavian, the guy who within a few years after 27 BCE would be known as Augustus, And he really was Rome's man on the ground from 37 to 4 BC when he when he passed away. And I mean, the case that I try to make in my in my book is that Herod, of course, because of his family problems and kind of his record of bloodletting and sort of iron-fisted tactics within Judea and actually outside. of it in some cases, has this kind of very bloody reputation, you know, which may be justified in

some ways, but on the other hand, he's really the guy who found a way to carve out a niche, not only for himself, but for his people and also for non-Jews living in Judea and in the surrounding area as well. I mean, the way I would put it most simply is that Herod kind of proposed and proposes a model for the way that somebody could be both a Jew and a Roman. And throughout his reign, there were a lot of people that kind of latched on to that model, but there also was opposition. It's just that people were literally afraid of Herod, afraid of him personally and his army, but also afraid of his connections with the Roman rulers, above all Augustus. So when Herod died, he was the sort of the rule of this area was up for question.

And essentially what Augustus did was decided to kind of divide up the immediate area. and gave part of it as an ethnarchy to Herod's son, Orkalouse. So the Romans tried actually to keep on ruling through this local family. But after less than a decade, it became apparent that it wasn't working, that Arcaloos wasn't Herod. And so what they did was they started sending out these Roman administrators called Prefects, the most famous of which, of course, is this guy, Plunkish Pilot. So that went on for, you know, a few decades. But eventually, in 41, they decided to revert back to the Herodian model and try another client, King, this guy, Agrippa the first.

Unfortunately, he only lived for a few years. And afterward, in 44, they went back to the provincial administration system and set out people who are called procurators. So for the next 20 years or so, there were procurators who were kind of working with the local authorities, the high priests and the various priesthoods in Jerusalem, trying to find a modus vivendi in this very volatile region. And in my book, what I try to do is to show how over this 20-year period or so, essentially, enough people became dissatisfied with this working arrangement that the kind of the impossible, which was a revolt of a relatively small place in the Eastern Roman Empire broke out and became this huge conflagration. I guess it's relatively straightforward to understand the Roman view of proxy rulers like

Herod and their value and why one would prefer that to direct. rule for a variety of reasons. But talk to me about what was the Jewish view of these sorts of rulers of Herod specifically, but also of his less less successful successors? I mean, did they understand themselves to be, you know, living in a kind of, in a, in a truly Jewish state? Or was the connection to Roman power, you know, debilitating to that understanding? Or, you know, just walk us through that? It's an excellent question, really, because Again, I think that the closer you look at the sources, the more you realize that from the time period of Herod and even before, there were always Jews living in Judea and to the north of Judea and Samaria and to the south in Yidotamaya, who were not okay, as it were with Rome and rule, who thought that it was impossible to live under a foreign ruler. But they were kind of in the minority.

There were a lot of people there who, since the time of Alexander the Great, who came through this region in 332, and essentially rested control of this region away from the Persians, there were a lot of people who thought that living under Greek rulers or Persian rulers or Roman rulers, were all kind of equally impossible. And then there were many, many people who perhaps thought that it really didn't make that much of a difference, whether it was Ptolemaic Greeks or Seleucid Greeks or Romans,

as long as they paid their taxes and basically kept the peace. Your average, Joe, wasn't going to have too many problems. So then kind of the question that Roman historians want to ask is, you know, what had changed? What is the big change that that comes about? And, you know, that is, that's sort of the $64,000 or shekel question of early sort of first century Judean history. And I think that part of the answer to that has to do with the recognition that by, Herod's reign, we're looking at a multi-ethnic and multicultural, cultural environment in which Jews and not just Jews, but Jews with very different ideas about what adherence to Mosaic law represented. And then also Greeks with different ideas about how,

interesting or not interesting Jewish history and Jewish law was. And then people who sometimes in the sources are called Syrians were kind of indigenous peoples of this area all living side by side with each other and not just, you know, sort of

one village to the next village, but in places like Caesarea on the coast of modern day Israel, are literally living, you know, within a few feet of each other. So, so it was a, a place where contact and conflict are there potentially all the time. And the kind of the jobs of both the Roman administrators and then also the Jewish authorities, the authority figures within Judaism were very, very, very.

