Bar Kokhba revolt

Bar Kokhba revolt
First century palestine.gif
Judea in the 1st century
Date 132– traditionally Tisha B'Av of 135
Location Iudaea Province
Result Romans enslaved many Jews of Judaea, massacred many Jews, suppressed Jewish religious and political authority, banned Jews from Jerusalem, and renamed Iudaea to Syria Palaestina.
Belligerents
Roman Empire Jews of Iudaea
Commanders
Hadrian
Sextus Julius Severus		 Simon Bar Kokhba
Strength
Legio X Fretensis
Legio III Gallica
Legio III Cyrenaica
Legio XXII Deiotariana
Total forces from 12 legions;
60,000-120,000		 Unknown (probably hundreds of thousands, ill-equipped)
Casualties and losses
Legio XXII Deiotariana, rest unknown 580,000 Jews (mass civilian casualties), 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed (per Cassius Dio).
Jewish–Roman wars
First War – Kitos War – Bar Kokhba revolt - War against Gallus - Revolt against Heraclius

The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135CE) (Hebrew: מרד בר כוכבא‎) against the Roman Empire was a second major rebellion by the Jews of Iudaea Province (also spelled Judaea) and the last of the Jewish-Roman Wars.

Simon bar Kokhba, the commander of the revolt, was acclaimed a Messiah (rather than The Messiah), a heroic figure who could restore Israel. The revolt established a Jewish state for over two years, but a massive Roman army finally crushed it. The Romans then barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for Tisha B'Av.

Jewish Christians hailed Jesus as the Messiah and did not support Bar Kokhba. They were barred from Jerusalem along with the rest of the Jews. The war and its aftermath helped differentiate Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism, see also List of events in early Christianity.

The revolt is also known as The Second Jewish-Roman War, The Second Jewish Revolt, or The Third Revolt (counting the Kitos War, 115 - 117, as second).

Contents

Background

After the failed Great Jewish Revolt in the year 70, the Roman authorities took measures to suppress the rebellious province. Instead of a procurator, they installed a praetor as a governor and stationed an entire legion, the X Fretensis.

In 130, Emperor Hadrian visited the ruins of Jerusalem. At first sympathetic towards the Jews, Hadrian promised to rebuild the city, but the Jews felt betrayed when they found out that his intentions were to rebuild the Jewish holiest city as a Roman metropolis, and a new temple upon the ruins of the Second Temple, which was to be dedicated to Jupiter.[1]

An additional legion, the VI Ferrata, was stationed in the province to maintain order, and the works commenced in 131 after the governor of Judaea Tineius Rufus performed the foundation ceremony of Aelia Capitolina, the city’s projected new name. "Ploughing up the Temple" was a religious offence that turned many Jews against the Roman authorities. The tensions grew higher when Hadrian abolished circumcision (brit milah), which he, a Hellenist, viewed as mutilation. A Roman coin inscribed Aelia Capitolina was issued in 132.

Because the Great Jewish Revolt had resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin at Yavne provided spiritual guidance for the Jewish nation, both in Judea and throughout the diaspora.

Revolt

The Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva (alternatively Akiba) regarded the chosen commander Simon Bar Kokhba to be the Jewish Messiah, according to the Star Prophecy verse from Numbers 24:17: "There shall come a star out of Jacob" [2]("Bar Kokhba" means "son of a star" in the Aramaic language).

At the time Jewish Christians were still a minor sect of Judaism, and most historians believe that it was this messianic claim in favor of Bar Kokhba that alienated many of them, who believed that the true messiah was Jesus, and sharply deepened the schism between Jews and Christians.

The Jewish leaders carefully planned the second revolt to avoid numerous mistakes that had plagued the first Great Jewish Revolt sixty years earlier. In 132, a revolt led by Bar Kokhba quickly spread from Modi'in across the country, cutting off the Roman garrison in Jerusalem.

"The Era of the redemption of Israel"

Bar Kokhba's tetradrachm. Obverse: the Jewish Temple facade with the rising star. Reverse: A lulav, the text reads: "to the freedom of Jerusalem"

A sovereign Jewish state was restored for two and a half years that followed. The functional public administration was headed by Simon Bar Kokhba, who took the title Nasi Israel (ruler or prince of Israel). The "Era of the redemption of Israel" was announced, contracts were signed and coins were minted in large quantity in silver and copper with corresponding inscriptions (all were struck over foreign coins).

