Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (11 page)

In May of 66
C.E.
, Florus suddenly announced that the Jews owed Rome a hundred thousand dinarii in
unpaid taxes. Trailed by an army of bodyguards, the Roman governor marched into the
Temple and broke into the treasury, plundering the money that the Jews had offered
as a sacrifice to God. Riots ensued, to which Florus responded by sending a thousand
Roman soldiers into the upper city to murder at will. The soldiers killed women and
children. They broke into homes and slaughtered people in their beds. The city was
thrown into chaos. War was on the horizon.

To calm the situation, the Romans sent the Jews one of their own: Agrippa II, whose
father, Agrippa I, was a beloved Jewish leader who had managed to maintain a close
bond with Rome. Although the son did not share his late father’s popularity, he was
the best hope the Romans had for defusing the tension in Jerusalem.

The young Agrippa rushed to the holy city in a last-ditch effort to stave off war.
Standing on the roof of the royal palace with his sister Bernice at his side, he pleaded
with the Jews to face the reality of the situation. “Will you defy the whole Roman
Empire?” he asked. “What is the army, where is the weapon on which you rely? Where
is your fleet to sweep the Roman seas? Where is your treasury to meet the cost of
your campaigns? Do you really suppose that you are going to war with Egyptians or
Arabs? Will you shut your eyes to the might of the Roman Empire? Will you not measure
your own weakness? Are you wealthier than the Gauls, stronger than the Germans, more
intelligent than the Greeks, more numerous than all the peoples of the world? What
is it which inspires you with confidence to defy the Romans?”

Of course, the revolutionaries had an answer to Agrippa’s question. It was zeal that
inspired them. The same zeal that had led the Maccabees to throw off Seleucid control
two centuries before—the zeal that had helped the Israelites conquer the Promised
Land in the first place—would now help this ragtag band of Jewish revolutionaries
to throw off the shackles of Roman occupation.

Derided and ignored by the crowd, Agrippa and Bernice had
no choice but to flee the city. Still, up to this point, war with Rome could have
been avoided if it had not been for the actions of a young man named Eleazar, who,
as the Temple captain, was the priestly official with powers to police disturbances
in the Temple vicinity. Backed by a group of lower-class priests, Eleazar seized control
of the Temple and put an end to the daily sacrifices on behalf of the emperor. The
signal sent to Rome was clear: Jerusalem had declared its independence. In a short
time, the rest of Judea and Galilee, Idumea and Peraea, Samaria and all the villages
scattered across the Dead Sea valley would follow.

Menahem and the Sicarii rallied to the Temple captain’s side. Together, they expelled
all the non-Jews from Jerusalem, just as the scriptures demanded. They tracked down
and killed the high priest, who had gone into hiding as soon as the fighting began.
Then, in an act of profound symbolism, they set fire to the public archives. The ledgers
of the debt collectors and moneylenders, the property deeds and public records—all
of it went up in flames. There would be no more record of who was rich and who was
poor. Everyone in this new and divinely inspired world order would begin anew.

With the lower city under their control, the rebels began fortifying themselves for
the inevitable Roman assault. Yet rather than sending a massive army to retake Jerusalem,
Rome inexplicably dispatched a small force to the city, which the rebels easily repelled
before turning their attention to the upper city, where the few remaining soldiers
left in Jerusalem were holed up in a Roman garrison. The Roman soldiers agreed to
surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city. But when they laid down their
arms and came out of their stronghold, the rebels turned on them, slaughtering every
last soldier, removing utterly the scourge of Roman occupation from the city of God.

After that, there was no turning back. The Jews had just declared war on the greatest
empire the world had ever known.

Year One

In the end, it came down to just a thousand men, women, and children—the last of the
rebels to survive the Roman onslaught. The year was 73
C.E
. Fitting that what had begun with the Sicarii should end with the Sicarii. The city
of Jerusalem had already been burned to the ground, its walls toppled, its population
slaughtered. The whole of Palestine was once more under Roman control. All that remained
of the rebellion were these last few Sicarii who had fled Jerusalem with their wives
and children to hole themselves up inside the fortress of Masada, on the western shore
of the Dead Sea. Now here they were, stuck on top of an isolated rock cliff in the
middle of a barren desert, watching helplessly as a phalanx of Roman soldiers gradually
made its way up the face of the cliff—shields up, swords drawn—ready to put a definitive
end to the rebellion that had begun seven years earlier.

The Sicarii originally came to Masada in the first few days after the launch of the
war with Rome. As a naturally fortified and virtually impregnable fortress situated
more than a thousand feet above the Dead Sea, Masada had long served as a refuge for
the Jews. David came here to hide from King Saul when he sent his men to hunt down
the shepherd boy who would one day take the
crown from him. The Maccabees used Masada as a military base during their revolt against
the Seleucid Dynasty. A century later, Herod the Great transformed Masada into a veritable
fortress city, flattening the boat-shaped summit and enclosing it with a massive wall
made of white Jerusalem stone. Herod added storerooms and grain houses, rainwater
cisterns, even a swimming pool. He also placed in Masada a huge cache of weapons sufficient,
it was said, to arm a thousand men. For himself and his family, Herod constructed
a monumental three-tiered palace that hung from the northern prow of the cliff face,
just below the lip of the summit, complete with baths, glittering colonnades, multihued
mosaics, and a dazzling 180-degree view of the briny-white Dead Sea valley.

