Aton Holzer
The recent release of Gladiator II, an immersive epic in the style of its predecessor, drew plaudits from critics and raised hackles from historians.[1] Most notable among them were the implications that in the early third century CE, in which the movie is set, the Roman Empire was imperiled due to its ‘reckless conquests’ – Roman territorial expansion had peaked with Trajan a century earlier – and that there was any hope, or even thought, of restoring the Roman Republic at that point in history. Reversing imperial overreach and restoring the republic are two aims of Lucius, the plot’s main protagonist, and the conclusion suggests that he is poised to succeed. The movie creates a counterfactual, a fantasy that was never obtained in real life – restoring the hope of Rome.
But this may just make it the perfect Hanukkah movie. Consider this:
Judas heard of the fame of the Romans, that they are mighty warriors but are well-disposed toward all who join them and establish friendship with whoever approaches them, and that they are mighty warriors. And he was told of their wars and of their valorous deeds…any who ever opposed them they destroyed and enslaved, but with their friends, and those who rested their hopes upon them, they kept friendship. And they conquered kings both near and far, and all who had heard their name feared them. Those whom they want to help reign, reign, and those they want, they depose; they were greatly exalted.
But despite all of this, not one of them crowned himself with a diadem or wrapped himself in purple so as to pretend to be great. Rather, they made themselves a council, and every day 320 of them always take counsel together concerning the population and maintaining its good order. Every year they entrust a single person with governing them and ruling all of their territory, and they all listen to that one person; among them there is neither envy nor jealousy.
So Judas chose Eupolemus the son of John of the Haqqoz clan and Jason the son of Eleazar and sent them to Rome to establish friendship and alliance with them, and to remove the yoke from them, for they saw that the kingdom of the Greeks was subjugating Israel into slavery. They went to Rome—and the trip is very long!—and entered the council and declared: “Judas, also known as Maccabaeus, and his brothers and the community of the Judeans have sent us to you to establish alliance and peace with you, so that we may be listed among your allies and friends.” This found favor in their eyes. And this is the copy of the letter, which they wrote in response on bronze tablets and sent to Jerusalem, so as to be a memorial there, among them, of the peace and alliance: Let it be well for the Romans and the people of the Judeans on sea and on land forever, and let sword and enmity be far from them. But if war is made upon Rome, first of all, or upon any of its allies in its entire realm, the people of the Judeans will fight together with them wholeheartedly, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. And they will neither give nor supply their enemies wheat, weapons, money, or ships—as Rome decided, and they will observe their obligations without receiving anything. In the same way, if the people of the Judeans is attacked first, the Romans will fight enthusiastically as its allies, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. Nor will they give to the allies (of the partner’s enemies) wheat, weapons, money, or ships, as Rome decided, and they will observe these obligations without duplicity. (I Maccabees 8:1-28)[2]
This remarkable passage has Judah Maccabee, the great hero of the Hasmonean revolt, describing his admiration for the Roman Republic, and sending an embassy to form a treaty with them. This took place, per the text, in 161-160 BCE, at a critical juncture in Judah’s second series of wars against the Seleucids.
There has been recent work focusing upon the nature of the alliance that was reached, and whether the agreement – concretized in tablets of bronze – was one in which the Judean embassy was duped into a submissive stance with few real benefits, a relationship of amicitia (friendship) – which led to their ultimate conquest by Rome, with all of its dire repercussions[3] – or if it was one in which a real treaty of friendship and alliance was concluded, alas too late to save Judah himself, and had nothing at all to do with later adverse developments.[4]
Less attention has been paid to the glowing description of the Roman Republic and its institutions. The Roman Republic (510-27 BCE) was unique among ancient empires in that it managed to retain a system of popular governance, even as it expanded to include the entire Mediterranean littoral. Exceptions were made for times of war or civil unrest, when a dictator with broad powers was appointed as executive, only until resolution of the crisis; but this institution was not invoked between 202 to 82 BCE.
