God's Gold (15 page)

Whether the occasion was the appearance of God from a clap of thunder, a cry to battle, or Temple worship, music was a constant source of inspiration in the Old Testament. Among the biblical orchestra of lyres, cymbals, and singers, the silver trumpet was the noblest instrument. From Exodus to the Arch of Titus and beyond, as the announcer of pageantry in medieval and modern royal courts, the trumpet's special status is secure. But what exactly was so special that compelled Rome to parade the two silver trumpets of Herod's Second Temple in the triumph of AD 71 and depict both tied to the Table of the Divine Presence on the Arch of Titus? Were they examples of the wealth of the House of God or vanquished symbols now rendered impotent?

The trumpet evolved from the shofar, the earliest wind instrument used in the ancient Near East. Derived from the Akkadian word
shapparu,
a wild goat, this natural instrument was originally a goat's horn, but was quickly replaced by a ram's horn in early Judaism. Even though the shofar survives today as a symbol of redemption blown in the festivals of Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), certainly by the time of King Solomon and the First Temple period it had been replaced by the trumpet in more general, everyday Jewish ritual and worship.

Along with the menorah and Table, the trumpets were the last of the key religious items that God commanded Moses to create on Mount Sinai:

Unlike the golden lamp, the silver trumpets may well have existed in this biblical form from the very beginning. Archaeologists generally date the emergence of Israel within Canaan to the Late Bronze Age, placing the historical period of the Exodus toward the middle of the thirteenth century BC. Rather neatly, the stunning discovery in 1922 of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh of Egypt, leaves no shadow of doubt that such trumpets graced this period. Tutankhamun ruled from 1334 to 1325 BC and his military trumpet was a cylindrical tube of bronze, silver, and gold inlay terminating in a flaring bell depicting the king wearing the Blue Crown of Egypt and holding the crook scepter.

Following the discovery of Tutankhamun's trumpets, in 1939 Egypt's Antiquities Service agreed to allow James Tappern, a bandsman from a British Hussar regiment, to play the silver trumpet. Against a backdrop of intermittent power failures in Cairo, which prompted fears of the resurfacing of the boy-king's curse, Tutankhamun's trumpet was broadcast live by the BBC to an estimated global audience of 150 million people.

This wonder of the age of the ancient pharaohs, however, was nothing short of a mirage. Bandsman Tappern's rendition of the Grand March from
Aida
and the
Posthorn Gallop
may have produced gasps of amaze
ment at the time, but he did enjoy a little help from modernity. Tappern had quite normally, and in all innocence, inserted his own moveable mouthpiece into the end of Tutankhamun's trumpet. This time travel enabled the instrument to be manipulated like a modern version. Unfortunately, pharaonic musicians had access to no such advantage.

Both the trumpets of Tutankhamun and of biblical Temple worship would only have been able to produce three notes. The lowest was dull and poorly centered; the middle one was excellent and would have traveled across any battlefield admirably; the upper note, however, would have been useless, requiring extreme pressure that would have damaged the player's lips. Thus, in effect, the silver trumpet was a one-trick pony.

The natural trumpet lacking valves, slides, or pistons dominated history into the eighteenth century and, as the baroque trumpet, was especially popular in royal circles from 1600 to 1750. Only in 1815 would Heinrich Stölzel and Friedrich Blühmel invent the modern-day version equipped with valves. The prototype, however, was never intended to be a musical instrument. Sounding the shofar was a cry to God for relief and help. Its sound combated evil and averted catastrophe (war, pestilence, and locusts); it was, in short, a loud noise that frightened away spirits in the same way that church bells protected Christian communities in medieval Europe.

The elongated trumpet, crafted from the medium of silver, denoting truth, held greater religious sway in the Old Testament. This instrument emitted a purer note than the ram's horn. The biblical silver trumpets were blown almost exclusively by a guild of seven priestly trumpeters at times of daily burnt offerings, celebrations, feasts, and the beginnings of each month. Thus, when Solomon dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem:

After the return from exile in Babylon, silver trumpets replaced the shofar for most cultic activities within Judaism. The priestly trumpet sounded three times every morning to mark the opening of the Temple gates; nine blasts accompanied morning and evening sacrifice; and the start of the Sabbath was announced by a threefold trumpet blast from the top of the Temple.

