The Rest Is History - 177. The Jewish Revolt

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

In the second of two episodes on the Jewish Revolt, Tom and Dominic discuss the burning of the Temple, Vespasian & Titus' triumph, and Masada. Why was it such a landmark revolt for both Christianity and Judaism? What happened in its aftermath? And what has its historical significance been in the modern world? All this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is History. 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. welcome back to the rest is history we are talking about the jewish revolt which i know tom holland thinks is the wrong title for it because he's going to explain why i mean he's going to explain why it wasn't jewish and maybe why it wasn't a revolt i don't know uh but before we get back into the narrative i just want to say this a few weeks ago tom we did a um a whole series of podcasts about russia and ukraine for the beginning of the war and you said that at one point oh well you know i wonder if anyone's listened to this in russia almost certainly not

because it's been because of the clampdown on information and so on but actually we have had a message uh i will just call him b because we don't necessarily want to give away who he is. He says he wants to thank us for the recent episodes. For him, a Russian, it was interesting and important. He says it's very important that we understand and the other European listeners understand that the current war is not the Russian people's war, but the war of their president. Millions of us are against this war, he says. He says, in one of your episodes, you've expressed doubts whether Russian people can hear you at all.

Yes, we can and we do. And we are listening to you through various technological wheezes to find their way around the Russian government's firewall. So, Tom, that's quite inspirational, isn't it? That's quite nice to hear yeah and it's very important to remember that as he says um you know there are plenty of people in russia who are very opposed to what's happening well those brave people who have been arrested at demonstrations and so on braver than i would be 15 years in prison they risk take our hats off to them right let's us um uh move back 2 000 years or just under 2 000 years so we were with brian adams in the summer of 69 and uh vespasian has become emperor the jewish revolt or i know you don't think it is the jewish

well jewish is fine but but i think judean is more accurate way judean revolt is in full swing so vespasian presumably tom it must be one of his kind of foreign policy priorities not really foreign policy is it's kind of he would see it as domestic policy that he needs to crack down on this straight away to assert his you know well yeah you might think that actually that's not the case um so soespasian basically has, he's essentially everywhere that's in rebellion has been crushed. The only places that aren't are Jerusalem and a couple of fortresses, one of which is Masada. So Masada was the palace built by Herod on top of the mountain. palace complex which has been occupied by who well we'll maybe come to that later yeah um so vespasian basically he judea is is not now sufficiently important for him to bother with he has much bigger fish to fry so he goes to alexandria and then he goes to rome um he said

he sells for rome in um in the spring of 70 and what he's done is his son, Titus, has been with him, has been commanding one of the legions. And he entrusts the command of the suppression of the conquest of Jerusalem to Titus. And Titus has with him a very, very interesting and perhaps unexpected character, a man called Julius Alexander, who'd been the prefect of Egypt, which is, you know, Dominic, as you'll know, the richest province in the whole Roman Empire. The breadbasket. And so therefore, no senator is allowed to serve as its prefect. So this Julius Alexander is not a senator, but hugely trusted. He's worked his way up through the Roman military, held a number of administrative posts. Now, the thing that's interesting about him is that he is a Judean. And in fact, he is the son of an Alexandrian

Judean who had paid for the great gates at the Temple of Jerusalem to be silver-plated. So the fact that Titus's deputy is a Judean, I i think is sufficient to complicate the sense that here we have a you know it's it is just romans and jews as the title of our episode suggests and then of course also we you know there is yosef this guy who has um proclaimed that vespasian is so he's totally turned his coat now as he's totally turned his coat yeah, as is Yusuf. He's totally turned his coat. But because I think he feels quite legitimately that God is on the side of the Romans, that Jerusalem is doomed. And therefore, what God wants is for the Judeans to surrender to Rome and to resume their role under Roman rule. So this raises a really interesting question, Tom. The fact that you've got Julius Alexander and you've also got yusuf how much is this a an inter an internecine kind of

judean thing i mean there must be quite a lot of judeans who think god i wish the revolt had never happened who are these clowns who are yeah absolutely i suppose it's impossible for us at this distance to have any sense of the numbers or the proportion, presumably? Well, we can say that it spans from high to low. So from high, Herod Agrippa is also riding with Titus and also going is Berenice, his sister, who has begun an affair with Titus. So Berenice is not only in Titus's train, but actually in his bed, probably by this stage. But we also know that there are lots of people in Jerusalem who are frantic to get out and to surrender. And so that passage from the Gospels that you quoted, Jesus was saying, get out. There are lots of people who do try and do that. The problem is that there are enough people in Jerusalem who know that they have no way out. They know that

they are going to suffer terrible death if they surrender because of the role that they've played, either in the original revolt or in the annihilation of the Roman legions at Beth Haron. And they're the ones with the weapons. And so they are the ones who are in a position to determine policy. So they sort of double down, basically. Yeah, they double down. And so when the Romans arrive in front of Jerusalem, Titus has four legions, large quantities of auxiliary soldiers, huge quantities of artillery. He waits for the Judeans to surrender. They don't.

