Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (7 page)

The Alexandrine empire, significantly weakened by its division into parts, was, by the early first century
B.C.
, ripe for plucking. The energies of the founder had long been squandered in ceaseless competition among the leading dynasties, led by ever less distinguished scions. The
Hasmoneans, who were but an instance of local resurgences throughout the lands of Alexander’s conquests, were particularly
successful in establishing first a measure of local rule, then gradually something approaching independence—though it should not be forgotten that much of what they accomplished was at the expense of Jewish identity. In the end, they were even affecting Greek names.

The Jews of
Palestine
⁷
knew almost nothing of Rome but its name and that it was a newly expanding power, situated in far-distant Italy. Though Judas had entered briefly into alliance with the Romans, First Maccabees makes clear how vague and naive the Jews were about these Romans: “Now Judas had heard of the reputation of the Romans: how strong they were, and how well disposed toward any who made common cause with them, making a treaty of friendship with anyone who approached them.” Yeah, sure. Judas also thought he had an alliance with the strange, militaristic, xenophobic Greek city-state of
Sparta, the North Korea of its day, because for some reason the Jews imagined they were kin to the Spartans.

Rome, the far-distant, was in its expansiveness drawing near. Having begun in the seventh century at a bend in the Tiber as a settlement of Latin-speaking farmers, it came to master the Italian
peninsula by a combination of military acumen and what it thought of as moral superiority. Romans were, by their own lights, a frugal, plainspoken people who put security first, prosperity second, and pleasure far down the list. They had nothing in common with the sybaritic, effeminate East that had so attracted Alexander; and while they admired the Greeks for their unparalleled intellectual accomplishments, they wanted no truck with their effete self-indulgence and inability to form a cohesive society. Despite Alexander’s formal uniting of the known world, the traditions of the independent Greek city-states, each with its cherished and eccentric sensibility—democratic, indifferent, philosophical
Athens, for instance; fat, artistic, fornicating
Corinth; brutish, lockstep, homosexual
Sparta; erudite, airy, esoteric
Alexandria—were too ingrained to be dislodged. If all this made for variety, excitement, and life, to the self-denying Romans such quirkiness invited centrifugal fragmentation; and it was no way to run a society or an army, both of which require the upholding of inviolable laws of consistency, uniformity, and order—the preeminent Roman virtue. The Greeks thought they were the most intellectually discerning; and the Romans, arriving late to the fountains of self-conscious culture, were happy to hand them the palm in this regard. But the Romans prided themselves on having crucial talents that the Greeks, for all their complexity, lacked: realism and practicality. By the time their general,
Pompey, invaded
Palestine, the Romans had come to believe that, since they knew best, they would rule best. To implement their purposes, they had created a military
machine that, like a universal steamroller, could flatten the world and re-create it according to Roman specifications.

Pompey was an old warhorse who had put down a rebellion in Spain, helped extinguish the slave revolt led by
Spartacus, and served as consul in 70
B.C.
, having pressured the Roman Senate into giving him this highest executive honor even though he was only thirty-six at the time and had held none of the required prior offices. Thereafter, he was allowed much leeway in his successful campaign to rid the Mediterranean of pirates (piracy being just the sort of thing Romans found intolerable) and to settle matters in Pontus on the south shore of the Black Sea, where the local king had a misconceived ambition to rule the Balkans and Greek Asia. While Pompey was putting paid to that bit of business, civil war broke out most opportunely in
Judea between the forces of two opposing candidates for the kingship—brothers and
Hasmoneans—giving Pompey the excuse to intervene in the year 63. Judea, as well as all of Palestine,
Syria, and North Africa, would remain in Roman hands till it would fall to the Muslims in the seventh century of the Christian era.

Pompey was one of three eminent Romans—the others being
Crassus and
Julius Caesar—whom Caesar would shortly bring together to form the First Triumvirate, whose public mission was to solidify Rome’s political order (always an admirable Roman objective) while furthering Caesar’s unannounced political ambition to become Rome’s dictator. Pompey took
Jerusalem after a three-month siege and entered the
Holy of Holies—which the high priest alone was fit to enter, and that but once a year. You can almost hear Pompey’s gruff “What the hell d’ye suppose they have in there?” as he, mounting the steps of the sanctuary, noted the growing alarm
of the priests. But, his curiosity satisfied, he otherwise left the Temple alone. It would fall to the well-named
Crassus to plunder its treasury to finance his military campaign against the Parthians. The Parthians (today they are Iranians), however, were tough nuts whom the Romans never cracked. Apart from the Scots, they were the only people ever to stop the Romans, who were made to halt their eastward expansion at the Euphrates, where Crassus was cut down at ancient Harran, from which a man named
Abraham had once set out on the journey of a lifetime.