The pair of trumpets so conspicuous on the Arch of Titus relief measure twenty-eight and thirty-one and a half inches in length and conform to Josephus's description of these holy vessels as “a narrow tube, somewhat thicker than a flute, but with so much breadth as was sufficient for admission of the breath of a man's mouth: it ended in the form of a bell, like common trumpets” (
AJ
3.291). Remarkably, both closely resemble Tutankhamun's trumpet and also a pair depicted on the revolutionary coins of Simon Bar-Kokhba during the Second Jewish Revolt of AD 132–135. Of all the Temple treasure (menorah and Table), the silver trumpets remained the least changed over time and were essentially standardized into the eighteenth century.

After the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, however, the trumpet disappeared from Jewish worship. In a deliberate search for individual cultural identity, early Christianity avoided the trumpet. To the Christian God the trumpet was idolatrous, a cry of war. Thus, in the eighth book of the second-century AD
Sibylline Oracles,
Christianity was described as vastly different from pagan and Jewish worship:

Similarly, in his
Paedagogus
(
The Tutor
), Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150–215) advised Christians to “leave the syrinx [Greek trumpet] to the shepherds and the flute to the superstitious devotees who rush to serve their idols. We completely forbid the use of these instruments at out temperate banquet.”

Usually, where the instrument does feature in the New Testament, it is as an allegory of peace and tranquility. The exception is the book of Revelation, which predicts that seven trumpets blown by seven angels will announce the destruction of man:

For Judaism, redemption and the second coming of the messiah will also be heralded by the brassy sound of the trumpet.

Once the trumpets were in the hands of Rome, however, no temple stood and no messiah could come. The empire had not just imprisoned Judaism in the present; it now owned its future, too. At this stage of my quest I now finally understood why the emperor Vespasian refused to sell or melt down the silver trumpets of truth and emblazoned their image across the Arch of Titus: by possessing these icons, the empire had literally silenced Israel.

Now that I understood what the main icons from the Temple treasure meant to Judaism, a logical extension was to fathom the spoil's value to Rome—monetary windfall or symbol of eternal victory? Was the torching of the Temple icily premeditated or just a sad casualty of war? The answers lay hidden amid the complex causes of the First Jewish Revolt. Rarely triggered by a single event, wars are invariably the culmination of interrelated provocations. The First Jewish Revolt was a snowball rolling down a mountainside, starting slowly but eventually accumulating uncontrollable mass and speed. An ugly crash was inevitable.

Josephus's account of the slippery slope that descended into war is a saga of epic complexity and bloodshed that resonates profoundly with the modern Arab-Israeli conflict. When I gaze at the intriguing art on the Arch of Titus, I don't just see ancient Jewish treasure worth perhaps over a billion dollars but a deeper reflection of one of the most devastating battles of antiquity. It shows the ambitions of Rome and its military machine in action, the inner workings of the mind of an emperor. I see, too, a string of tragic and selfish decisions made by a small minority of megalomaniac Jewish politicians, who were responsible for the tragedy that subsequently befell Judaism—expulsion into a dark Diaspora and far-off lands.

The Temple treasure of Jerusalem makes little sense dislocated from its historical setting. But the tale is a maze of complications and only the bare bones can be summarized here. Today, leading scholars such
as Professor Martin Goodman of Oxford University package the First Jewish Revolt not so much as a war against Roman colonialism and culture but as an internal class struggle between Judea's peasantry and ruling class. However, while the destruction of Jerusalem was admittedly paved by Jewish factional infighting and hatred, the roots of the fall actually lay in the emergence of Roman cultural values that led to the suffocation of local religion.

The first fifty years of the first century AD were precarious for Israel. Ever since King Herod assumed the throne as a client king of Rome in 40 BC, the Jewish ideal of a land ruled by a wise leader of esteemed ancestry had faded. The two-faced Herod could not be trusted. Despite being the brains and purse behind the Second Temple of Jerusalem, one of the architectural wonders of the age, Herod forfeited the people's trust. This half-Jew of Edomite extraction—an isolated group from southern Israel and Jordan not recognized by mainstream Judaism—lacked morals and wisdom, preferring to court status and wealth by playing politics for high stakes.

Herod may have paid lip service to Jewish values, but his soul had been bought by Rome. In return for keeping the peace, controlling Israel's Jews, and collecting taxes for the empire's coffers, Herod was granted rulership over a fertile land ripe for the picking. With the construction of the port of Sebastos at Caesarea in the late first century BC, Israel suddenly found itself linked to a commercial revolution that was sweeping across the former backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean. Wine, oil, glass, wheat, purple dye, and dates found a highly receptive market across the empire, bringing unparalleled wealth to the rulers and middlemen of Israel. As lord of all he surveyed, everything was available to Herod for royal taxation. Eager to be more Roman than the Romans, he became filthy rich on the sweat of his subjects. His introduction of athletic festivals, musical contests, wild beast fights, and gladiators to Jerusalem fueled local antagonism to the new culture.

