The First Jewish Revolt

Tellingly, Josephus begins his account of the First Jewish Revolt with the rise of the Hasmonean dynasty, the demise of which was the direct result of Roman ambition and involvement in Judean affairs. After the Romans expelled the Parthians with Herod’s help, they installed Herod as king of Judaea in 37 BCE, and for the duration of his reign he maintained friendly relations with the Roman Empire, even as he ruled Judaea primarily through threat of force. Upon Herod’s death, there was much competition between the claimants to the throne. And, in any case, Rome did not grant the title of king to any of Herod’s sons. After the deposition and expulsion of Herod’s son Archelaus in 6 CE, Judaea was made into a Roman province—even as Herod’s descendants continued to influence Judean politics in subsequent decades.

For decades before the outbreak of the war in 66 CE, Jews throughout the Roman world had lived peacefully. In Judaea itself—a relatively unimportant province and one that did not register as a threat to the empire—the Romans allowed the Jews the unique privilege of traveling to the Temple in Jerusalem in large numbers three times each year for their pilgrimage festivals. Nevertheless, Josephus characterizes these decades in Judaea as a time of widespread chaos fueled at once by Roman violations of Jewish ancestral traditions and by violence perpetrated by multiple rebel factions. According to Josephus’ telling, by the time Herod’s grandson Agrippa I became king in 37 CE, Judaea was in a continuous state of chaos. The relationship between Roman governors and the governed populace was incurably fraught.

Josephus points to many causes of the outbreak of war. These include that some Roman governors stoked it—either through their obliviousness of Jewish cultural mores or quite wittingly—and a vacuum of leadership that presented the opportunity for many competing parties to fight among themselves and so for rebellion to grow. 

The Revolt

Often referred to as the Great Revolt or the First Jewish Revolt, the rebellion against Rome that broke out in Jerusalem in 66 CE and spread throughout Judaea was a transformative event in the history of the Jewish people. (See the map First Jewish Revolt, 66–73 CE.) Tensions between the Romans and the Jews had been gradually escalating as the Romans installed corrupt and incompetent administrators in Judea.

In many places where Jews and Greeks lived side by side, including the coastal cities of Palestine, the mid-60s was a period of turbulence and rioting. While Roman officials usually tried to maintain a semblance of order, their political preference for Greeks pushed Jews in many places into a corner. In overwhelmingly Jewish districts, like Judea and Galilee, this was hardly an issue, but Jewish leaders even there were keenly aware both of crystallizing Roman policy and of the activities of the Roman procurators of Palestine. The conflict between Jews and Greeks at Caesarea, which Josephus describes as precipitating the war, reveals deep tensions within Judaea’s provincial populations. Josephus’ historical account also emphasizes the role played by corrupt Roman governors and by disagreement and competition among Jewish factions.

In 66 CE, when Gessius Florus, then procurator of Judea, visited Jerusalem to insist that the Jews hand over unpaid taxes, news of a near-war in Caesarea Maritima and of Florus’ ineptitude in handling it led to mass demonstrations in the city. Around the same time, a group of young priests decided to cease offering the daily sacrifice on behalf of the emperor. These events might have remained a temporary local disturbance, however, if not for a single decision by a Roman general. Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, marched on Jerusalem with one of his three legions, but after arriving, he decided to return home without intervening in an increasingly tense situation. His retreating legion was attacked and many of its members massacred by Judean guerrillas; Roman rule in Palestine simply collapsed. The Great Revolt was, it seems, hardly a revolt at all. The priestly authorities in Jerusalem attempted to patch together a state, Josephus writes, but this seems to have been successful only in Judea proper; Galilee and Idumaea had their own leadership and their own social structures.

It took Nero a year to realize that he had lost a province and to assemble an army, led by a distinguished elderly senator, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, to reconquer it. The army turned out to be exceedingly large: three full legions, an equal number of auxiliaries, and a large force drawn from the private armies of the local client kings, including that of the Jewish king Agrippa II (the great-grandson of Herod and last ruler of the Herodian dynasty). There were, in total, as many as sixty thousand troops.