Crassus’s quaestor (or quartermaster), one
Cassius, became Rome’s proconsul for Syria (and, incidentally,
Judea), soon after which civil war broke out in Rome between Caesar, who had added the conquest of Gaul to his résumé (and immeasurably increased his fame by writing a book about it), and sour old
Pompey, who’d had enough of Caesar’s strutting about. Pompey lost and was assassinated by the Ptolemies on fleeing with his army into
Egypt. Caesar followed and quickly found himself outnumbered and in trouble, from which he was rescued—by Jews!
Hyrcanus II, the Hasmonean priest-ruler whom Pompey had set in place, persuaded the Jews of Egypt, who were considerable in number, especially in Alexandria, to fight for Caesar.
Antipater, influential king of the
Idumeans, a mixed population of Jews and Arabs who lived south of Jerusalem between the Judean hills and the Negev desert, sent troops and supplies. Caesar, triumphing once again while carrying on a torrid affair with
Cleopatra, the teen queen of Egypt, was grateful for such surprise support. He gave Hyrcanus the official title “ethnarch of the Jews”; to Antipater he gave Roman citizenship, exemption from taxation, and the procuratorship of Judea. Obviously, he valued Antipater’s contribution
more highly than Hyrcanus’s, and he was right to do so: the Idumean king was the real power propping up the Hasmonean priest.
Antipater was a crafty desert chieftain who had converted to Judaism and had ambitions far beyond the desert. His son
Herod was appointed about this time military prefect of greater
Syria and would soon become a Hasmonean by marriage.

Just three years after his victory in
Egypt, on the Ides of March 44
B.C.
, Caesar was assassinated by conspirators who included
Cassius, the proconsul for Syria-Judea. The following year, Caesar’s great desert supporter Antipater was murdered; and
Mark Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and adoptive heir, defeated Caesar’s murderers at
Philippi, where Philip of
Macedon had long ago begun his conquests. The Parthians entered Jerusalem, elevating their own candidate as king and high priest. But Herod escaped to Rome where, with the help of Antony and Octavian, he was declared by the Senate to be “King of the Jews.” Hard fighting lay ahead; but the Parthians were pushed back, and by the summer of 37, after a successful three-month siege of Jerusalem, Herod could claim his land as well as his title. He would sit for thirty-three years on the Judean throne, dying in 4
B.C.
, a year or two after the
birth of Jesus.
⁸

Mark Antony divided the emerging Roman empire with Octavian (and—for a short while—
Lepidus, another of Caesar’s allies). Mark Antony’s share was Asia, which included Egypt; and it was there he met Caesar’s old mistress
Cleopatra, with whom he fell desperately in love, quite forgetting his marriage
to Octavian’s sister. In his ardor, he began to make presents of vast territories under his command to
Cleopatra and her children, leading Pascal to remark many centuries later that “had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter [it was quite long], the whole face of the world would have been changed.” But however decisive details such as nose length may be to the outcomes of history, time had run out for Cleopatra. Octavian prevailed upon the Senate to declare war on this unwholesome twosome; and the once-stalwart Roman tribune and the sultry Egyptian queen were defeated at the sea
battle of Actium, after which each committed suicide. Octavian returned to Rome, now the only claimant to the authority of Caesar. A grateful Senate, filled with his supporters, greeted him as Rome’s deliverer, the man who had restored its precious peace and order. Octavian, who had already assumed the name of Caesar on his adoption, now received his new name of Augustus (“Exalted One”) and the title Imperator (“Commander-in-Chief”), which was soon to have the force of Emperor.

The year was 31
B.C.
The Roman Republic, with its elaborate consultative mechanisms of Senate, consuls, and tribunes of the people, was drawing to its close. Though no one had quite noticed as yet, the empire had been born, and it would grow ever more extensive and absolute in the years to come. Octavian Caesar Augustus would reign for forty-five years. In 31
B.C.
, when he was barely thirty, no one could be sure what kind of ruler he would make; but Augustus would prove a proper emperor—an excellent administrator, a politician of labyrinthine cunning, difficult, delusional, and cruel. Those who knew him hated and feared him. He was approaching his fourth decade on the imperial throne when a male baby of uncertain
paternity was born to a rural Galilean girl in the emperor’s province of Syria, in the bothersome subdivision the Romans called Judea.

By the year of Jesus’s birth, the Jews, long familiar with Greek language and culture, had adopted many of the ways of their overlords for many reasons—to survive, to do business, to fit in. They had even, like the Irish in the wake of the nineteenth-century potato famines, abandoned their ancestral language, the Hebrew in which all their sacred books were written, and adopted the common Aramaic of the eastern provinces. This shift in language gives us a better sense of their dispossession than almost anything else. What does it take for a whole people to give up their language, their mother tongue, the original nourishment received along with breast milk, the medium of their hopes and dreams? Does it not mean that their common hopes and dreams have already been shattered and that they have seen their inheritance so devalued that it no longer counts for much of anything?

Of course, beneath the surface of such a devastating situation, there live the dreams no one wishes any longer to give name to, the dreams we can no longer recount even to ourselves. These dreams had been expressed by the prophets, who initially had warned the people that their apostasies would bring catastrophe, then subsequently tried to comfort them with visions of a time when God would come to save them from their miseries and grant them peace, prosperity, and mastery once more under a salvific leader:

Thus the anonymous prophet, known to scholars as
Deutero-Isaiah (or the Second Isaiah) and whose prophecies are collected in the last third of the
Book of Isaiah. The historical Isaiah, whose oracles are collected in the other two-thirds—the first thirty-nine chapters—wrote in the late eighth century
B.C.
, before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Deutero-Isaiah, writing at the end of the
Babylonian Captivity, does not wag his finger as his predecessor did but caresses his people and weeps with them, speaking in chapters 40–55—often called the
Book of the Consolation of Israel—about
a coming era of fulfillment. But even the original
Isaiah was full of mysterious prophecies of comforts to come: