Jewish life under the Romans from Pompey to the destruction of the Temple.
 

Why this period?

 

The context of this course is the Second Temple Period in the history of the Jewish people – the period during which the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem served as the foundation stone and standard for the beliefs and practices of Jews in and around Jerusalem as well as everywhere else.

 

The focus of the course is on the time of Roman occupation of the Jewish polity and surrounding lands from 63BCE to 70 CE as this was the crucible for the formation of the religions of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism and had a major influence on the development of modern western secularism. These major changes helped determine the future development of the West, of early Christianity as opposition to both Judaism and paganism; of Judaism as a belief framework for a defeated people who lived in hope; and of the civic nationalism that sought to put the state as the highest value above various cultic practices and belief.  These are questions we often have to deal with still today.

 

The threads of this development go back further into this period than the exact dates we are using.  But we only realize how important these early developments were because of where they led in the period of the Roman occupation and their destruction of the Second Temple.

 

We will therefore not stick precisely to the dates of 63BCE to 70 CE in this examination but will look at the context in which the Roman conquest began and the implications of the destruction of Temple, which sent many ripples of cause down the stream of time.

 

As always our own individual backgrounds will surely shape the meaning we see in what happened.  Part of what we will have to grapple with is how various groups have interpreted events and inserted them into their own narrative; indeed, it is inevitable that we would be called upon to do so.   Many of our sources for this period have their own agendas.   Sometimes, we do not have more than one source of information on a particular set of events.    Sometimes, our written sources have been passed down over the ages, with obvious changes, editorial cuts and insertions.   Many sources recount events which occurred in the past and some of the writers do not have any personal, direct knowledge of them.   Some of them do, but this of course brings its own set of challenges.  In addition, different writers have chosen to give details about different aspects of any particular set of facts.   Some writers may pass over completely one aspect of a situation which others spend pages on.   Josephus for instance, wrote a whole book about the Jewish-Roman War of 66-70CE.  For Roman writers, there is no equivalent detailed account.  For that matter, Josephus’s Jewish opponents have not left us much of their perspective either.   At some points, we will have to try to imagine what they might have to say.

 

Finally, we have to be conscious that we are studying our sources in English, our common language of communication.  The texts themselves may have been written in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic or Latin.   Occasionally a text is only available to us in an English translation of a translation of an original.

 

To help us along the way, we will also make use of secondary texts written by scholars, providing their own opinion and interpretation and helping us identify various narratives told about the events, events that we cannot be entirely certain of because as we have them, they are always contained and arranged within one of those narratives.

 

It may be that sometimes, we cannot know what actually happened, only what effect it had.   We are always separated from the reality by having to look through someone else’s  eyes.  And even when we are fairly certain of any one event, there will no doubt be different ways of understanding it.

 

 

Topics include

 

–        Introduction and Overview:  Why this period? What can history tell us?  - What questions should we ask?  What kind of answers should we expect?

–        Political History from the rebuilding of the temple to conquest by Pompey – What led Rome and Pompey to Judea?  Why held the Hasmonean state together and what pulled it apart?

–        The Career of Herod the Great:  Achievements and failures?  Was he Jewish ruler?  Was he a pagan ruler?

–        Herod’s successors: What did the Romans expect from the administrators of Judea et al? How did this affect their actions? How did they treat popular leaders?

–        Jewish literature of the Second Temple with and emphasis on the rise of Apocalyptic literature

–        Jewish religion - Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees and heresies

–        Jews and Pagans – Hellenism and Romanism

–        The Jew Jesus and his times: the individual; the connection to his time; the impact on his followers

–        The Jewish War 66-70: root causes? Why did the Jews fail?  Was the destruction of the temple a political imperative?  Why was the temple not rebuilt?

–        The destruction of the Temple and its aftermath: Jewish, Roman and Christian narratives: How are they similar?  How are they different?

 

Sources include Jewish Wars and History of the Jews, From the Maccabees to the Mishna, Dead Sea Scrolls, Maccabees I, Apocrypha, Tanakh (Daniel in particular), Gospels, etc.  Readings will be in English.