There are lots who want to surrender but the people in charge the people with the ability to decide what policy should be are you know they have waded in blood so far that you know there's no going back quite a familiar pattern yeah so so titus uh launches the attack um so where what what year are we now are we so we're now we're now in spring of 70. And Jerusalem is a very, very hard nut to crack. And the siege of Jerusalem is the bloodiest, most brutal, the most challenging that a Roman army has faced since the destruction of Carthage almost two centuries previously. And the reason for that, as I said, is that there are basically three great lines of walls that have to be breached. So there's an outer wall in the north and then there's kind of inner wall and then a wall kind of in between them.

You have a fortress called the Antonia, which had been the Roman military fortress. And that is next to the Great Rock of the Temple, which is also basically a fortress. So to capture Jerusalem, you have to go through three walls and you have to capture the Antonia and you have to capture the temple. And even then, there's the great palace of Herod. That's also been fortified, so that too has to be taken. So it's a very, very tough ask. But the Romans are not the elite fighting force that they are for nothing. They smash through the outer wall.

They invade from the north again, as Gallus had done. And they occupy the whole of this new town, which had been built north of the old central city. And they occupy it and having done that titus arrays all his legions in full battle honor um armor shining uh horses lined up auxiliaries lined up standards glittering and gleaming with the aim of intimidating the judeans to surrender and i think still at this point his aim is essentially to try and get back to the status quo. He wants to get back. So he wants to round up the ringleaders to kill them, to execute them.

Punishment will certainly be inflicted. But essentially, he's got Herod Agrippa with him in his train. He probably wants to return to a situation where Herod Agrippa can administer the temple, where there are kind of tame priests installed, where once again, Jerusalem can kind of provide a center for Roman administration over the region. He doesn't want to obliterate the entire city. That would raise issues that at this stage, he doesn't want to have to face. But the Judeans continue to resist. Jerusalem does not surrender. And so what Titus then does is he moves in for the kill.

And he does this in two ways. The first is he builds a huge, great wall around Jerusalem to block everybody in. And that's what Jesus alludes to in his prophecy. That's worrying. When you've been holding out against a siege and the besiegers start to wall you in, then you know something terrible is coming. And by this point, all the kind of the woods, the parks for which Jerusalem had been famous have all been leveled for around 10 miles to build siege engines, to build ramps and to build this wall, which is completed in five days. And from now on, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to forage food, to forage for food or to launch attacks or to um still more to try and escape and anyone who is captured what the romans do is they what what trees remain are planted in the kind of the rubble of the old of the new town that the romans have

occupied and they are crucified there and we're told that um told that the legionaries to amuse themselves, and because they're so full of hate for the resistors, you know, among the kind of the heat and the stench of blood and dust, that they tie their prisoners in increasingly inventive and cruel ways. I know I've already, I mentioned this in the crucifixion episode. So these crucifixions are, you know, designed to be as grotesque as possible. And so the defenders looking out from their walls, see this great forest of their compatriots kind of writhing and twisting, nailed or bound to trees. I mean, kind of horrible, gruesome spectacle. And this is um uh women and children as well as men or if they they have no left probably men it's probably fighters yeah probably men so what's happened to the to the women and children well they're trying to get out so one of the things that um that happens is that people swallow their gold and then go out and then they kind of you know they have a a dump and take the gold out from the,

from the poo. That's a nice image. But the various Syrian auxiliaries discover that they're doing that. And so whenever they get prisons, they slit open the stomach to try and feed, to grab the gold out. So that's an added complication that people face. And so increasingly people just stay inside the city and,

you know, people are beginning to starve because the fighters, the people who are leading the resistance, are monopolizing the food. And so people just start to die in the streets. And their bodies get tipped over the walls and they start kind of littering the various ravines. So presumably huge dysentery, cholera or whatever. Yeah, it's unspeakable. The conditions are unspeakable.