161 BCE came during this dictatorial desuetude, when the institutions of Republican Rome were sufficiently robust and adaptive to crises, and in the first half of the second century, when Rome was fighting wars away from its homeland and the city was in no danger.[5] Rome had become a sort of a “city upon a hill,” or upon seven hills – a shining beacon for the world, in which political murder did not exist, and violence among the ruling class was unthinkable; its system of separation of powers, limited checks and balances, and political norm of restraint, allowed for a scalable participatory democracy that could serve as a model for others.
For Judah Maccabee, leader of the insurrection, the Roman Republic was an inspiration. Absolute monarchy had led to terrible violence and destruction, lamented in Jewish texts dating from the wars of the Diadochi,[6] and the records of the successors of Ptolemy and Seleucus were marred by fratricide and chaos. It is tempting to see within the system of governance that emerged – a ‘dictator’ priest nasi – not a king, just a leader (at least until Aristobulus) presiding over a hever ha-Yehudim, a Jewish senate – a conscious attempt to mirror the Roman system as it was understood in Judea, until ‘a trustworthy prophet should arise’ (14:41) to elaborate the contours of a workable monarchy.
Tragically, the model polity did not last. The expansion of Rome led to severe inequality in land distribution. Tribune of the Plebes Tiberius Gracchus advanced legislation for redistribution of excess land; his assassination in 133 BCE heralded the introduction of political violence into Republican Rome, and the breach of this taboo created a snowball effect. Moral panic – the conviction that one’s opposing party violated the core value of restraint – consumed Rome, led to the assassination of Gaius Gracchus a decade on, and ultimately to the abuse of the consulship by Gaius Marius in the last decade of the second century, the marches on Rome and dictatorship of Sulla in the ensuing three decades, the norm-bending career of Pompey and the dictatorship-for-life of Julius Caesar in the latter half of the first century, and finally, the utter collapse of the Republic and its reconstitution as Empire – an unexceptional military dictatorship-cum-monarchy – with the ascension of Octavian.
In later Jewish historiography, Judea and Rome are the twin brothers Jacob and Esau;[7] fittingly, the Hasmonean kingdom, in tandem with Rome, descended into similar patterns. The first Hasmonean leader to succumb to internal political violence, Simon Thassi, the Jewish ‘pontifex maximus’/kohein gadol, was assassinated by his son-in-law just a year before Tiberius Gracchus fell to the angry mob led by his cousin, pontifex maximus Scipio Nasica Serapio. During the long, expansionist reign of Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus, as Rome divided itself between the ultraconservative, aristocratic optimates and populist populares, Judean politics aligned itself among two roughly analogous parties, Sadducees and Pharisees. In his short reign, Aristobulus assumed the title of king, right at the time that Marius began to abuse the consulship to yield what resembled a more traditional-style monarchy. Alexander Jannaeus’ ruthless dispatch of his political enemies in Jerusalem matched Sulla’s contemporaneous bloody purges in the city of Rome. As political violence sundered Republican Rome into warring factions, Hasmonean Judea fell victim to the scourge of fratricidal mania. In the absence of a prophet to restrain a potential monarch (1 Macc. 14:41), Judea had abandoned its own mos maiorum, the way of its ancestors, in favor of the Roman model, and as the Republic began its death throes, there was no voice of tradition, no precedent to invoke, to save Judea from itself.
