Roman Rule in Palestine

The Hasmonean period was one of political unease, and the dynasty’s struggles over succession ultimately led the Roman general Pompey to intervene and conquer Palestine in 63 BCE. This was a period of both Roman and Hasmonean civil war. Pompey installed a Hasmonean puppet, Hyrcanus II, who was consistently recognized by what would become the Caesarian faction, but not always by their opponents. Indeed, Pompey’s successor removed Hyrcanus from power altogether, although he was restored and saw his stock rise immensely as a result of the help he provided to Caesar during the Alexandrian War of 47 BCE. In 40 BCE, the Parthians conquered Palestine and installed Antigonos, Hyrcanus’ nephew, on the throne; Hyrcanus was taken captive by the Parthians. Herod was crowned by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE but for three years was a king without a realm. 

The arrival of Rome in Palestine changed everything, though not at first. The Roman Republic was crumbling. Its partly democratic, partly oligarchic constitution had been developed in and for a midsize city-state and could not withstand the stresses associated with empire. The practice of entrusting military campaigns to senators—elected from a small number of wealthy Roman landowners—and their retainers had been workable when campaigns were small-scale local affairs but was disastrous when the stakes were raised. Some senators became dangerously wealthy and powerful, and competition among them grew violent. There was little oversight in foreign provinces, where locals were subject to oppressive misadministration. Pompey himself, who conquered Syria and Palestine between 65 and 63 BCE, stood at the center of one of the leading senatorial factions, and Julius Caesar led the other. 

Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 BCE, but the civil wars persisted until the decisive victory of Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, over Caesar’s most aggressive general, Marc Antony, off Cape Actium in 31 BCE. By 27 BCE, Octavian, by then Imperator Caesar Augustus, had set in place most of the institutional framework of the Roman Empire. 

While the Romans were unprecedentedly brutal in war, as peacetime provincial rulers they made some effort to rule rationally, if not always gently. Tax rates were unusually low. Provincials were fully entitled to file formal complaints against governors, complaints that the emperors were not above actually addressing. Some even recalled and put on trial violent or greedy governors. Private citizens could petition the emperor and expect some sort of response. Centuries later, even the rabbis, despite their strong anti-Roman bias, acknowledged and grudgingly admired the rule of law under the Romans. 

Nevertheless, Rome was always and everywhere far more aggressively interventionist than its predecessors. The Persians and Macedonians, while trying to systematize and rationalize their empire-wide administrative practices, had kept local elites in power by supporting native political and religious institutions. By contrast, the Romans favored standardization all the way down the power pyramid. Out of the ineffably complex mosaic of states, cities, tribal regions, and kingdoms that they had conquered, they tried to produce an integrated imperial state. And due to deeply ingrained cultural prejudices, they moved much more quickly and aggressively in the “barbarian” west than among the ancient civilizations of the east. 

In the east, the Romans continued to govern in part through institutions created by the Hellenistic kings. First Mark Antony, and then Augustus, imposed a new dynasty on the Jews, founded by Herod. Herod was an Idumean courtier of the Hasmoneans. His family had enjoyed a generations long friendship with the old Hasmonean dynasty, but having fallen out of power, they were gradually being massacred by Herod himself.

Herod’s reign, which lasted from 37 to 4 BCE, began a new era. The Mediterranean and Near Eastern Jewish communities attained a measure of wealth, importance, and visibility on the regional stage probably not seen again until Europe between the French Revolution and the Holocaust. To judge from both archaeological evidence and literary sources, there were probably also a greater number of Jews than ever before. Our best guess is that 250,000 to 500,000 Jews were living in Palestine. Outside Palestine, however, we cannot even hazard a guess.

First-Century Temple Culture and the Roman State 

First-century Jerusalem was dominated by the Temple and was saturated with piety. For the well-to-do, this piety had a strongly intellectual character and concerned itself with contemplation and interpretation of the holy books and associated traditions. Religious exploration was apparently de rigueur for young men of the Jerusalem upper classes, just as exploration of the various philosophical sects was considered a normal part of the life of upper-class teenage boys in the Greco-Roman world—a comparison Josephus makes explicit. In these circles, sectarian affiliation was very common indeed. Jewish affiliations were already structurally similar to those prevalent in the Greco-Roman world. Young men might opt for a more Greek style of education and set of affiliations, but both Jewish sectarian and Greek philosophical experimentation and affiliation were tokens of an elite connection to a broader set of values—for the former, the Jewish ethnos, and for the latter, the classical city. However countercultural the Dead Sea sectarians were, they were inextricably tied to a cultural mainstream that was not only Jewish but also part of a wider set of associations.

All this was, for the time being, controlled and manipulated by the Roman state. The situation might have persisted for centuries had the Romans been different types of rulers. But early Roman Judea was anomalously complicated. It was populated not only by Jews but also by “Greeks,” “Syrians,” “Arabs,” and Samaritans. And power was split—even the participants cannot have been certain precisely how—among a Roman procurator, a high priest, one or more members of the Herodian family, and the powerful Roman governor of the garrisoned imperial province of Syria.

Jews were probably expected to live by the laws of the Torah, but there was no unanimity among Jews about how Jewish law was to be observed, even aside from the usual local differences among Galileans, Judeans, and Idumeans and the sectarian divisions just discussed. Furthermore, by the first century, some smaller groups of intensely dedicated Jews gathered around charismatic individuals like John the Baptist or Jesus of Nazareth. It should be noted that much of the sectarian disagreement over Jewish law concerned matters of purity and cult, of interest only to a priestly and pietistic minority, though this was, admittedly, a very large minority in Judea. Judean civil law was probably in most places determined by local convention.

The Roman Empire was moving toward standardization, however, and in the east as elsewhere the bedrock of this standardization was the city. The Persians had had a predilection for temple establishments, and the Macedonians had been happy to support both city and temple. In the east, cities were by definition Greek. The damaging Roman policies already encountered by Jews in Egypt and Alexandria would soon spread.

Meanwhile, some Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were becoming radicalized. What should have particularly alarmed the Romans was the involvement of the upper classes. Even the most solid representatives of the Judean establishment had only shaky friendships with Rome, and as the first century progressed, Rome’s disfavor toward them became ever more evident. Josephus relates the reluctance of the last procurators of Judea to work with the high priests; he also hints that the Jewish authorities, for their part, were not handing over taxes.

Herod had aimed to glorify himself by uniting the Jews around a great center and projecting them onto the world stage, making them, and so himself and his descendants, indispensable to the Roman state. His project backfired. He had poured resources into institutions that embodied devotion to values almost irreconcilable with Roman political interests and had thus turned the Jews into a political problem: the only politically integrated and self-consciously important group of non-Greek subjects in the east.