But the Judeans, the fighters continue to resist um the titus orders the antonia to be stormed the great fortress uh and this again is a kind of brutal exhausting process so great um great ramps are built uh the judeans have tunneled underneath them. They kind of set these tunnels on fire. The ramps collapse. Titus orders them to build it again. The wall comes down. The Romans storm it. And now they've got to get into the temple.

And again, Titus levels the Antonia. They build the ramps up on the temple, build it on the other side of the wall as well. And finally, Titus decides that he's you know he's had enough so they set fire to the the uh to the great gates these gates that have been silver plated by his deputy's father the silver melts the wood implodes the fire starts to spread and to um it lights up the colonnades that surround the great central the great outer court of the temple and the legions are able to force their way in, but the Judeans are still holding out in the inner sanctuary. And now Titus has to decide what he's going to do about the temple. Is he going to incinerate it or is he

going to try and spare it? And this is hugely contested because the one account we have of it is written by a Judean. And I don't think I'm giving away any spoilers when I say that it's Yusuf, who in due course will go on to become a Roman citizen and take the name of Josephus. And Josephus tells us that Titus wanted to spare it. But Josephus is trying to square two very different things. One is he wants to keep the favor of Titus, and the other, he wants to explain how it is that the temple came to be destroyed, because he remains a very devout Judean. And so this idea that Titus wanted to spare the temple, but that God had destined it for destruction is very, very important to him. So whether that's actually what happened or not, we don't know. One thing that perhaps counters the idea

that the temple was set on fire by mistake, which is what Josephus says happens, is that the treasure of the temple is taken out and kept. And how would you do that if the temple was on fire? Tom, there's a question from one of our listeners, Stephen Clark, history teacher. He says, it's the Raiders of the Lost Ark question. What happened to the Ark of the Covenant and the other sacred objects that were in the Jerusalem temple?

Are they in an American warehouse somewhere in the Midwest? Well, the Ark of the Covenant is not there, as far as we know. It kind of vanishes with the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem. Okay. But there's the great kind of the menorah. There's a great table all made of gold. These are treasures that are taken. And so one implication of that might be that the legions had gone in,

they had stripped the temple, and then they'd incinerated it. I mean, the honest answer is we will never know. We cannot know. So the destruction of the temple, I mean, this is an absolute body blow, not just to the defenders, but to every Judean, because this is the holiest place for Judeans on the face of the earth. So the horror of it is hard to overemphasize. But even after its destruction, even when it's just a kind of smoking black and rubble, the Judeans continue the fight. They withdraw to Herod's palace and it takes another month for that to be taken. And then once that has been taken, Titus orders the entire city to be

destroyed except for a stretch of wall and three of the great towers so that people in future ages would be able to look at it and be able to gauge the scale of what it was that the Romans had done in taking this great and famous city. But everything else is absolutely flattened. And where do the people go who lived there? Or are they all dead? They're enslaved. So they are either dead or they're dead. Just taken to slave markets and traded. Yeah, so the best looking, the tallest, the most handsome captives are taken to Rome to adorn Titus's triumph. And the rest are sold to the slave markets.

But this is not the end of the revolt though, Tom, right? No, so Titus goes back, having done his stuff. And whereas previously there hadn't been a legion installed in Jerusalem, now a legion is plonked absolutely on the heart of what had been Jerusalem. So that's one of the reasons why the wall is kept, so it can serve as a kind of outer ring for the legionary base. And it's the 10th legion, which has absolutely has an absolute kind of crack it's it's it's absolutely kind of an elite legion yeah um and order is you know it's judea is definitely

at this point constituted as a province and the responsibility rests on the uh the guy given command of this new province to crush the last remaining holdouts. And the very last holdout famously is Masada. So that's Herod's Palace. That was on the rock. Yeah. Yeah. So that's Herod's Palace.

And that is very, very difficult to take, but the Romans take it. How? How did they take it? They sort of scale the mountain well according to josephus who was not there right so again this massively complicates our our ability to know what actually happened supposedly they build a great ramp i mean you know as they had done in jerusalem but this is on an even larger scale uh and the story goes that um

the uh the rebels on the top when they see that Mossad is doomed to fall or commit suicide rather than be taken. Yeah, that's the one thing that most people know about the Jewish revolt, I would say, is that the last defenders kill themselves. And how true do you think that is? Well, so how true is any of this? I mean, the basic outlines i think are definitely true um you know clearly judea does blaze into revolt yeah clearly jerusalem is destroyed clearly masada is captured uh and there is the evidence of josephus's record he writes a history i'm presuming there's archaeology yeah yeah so there's archaeology both at Jotapata, where Josephus had been taken prisoner, and at Masada.