A recent work traces the fall of the Republic to a breach that opened then between two of these senators in particular, tribune-elect Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (Cato the Younger) and praetor-elect (and newly pontifex maximus) Gaius Julius Caesar. Both scarred in their youth from the depredations of Sulla’s reign of terror, both were intellectuals and authors distinguished by a strong sense of justice and personal integrity, but toward opposite ends. The austere, moralist conservative Cato was determined to strengthen and purify the republic’s corrupted institutions. The flamboyant, profligate populist Caesar – a fierce conqueror in war – was drawn toward sympathy for innocent victims, which came to include those brutalized by the corrupt, sclerotic Senate in the city of Rome and unenfranchised new subjects throughout the Empire. The uncompromising, intransigent partisanship of the two and their loyal followers led to an awful civil war that ended in Cato’s suicide in 46 BCE, an effective vitiation of the Republic that resulted in Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE[8] and a resulting upheaval leading to the Republic’s formal end in 27 BCE with the proclamation of Caesar’s heir Octavian as Augustus.
Neither Cato nor Caesar appear in rabbinic literature. Jewish sources do identify a villain in this period – the executioner of the Judean polity – and an equal share of blame for the Republic’s unraveling may lie at his feet.
In 63 BCE, the armies under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great– finished his Senate-authorized task of pacifying belligerent Asia minor and Syria, determined that he was the law, and swung south and handily (and completely illegally) consumed civil war-torn Judea, killing thousands, abrogating the “bronze tablets” of the covenant reached with Judah Maccabee. He nonetheless made a show of his virtuosic ‘restraint’ by (allegedly) not ransacking the Temple, into whose sanctum sanctorum he intruded, very much uninvited. Josephus describes the events in his Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews; in the latter, which relies mostly on pro-Roman sources[9] (and in this passage, particularly on the Pontic Greek geographer Strabo of Cappadocia[10]), he writes (Ant. 14.4.3-5, Marcus translation):
And indeed when the city was taken, in the third month, on the Fast Day, in the hundred and seventy-ninth Olympiad, in the consulship of Gaius Antonius and Marcus Tullius Cicero, and the enemy rushed in and were slaughtering the Jews in the temple, those who were busied with the sacrifices none the less continued to perform the sacred ceremonies; nor were they compelled, either by fear for their lives or by the great number of those already slain, to run away, but thought it better to endure whatever they might have to suffer there beside the altars than to neglect any of the ordinances. And that this is not merely a story to set forth the praises of a fictitious piety, but the truth, is attested by all those who have narrated the exploits of Pompey, among them Strabo and Nicolas [of Damascus] and, in addition, Titus Livius, the author of a History of Rome…
For this misfortune which befell Jerusalem Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were responsible, because of their dissension, for we lost our freedom and became subject to the Romans, and the territory which we had gained by our arms and taken from the Syrians we were compelled to give back to them, and in addition the Romans exacted of us in a short space of time more than ten thousand talents and the royal power which had formerly been bestowed on those who were high priests by birth became the privilege of commoners.
The expansion of Rome’s empire was identified already by Machiavelli and Montesquieu as rendering it ungovernable by the institutions of a city-state.[11] The conquest of Judea completed Rome’s control of the Mediterranean seaboard. Republican Rome had bitten off more than it could chew.
But a – perhaps the – key catalyst in this decline is the figure of Pompey. Unlike Caesar and Cato, Pompey seems to have had no overarching principles beyond self-aggrandizement. He gladly accepted from Sulla the cognomen of Magnus, applied heretofore only to Alexander III of Macedon. From a young age, he made clear that the rules did not apply to him: he took the consulship without proceeding up the cursus honorum, and he held a triumph despite being too young to legally do so, albeit being careful to perform public affectations, if clumsy, of ‘restraint.’[12] For Caesar, territorial conquest was a means to the end of political power; for Pompey, political power was a means to the end of territorial conquest and the attendant glory of the Roman triumph. He earned the wraths of both Crassus and Lucullus by arriving at the end of their campaigns so as to ‘finish off’ the enemy and thus take credit for the victory and control of the spoils.
As the consummate mercenary with no ideological commitment and with the greatest of notches in his belt – completing Rome’s contiguous empire – Pompey the Great lulled Cato and Cicero into the false hope that, with his brawn, they could subdue Caesar by force, without any need for compromise, and Pompey could achieve the last bit of acclaim that had been out of his reach – that of the full Senate, including the optimates, and control of the Republic under his own military dictatorship. Caesar chose empire over republic, Cato republic over empire. Pompey would have had both.