difficult jobs, giving the peace. Having set the table, let's just dive in. So 66 AD or C. D. Banderthes, how does the revolt start? Right. So really, it began as kind of so often in the history of warfare with an incident in Cizarea, which was kind of a small scale conflict between Jews and Greeks in the city, essentially over some sacrifices that a Greek guy made next to a Greek meeting house, a Jewish meeting house or synagogue, which the Jews complained to the governor about and tried to get him to do something about. And basically, he wasn't interested. And it just kind of escalated and moved as it were from Caesarea to the to Jerusalem. And at the time in 66, the emperor Nero was very short of cash and because of the the great fire in Rome and all the

expenses that he had trying to rebuild Rome. And not only in Judea, Judea, but in other provinces in the Roman Empire, was kind of pressing people like this governor Flores to make sure that the tribute was paid and paid on time. And Flores went to the temple and the temple treasury and took a large sum of money from the treasury. And when protests broke out afterward in Judea, he brought in the kind of local. He brought in the kind of local, auxiliary groups of soldiers, and they massacred a large number of Jews, both outside of Jerusalem and inside of the city. And really, that is what lit off the revolt itself. And I try to remind readers of my book that, you know, that sounds like just another day in the Roman Empire.

But it really isn't. If Josephus is right about the numbers, we're talking about thousands of civilians being massacred by these auxiliary soldiers, most of whom were non-Jews. They were locally recruited. There were Greeks and or Syrians. And that kind of served as the focal point for this explosion of inter-ethnic violence with the, Romans seeming to choose one side over another. So that's, that's really what started the revolt. There were attempts to kind of to tamp it down and make sure that it didn't, didn't spread. But unfortunately, the Romans seemed to underestimate the amount of hatred that

existed between some of these groups within within Judea. And they kind of botched their response. They, they chose a sort of middle path. They hope to, they hope to stem the revolt by intimidation rather than either negotiation or overwhelming force. And that, that's what really led to this, this long war. Yeah. I mean, if you, if we step back and sort of expand.

of what you're saying into just generalities, you know, an insurgency that transforms the fortunes of both the insurgents and counterinsurgents, the failures of half measures. So very familiar, very familiar subject matter for me, at least, in a contemporary sense. So, okay, so who emerged then as the Jewish leaders here in the early stage of the revolt? And what are their goals? How do they go about pursuing them? Right. So what happened was after the Roman, In the summer of 66 sent down a large Ardeny under the governor of Syria, this guy Kestis, to try to intimidate the rebels into submission. And instead, he was ambushed on the road from the coast to the coast to Jerusalem.

And they suffered major casualties. And so the interpretation of that by people within Jerusalem, was that, you know, the Romans really were not invincible. So what they did was in the late summer, in early autumn of 66, within Jerusalem, they organized a kind of defense of Judea and the Galilee's and selected a group of generals to send out to these different places because they knew there would be a, a Roman reaction. While that was going on,

so the leadership in Jerusalem was divided about how to respond to the success that the Jews had had against the governor of Syria, Kestheus and his army, and he advised against pushing their success to into a full-scale rebellion. On the other side, there were a number of leaders who wanted to leverage the success that they'd had

and either to drive the Romans completely out of Judea and probably the Galilee's as well or minimally to come to a kind of different relationship with the Romans. But what happened was they selected a group of generals to serve as kind of the leaders. kind of the leaders of the defense of these different regions, because they knew that if no accommodation could be reached with the Romans, that the Romans eventually would send a much larger army to Judea. And it was in the context of getting that army together that Josephus, our primary source for the war was selected as the general for the sort of northern. northern resistance. But at the same time, if Josephus is correct, most of the leaders were kind of

hoping that some sort of negotiated settlement could be reached. So again, like a lot of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, assuming that there is a uniform attitude toward a large power. is probably incorrect. And so you and I both spend a fair amount of time in Jerusalem, perhaps you more than me. You know, that's unfavorable terrain to attack, favorable terrain to defend. But on the other hand, when you have,

you know, when you are, I don't know the numbers involved, but you have whatever the limited resources of Judea are available to you and you have the might of the Roman Empire coming at you. I don't think it can be that comfortable of a feeling to just sort of sit there and wait for it to come. So what did they, what did they do? How are they gonna win?