The evidence is intriguing and fascinating and being done. So how is it that Josephus comes to write what he writes? Because it's not at all obvious that a Judean would write an account of this terrible event. And why is it that we know so much about this revolt? And there are three basic reasons for that, I think. The first is that this revolt is not cast by the Flavians as a revolt. It's incredibly important to Vespasian and indeed to Titus, both of whom are kind of upstarts. They have no background. There's nothing about them that would ever have marked them out as potential Caesars. That's why Nero had originally entrusted Vespasian with the command. What they can do is say, well, Vespasian can say, I am a proper

imperator. Imperator, the word we translate as empire, can also be translated as a general who has prevailed on a battlefield. So Vespasian is a proper Roman in that sense. He has won a great victory. And that's why he and Titus are awarded a triumph, which is this kind of great procession through the streets of Rome, where you have conquered an enemy and brought that enemy in. A sort of worthy enemy, like Cleopatra or like Pyrrhus or great figures from the past. Yes. So like Cleopatra, but not Antony. So Augustus had celebrated a triumph over Cleopatra, but not Antony, because you cannot celebrate a triumph over fellow Romans. So Vespasian's great triumph is his victory in the civil war. That is what has led him to be emperor. But he can't celebrate that, because that is absolutely not the done thing. Now, the problem for Vespasian and Titus is that actually, you can only celebrate a triumph

if you have conquered an enemy that had not previously been a part of the empire the judeans had been inside the empire hadn't they absolutely had they absolutely had and so this is a huge problem for the flavians and so they bring the full weight of their propaganda um expertise to bear on the problem which they do absolutely brilliantly so one thing they do the the triumph they they big it up massively. So they pretend that the Judean captives that they're parading through the streets are people who have never been a part, you know, they'd never belonged to the empire. also parade large quantities of treasure from the the entire east so all kinds of things that had not come from judea right like kind of rare animals great carpets with figurative illustrations which obviously you know no judean yeah would have had um all kinds of things like that uh and they even parade ships implying you know a bit like uh they fought battles. They kind of fought the equivalent of, yes, of the great naval battle that Augustus had won at Actium.

There had been no naval battles. The most there had been, the Romans had chased some rebels down to the Lake of Galilee and kind of gone out in fishing boats to kill them all. So the Sea of Galilee was dyed blood. A fishing boat would look red but that's it so it's massively massively over inflated they also issue a constant stream of coins with the the phrase udair captor on it so judea has been taken captive and judea is portrayed as a barbarian

woman weeping underneath a tree and this is a kind of standard image which is done to promote the annexation of previously uncorked peoples. Yeah, they did that when they defeated Cleopatra, didn't they? They did, yes. Egypto-Copter. But they haven't captured Judea

because it was part of the empire. So, Dominic, this is the intriguing thing is that a few decades ago, a coin collector walked in to the numismatists and showed a coin that had been in the collection for quite a while. And on that was the phrase, Judea recepter, Judea retaken. And nobody had any idea that this coin had ever been minted. And the reason for that is that obviously it was done by an overenthusiastic, but ignorant mint.

You hadn't realized that you were not meant to be broadcasting that message and so you know this is absolutely unique it's the only example of it and there was um an inscription found on a triumphal arch that had stood by the the um circus maximus the great chariot stadium where titus basically says that he's the first person ever to have captured Jerusalem, which would obviously have come as news to Nebuchadnezzar or Pompey the Great. I mean, people know that Judea had been a province. But they willingly suspend their belief because it's so crucial to Flavian status and propaganda. And so the fact that the Judeans have been defeated and they've become enshrined as the enemies destroyed by the Flavians is fundamental to the establishment of this regime. So that's basically for them,