But this was a bridge too far. Pompey could not deliver. And fourteen years after Pompey had marched to unlawfully seize a divided Jerusalem, Caesar came for Rome, and the die was cast. Pompey would lose his head, and Rome would lose its Republic.
The Judean View: the Lawless One
Four distinct “genres” of late antique Jewish literature emerge from four distinct periods after the event. Pompey is unambiguously referenced in three, and a consistent picture begins to emerge of the Judean view of the events of 63 BCE: a terrible betrayal. In Dead Sea Scroll calendrical texts and Pesher-commentaries, which originate from the Qumran sect that date roughly contemporaneous to the events, the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey and his legate M. Aemilius Scaurus is the key historical event, understood as heralding the onset of the eschaton.[13] 4Q386 (Pseudo-Ezekiel) fragment 4 describes the grim fate of Pompey,[14] his assassination by Ptolemy XIII Philopator upon the former’s arrival in Egypt in 48 BCE: “And the wicked one (ha-rasha) I will kill in Moph (Memphis) and my children I will take out of Moph…” The Psalms of Solomon, eighteen extracanonical Psalms which appear in some versions of the Septuagint and Peshitta dating to the early first century CE, decry “the lawless one” who “devastated our land” referenced in Psalm 17, a mixture of Pompey and Herod, ‘Herodompeius.’[15] A major theme in the psalms is reactive, retributivist Divine justice.[16] Pompey and his ravages clearly loom largest in the imagination of the psalmist, even as the people share the blame for the catastrophe:[17]
When the sinner contemptuously used his battering-ram to smash down the fortified walls, you did not interfere. Gentiles who worship other gods went up to your altar; they brazenly trampled around with their sandals on… The Gentiles humiliated Jerusalem when she was trampled down; he dragged her beauty from her once magnificent throne… I did not have long to wait until God showed me his arrogance. Stabbed on the sand dunes of Egypt, he was more despised than anything in the whole world. His body was violently carried over the waves, and there was no one to bury him, because God contemptuously despised him. He did not realize that he was merely mortal, and he didn’t think about the future. He said: “I will be lord of the whole world”: he failed to recognize that it is God who is great, who is mighty in his great strength… (2:1-29)
Flavius Josephus wrote his monumental histories between the years 75 and 93 CE. Josephus is the sole ancient Jewish source that mentions Pompey by name. Given the preceding Judean treatments, one might expect a negative assessment of the man, especially in light of the dire consequences of Roman occupation to which Josephus himself had recently borne witness. This is not the case, as seen in the citation above – in Antiquities, Pompey is praised for respecting the sanctuary vessels, his men are praised for their bravery, and he is regarded as ‘setting free’ the non-Jewish cities that had been subjugated by the Hasmoneans. Josephus wrote in the tradition of Thucydides and Polybius, political realists who refrain from moral assessments of powerful men. Roman strongmen come and go at God’s will, and Josephus’s focus is on how the Judean leaders deal with them. Even Titus and Vespasian, the destroyers of Jerusalem, are not condemned for it.
But even Josephus ends the passage with a lament for the loss of Judean liberty (although, owing to the objectives of that work, he blames this upon Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, whose fighting deviated from God’s law). In his later work Against Apion, he again identifies this event as the watershed for Judean freedom, which he holds up as having been a point of pride:
One should also be particularly amazed at the great intelligence in what Apion goes on to say. For he says that it is evidence of the fact that we do not employ just laws or worship God as we should that [we do not govern,] but are subservient to other nations, one after another, and that we have experienced some misfortunes affecting our city… while we, being free, used to rule in addition over the surrounding cities for about 120 years up till the time of Pompey the Great; and when all the monarchs, on all sides, were hostile to the Romans, ours alone, because of their loyalty, were maintained as allies and friends. (2.11.125-134)[18]
One may also detect here a complaint: Judea was unfailingly, singularly, loyal to Rome, and yet it took her freedom.
