Ire and dread fueled the rebellion. One more nation. Another conquest for the “Land Between.” Further expulsions of the Jews. As the prophets warned, it had been their idolatrous rebellion and God’s chastisement in 586 BCE. They would right their wrongs against the Seleucids in 168 BCE and again possess their unconditional inheritance (cf. Gen. 15:8-18). Within a hundred years, in-fighting would spell their demise. Under Pompey's direction, the Roman army seized the Land in 63 BCE. The rest, as oft said, “is history.”
It is a history that will repeat itself time and again. Yet, the still, small voice of the unseen God drew them back. To the Land. A land with generational rights. According to whom, you ask? Who carved out this sliver for the Jews? As my mother fondly chided my youthful proclivity for things belonging to my siblings: “Is your name written on it?” She meant, of course, that I was not the rightful owner.
Yes, then, the Land belongs to the Jews, more aptly to God, who carved his name smack-dab in its center. It’s true. A look at satellite images of Jerusalem reveals a valley system curving and cutting the letter shin (ש), representing his name, “Shaddai.” So, in the authoritative voice of my mother, or better, the authority of El Shaddai, the God of Israel wrote his name upon the Land, stamping his ownership with the Israelites:
“The land is not to be sold permanently because the land is Mine. For you are sojourners with Me” (emphasis added, Lev. 25:23 TLV).
A short Jewish autonomy within their inherited land whetted an appetite for independence; Jewish sects of varying scriptural foci fomented in the first century of the Common Era. Particularly, the Zealots, and specifically a militant group within the Zealot faction, the Sicarii—so named after the curved blade of the sicae—taunted the Roman authority through brutality and subterfuge. The scene of the infamously siditious Barabbas and Yeshua before Pilate offers a brief encounter between independence wrought through warfare or sacrifice (Matt. 27:15-26).
Ultimately, this struggle to regain Jewish independence against the Roman war machine failed. Josephus, a Jewish first-century historian, records Jerusalem’s ghastly destruction, which started in 66 CE, culminating in a frontal attack from the north upon the Tower of Antonia recorded in The Wars of the Jews, 6.1.1-2; 4:
Thus did the miseries of Jerusalem grow worse and worse every day, and the seditious were still more irritated by the calamities they were under, even while the famine preyed upon themselves, after it had preyed upon the people. And indeed the multitude of the carcasses that lay in heaps one upon another, was a horrible sight and produced a pestilential stench, which was a hinderance to those that would make sallies out of the city and fight the enemy … for the war was not now gone on with as if they had any hope of victory; for they gloried after a brutish manner in that despair of deliverence they were already in.
After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE under the Roman military commander Titus, the Jewish and Messianic Jewish (Christian) faiths needed new centers of organization. The center of Christianity moved to Rome, while Judaism sought reunification in Israel’s coastal town of Yavneh.[1] During the second and third centuries, Jewish revolts and gentile persecution under Roman rule fueled a more significant political divide. Growing tensions brought anti-Jewish polemics expressed in tomes and pockets of violence.[2] In the fourth century, Christians became a protected class under the Christian Emperor Constantine. How did their new status and a new administration impact Jewish-Christian relations?
This question will encompass the rest of this topic on Jewish Histories, exploring the “parting of the ways,” and the period’s impact upon biblical exegesis and Jewish-Christian relations. My friend, Robert Ramos will assist with research materials.
Blessings—
[1] James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 144.
[2] James William Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1961), 185, http://archive.org/details
/conflictofthechu012717mbp.