Tom, what defeating Cleopatra was for Augustus' sort of foundational myth, a conquest myth. Yeah. And so Augustus celebrates his emergence as Caesar by sponsoring Virgil to write the Aeneid and so on. What the Flavians do is they act as patrons for Josephus, this guy who had been a commander against them, who had hailed Vespasian, you know, as the king who had come out of Judea, and who now writes a series of history. So he writes a history of the war, he writes a history of the entire history of the Judeans, he writes a biography, an autobiography of himself, and he writes a defense of the Judeans and their God and their practices against a pagan critic. So Tom, in many ways, I would say he's come out of quite badly from

this podcast because he seems a bit of a weasel. I mean, he's basically abandoned all his former cause, thrown his lot in and become a Flavian propagandist. Yeah. So this is the image of him, that he's a sinister turncoat and a coward who has just jumped ship. I think this is incredibly unfair. Okay. He is from a class of person in Jerusalem who did not want to rebel against the Romans. He bravely holds out at Jotapata, but when he gets stormed, he thinks, well, I never really believed in this in the first place. I think that we should be siding with Rome. He sees Rome as the agent of God. He finds no contradiction whatsoever in being a dutiful Judean, dutiful to his God and dutiful to Caesar. And the histories that he writes, even though they are incredibly self-aggrandizing, I mean, he's unbelievably

conceited, kind of comically so. They're also quite brave. Because what happens in the wake of the destruction of the temple and Vespasian's triumph is that it's decided not to rebuild the temple. And therefore, the priesthood will not be reconstituted. And therefore, a whole new way of ministering the region has to be put in place. And what that in turn means is that it's not just the Judeans who were cast as rebels, but the entire kind of framework of their belief that is seen as having been found wanting. And what had happened during the civil war in Rome in 69 is that their great temple, the temple of Jupiter up on the Capitol had been burnt. And so what the Flavians do and they're short of money, just as Nero had been, is that the tax, the money that Judeans

had previously contributed towards the temple in Jerusalem, they now have to pay it to fund the rebuilding of the temple on the Capitol. And that is accompanied by... One of the reasons why Josephus writes his defense of the Judeans against the pagan critic is that you're starting to get... Well, I suppose you could... I mean, it's a kind of precursor of a lot of anti-Semitic attacks that will be to come. And this is brave of Josephus to do this.

You know, he doesn't have to do it. So he's sticking up for his people. People saying the Judeans are anti-Roman or un-Roman. Yeah, they're anti-Roman, that their God is ridiculous, that their customs are ridiculous, that they're kind of inveterate rebels, that they're standoffish, that they want to have nothing to do with other people. A lot of the kind of abuse of Jews that is still kind of mainstream to this day. And it's imperially sponsored for the first time. This hadn't previously happened.

But because of the importance of the Judean revolt to the founding of the Flavian regime, it does. And I don't think Josephus was in any way a coward. I mean, I think he was very, very brave to write what he did. and 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. You just said a second ago the importance of the Jewish revolt. So we've had lots of questions about this.

Mark Woodhouse, what's the difference between the Jewish revolts and we've had lots of questions about this. Mark Woodhouse, what's the difference between the Jewish revolts and other revolts? Thoughtfully Catholic, was there a qualitative difference between the Jewish revolts and other rebellions that the Romans faced? To what extent is this something, well, has the place of this rebellion been completely inflated by flavor and propaganda? Or actually, would you say this is the kind of thing that happens in the Roman Empire? Every 5, 10, 20 years in a different part of the empire, there's a tax revolt.

People kick off. They have to send in troops to quell it. And then all the others are completely forgotten. But this is the one that's remembered. Well, has the memory of this been, and the significance of it being inflated by the flavians absolutely has it been inflated by another group of people who have a stake in putting a particular spin on this episode yes it has and those people of of course, are the Christians. Because even before the destruction of Jerusalem, you look in the writings of Paul.

And what you have there is a sense that because Christ has offered the perfect sacrifice to God, there is therefore no more need for the sacrifices that Judean custom prescribes should be done in the temple. And that furthermore, the temple has been replaced by the body of the Christian faithful. The church is now the new temple. And these are ideas that are current before the sack of the temple. So the fact that the temple is then destroyed seems to the emergent Christian community absolute evidence that this perspective is correct and that God has found the temple establishment, he's weighed it in the balance and found it wanting. And that is why in the long run, the writings of Josephus survive. Because of the christians they're preserved by christians because they're so important to for backing up the kind of christian idea that basically the church has replaced the temple as the focus of of god's um care so hold on tom let's say that uh you know constantine the great um he is one of a number of well people they are auditioning different religions we've talked about this in previous podcasts yeah you know it could have been isis it could have been