Rabbinic Literature
After Josephus, late antique Jewish reflections on historical events pass to rabbinic writings, beginning with the Mishnah, c. 200 and the tannaitic midrashim. Rabbinic historiography is quite different from that of the Bible or Josephus; with few exceptions, historical accounts are not a focus, and when historical events are recalled, mythical elements are often introduced into their descriptions.
Nonetheless, based on careful literary analysis, Vered Noam finds that there is a shared pool of Jewish oral traditions and anecdotes spanning the latter half of the Second Temple period from which both Josephus – specifically in Antiquities – and the Rabbis drew, independently. [19]
Pompey does not appear in rabbinic literature,[20] and given the centrality assigned to the trauma of his conquest, as seen in the three prior manifestations of Judean literature, the omission is glaring. This is particularly true given that the Rabbis did not share Josephus’s reticence regarding moral condemnation of Roman strongmen, assigning various Roman emperors and officials the cognomen ha-rasha (the wicked), ha-shodeid (the robber) or even shehik atzamot (may his bones be pulverized).
One might suggest that, given the late date of rabbinic compositions, the Rabbis simply did not know of Pompey and his conquest – that despite their demonstrable access to a range of oral and written historical materials of the Second Temple period, this particular event was lost in the mists of time. This is somewhat undermined by incorporation of anecdotes in both Talmuds (b Sotah 49b, b Bava Kamma 82b, b Menahot 64b, y Berakhot 4:1, and y Ta’anit 4:5) relating to the immediate antecedent siege of Jerusalem by Hyrcanus against Aristobulus,[21] and an apparent reference to one facet of the event itself, the disappearance of a golden vine from the Temple when ‘the gentiles entered the sanctum’ (b Yoma 21b, 39b) – which parallels Josephus’s report (Ant. 14.34-36) of Aristobulus’s gift of this particular Temple adornment to Pompey, right around the time that this gentile and his men indeed entered the sanctum.[22]
Another old approach in scholarship paints the Rabbis as antagonistic to the state established by the Hasmoneans, or even Jewish sovereignty more generally, such that they would have welcomed Pompey’s intrusion to set things right. Isaiah Gafni carefully examines the rabbinic sources, and demonstrates that rabbinic appraisal of the Hasmonean state is actually, on the balance, favorable.[23] Recent work by Vered Noam likewise supports the contention that the Rabbis were invested in the Hasmonean state and preserved materials from the period that were interesting and useful for their purposes.[24]
It seems that the most likely approach is that which also explains why Judah Maccabee is not mentioned in rabbinic literature. From the vantage point of the Rabbis, Pompey was unremarkable. By the time of the Rabbis, alliance, or even coexistence, of Judea and Rome was long forgotten. The best that could be said of the Empire was that they were masters of infrastructure: “they established marketplaces, established bridges, and established bathhouses” (Shabbat 33b). Rome had become synonymous with ‘the wicked kingdom’ or the ‘willful kingdom’ in rabbinic writings and liturgy. More than that, it had become the very antithesis of Judea (Megillah 6a):
Caesarea and Jerusalem: If someone says to you both are destroyed, do not believe; they are both settled, do not believe. Caesarea is destroyed and Jerusalem is settled, Jerusalem is destroyed and Caesarea is settled, believe. As it is stated: “I shall be filled with her that is laid waste” (Ezekiel 26:2): if this is filled, that one is laid waste, if [that] is filled, this one is laid waste.