Right. Really, really good question. And actually, I think one of the things that I would claim about my book is that although there are books or studies where issues of strategy, logistics, and tactics are addressed, I think my book is the first one in recent memory anyway to look at those issues in real detail, especially the issues. of strategy and logistics. And so the short answer to your question is that I don't really think that the Jewish rebels have a uniform, consistent strategy from the beginning of the war. And that turned out to be a huge problem. If you read backward from

what happened, the default strategy seems to have been to kind of defend the major population centers, the kind of, we would call them, or we sometimes call them cities, but they're not really cities. They're large towns or even fortified villages. And on a kind of logical basis, you're 100% correct that, you know, Jerusalem. as it were, turns out to be the last of these major fortified population centers. And what I argue in my book is that that strategy from the very beginning was a flawed strategy. And it was a flawed strategy that they hadn't really thought very clearly about the war itself,

who their enemy, the Roman, were, but what the strategy is likely to be. And also, most curiously, they hadn't really thought carefully about their own history because there were paradigms out there in Jewish history for insurgencies, like the Magadines, for instance.

So... David himself. Right, David, exactly. So, so this was, this was all there. There's even less in Josephus or any other source about logistics, unfortunately. So what we're left with are Josephus' descriptions of the tactics once this implied strategy is in place.

And so what I try to do. is I try to show how, while on a tactical or kinetic level, the Jews did very well against the Romans. And in some sense, I would argue, exposed some of the weaknesses of the Roman system of warfare in the first century. On the other hand, the rebels never seem to learn from the strategic mistakes they made at the beginning of the war and to adjust that strategy after the first year of the war. So in 67, essentially in this great moment period, almost all of the rebel strongholds in the north were conquered fairly easily, fairly easily. After, you know, sieges and bloody sieges and sieges where people fought with great bravery and loss of life, but they lost.

They had a chance, especially after the death of the Emperor Nero in June of 68, to rethink that strategy and not, as it were, to draw the Romans to Jerusalem. But instead, they stuck with it. And that kind of leads up to the famous siege of Jerusalem in 70. So let's talk about the Romans and maybe a bit generally about the Roman. Roman way of warfare. You've mentioned auxiliaries at some point. She should talk about who they are and what the legions were. But so after this initial sort of disaster, after this disastrous start in 66, the Romans have an opportunity to reset. You talk about Vespasian. Let's start there. Who was Vespasian? He goes on to bigger and better things, it turns out, after the revolt.

But how did he get the nod and how does he go about defeating the Jews? Right. So Vespasian came from a, you know, a family that was kind of in the middle level of the Roman socioeconomic hierarchy from the kind of equestrian background family. Family had had some success as kind of in the financial. We would say that the field of finance, as it were, tax collection. But they were not, they didn't belong to the allegiance in the city of Rome. And, you know, going back actually for hundreds of years into the time period of the Roman Republic, if you came from a not very distinguished family, the way to make your mark, of course, was to go into the military. And that's what Vespasian did. So Vespasian was a successful military commander who kind of worked his way up the military ladder. But he was not. one of these charismatic Roman generals. He wasn't a Pompey. He wasn't Julius Caesar. He was kind of a

quiet, inefficient guy. And he happened to be with the emperor Nero, when Nero was on one of his, you know, his artistic tours in Greece, when all of these problems came down in Judea, and in fact, he sort of embarrassed himself on several occasions in Nero's presence. And I think that he got the job because got the job of snuffing out the revolt, because on the one hand, Nero knew that he was a competent commander, But on the other hand, he wasn't the kind of commander who was going to attract a large following because he just lacked charisma or so neuro thought. So that's how he was put into this position and sent off to Syria first and then down into the north and eventually with the idea, of course, of bringing an army, which was a large, army. The army that Vespasian brought down into the theater of war, the auxiliaries who are kind of the