Rabbi Akiva presided over the Sanhedrin. The religious rituals were observed and the korbanot (i.e., sacrifices) were resumed on the Altar. It has been believed that attempts were made to restore the Temple in Jerusalem, but the evidence—letters written in Jerusalem and dated to the revolutionary era—has turned out to belong to the revolt of 66–70.

Roman reaction

The outbreak took the Romans by surprise. Hadrian called his general Sextus Julius Severus from Britain, and troops were brought from as far as the Danube. The size of the Roman army amassed against the rebels was much larger than that commanded by Titus sixty years earlier. Roman losses were very heavy. Among its losses it is believed that an entire legion, the XXII Deiotariana was completely wiped out. [3]

The struggle lasted for three years before the revolt was brutally crushed in the summer of 135. After losing Jerusalem, Bar Kokhba and the remnants of his army withdrew to the fortress of Betar, which also subsequently came under siege. The Jerusalem Talmud relates that the numbers slain were enormous, that the Romans "went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils" (Taanis 4:5). The Talmud also relates that for seventeen years the Romans didn't allow the Jews to bury their dead in Betar.

Outcome of the war

According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed.[4] [5] The Talmud, however, claims a death toll in the millions. The latter figure is unlikely, because there were simply not that many Jews in the region at that time. Cassius Dio claimed that "Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war. Therefore, Hadrian, in writing to the Senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors: 'If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the army are in health.'" [1]

Hadrian attempted to root out Judaism, which he saw as the cause of continuous rebellions. He prohibited the Torah law, the Hebrew calendar and executed Judaic scholars. The sacred scroll was ceremoniously burned on the Temple Mount. At the former Temple sanctuary, he installed two statues, one of Jupiter, another of himself. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea, he wiped the name off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina, after the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Jews; previously similar terms had been used to describe only the (smaller) former Philistine homeland to the west of Judaea. Since then, the land has been referred to as "Palestine," which supplanted earlier terms such as "Iudaea" (Judaea) and the antiquated "Canaan." Similarly, he re-established Jerusalem as the Roman pagan polis of Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden from entering it.

Long-term consequences and historic importance

Expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem during the reign of Hadrian. A miniature from the 15th-century manuscript "Histoire des Empereurs".

Constantine I allowed Jews to mourn their defeat and humiliation once a year on Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall. Jews remained scattered for close to two millennia; their numbers in the region fluctuated with time.

Modern historians have come to view the Bar-Kokhba Revolt as being of decisive historic importance. The massive destruction and loss of life occasioned by the revolt has led some scholars to date the beginning of the Jewish diaspora from this date. They note that, unlike the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War chronicled by Josephus, the majority of the Jewish population of Judea was either killed, exiled, or sold into slavery after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, and Jewish religious and political authority was suppressed far more brutally. After the revolt the Jewish religious center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. Judea would not be a center of Jewish religious, cultural, or political life again until the modern era, though Jews continued to live there and important religious developments still occurred there. In Galilee, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the 2nd–4th centuries. Eventually, Safed became known as a center of Jewish learning, especially Kabbalah in the 15th century.

Historian Shmuel Katz writes that even after the disaster of the revolt: "Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was there that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land."

The Galilee in late antiquity.

He lists the communities left in Palestine: "43 Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: 12 on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and 31 villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley". [6]

The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah. The deeply ambivalent rabbinical position regarding Messianism, as expressed most famously in the Rambam's (also known as Maimonides) "Epistle to Yemen", would seem to have its origins in the attempt to deal with the trauma of a failed Messianic uprising.

In the post-rabbinical era, however, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt became a symbol of valiant national resistance. The Zionist youth movement Betar took its name from Bar-Kokhba's traditional last stronghold, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, took his Hebrew last name from one of Bar-Kokhba's generals.

Further revolts against the Roman Empire

Main articles: War against Gallus and Revolt against Heraclius

In the year 351, the Jews launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. [6]

In 438, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come"! [7] [6]

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for five years governed the city. [6]

See also

Sources

The best recognized sources are Cassius Dio, Roman History (book 69) and Aelius Spartianus, Life of Hadrian (in the Augustan History). The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has exposed some new historical data.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Cassius Dio, The Roman History
  2. ↑ Book of Numbers 24:17: There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.
  3. ↑ livius.org account(Legio XXII Deiotariana)
  4. ↑ The 'Five Good Emperors' (roman-empire.net)
  5. ↑ Mosaic or mosaic?—The Genesis of the Israeli Language by Zuckermann, Gilad
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Katz, Shmuel, Battleground, (1974), page 96
  7. ↑ Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

Further reading

External links