The Rest Is History - 176. The Jews Against Rome

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

"The destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans: a thrilling, terrible, and blood-soaked story." Following on from last week's episode on the Crucifixion, Tom and Dominic take us back to Judea to dissect the tumultuous events of the Jewish Revolt. Tune in to hear the first part of the incredible story that features Pontius Pilate, Nero, and the figure of Jesus - plus how it all tenuously links to Bryan Adams and the Summer of '69. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it, for these are days of vengeance to fulfill all that is written. Alas for those who are with child, and for those who give suck in those days, for great distress shall be upon the earth, and wrath upon this people. They will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

Now that was the top geopolitical pundit, Jesus Christ, making his debut on The Rest is History. It was a brilliant impression, Dominic. Yeah, well, that's exactly how he spoke. To add to your roster. Yes. Well, I can do Trump, Nixon, Margaret Thatcher. Churchill.

I mean, that's basically covering. Churchill and Jesus. And smugglers. And smugglers, yes. So, Tom, Jesus was right. Jerusalem was surrounded by armies. People did flee to the mountains. And Jerusalem was utterly crushed by the military might of the Roman Empire at the end of the Jewish revolt, which is the subject of

today's podcast. I mean, that's basically the story, isn't it? People can stop listening. Or am I wrong? Dominic, you're so wrong. I mean, this is a brilliant, a thrilling, terrible, blood-soaked story. This episode is following on from the episode that we did for Easter on the crucifixion. I'm not saying this is a sequel, but it kind of is a sequel in that this is about, just as the crucifixion was in the long run a seismic historical event, so also is this revolt, this destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. And it's one that far more than the crucifixion, of course, is recognized by contemporaries at the time as being of great significance. So right from the beginning, people who wrote about it said this is a war without parallel.

Certainly that was the perspective of one Jewish historian. And to the present day, people have said this is the key clash, not just in ancient history, but of all time. So in 1896, a New Testament scholar, the Bishop of Durham, a guy called B.F. Westcott, said that it is no exaggeration to say that the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70 is the most significant national event in the history of the world. Okay, well, that is an exaggeration. I mean, the beginning of the sentence was completely wrong, wasn't it? Or was he arguing that because it has this immense theological significance? It's because this is in the first century AD, and as your quotation from the New Testament suggested, this has an amazing significance for Christians. But of course, it also has a huge significance for Jews because the climactic event in this war, the event that continues in a way to cast a shadow over politics in the Middle East to this day, was the incineration of the temple, which was the great focus of Jewish life,

Jewish ritual practice. And the loss of the temple continues to reverberate through into the present. So I think you can absolutely make a case that the subject of today's episode is crucially important. However, I think saying that it's massively important to both Jews and Christians does highlight a risk with studying the episode itself, which is that we back project that significance onto what actually happened. Yeah, understood. So maybe, Tom, what we should do, I know you want to tell the story and then revise the story. So there's a great sense of mystery here for the listeners, because you're going to tell the story in the first half, and then the second half,

you're going to tell us why everything you basically said was wrong. No, I'm not going to say it's wrong, but I'm going to say that perhaps the traditional perspective on it doesn't entirely tell the whole story. Fine. You're going to pile on the nuance. You've sold that in a more nuanced way than I wanted to sell it. I wanted to create a greater sense of jeopardy and excitement.

But you've destroyed that, so that's fine. So as punishment, what you should do now is give us a bit of context. So in the first century AD. No, I think we should actually go back a bit further than that. Oh, this is unbelievable. All right, go back further. Where do you want to start? Well, I want to start.