locally recruited militia guys, but then also allies from the region. One caveat, though, about those numbers. And the caveat is that, in fact, we don't have, our sources, Josephus specifically don't tell us exactly how many soldiers there are in these Roman legions. So in my book, what I do is I have to work within sort of ranges between a very low estimate of around 4,800 per legion, up to 6,000 or so. And kind of all of my logistical estimates are based on those ranges as well. But anyway, you know, we're talking about a large army that Vespasian had under his command and with corresponding, you know, huge supply requirements as well.

And what is the, what is the task organization of this army? I just want to get a bit into its component parts and what they're designed to do. So, I mean, the Roman Legionary Army during this time period, it's essentially, eventually an infantry army. In fact, there were people, it's not true that all Roman legionaries are just infantry men. Some of them were sort of what we would call cross-trained, as it were. Some of them could serve as cavalry men, but there was a very small number of guys within a legion of between 48006,000. Most of the cavalry men would have been those auxiliaries. A lot of them locally recruited, and then the auxiliaries, who in many cases came with sort of specialty

expertise, you know, archers, skirmishers, reconnaissance, things like that. People who knew the topography and the landscape, which of course is a major issue for people fighting in that area to this day. So I think if you look at first Kestius's army, the first army that they sent down in 66, the Spasian's army in 67, Titus' army at Jerusalem, and then five, the last big army, the one at Masada, probably in 74. These were essentially infantry armies. And the reason for that was that the Romans knew that. they were going to be involved with sieges of these kind of, you know, fortified places. And talk through, if you would, the sort of evolution of Roman objectives, you know, 66, 67, 68.

I mean, you described a few minutes ago, you know, the opening stages of the revolt, it clearly was a possibility that there could be some kind of negotiated settlement that choose would be awed by the demonstration of Roman force. And we go a little bit back to the status quo or something like it. Obviously, at some point in the war, this changes. and something like the destruction of, well, certainly of the temple cult, right? Destruction of a kind of Jewishness becomes the Roman objective. How does that happen and why does it happen?

Right. So what happens is after Vespasian manages to kind of knock out the north in that next year of 68, Nero dies. And to a very large extent, I argue that this was Nero's war. I mean, Nero, like all Roman emperors, couldn't have a group of people who were living within putative boundaries, however elastic those were in reality, within the Roman Empire, you know, roughing up a Roman army and not paying for it, as it were. So he was the one who directed this kind of punitive war. That goal was accomplished more or less in the first year. And I think that the Spasia's job was to then bring this massive army down into Judea to sort of cut Jerusalem off by, you know, knocking out all opposition at the sort of cardinal points on the map.

And then besieging Jerusalem. And I think personally, essentially starving a Jerusalem into submission. But that didn't happen because Nero died. Eventually, Vespasian became kind of a candidate to replace Nero. And his attention was deflected from the war there. And he left his son in charge of the war in Judea. I think at that point, or by then also, the opposition, the rebellion itself had grown.

People, I think, you know, scholars and other people have kind of failed to focus on what Josephus says about this, that by 70, there were more than 20,000 real soldiers behind Jerusalem's walls, which were, you know, mass. massive walls and not just one, but three sets of walls, let alone the walls around the temple mount. So there was a hard army there, and the leaders by this time were minting these coins, which show that they were associating themselves with the free past of their people. people, which is where really I get the title of this book from. There was a Zion, which was both a place, but also an idea. So this was now a, you know, a free state, as it were. And at that point, I think that Vespasian and Titus had to, according to their own understanding, to quash this rebellion. and this was part of their clean to be the legitimate rulers of the of the empire itself.