For the Rabbinic movement, coming on the heels of Hadrian’s desecration of Jerusalem’s ruins and genocide of Judea, Pompey was a saint. The belief in the Roman Republic as champion of something approaching representative government and a liberal, or even somewhat equitable, international order was long dead and buried. In hindsight, alliance with Rome was a fool’s errand from the outset. Pompey simply did what Romans, what a society wed to a sense of tradition but unmoored from objective norms – consumed by moral panic, political violence, brimming with intellectual elites given to sophisticated rationalizations and lawfare – could be counted upon to do.
The Hasmoneans had jettisoned traditional Jewish eschatology – envisioning the advent of a Davidic messiah and the restoration of the monarchy – in favor of a different vision: a Jewish polity ruled by priests that would follow the Roman model of governance, be a loyal partner with the Republic, and ideally provide moral and spiritual content to its empire, a sacred tip to their spear. It would be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), along the lines of the model articulated prior to the Golden Calf incident.
But the “shattering of the tablets” – commemorated by the Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8) on the seventeenth of Tammuz, a fast for the ‘beginning of the end’ – here the bronze tablets – changed all of that, just as it had done in the book of Exodus. It seems to be no coincidence that all aggadic treatments of the Tablets of the Law dilate on Exodus 32:16, ‘harut al ha-luhot’ (‘inscribed on the tablets’), homiletically rendering it heirut, (freedom) (Kallah Rabbati 8:2, Avot De-Rabbi Natan 2:3, Eruvin 54a, Exodus Rabbah 41:7, Leviticus Rabbah 18:3, Numbers Rabbah 10:8, Song of Songs Rabbah 8:6, et al.). Judean freedom ended when Pompey ‘broke’ the bronze tablets, promising cooperation and non-aggression in exchange for loyalty.
Ultimately, the ‘special relationship’ could not last, the partnership could not work – the appetites of Pompey, Caesar, and even Cato were just too great. Their self-serving sophistry consumed Judean civilization, and then their own.
The deaths of Jacob and Esau – the Hasmonean State and the Roman Republic; the tension between lawfare and violence, even Pompey himself, beheaded at the hands of a rash young Egyptian, and the celebratory deuterocanonical literature written in response – may be referenced in an Aggadic passage which appears in Sotah 13a, Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer 39, Targum pseudo-Jonathan to Genesis 50:13, and Shitah Hadashah (on Genesis Rabbah), 97. The latter describes what transpired when Esau blocked the tribes from burying Jacob, claiming as his own the Cave of Makhpeilah – the family’s sole land holding in Judea:
Naphtali is a hind let loose [Gen. 49.21]. This teaches that he sped to Egypt like a deer and brought the title deed of the cave [of Makhpeilah], so that his father could be buried. While he was gone Hushim[,] the son of Dan, who was deaf, came. When he saw Esau restraining them from burying our father Jacob, he stabbed him with his hand through the neck and struck off his head. His two eyes fell upon the bier of our father Jacob, whereupon he [Jacob] opened his eyes, saw vengeance, and rejoiced, as it says, “The righteous man will rejoice when he sees revenge” [Ps. 58.11]. Thus was fulfilled Rebecca’s prophecy when she said, “Why should I lose you both in one day?” [Gen. 27.45].[25]
Epilogue: The New Republic
The Rabbis describe the fall of Hasmonean Jerusalem as deriving from the traitorous advice, ‘in Greek wisdom,’ of a Jewish elder (Sotah 49b, Bava Kamma 82b, Menahot 64b). They formulated a response to the incident: divestment from Greco-Roman culture.
They said at that time: Cursed is the person who raises pigs, and cursed is the person who teaches his son Greek wisdom.
In this rabbinic reading, on the face of it, Greco-Roman culture was proscribed because it bred quislings – Judeans in the thrall of an ostensibly just, but too-easily subverted, Roman system of international law and politics – who betrayed their most sacred national treasures and their fellow countrymen. The abandonment of the ideals of the Republic in order to sate Pompey’s appetite – first by Caesar, then by Cato – and the rewriting of law, on the international stage to annex Judea, and on the national arena, to ensnare Caesar – convinced the Rabbis that they would be better off formulating their own approaches to statecraft and governance, and setting them down in writing – an objective record of principle and values, less able to be subverted to their very opposite.
But the edict embraces not merely education but raising swine, as well, which offers a second reading: Judea was easy for the Republic to devour because it was too similar to Rome. Greek wisdom – the formulation of Jewish thought and history in Greco-Roman styles, in the middle Platonic mode of Philo or the Polybian objectivity of Josephus, not to mention the playwriting of Ezekiel the Tragedian, the Greek poetry of Philo the Poet, and the Sibylline Oracles, made Judea too compatible, too easy to subsume within the expanding empire. Pork, the favored Roman delicacy, was made too available in a too-cosmopolitan Hasmonean state that sacrificed too much of its particularism in extending its rule over non-Jewish cities. For their part, the Rabbis would write in Hebrew, not Greek or Latin – in a style suited to their own interests, not Roman ones.
The symbol of swine itself suggests a third, perhaps the most important, reading. Of the many negative associations with swine in rabbinic literature – filth, lust, disease, and drunkenness, to name a few – with regard to one, the Aggadah draws a direct connection to Rome: hypocrisy.
Moses said: “The pig because it has a split hoof” (Deuteronomy 14:8). Asaf said: “The swine from the forest gnaws at it.” Why does he analogize it to a pig? Just as this pig, when it lies, extends its hooves, saying: ‘I am pure,’ so, this evil empire robs and takes forcibly, [yet] it appears as though it is arranging the courtroom. (Genesis Rabbah 65:1, Leviticus Rabbah 13:5)
Here, rabbinic literature preserves the sense of betrayal that preceded predatory procurators, fiendish Flavians, and genocidal ‘good’ emperors that were, for Judea, anything but. A Hasmonean Judea that adored Rome for ostensibly shared values, and extended its full loyalty, instead found a voracious swine which made a show of its values, but which viewed its relationships as purely transactional, which dispensed with long-term alliances when they interfered with even the most narrowly-defined short-term political or personal self-interest.
Already in the Psalms of Solomon, explicit longing for a Davidic messiah would return in full force, and the potent logic of a king of the Jews who would inaugurate a new world order would ultimately escape the bounds of the Jewish religion and actually overtake the Empire that Augustus built on the ruins of the Republic. For its part, the rabbinic revolution also did not hope to live alongside Roman imperial administration, but to replace it, and the Mishnah deals with fully functioning national institutions – as an alternative, rather than a complement, to dominant Imperial Rome. In this, the Rabbis went far beyond other similar ancient societies subordinated to Rome. Ishai Rosen-Zvi writes, “The Rabbis… could not see themselves as integral parts of a Roman whole because they offered a complete alternative to the Empire [italics his]; a system, indeed a universe, of their own making.” [26] The Rabbis appear to have concluded that the Jewish ‘mission’ must never again be unreservedly tethered to the horses of an empire or great power.
For Jews, mourning the broken tablets on the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz may contain a hint to mourning the Judea, and Rome, that once was thought could have been: an eschatological vision which, if not stillborn, met a violent death in relative infancy. Instead, a rabbinic ‘polity’ arose off the stage of history – the alternative reality of the Mishnah – rabbinic ‘consuls’ and ‘senators’ who would preserve Jewish nationhood beyond the collapse of the Republic, the Empire, and all of its heirs.
Like Gladiator II, the alternate Republic that the Rabbis created took shape precisely in the early third century, with the publication of the Mishnah by R. Judah the Prince, a friend of the Antonines, also ‘royalty,’ but due less to genealogy than merit. In this alternate reality, there were gladiators: ba’alei tereisin – “shield-bearers” (Berakhot 27b, Bekhorot 36a, et al.) – tannaitic scholars who would ‘battle’ in the study hall to determine the laws that would chart the future of the Jewish Republic. Ten of these received a ‘thumbs down’ from the Roman overlords, but their project outlived them.