When Vespasian’s forces landed at the southern Phoenician port of Ptolemais-Akko in 67, the countryside of Galilee quickly yielded. Those hill fortresses that offered resistance, especially Iotapata and Gamala, were quickly reduced. Significantly, Vespasian made no attempt to come to terms with local grandees, like John of Gischala, from upper Galilee; he regarded them as enemies of Rome. John, who was probably not initially anti-Roman, took his followers and fled to Jerusalem. The same pattern was repeated throughout the country.

Vespasian’s progress was slow. The highly unstable situation at Rome, following the suicide of Nero, was irresistibly distracting to him. He spent at least a year of nearly complete inactivity in Palestine before deciding to leave the province in the charge of his son, Titus. He then assembled more troops at Alexandria and marched on the capital to seize the imperial throne in the summer of 69.

By 69, all but Judea was back under Roman control. Rebel groups from all over and Judeans from the countryside, fleeing the renewed Roman advance, crowded into Jerusalem, where the Roman siege began in the spring of 70. Although even now the rebel groups could not join forces, they offered fierce resistance to the Romans. But the city was ill equipped to withstand a long siege, especially when so disastrously packed with refugees. The besieged soon began to starve. By midsummer, the sacrificial cult came to a halt. The Romans soon breached the walls, but even so they continued to meet fierce resistance. Finally overcoming the city, they burned down the Temple. The war was over. The fall of the last Jewish stronghold at Masada in the Judean desert in 73/74 CE marked the end of the revolt.

In other provinces, rebellions were often a matter of local, partly Romanized, aristocrats having one last fling before settling down to a privileged place within the Roman system. No one ever mistook the Romans for gentle. The Romans treated the Jews with unusual harshness. In Jewish Palestine, members of the aristocratic stratum were mainly not on the road to successful Romanization, and Rome had no interest in rehabilitating them. No local aristocrats returned to Rome’s embrace; instead, they were slaughtered or taken into captivity and put on the slave market or put to work in Rome’s silver mines or as rowers in the fleet. Even the impeccably pro-Roman Agrippa II, whose sister Berenice had been Titus’ lover, gradually faded from view, and he was never absorbed into the Roman senatorial aristocracy.

The Aftermath

In the wake of the revolt, the province was completely reorganized. It received a legionary garrison and along with it a proper Roman senatorial governor. The Roman state had expropriated all land from Jews, though some were in the position to repurchase it. Others, if they had survived the war and avoided captivity, were presumably reduced to tenancy on their own land. Jews throughout the empire were required to pay a special tax: the two denarii per annum they had previously been allowed to send to the Jerusalem Temple were now paid into a fund, the fiscus Iudaicus, dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, chief god of the Roman pantheon. Jerusalem remained desolate, with a Roman legion encamped near its ruins. The entire structure of late Second Temple Judaism was swept away. The Romans slaughtered and enslaved the Jewish leadership. Judea was now a Roman province, with Roman officials, Roman courts, and Roman cities of Hellenic culture. Many Jews remained, even in Judea, but they were expected to live not under their own alternative constitution (the Torah), as before 66, but simply as Roman subjects.

The destruction of the Temple was traumatic for the Jews of Roman Palestine, so much so that the tannaitic rabbis active at the time had almost nothing to say about it directly. Strikingly, the Mishnah is enmeshed in the Temple, sacrifice, and related concerns, barely reflecting the Temple’s destruction. Nevertheless, festivals, sacrifices, and other observances that had previously been centered on the Temple shifted to new forms and settings after 70 CE. Communal worship and synagogues emerged as the locus of this new Judaism. Many of the Jewish sects that had existed in the first century CE simply disappeared. But in addition to the early rabbis, groups with messianic hopes also persisted into the second century, waiting for an opportunity to rebuild the Temple.

For historical reconstruction of these events, we are reliant mainly on Josephus, a Jerusalem priest and a leader in the early stages of the revolt, before he went over to the Roman side. Josephus was not only an eyewitness to many of the events, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Rome, he wrote The Jewish War, under the patronage of the emperor Vespasian. His Life of Josephus also recounts his military career and the events of the war, though there are discrepancies between the two accounts.