After Herod’s death, the fortress and palaces at Masada, and the cache of weapons
stored therein, fell into Roman hands. When the Jewish rebellion began in 66
C.E
., the Sicarii, under the leadership of Menahem, seized Masada from Roman control
and took its weapons back to Jerusalem to join forces with Eleazar the Temple captain.
Having seized control over the city and destroyed the Temple archives, the rebels
began minting coins to celebrate their hard-won independence. These were etched with
symbols of victory—chalices and palm branches—and inscribed with slogans like “Freedom
of Zion” and “Jerusalem Is Holy,” written not in Greek, the language of the heathens
and idolaters, but in Hebrew. Each coin was self-consciously dated “Year One,” as
though a wholly new era had begun. The prophets had been right. Surely, this was the
Kingdom of God.

Yet in the midst of the celebrations, as Jerusalem was being secured and a fragile
calm was slowly descending upon the city, Menahem did something unexpected. Draping
himself in purple robes, he made a triumphal entry into the Temple courtyard, where,
flanked by his armed devotees among the Sicarii, he openly declared himself messiah,
King of the Jews.

In some ways, Menahem’s actions made perfect sense. After all, if the Kingdom of God
had indeed been established, then it was
time for the messiah to appear so as to rule over it in God’s name. And who else should
don the kingly robes and sit upon the throne but Menahem, grandson of Judas the Galilean,
great-grandson of Hezekiah the bandit chief? Menahem’s messianic assumption was, for
his followers, merely the realization of the prophecies: the final step in ushering
in the last days.

That is not how Eleazar the Temple captain saw it. He and his associates among the
lower priests were incensed at what they viewed as a blatant power grab by the Sicarii.
They put together a plan to kill the self-proclaimed messiah and rid the city of his
meddlesome followers. While Menahem was prancing about the Temple in his royal garb,
Eleazar’s men suddenly rushed the Temple Mount and overpowered his guards. They dragged
Menahem out into the open and tortured him to death. The surviving Sicarii barely
fled Jerusalem with their lives. They reassembled at their base atop the fortress
of Masada, where they waited out the rest of the war.

Seven years the Sicarii waited. As the Romans regrouped and returned to wrest Palestine
from rebel control, as one after another the towns and villages of Judea and Galilee
were razed and their populations tamed by the sword, as Jerusalem itself was surrounded
and its inhabitants slowly starved to death, the Sicarii waited in their mountain
fortress. Only after every rebellious city had been destroyed and the land once again
placed under their control did the Romans turn their sights toward Masada.

The Roman regiment arrived at the foot of Masada in 73
C.E.
, three years after Jerusalem fell. Because the soldiers could not attack the fortress
outright, they first built a massive wall around the entire base of the mountain,
ensuring that no rebel could escape undetected. With the area secured, the Romans
constructed a steep ramp up the yawning chasm on the western side of the cliff face,
slowly scraping away tens of thousands of pounds of earth and stone for weeks on end,
even as the rebels hurled rocks at them from above. The soldiers then pushed a huge
siege tower up the
ramp, from which they spent days bombarding the rebels with arrows and ballista balls.
Once Herod’s perimeter wall finally gave, all that separated the Romans from the last
of the Jewish rebels was a hurriedly built interior wall. The Romans set fire to the
wall, then returned to their encampments and patiently waited for it to collapse on
its own.

Huddled together inside Herod’s palace, the Sicarii knew the end had come. The Romans
would surely do to them and their families what they had done to the inhabitants of
Jerusalem. Amid the steely silence, one of the Sicarii leaders stood and addressed
the rest.

“My friends, since we resolved long ago never to be servants to the Romans, nor to
any other than to God himself, who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the
time has now come to make that resolution true in practice.” Drawing his dagger, he
made a final plea. “God has granted us the power to die bravely, and in a state of
freedom, which was not the case for those [in Jerusalem] who were conquered unexpectedly.”

The speech had its desired effect. As the Romans prepared for their final assault
on Masada, the rebels drew lots among them to decide the order with which they would
proceed with their gruesome plan. They then pulled out their daggers—the same daggers
that had given them their identity, the daggers that had, with a swipe across the
high priest’s throat, launched the ill-fated war with Rome—and began to kill their
wives and their children, before turning the knives upon each other. The last ten
men chose one among them to kill the remaining nine. The final man set the entire
palace ablaze. Then he killed himself.

The following morning, as the Romans stood triumphantly atop the hitherto impregnable
fortress of Masada, all they encountered was a ghostly calm: nine hundred and sixty
dead men, women, and children. The war was finally over.

The question is why it took so long.

News of the Jewish Revolt had traveled swiftly to Emperor
Nero, who immediately tapped one of his most trusted men, Titus Flavius Vespasianus—Vespasian,
as he was known—to retake Jerusalem. Taking command of a massive army of more than
sixty thousand fighting men, Vespasian set off at once for Syria, while his son Titus
went to Egypt to collect the Roman legions stationed in Alexandria. Titus would lead
his troops north through Idumea as Vespasian pushed south into Galilee. The plan was
for father and son to squeeze the Jews between their two armies and choke the life
out of the rebellion.

One by one the rebellious cities gave way to the might of Rome as Titus and Vespasian
carved a trail of destruction across the Holy Land. By 68
C.E
., all of Galilee, as well as Samaria, Idumea, Peraea, and the entire Dead Sea region,
save for Masada, were firmly back under Roman control. All that remained was for Vespasian
to send his armies into Judea to lay waste to the seat of the rebellion: Jerusalem.

As he was preparing for the final assault, however, Vespasian received word that Nero
had committed suicide. Rome was in turmoil. Civil war was tearing through the capital.
In the span of a few short months, three different men—Galba, Otho, and Vitellius—declared
themselves emperor, each in turn violently overthrown by his successor. There was
a complete breakdown of law and order in Rome as thieves and hooligans plundered the
population without fear of consequence. Not since the war between Octavian and Mark
Antony a hundred years earlier had the Romans experienced such civil unrest. Tacitus
described it as a period “rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil
struggles, horrible even in peace.”