Josephus tries to or goes out of his way in the war to hit the point over and over that Titus kept saying to them, you can surrender, you can surrender, you can surrender, but they weren't having it, which kind of leads to, you know, the whole issue of how and why eventually they, they broke through the final wall and destroyed the temple. It occurs to me, we've been having this conversation just sort of on the general assumption that Jerusalem is significant and important and assuming that that everyone will get that. And I assume a lot of our listeners do, but if there are one or two who do not, I mean, who cares? What's the big deal about Jerusalem? What's the big deal about the temple? There are lots of cities, lots of capital cities of ethnic groups. There are lots of temples in the world at the time.

What's the big deal about this one? Right. So actually, that is an incredibly interesting question in many ways, not only in the ancient world, but in the modern world, there is a resource question and answer to that. And it turns out that in that area, Jerusalem is a plate. It's an old Jebosite site. It had a great water supply. So it's not an accident that it became a focal,

point of conflict in this area. But from 66 to 74, it's the place where by now, by now, the vast majority of Jews, of whom there are kind of a non-exactly quantifiable but still large number living in the Roman Empire, believe is the only legitimate place where sacrifices can and should be made to their God. And by a priesthood or service by a priesthood at the top of which is a high priest, who's the only one who enters into kind of the very inner part of the temple. And only on specific occasions to make these sacrifices. So it is the epicenter of a complete alternative system to the general system that persists throughout the Roman Empire.

I mean, this is what when I teach my students about this, I try to remind them periodically that in the Roman Empire with, say, 30 or 40 million people in it, 95 to 99% of the people in it are paid up polytheists, which as you say, means, certainly in the Greco-Roman towns and cities, means that there are a multiplicity. of temples in every single place. The Jews are the only people in the Roman Empire who the vast majority of Jews believe have only one temple. And they are also the only people

who have what in effect is a book, which is in their own language, which is, a what we would call a cosmogity, but also tells the history of their people as well. So that's what's at stake in this place. And so it's a huge issue for people in this world. And as I said, when we first started to have our discussion, I'm now pretty convinced that by the we get to 70, that Vespasian anyway sees this sacrificial cult as really kind of a strategic threat, not in a military sense necessarily to the Roman Empire, but in a philosophical

slash theological sense to the Roman Empire. And as supporting evidence for that, I would point out that after they destroyed the temple in 70, three years later, there was another temple that had been built by kind of exile Jews and at which sacrifices were taking place at a place called Liantopoulos in the Nile Delta, that the Spasian ordered to be first shut and then destroyed as well. So he went out of his way to make sure that there were no more sacrifices being made at these cult centers by the Jews. And it's really fascinating. And I guess in a way that's both obvious and maybe a little circuitous, he's clearly right. You know, there clearly are challenges to the Roman vision of the first century that Judaism and it's,

what's downstream of Judaism present. Absolutely. I would, I agree 100%. And for, for that reason, I think it's, it's incredibly ironic that scholars argue about how and why Titus and the Roman army destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. But that, as important as that is, that doesn't matter to the question of what the facts of doing that really were. Vespasian and Titus later on in the city of Rome had erected monuments in which they proudly declared their victory over the Jews in this war.

So now, centuries later, millennia later, it turns out that, yes, the sacrificial cult is not operative. But if they thought that they had removed Judaism or Judaism as an ongoing alternative, to the worldviews that they were offering. They were wrong. Yeah. As you point out, go ahead and visit the Arch of Titus and check out the scene there and then go visit the Western Wall and Jerusalem and compare the experiences and compare how people relate to the spots even today.

Just as a limited way of testing your assertion here, it's pretty obvious which one is still the live place for politics and religious sentiment and human, the investment of human passion. Well, so let's talk about the destruction of the temple. So how does Jerusalem fall? And what do, Titus presumably walks into the temple? What does he see in there? What does he do? So, I mean, the temple, the temple mount and the temple are conquered because eventually

the Roman attacks against the defenders of Jerusalem kill another. of the defenders, that it's impossible for the different groups who made up that number that I was citing before the 20 plus thousand kind of hardened soldiers that there were, that there were no longer enough of these guys to keep the Romans out. So it was a battle of attrition over a four-month period or so. I've never fought in a siege, so I don't know what it's like. But I think that this siege ended in the way that probably a lot of sieges end, which is that to the very last moment, at least from the Roman point of view,

they didn't really know what the endpoint would be. And then suddenly they kind of broke through and they were up on top of the ten. Temple Mount. And if Josephus is right, Titus was kind of, you know, resting, taking a nap when he found out that this had happened and he was awakened and rushed up there himself. And there's a lot of controversy, of course, about whether he really tried hard or hard enough to get his soldiers to stop killing people up on the Temple Mount. And also to spare the temple. But whatever you, whatever side you come out on, on that issue,

we're pretty sure that he broke into the temple. And we don't know exactly what was left in the inner sanctum when he got in there. But I think it's very likely that most of the relics that are shown for instance, on the Arch of Titus in Rome or are referred to in other sources had been previously removed from the inner sanctum. I just, I can't believe that the priests up there

would have, would not have taken measures to remove, for instance, you know, the candelabrum, the menorah that was there. although we know, in fact, there were several of them in the temple. So what he probably saw was the rock, which you can still see up there. And hence, you know, that investment of political and religious affiliation and identity that you were referring to at the Western Wall, but multiplied by a thousand in that. space. So, so, you know, it's, we don't have any first-hand account of Tituses, so we can't

really say what he saw. But presumably, whatever it was, it was different from anything he saw in any temple in Rome. Yeah. So this is, this, and then obviously the city is, city is destroyed, but the war goes on. The war goes on for four more years. Talk a bit about this final stage, which has a kind of mopping up character. And talk also about, you know, famously, this is the period in which the fortress at Masada is besieged. Right. So just to be clear about this, in the aftermath of the destruction of the temple, Titus systematically destroyed several sections of Jerusalem. He did it on purpose.

It wasn't an accident, but not the entire city. So a lot of scholars actually dating back to the ancient world have kind of claimed that the war was over at this point. But the war wasn't over because outside of Jerusalem, there were rebels as well, including, of course, a large number of people who were living on Masada.

Masada is one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting episodes of the entire story. And it's also one of the most controversial because of its capture by the Romans in either 73 or 74. But I think what we have to realize about Masada is that Masada was a place. that all during the war, there had been people who were there essentially to get away from the war. So it was kind of a refugee camp. And also soldiers as well. There's kind of a complicated history of what happened there at the very beginning of the revolt as well. but for a minimum of three years after the capture of Jerusalem, the Romans didn't go near Masada, which is kind of interesting and suggests something about Roman ambitions as well in this area. And why it is that they decided in 73 or 74 that it was unacceptable

for almost a thousand people to be living up there, who clearly were outside of Roman jurisdiction is something that I don't think any scholar has completely convincingly explained. But they decided to besie and capture Masada and they sent another legionary army up there. And so it was not a large army. It, in fact, was the smallest of the four major armies that were put together in the course of this war from 66 to 73 or 74.

It's very interesting from the point of view of warfare because unlike the other instances from the well-known sites like Yotapida, and Gomois and Jerusalem, the remains of the Roman fortifications, the circumvallation wall around it, have been very thoroughly studied by scholars. So again, a very good idea of what the siege looked like, as it were, on the ground. There are huge debates among scholars about

whether the story, whether the story Josephus tells about the mass suicide slash murder of the inhabitants of Masada really took place in the way that he claims that it did. And the debates now revolved not just around the story and its plausibility, but also, of course, the archaeological remains on the site. I personally come out on the side of or try to argue that the basic story Josephus tells about Masada that there was a siege, that the Romans were, that the Romans did build a siege wall, an earth wall to bring a artillery up to breach the wall. I believe that the, the archaeological evidence

supports that. So, but there are others who fall on the other side of that debate. I guess the problem is if we accept some of the basics of the story, everyone there, mostly everyone there is killed. So we have this record of this incredibly moving speech, right, by one of the leaders of the resistance calling on the remaining fighters to die as free men and with their women and children, that they should all die free and not feel the, you know, the, the yoke of slavery, as it were. How does one, it's a bit of a Thucydidean analysis, analytical question. How does one know this speech actually was delivered? And if so, if it sounded anything like what's recorded here. Right. So Josephus tells us that in fact, there were survivors. There were a couple of women and some

children and that they were the ones who told when the Roman soldiers breached the wall and came up on top of Masada. They found the dead bodies of 968 or 67 or 68 people there. And women and the children and women came and told the Romans what it happened. So that's that's the source answer to how they the Romans found out what. happened. So that begs all kinds of questions, like for instance, how is it that these women who presumably didn't know Latin or Greek told these the Romans, maybe, you know, there were auxiliaries or Jews fighting with the Romans at that point that these women's, the women could speak to. But you're right. It creates the story, creates a verification problem. My answer,

did that is so if if there wasn't a mass suicide slash murder and I used the word murder because the way that this supposedly worked was that there was a group of guys who were you know got the short shored as it were and had to kill their fellow Jews and then killed each other until the last guy who was the only one to commit suicide so my my answer to this is that okay So it wasn't, this wasn't a siege where there were 30,000 Roman legionaries involved, but there were, there were thousands of them and auxiliaries. So if Josephus wrote up this story and included it in his, in his book, he tells us that he circulated copies of what he had written up to prominent Romans. including Titus, and that he received from Titus and from other people kind of feedback about this. If that's how, if Masada, if there was no mass suicide on Masada, then how did how did it pass, as it were, through these editors?

I think that that's a real problem. As far as the speeches are concerned by the guy who was the leader up there, you know, You're, again, I think 100% correct that there are the Thucydidean speech problems. And a huge amount has been written by scholars about these speeches, especially the first speech, which talks about issues which like the, you know, the immortality of the soul and things like that, which, you know, sort of show or indicate. that Josephus was thinking about other works of literature from other cultures as well. So in other words, they are there as reflections of somebody writing about what happened in Rome, which is where we know he was when he wrote this up.

There was a first version of the war, which was written in Aramaic, and sent to the, as he says, to the other side of the river, meaning Euphrates. But that didn't survive. This is the first version that we have. It's written in Greek. We know that he had help in some places with the Greek because he wasn't a native speaker of Greek. So, so yeah. And of course, there are ramifications of all of this. For modern history, because as I'm sure you know, that for many years, Israeli army formations were brought up to Masada to swear oaths up there. And those speeches were cited as well. So again, it's the living history part of this, which is both kind of its fascination, but also kind of a warning as well. As somebody who occasionally writes, I feel a great deal of sympathy for Josephus in his original version. It reminds me of T. Lawrence leaving the first draft of the seven pillars of wisdom on a train and then having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. That's just tragedy upon tragedy.

If Lawrence left that on that train. Indeed. Could the Jews have won? Just stepping back completely. Could the Jews have won? I don't mean this in a flippant way at all. You have to define winning, right? I mean, It depends from my point of view on what you mean by victory. For some people, for Jews, for for millennia, the destruction of the temple is kind of one point of darkness on a long road where there are lots of points of darkness, okay? For other Jews, the destruction of the temple is not that kind of point of darkness. So could they have, if they used a different strategy, if there had been a unified leadership,

if they kind of thought it all, maybe about logistics or thought differently about logistics, could they have fought a different kind of war, which would have forced the United States, the Romans, who have, you know, negotiated with their leadership, without mass casualties, without the destruction of the temple? I think that that we have to consider that that's a possibility. And I think the reason why I sort of slipped the United States in there is because, you know, we fought a war in Afghanistan for 20 years, which maybe if we had fought in a different way, there might have been a different outcome. And it's kind of one of the, I mean, this is obviously it's a long book, a very detailed book. But it's one of the things that I wanted to kind of put on the table for people that every, in my reading of antiquity, every war can be won, every war can be lost.

So on a theoretical level, this was a war that could have been won. But it could have been lost more easily as well. Guy Rogers, Guy McLean Rogers, I should say. I think if we go back far enough, we could find our common relations fighting and less remarked upon wars than the Hebrides. Completely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.