heracles who knows solon victus had it been one of those are you basically saying josephus would be forgotten because he wouldn't be useful we wouldn't be doing this podcast about the jewish revolt because the jewish revolt like so many other provincial revolts, would just have been completely and utterly forgotten. I mean, Josephus is being used by Christian writers before Constantine converts. So it's possible that, I mean, in a sense, it kind of backs up drama, which is how Christians understand the rolling through of history. So that, I think, is basically why the text of Joseph into the uh into the middle ages and then into the modern period um and if we didn't have josephus we'd know almost nothing about the context so what about there's another group fine but there's another group of people who might remember

it which who are the jews themselves or the rather the judeans so well yeah this okay so first of all i mean there's so many questions here. What happens to the Judeans? Are they all still in Judea? Secondly, at what point do they become Jews? And thirdly, what role does this event have in their kind of sense of themselves and their unique history. The destruction of the temple and the annihilation of Jerusalem is, I mean, it's hard to think of a more shocking, destabilizing event for a devout Judean. Because without the temple, you can't offer the sacrifices that that are mandated in torah so what do you do there's there's you know there's plenty of evidence that lots of them abandon their faith in their belief in the benignity of of their god essentially that that you know if they can't practice you know

they the temple is no longer there they just give it up completely but also do they feel let down abandoned do you completely abandon yes absolutely but because this has happened before so you know there are there are there are scriptures and writings written in the wake of the sack of jerusalem by the babylonians yeah kind of try to make sense of this and to explain it. And because you have the body of Torah still, that for Judeans who want to stay true to their traditions provides them with more than a life raft. I mean, it's something absolutely see where they can cling on to what happens over the course of the decades that follow and the centuries is that the the authority that had previously been invested in the temple authorities comes to be invested in

in teachers who are associated with institutions called synagogues. So these are places beyond Jerusalem where you gather to, you know, the Torah scrolls are kept and so on like that. And there's one place in particular, a place called Yavne, which is now a suburb of Tel Aviv, where these teachers, rabbis, seem to have particularly congregated.

And there is this very strong tradition that this is basically where what we might call rabbinical Judaism, the form of Judaism that is practiced now by people that we would call Jews, it's where it really puts down roots. Now, obviously, for the rabbis, the memory of the destruction of Jerusalem is always there, but they don't remember it as Josephus had done, or indeed as Christians do, as an event of history. They see it as a kind of cosmic calamity that transcends history. And so you do have Vespasian and Titus do feature, say, in the Talmud, which is this kind of great corpus of writings that emerge through the 5th, 6th, 7th century. So there's a legend that one of the rabbis, a guy called Yohanan ben Zakkai, he escapes the siege of Jerusalem in a coffin.

And he gets brought to Vespasian, who in this version is leading the siege rather than Titus. And he gets out of the coffin and he hails Vespasian as the king of the world. And at that point, news arrives that Nero is dead. And so Vespasian grants Yohanan ben Zakkai and all the other rabbis the right to go and set up their base in Yavne. And you can see there a kind of distorted memory of Josephus' writings. It was really interesting. Even more, Titus is commemorated as a monstrous figure. So there is a story told that his plan when he captured the temple had been

that he was going to go into the Holy of Holies, so the most sacred place, not just in the temple, but in the world, and he was going to have sex with a prostitute there on a kind of rolled out Torah scroll. Oh my word. Yeah, I mean, the kind of ultimate blasphemy. And when he gets in there, he stabs the curtain that veils the Holy of Holies and it starts to bleed. And Titus thinks that he's killed the Judean God. And so therefore he doesn't need to go ahead with his blasphemy,

but this doesn't preserve him because the rabbis say a little gnat, as he was sailing back to Rome, flew up his nose all the way through his sinuses, up into his brain, and started gnawing on his brain for seven years and drove him mad until he died. And he's now in hell. And every day he is incinerated and his ashes are cast on the sea, and then he's reconstituted. And so the process goes on. So this is clearly not history, but it's tribute to the kind of, you know, the potent role that the destruction of the temple continues to play in the imaginings of both Jews and Christians.