To the Jews of Israel the Roman dream was a shock and an affront. But nobody could have predicted just how destructively the old and the new worlds would collide. After all, Rome's model of puppet kings and
taxation was a tried and tested formula. From Britain to Syria the imperial war machine had annexed the known world by military strength and political stealth. Contrary to the stereotype of popular history, the empire did not court perpetual war. Instead, it shrewdly selected sympathetic local rulers to serve as puppet kings. It was an easy sell: join the greatest political and economic union the Mediterranean world had ever seen, merely offer a daily prayer to Rome while retaining your old domestic gods, and grow fat on the fruits of globalization. The alternative: a toxic cocktail of poverty, enslavement, or death. The opulent mausoleums scattered across the pre-Saharan fringe of Roman Libya remind us today that even the primitive tribal Garamantes bought into the new worldview. In the end, everyone signs.

With the Jews of ancient Israel, however, Rome had made a serious miscalculation—they would not blindly enter the wolves' lair. In AD 6 the emperor Augustus established the new Roman province of Judea over land formerly ruled by Herod. From the very start, might was right and Rome failed to acknowledge the deep sensitivities of the local Jewish population.

From the day Pontius Pilate controversially carried Rome's legionary standards into Jerusalem and dipped into the sacred Temple funds to build an aqueduct, violence was only ever one provocation away. The new coins minted in Israel carried pagan symbols of sacrifice, a source of daily revulsion to Judaism. Rome behaved however she wished, with Felix Antonius, a lowly ex-slave forced by the emperor Claudius to turn procurator from AD 52 to 60, stealing the Herodian princess Drusilla from her husband and marrying her without converting to Judaism. The painful truth is that Roman aristocrats considered Judea the soft option on the path to political promotion. Most governors were appointed through favor and patronage, not on merit. Lacking skills of negotiation and an understanding of Near Eastern customs, after serving in Judea most governors like Pontius Pilate, Cumanus, and Festus quickly disappeared from the pages of history. Most proved to be rotten eggs.

Yet these were minor complaints compared to the provocations of
the megalomaniac emperor Gaius Caligula who, in AD 40, demanded the High Priests erect his statue inside the Temple of Jerusalem as a living god. To enforce his demand, the emperor ordered Publius Petronius, governor of Syria, to march from Antioch to Jerusalem with three legions and Syrian auxiliaries. To the Jews erecting a statue of a Roman emperor in the Temple was a direct attack on monotheism and thus absolutely nonnegotiable. To no avail the High Priests pointed out that sacrifices were already offered to Caligula and Rome twice a day, and grimly promised that “if he would place the images among them, he must first sacrifice the whole Jewish nation” (J
W
2.197). Caligula was unforgiving, and ordered anyone opposing his demands to be slain. Outright war was only avoided by the emperor's timely assassination in AD 41.

For a short time the inevitable was merely delayed. During Passover a Roman soldier guarding the Temple “pulled back his garment, and cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews” (
JW
2.224). The Jews responded in time-honored biblical tradition by stoning the Romans, and in the subsequent Temple riot 10,000 Jews were trampled underfoot. Not long after, a soldier at Beth-Horen tore up a copy of the Jewish prayer book and threw it into a fire.

During the reign of the emperor Nero (AD 54–68) the Jews started to fragment into various seditious sects to fight the Roman presence. In particular, the Sicarii, knife-wielding anti-Roman contract killers, arose in Jerusalem with a deadly reputation for mingling with crowds during festivals and slaying people by stealth before silently vanishing back into the crowd. The Jewish revolution was born; the seditious called for Jews obeying the Roman way of life to be killed. The houses of great men were plundered and villages set on fire “and this till all Judea was filled with the effects of their madness” (
JW
2.265).

Finally, in AD 66 Gessius Florus, Roman procurator of Judea, “blew up the war into a flame,” according to Josephus, by seizing seventeen talents from the sacred Temple treasure. When the inevitable anti-Roman riot erupted, Florus got his excuse to march on Jerusalem, where he plundered houses and killed the inhabitants of
the Upper Market Place. Some 3,600 men, women, and children were slain according to Josephus, but Rome had now made its final irreversible mistake. These Jews included nobility from the Roman equestrian upper classes, former allies.