Those listeners who've heard our episode on Babylon will remember that the first temple had been built by Solomon, gets destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century. The people of Judah, the kingdom of Judah, get hauled away to Babylon. They then get allowed to return to their land, to Judah, by Cyrus, the king of the Persians. And they rebuild the temple on the great rock in Jerusalem. And essentially, they live as law-abiding, tax-paying subjects of the Persian empire. And they have been able to preserve their identity in a way that other peoples who'd been transported by the Babylonians or the Assyrians hadn't, because they have a body of scriptures, of teachings, what they call Torah,

and a whole body of other teachings as well, histories of how God had given them their land, of how they should behave, all kinds of things like that, prophecies. And this corpus of texts, what in due course will come to be known as the Bible, enables them to preserve their identity in a way that other peoples had not. So the combination of returning to this land and this body of scripture enables them to trace their origins back to before the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Okay, I'm interrupting you now. Do they call themselves Jews? I believe they don't. Is that right? They do not. No, they don't. What do they call themselves? So they are the people of Judah,

but over time, so in due course, the Persian Empire falls, gets conquered by Alexander the Great. We've done that as well. Very much a the show yeah and so these these people become absorbed into the greek world and they're known as yudai so we judaians we translate that as jews but a better sense would be judaians and i think it is i think the problem with using the word jew the Jews, is that it brings a lot of medieval and modern baggage. There are lots of Judeans still in Babylon. In the Greek period, they start to migrate to Alexandria. Then when the Greek empires succumb to the Romans, they start to migrate to Rome. These are still Judeans because they're still looking to the mother city of Judea, which is

Jerusalem. And this is nothing exceptional. There are Greeks scattered all over the Mediterranean. They're still Greeks. There are Romans who were scattered all over the Mediterranean. Their mother city is still Rome. So I think that if you call them Jews, and the title of this episode is Romans against Jews, it kind of gives it a slight sense of a kind of religious war that has been very, very influential, but I think obscures the degree to which this is essentially a provincial revolt, and therefore perhaps not quite as exceptional as we might otherwise be led to think. All right, let's not leap ahead too much to that, Tom. So at what point does this territory, the area around Jerusalem, at what point has that been brought into the Roman orbit? Because

obviously you said it was Alexander the Great and then the Greek world. But then at the end of the BC period, the Romans are the superpower. And Judea, like most of the Eastern Mediterranean, has been fought over by Cleopatra and Octavian and stuff. And it's been brought into the Roman orbit. Before that. So Alexander's empire gets dismembered. You have two great powers. You have the Ptolemies in Egypt and you have the Seleucids based in Syria. And Judea is basically the pivot.

So it's kind of endlessly fought over. And as the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic empires decline, so they are able to establish a kind of independence. The Judeans. The Judeans are able to. The Judeans, yeah. And in fact, they become a very expansionist, almost imperialist power. So if you think of a, try and visualize a map. Jerusalem is kind of just above the Dead Sea,

south of that region. So kind of the western flank of the Dead Sea is a region called Idumea that gets conquered by the Judeans, and the Idumeans basically get obliged to become Judeans, to worship the Judean god, to live by Judean laws and rules. They also wage war against the people who live to the north, who readers of the New Testament will remember from the parable of the Good Samaritan. These are people from Samaria who are, the Judeans hate them because they are kind of like a ghostly parallel. They also have the law of Moses and so on, but they don't regard Jerusalem as holy.

And this infuriates the Judeans. So at the very end of the second century BC, they storm the Sumerian capital, they destroy its holy place. So the Judeans are a minor power relative to the great Greek empires and certainly to the Roman Empire, but relative to the kind of the mix of peoples in what you could call kind of the southern Levant. They're a significant player. However, they prove powerless to withstand the might of Rome. The guy who initially conquers them is Pompey the Great. So go on to become the great rival of Julius Caesar. He captures Jerusalem in 63 BC. He goes into this great temple, which is so holy that only one man,

the high priest of the Judeans, on one day can go into the Holy of Holies. It's supposed to be the place, the presence of the one God of the Judeans, of the Jews on earth. Pompey goes into it. He looks at it. He finds there's absolutely nothing there and is quite impressed. And so he essentially says, you know, fine, pay us tribute, but you can continue to worship as you want. He thinks that the Judean God is worth kind of sucking up to. He basically equates him with Jupiter, with the supreme God of the Romans.