So you've got all that way. You've got the Flavian propaganda. You've got the Christian idea that the destruction of Jerusalem shows the truth of the fact that the church has replaced the temple. And you have the Jewish, the rabbinical idea that the wellsprings of the study of Torah as it's practiced now and of the Talmud and so on is also rooted in the events of this great revolt, that you can see why it's such a kind of seismically important event in history. But you can also see why it's really, really difficult

to get back beyond all those perspectives and to see what might actually have happened. All right, Tom. I think you should, though. Have a go. And let's say it's very, very speculative. But what do you think? So, okay, we can't know, we can't tell all this, but do you think it really was just a common or garden provincial tax revolt? That the Flavians and then the Christians and the Jews all exaggerated? Or do you think this was something more large scale, more serious? Right. So it's clear that there are, as I said, there are trends in Judean culture, in Judean society

that lead Judeans to resent Roman rule. Yeah. And these are cast in theological terms you know the romans are idolaters pagans um you know they will be destroyed at the end of days these are traditions that are kind of circulating bubbling around the idea of the messiah is there it is present it's all kind of part of it um against that it's it's evident that lots of judeans and particularly jerusalem itself had had absolutely flourished under roman rule jerusalem has been very strongly favored by the by a succession of emperors and Roman rulers and Roman governors. They have been treated with absolute kind of kid gloves.

There's a huge sensitivity towards Judean scruples, theological scruples, cultic scruples. So, you know, for instance, there's a soldier who bears his arse during the Passover. He's executed. Another one desecrates a scroll of Torah. He's also executed. There are the coinage bears no Roman coinage. You know, there's a kind of concentrated effort not to put things on this coinage that would offend Judean sensibilities. And, you know, a lot of Judeans recognize, and, you know, there are a lot of Judeans outside Judea,

in Alexandria, in Rome, they're the dog that doesn't bark. You know, they do not join in the revolt. And they can recognize that Roman rule is kind of good. You know, it's good for prosperity. You can travel there. You can, you know. Good for trade. Good for trade. Globalization has its benefits. You know, as in globalization today, there are people at the bottom who tend to resent it. But, you know, there's absolutely a case for saying that, you know, most Judeans can recognize that Roman rule has been good for the temple, good for Jerusalem, good for their standard of living. And that the Romans basically have backed them backed them say against the sumerians now one of the complications is that the the troops that the governors use are probably sumerian so when gessius floris the procurator whose exact tax exactions kind of initiates the uh the explosion The soldiers that he has are probably

Sumerians. So they're not Romans. They're serving the Roman army, but they're Sumerians. And so there is that sense of a kind of a religious and ethnic rivalry that is, it's a kind of a fire starter on the bonfire. So that's a kind of crucial part of it, I think. So I think you could say there's nothing inherent, I think, within the currents of Judean society that made it inevitable. And the further evidence for that is that actually Judeans had lived very, you know, I mean, not exactly contentedly, but they had, you know, they'd lived under the Persians, they'd lived under the Greeks, they'd been the bust up, you know, with Julius Maccabeus, that's true. But then under Rome, again, there hadn't been, you know, there'd been no kind of particular disturbances. And so I think that that implies that the events are, the revolt is set in train by contingent events. And I think essentially the contingency is the fact that Nero needs the money. I think it's a kind of ripple effect from the fire of Rome.

And it's the fact that the Judeans, for once, because Gessius Florus, his tax collector, has gone there and he has the personal backing of Nero, they can't appeal over his head either to Herod Agrippa, the local king, or to the governor in Syria. And I think that basically that's the problem, that resentment against the taxics' actions result in the massacre of the Sumerians, the Sumerian garrison in Jerusalem. And that then having done that, they're then, you know, they're stuck on the on the down escalator, which then starts to accelerate when they wipe out the legions that have come from Syria. And then, you know, there's no way back, really. Okay. And obviously, then you end up with this event that sort of retrospectively becomes a complete landmark, both forianity and i guess for judaism yeah and so people have asked um you know is this a bog standard provincial revolt i mean on one level clearly not because it it's still remembered to this day for the reasons we've gone in yeah but in another sense it kind of

is really i mean if we had a josephus to describe say buddhica's revolt where likewise you have you know a war is is you know of eradication is practiced against the druids the druids are cast as people you know far more than that that say that you know judean priesthood or the rabbis are the romans never attempt to extirpate the judean priests they never attempt to extirpate the rabbis they do attempt to extirpate the druids and against the backdrop of 69 you know the year of the four emperors yeah this where it seems that the roman empire is collapsing you have very kind of similar apocalyptic movements elsewhere in the empire so you in in um in lyon in gaul you have um a local gaul who declares that he's he's a god and he's come to rule the world. He ends up being

