The Bar Kokhba Revolt and Its Aftermath

Judea became home to yet another rebellion against the Romans with the Bar Kokhba revolt, which lasted from 132 to 135 CE. (See map of The Second Jewish Revolt, 132–135 CE.) The factors that led to the Bar Kokhba revolt are not entirely clear, although the emperor Hadrian’s ban on circumcision and his plan to build a temple in honor of Jupiter on the ruins of the Second Temple are considered factors. Hadrian acceded to the throne in 117 CE and reigned until 138 CE. Whether he specifically targeted the Jews for persecution is debated. As an expression of his philhellenism, he decreed a ban on circumcision throughout the empire, including in Judea. When Antoninus Pius (138–161 CE) succeeded him, he permitted Jews to circumcise their sons; however, the ban was in place for others who practiced circumcision, such as Egyptian priests and Arabs.

In 129, the emperor Hadrian began a tour of the eastern provinces of the empire, a cultural and linguistic mosaic bound together by a network of Greek cities. Roman philhellenism saw the city as the essential political entity. In an effort to support its institutions—at the expense of other, less Hellenic, institutions and populations—Hadrian lavished gifts on Greek cities and institutions wherever he went. When visiting Judea, whose central district contained no Greek cities, he announced the refoundation of Jerusalem as a new Roman city, to be called Aelia Capitolina and dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Our most reliable source, Dio Cassius, views this, not unconvincingly, as the proximate cause of the last Jewish revolt against Rome. Any hope the Jews may have had for the restoration of the old regime was now crushed.

The Bar Kokhba revolt, about which we know relatively little, differed in character sharply from the Great Revolt. It seems to have been a large-scale, popular guerrilla uprising, with strikingly effective mass resistance by the Jews. Judea, nevertheless, was reduced by the Romans, village by village, with many casualties on the Roman side and immense loss of life on the Jewish side. Archaeologists tell us that some construction had begun at Aelia even before Hadrian’s visit, and Dio Cassius adds that the Jews had been stockpiling weapons for years. A significant amount of time would have been needed to prepare the system of tunnels and hiding places that they dug into the bedrock under every still-inhabited Judean village. Rumors of change may have been afoot long before Hadrian’s arrival.

The only leader we hear of is Simeon ben Kosiba, who assumed the title of nesi’ Yisra’el, “prince of Israel.” Dio Cassius does not mention him, but he appears in Christian sources as Bar Kokhba and in Jewish sources as Bar Koziba. The name Bar Kokhba, “son of the star,” was a messianic moniker bestowed on bar Kosibah by his supporters. And, as it happens, the most fortunate of all Israeli archaeologists, Yigael Yadin, discovered Simeon ben Kosiba’s Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek correspondence in a cave near the Dead Sea in 1960. The partial portrait that emerges from these letters is one not of a powerful leader but rather of a somewhat ineffective micromanager.

These letters also reveal the rebels’ commitment to Torah, the Temple, and the nation of Israel. Scholars are divided as to the extent and seriousness of the revolt, the focal point of which seems to have been Judea proper. A number of rebel-manufactured coins refer to “Eleazar the priest,” suggesting that the Jewish rebels hoped to retake Jerusalem and renew Temple operations.

The results of the Bar Kokhba revolt were at least as devastating as those of the Great Revolt. The district of Judea lay in ruins, Jewish settlement in Judea declined measurably, and Christian sources report an outright prohibition against Jews living in Jerusalem and its environs. Aelia Capitolina was built on the ruins of Jerusalem, but at a high cost. The hinterland had been destroyed. It thus remained a poor and marginal city. Most Galilean Jews had never fully joined the revolt and so were not directly affected by its outcome, but there is no escaping the fact that the province—by then renamed Syria-Palaestina—was partly de-Judaized. The Jewish nation was again defeated. 

In the wake of the Great Revolt, the Diaspora Revolt—which had devastated Jewish settlements in Egypt and Libya in 116–117—and the Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews entered the high imperial period (c. 100–300 CE) much reduced numerically, their once-powerful institutions destroyed, and their short-lived political greatness a bittersweet memory.