And as you said, Judea then gets kind of caught up in the snarl that is the civil wars, but first between Caesar and Pompey, then between Octavian and Antony and Cleopatra. And what Antony and Cleopatra do is to install a guy called Herod, who is an Idumaean, so from these people who've been conquered, but he's absolutely, you know, I mean, he is a Jew, he's a Judean. And he rules as king. And he very skillfully is able to jump ships. So Octavian, the future Augustus, when he has defeated Antony and Cleopatra, summons Herod. And Herod says, yeah, I was on the side of Antony and Cleopatra, but that's because I was so loyal to them. And I will now be loyal to you. And so he gets allowed to continue reigning. He's not famous for his childcare, is he herod no well so augustus famously said that he would rather be um he'd rather be herod's pig than uh than his son yes um which is quite a good joke

so yes and so herod is a very brutal but effective king he's a he's a great builder so he he he develops the temple he builds it on a stupefying scale so that it's installed as one of the great wonders of the entire Mediterranean world. And it remains what it's always been, the great focus for Judean loyalty. Pilgrims come from across the Judean world. They pay money to it, so it's very wealthy. But it's also an object of great admiration for non-Jews, for Gentiles, as they're called. Herod also develops an overtly Roman city on the coast, which he calls, with kind of unctuous civility, Caesarea. Caesarea, I was about to guess, Caesarea, yeah. And he also develops a palace out in the Idumean Desert on a great great rock called masada okay and i think that will be

uh playing a part in the rest of this episode it will so this is a palace not a citadel not a castle it's it's a palace up on a rock it has right around it but yeah there are a pair of palaces there um so herod dies in uh 4 bc probably and And Augustus then divides up his kingdom because none of Herod's sons are really quite a measure up to scratch. This doesn't really work out. So what then happens is that direct rule is imposed on Judea itself. From Rome. From Rome. So they send out administrators, whether this is a separate province or whether it's a part of

the larger province of Syria is much contested. I don't think it's a separate province. I think it's this kind of subdivision of Syria, and this is for reasons that we'll come to later. But essentially, part of the problem for the Romans and indeed for the Judeans is that the Romans can never quite decide what they should do with Judea, how they should rule it. Should it be ruled by kind of puppet kings? Should it be ruled by the priests who, you know, are so influential because of the power of the temple? Should it be ruled directly by Roman prefects and procurators? And they keep kind of changing their minds. So, you know, kings come in, they get moved out, they get kind of bits get chopped off and given to them, get removed, get given back to the kind of central Roman apparatus for control. So it's a muddle and a snarl.

And Tom, where does Pontius Pilate fit in? He's an administrator sent out by the Romans, presumably. by Caesar. So he's been sent by Tiberius. And he's a very effective administrator. He stays there for quite a long time. And interestingly, he's basically very pro-Judean. He builds an aqueduct for the people of Judea. He absolutely kind of respects the traditions of the temple. When he tries to introduce, he tries to introduce to put an eagle up on the temple and the Judeans complain, he immediately takes it down. And in fact, the reason that he gets recalled is that he is so pro-Judean that he's launched an attack on the Sumerians who are still kind of grumbling and discontented up to the north. So he's kind of one of those people who's gone native a little bit. He's so enlightened that he's...

I wouldn't call him enlightened, but essentially the Romans are backing the Judeans as the local big power. Okay. So the Romans are all about dividing and ruling, and there are all these kind of different cultural, ethnic fracture lines in the region. And so they pick on one grouping to back, and basically they back Jerusalem. And that's what Pontius Pilate does. However, as the decades go by,

tensions seem to develop. There are clearly Judeans who deeply resent Roman rule. Some of these seem to have gone out into the deserts. They seem to have been preparing for the end of the world, for the coming of a Messiah. And of course, the most famous groupings of Judeans who thought this are the people who gather around the figure of Jesus. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip,

and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. So, Tom, a question. Why do they resent Roman rule? And does that make them different from other occupied people? Let's say the people in Spain, the people in Gaul, the people in North Africa.

Are they different? Or does everybody resent Roman rule and we only think about the Jews because of the subsequent kind of theological history? Let's come to the second part of that question later because it's absolutely the key question. It's the key question. Is the resentment that Judeans feel against Roman rule something exceptional or is it something you would find across the empire? Why do they feel resentment because they're heavily taxed i mean that's ultimately the reason i think it is also clearly the case that um judeans have a sense that um the culture of and it's not necessarily Rome, it's more Greece, is attractive and appealing

and dangerous. So, I mean, if you wanted to draw a modern parallel, you could say, maybe the way that, say, in Muslim countries today, Muslims respond to Western culture. There are lots who kind of identify with it. Equally, there are lots, particularly perhaps on the ground, who profoundly resent it. So what you see, so above Samaria, you have the region of Galilee, which is where Jesus comes from, and in the Gospels is presented pretty much as being exclusively Judean, but it isn't. There are Greek cities all over the place.

And what you see there in the archaeological evidence is it would seem a conscious rejection by Jewish families, Judean families of Greek or Roman style pottery. So in Judean households, you don't get the kind of pottery that you get in Greek or Roman cities. And that seems to be a kind of conscious cultural rejection. So it's almost like a sort of, to use your modern parallel, it's like a kind of anti-globalization, let's celebrate our own, you know, that kind of. Yeah, a bit, a bit.

Now, the question is, are these tensions, are these kind of blend of resentment of taxation and kind of apocalyptic yearnings and talk of messiahs and all that kind of stuff, is that sufficient to explain what then happens in the 60s? And I think we should come to that in due course. So I'll just say what happens in the 60s. What happens in the 60s what happens in the 60s is that judea explodes the spring of 66 there's been a procurator who's been sent out by nero this procurator has basically been sent to try and screw as much money as he possibly can out of the judeans because two years late two years previously rome had burnt down in the great fire yeah and nero needs money

to redevelop the guy who gets sent out is a guy called geseus floris which is one of those kind of brilliant roman names that sounds like it should be from life of brian and he is um he's an associate of papaya sabina nero's wife and and deep love it uh And he comes out with the personal backing of Nero to raise as many taxes as he possibly can. In the spring of 66, a revolt explodes in Jerusalem against this. The garrison that the Romans have in Jerusalem is slaughtered. And this essentially binds the people of jerusalem to rebellion against rome yeah because they know there'll be a frightening place to be in and sure enough um that's that that that autumn the governor of syria a guy called gaius cestius gallus leads uh a large army comprising a couple of legions down to Jerusalem. The legions are the most effective

fighting force that the world has ever seen. They are highly trained. They are possessed with siege weapons, towers, particularly artillery, which has a kind of devastating impact. So people in Jerusalem are terrified. Gallus arrives in Jerusalem and Jerusalem is kind of built on, the walls are built on very, very kind of deep ravines, except in the north. And so that's where Gallus attacks. He forces his way through the outer wall. There are two further walls beyond, but rather than attack them gallus then withdraws and he withdraws through a pass called the beth haron pass and there he's ambushed and his army's wiped out and this is the worst disaster that roman arms has suffered since the um the annihilation of varus's legions by the Germans in the Teutoburger Forest.

And this absolutely means that the Roman war machine is going to now demand a brutal vengeance. So essentially, everybody who's been involved in that, whether it's been the massacre of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem in the spring, or the ambush of the Roman expeditionary force in the past, going down from Jerusalem down to the lowlands on the coast they are all that you know that their hands died in Roman blood and that means that that Rome is absolutely going to demand a terrifying vengeance Tom quick question never in history up to this point has anybody successfully rebelled against the Romans right I mean there's no precedent for

the Germans have the The Germans did. But was that a rebellion or was that just resisting? Yes, that was kind of a rebellion. I mean, the Romans thought that they constituted a province. And the Germans didn't agree. The Germans didn't agree. But you see, in the wake of that, the reprisals that the Romans brought to Germany were devastating. I mean, they waged kind of genocidal scale wars against the German tribes. And the only reason they didn't constitute a province was that they felt that it wasn't worth it. But Judea is worth it because it's strategically very important. Judea is rich. Yeah, richer. Yeah. And it's this absolutely

kind of crucial hinge. So you can't have a Roman province in Syria and Egypt and not have Judea. But I mean, quite aside from that, it's the insult to Roman prestige. It means that there is absolutely no alternative and no Roman would ever think otherwise except to absolutely crush the rebels into the dust. And the Judeans who have defeated Gallus and revolted, do we know what they are thinking? Do they think we could carry this off?