put to death. And on the Roman frontier, the Rhine frontier, you have a priestess who is apparently installed in a tower beyond the Rhine, preaching the doom of Rome and the fact that all the legionary bases will be wiped out. And again, you have this interface between provincial revolt and kind of apocalyptic visions. There's nothing distinctively unusual about what's happening in Judea. It's just the long-term ripple effect. But let's take this back then to where we started there is one very distinctive thing which is that what happened in the judean revolt was predicted by our top geopolitical pundit from the very beginning of this story jesus christ in the gospel of saint luke now tom what is going on there why has it been so why does it appear to have been so accurately predicted in in luke's gospel or is there some there some other story there that I'm not getting because I'm not familiar with this stuff?

Well, I mean, it depends if you think that Jesus is a true prophet. Maybe he foresaw what was going to happen, and that's an authentic record of what he foresaw. Or maybe he extrapolated from what he wanted to happen you know there's there's clearly a lot of uh apocalyptic language um in the gospels yeah uh and so the idea that the temple might be destroyed um is pretty important to um how christians you know even in the very early decades uh are seeing god's purpose or perhaps it's a retrospective prophecy that's attributed to him uh and and that that particular passage is written after the destruction of the temple i mean all these all these arguments have been made so we just don't know yeah i so one other thing i Yeah. So one last thing that we should probably just mention is Masada.

Because the destruction of the temple has always played quite an important role in the way that Christians have seen the world. Recently, the story of Masada has begun to play quite a significant role in the way that maybe not Jews, but Israelis. Well, because of being embattled, being surrounded, the self-sacrificial nature of the story, you can completely understand why, how in the 20th century, Israelis would take up that as a kind of founding myth. Yeah. So this story in the wake of the foundation of Israel becomes politically incredibly important. And there's this kind of interface between politics and archaeology in Israel that you get. So the great excavation at Masada took place in 1963, 1965,

with an archaeologist called Yigal Yadin, who was also the former military chief of staff. And so he felt, you know, just as Israel was surrounded by enemies, so also the rebels on the mountaintop of Masada had been surrounded by enemies. And this is an idea that then gets passed on to Moshe Dayan. And he has a kind of swearing in ritual for soldiers in, I can't remember what it is, one of the divisions of the Israeli army who've kind of graduated and passed their training, that they do, you know, they graduate on the summit of Masada

and they declare that Masada shall not fall again. So this is, you's very it's been very very important to to Israeli self-image I mean inevitably as with almost every other aspect of this story it's it's probably not quite what it seems because as I said just see the only account we have of this episode is written by Josephus. And he had clearly, not only had he not been there for the siege, but he'd never been to Masada. His account of what was on Masada doesn't correspond to what the archaeology shows. And in fact, the idea that it was rebels, people who were committed to fighting the Romans, camped out on Masada, seems almost to be the reverse of the truth. Because actually what you have on

the top of Masada are people who fled Rome. They fled confrontation with the Romans. If they'd wanted to fight the Romans, they wouldn't be up on that mountaintop. And probably by the time that the Romans get there, they've been there for kind of, you know, eight years, pretty harmless. I mean, they're not doing any harm, but they, you know, they are standing outside the frameworks of roman power and so therefore they they constitute rebels in the eyes of the romans yeah uh and they they send a single legion it seems to i mean basically it's probably a kind of you know to to keep keep the soldiers on their toes it's a pretty routine policing operation and they seem to have stormed it pretty easily so it's almost certainly not the um the heroic tale of resistance that uh that josephus and um you know current israeli yeah perspective would have it so hollywood will

not be getting in touch with you tom for um well script writing advice and probably not forthcoming masada films if there are any probably but you know but i mean it's a kind of you know it's a it is of course you know a tragic and terrible story because yeah you know you don't have to be a rebel for it you know they were clearly wiped out very bloodily and it's a kind of horrible story okay well um uh that as usual turned into into a much bigger story than we thought it would. So I hope you've enjoyed these episodes on the Jews versus Romans. Actually, Tom, this is one last thing., if you want to call the Judeans the Jews, I mean, you know, why not? There's nothing to stop you. I just think that using better to think of them rebelling as provincials than as people who are inspired by a religion. Okay.

Fine. Thank you very much, Tom. That was an absolute panoramic, brilliant narrative. Very enjoyable. And you can go and have a rest now. Thank you very much for listening and goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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