Now the empire would have to contend with not just the mob, but also the most resourceful citizens of Judea. Sacrifices in Jerusalem to Rome were ended, a sign of a complete breakdown in political relations. Josephus is quite clear on the effects of these actions: “And this was the true beginning of our war with the Romans; for they rejected the sacrifice of Caesar on this account” (
JW
2.409).

 

I
n a wonderfully comic cameo in Monty Python's
Life of Brian,
a group of Jewish revolutionaries quietly plot against Rome in Jerusalem's amphitheater when they are rudely interrupted by the hero and messiah-in-waiting, Brian, peddling Roman fast food: otters' noses, wrens' livers, and badgers' spleens. In hushed, reverent tones, Brian inquires whether the schemers are the Judean People's Front. The response is incredulous, with the leader literally spitting, “We're the People's Front of Judea.”

Although written for humorous effect, this scene faithfully reflects the confusion and tragedy that befell Jerusalem between AD 67 and 70. Fiction mirrors the sad reality of a Holy City fragmented into a web of hostile Jewish revolutionary groups. Each swore by its own High Priests, ignoring the legal line of succession. Over time intergroup alliances collapsed and re-formed, so when Titus arrived to besiege Jerusalem four sets of Jewish revolutionaries were locked in open warfare on the streets of the Holy City. Personal ambitions made a mockery of centuries-old tradition and loyalty. As Josephus explained, this was “a sedition begotten by another sedition, and to be like a wild beast grown mad, which from want of food from abroad, fell now upon eating its own flesh.” Internal revolution went a long way to weakening Israel militarily and politically, making Rome's task much easier. The empire could sit back and save energy while they watched the Jewish zealots slit Israel's wrists.

How did such an ungodly situation arise? Once Rome had dealt
with revolution in the Galilee in AD 66, at Jotapata defeating Josephus himself as commander of the Jewish forces, the empire marched toward Jerusalem. One logical response to this extreme military threat might have been to combine forces for a final showdown. Yet as gleaming Roman armor appeared on the horizon, the chasm dividing Jerusalem's Jews widened. This was not mere differences of opinion but entrenched civil war.

The direct seed of the revolt in Jerusalem was the green-eyed monster—personal greed. In the 50s AD, members of the ruling class of Judea exploited countrywide anarchy as an opportunity to increase their personal power at the expense of their friends. By AD 62 various gangs, such as the
poneroi
revolutionary party, led by the former High Priest Ananias, roamed Jerusalem like medieval warlords surrounded by their own court and private army.

The three most extreme factions dividing Jerusalem were controlled by Eleazar ben Simon, Simon ben Giora from Gerasa, and John of Gischala. For a year, from AD 68 to 69, the city was run by a coalition of John, Eleazar, and the Idumeans, descendants of the Edomites forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hasmonean kings. Eleazar may have been from solid priestly stock, but he was removed from office by the High Priests and so subsequently joined the Zealot leadership. Unwilling to share power, however, he later split from the central Zealot group and set up a new camp within the inner court of the Temple, hanging his weapons over the holy gates in a public display of defiance.

John of Gischala was equally partisan. With a force of 6,000 men, 20 commanders, and the support of a further 2,400 Zealots, he pursued a reign of terror between the Temple and the south, as far as the Ophel and the Kidron Valley.

Despite an acrimonious split with Eleazar, John eventually forced his old ally to reunite factions. During the Passover of AD 70, John's armed men sneaked into the Temple Mount to overpower Eleazar. But by now their constant bickering had allowed a third revolutionary to take over Jerusalem.

Simon was a splitter from the Zealot faction, whose reputation had
been cemented when he successfully attacked the rearguard of Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, in AD 66 and seized the imperial baggage. Through this display of courage he attracted the respect of establishment figures. By October, Simon controlled 10,000 men and 50 commanders backed up by a further 5,000 Idumeans. His anarchic band of men terrorized the Upper City of Jerusalem and the Acra district of the lower city. To the general Jewish population Simon and the Zealots were “a greater terror to the people than the Romans themselves” (
JW
4.558). Between the spring of AD 69 and the destruction of the Temple in the summer of AD 70, he forged a position as the leading commander of an independent State of Israel.

The general will of Jerusalem was disgusted by the chaos in its midst. Thus, Jesus, son of Gamala, denounced the revolutionaries:

Such was the anarchic madness polluting Jerusalem when Titus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem in spring of AD 70. Three different leaders, three different armies dividing the Jews, one faith. Within six months the ambitions of all three warlords would be strangled by Rome; John would be sentenced to lifelong imprisonment, Eleazar was probably killed at Masada, and Simon was executed in the Eternal City the following year.