We could beat the Romans and become independent? Or is it this sort of doomed, fatalistic struggle against overwhelming odds? Well, the Judeans are like a bunch of ferrets in a sack. So the rebels all hate each other. They're of kind of various different factions, depending on whether they are from Galilee, or whether they're from Id Idumea or whether they're from central Judea, whether they're upper class or lower class, whether they are of the priestly class or not. On top of that, you have large, large numbers of Jews, of Judeans who absolutely side with Rome. So the most notable of these is um the local king herod agrippa um who has a kind of tranche of lands that's not actually within judea but kind of on the margins of it but has a kind of personal responsibility for the administration of the temple and so before the revolt breaks out he turns up and he can sense

the way that things are going and he says guys you mustn't do this this is insane who do you think you are look at the power of Rome. Look at all the people that she has conquered. Just don't go there. And Herod Agrippa and his sister, Berenice, with whom he's said to have had an incestuous affair, they see themselves absolutely as kind of devout Judeans, people who are pledged to the upkeep of the temple, but also loyal servants of Rome. And there are lots of people across Judea, you know,

whose interests have been tied up with Roman rule, who think this is a terrible thing. So it's a very, very, it's a very vociferous state of affairs. There are lots of rivalries. There is in no sense a kind of united front. You know, this is very kind of Judean people's front or people's front of Judea. These are people who do all hate each other. So they're all busy squabbling. Meanwhile, the Romans are getting ready to reconquer it. And Nero is still emperor

at this point. And so he appoints a guy called Vespasian, who is not of, you know, the reason that Nero appoints Vespasian is that he's going to hand over a large number of battle-hardened legions to him. And he doesn't want anyone who might in any way be a threat to him. Vespasian is a relatively humble stock. He's from kind of farmland out beyond Rome. He's a very proficient soldier. He's pretty dull. He has a kind of very coarse sense of humor. He has the expression, as someone says, of someone,

he always looks as if he's having a straining for a shit. It's the phrase that one person uses to describe his expression. But he's popular with his men and he's very effective. And he moves into Galilee and he annexes it. He essentially takes it very, very easily. There isn't much resistance. The main focus of resistance is a town called Jotapata, which is commanded by a nobleman

of kind of priestly background called Yusuf, who is the son of Matthew. And they hold out, then the Romans storm it. Yusuf will later tell a story about how all the resistors decided that they'd all commit suicide and they'd each take it in turn. You know, one person would kill another, then so it would go on. And he and one other are left and they decide that they'll surrender. And he is laden down with chains, brought into the presence of Vespasian.

And Yosef says to Vespasian, you are going to become Caesar. It has been prophesied in our scriptures. And Vespasian, he's kind of torn between the skepticism of a guy who's come up from peasant stock and an absolute gullibility. And he's kind of intrigued, but not sufficiently intrigued to let Yusuf go. So Yusuf gets chained up and taken away with all the other prisoners. And the campaign continues. However, what then happens is that in the summer of 68, Nero is toppled and commits suicide. And the Roman Empire implodes into civil war.

And in AD 69, it's called the Year of Four Emperors. Yes, of course. And the person who emerges from the Year of Four Emperors as Caesar is none other than Vespasian. Oh, so Yusuf was right. Yusuf was right. Yusuf is right. And that summer of 69, when Vespasian decides that he is actually going to throw his hat into the ring

and try and become Caesar. As part of this, he has Yusuf, the chains are struck off and he gets brought into his presence and he gets strongly encouraged to tell everyone that he had prophesied that this was going to happen. I saw this coming. I saw it coming. And so Vespasian is very into it. So there's a whole, all this kind of swirl of prophecies that a king will come out of Judea who will rule the world. And Vespasian thinks it's him. Absolutely. And so he comes from a family called the Flavians. So Flavian propaganda is very, very hot on this.

They cite Judean prophecy to the effect that a king will come from Judea and rule the world. And what these prophecies mean is Vespasian. Okay, perfect. Tom, this is the perfect point to take a break. We're in the summer of 69. Brian Adams is warming up. I've been really looking forward to making that joke. We will be back to get into the bloodthirsty heart of the drama of the Jewish revolt.

Yep. We'll be back for the next episode and that will be on Thursday and we will see you then. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.