By reinterpreting Rome, the Rabbinic movement would retrieve the holiday of Hanukkah, the celebration of the Hasmonean project, from the oblivion to which Pompey had consigned it, and would secure Judea’s mos maiorum for millennia to come.
[1] Many thanks to Professors Kenneth Atkinson, Steve Mason, and Tal Ilan for their insights, and R. Reuven Chaim Klein for help in locating sources.
[2] Translation from Daniel R. Schwartz, 1 Maccabees: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Yale University Press, 2022), 284-285.
[3] Linda Zollschan, Rome and Judaea: international law relations, 162-100 BCE (Routledge, 2016).
[4] Altay Coşkun, “‘Friendship and Alliance’ between the Judaeans under Judas Maccabee and the Romans (1 Macc 8:17-32): A Response to Linda Zollschan’s Rome and Judaea,” Electrum 25 (2018): 85-125.
[5] Mark Wilson, Dictator: the evolution of the Roman dictatorship (University of Michigan Press, 2021), 267-289.
[6] George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Apocalyptic and Myth in 1 Enoch 6-11,” Journal of Biblical Literature 96:3 (1977): 383-405.
[7] Katell Berthelot, “The Impact of ‘Pagan’ Rome,” in Christine Hayes, ed., The Literature of the Sages: A Re-Visioning (Brill, 2022), 344-373.
[8] Josiah Osgood, Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[9] Jane Bellemore, “Josephus, Pompey and the Jews,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte H. 48:1 (1999): 94-118.
[10] Alessandro Galimberti, “Josephus and Strabo: The Reasons for a Choice,” Making History: Josephus And Historical Method (Brill, 2007), 147-167.
[11] Robert Morstein-Marx and Nathan Rosenstein, “The Transformation of the Republic,” A Companion to the Roman Republic (Wiley, 2006), 625-637.
[12] Paul Belonick, Restraint, Conflict, and the Fall of the Roman Republic (Oxford University Press, 2022), 139.
[13] Kenneth Atkinson, “Understanding Hellenistic and Roman History in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” The Dead Sea Scrolls in the Context of Hellenistic Judea (Brill, 2022), 9-27.
[14] Ibid., 20-21.
[15] See discussion in Julia Rath, “Exile and Diaspora in the Psalms of Solomon,” ibid.,
49-67, specifically 54, fn 34.
[16] Jason Zurawski, “Solomonic Paideia: Divine Pedagogy in the Psalms of Solomon and the Book of Wisdom,” ibid., 85-99.
[17] Translation from Robert B. Wright, James H. Charlesworth, eds. Psalms of Solomon: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007).
[18] Translation by John Barclay, in Steve Mason, ed., Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary: Against Apion (Brill, 2006), 233-238.
[19] Vered Noam, “Lost Historical Traditions: Between Josephus and the Rabbis.” Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls (Brill, 2017), 991-1017.
[20] For a possible reference, see Aton M. Holzer, “Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum,” The Seforim Blog, July 17, 2024, archived at https://seforimblog.com/2024/07/apostomos-now-contemporary-conjectures-on-a-classic-conundrum/ and accessed on December 17, 2024.
[21] See a historical analysis in Ernest Wiesenberg, “Related Prohibitions: Swine Breeding and the Study of Greek,” Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. 27 (1956), 213-233.
[22] Daphne Baratz, “A Golden Vine/Garden in The Temple,” in (Heb.) Josephus and the Rabbis, Vol. 1 (Yad Ben Tzvi Press, 2017), 341-348.
[23] Isaiah Gafni, “The Hasmonaeans in Rabbinic Literature,” Jews and Judaism in the Rabbinic Era: Image and Reality-History and Historiography (Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 59-75.
[24] Daniel R. Schwartz, “Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature, written by Vered Noam,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 51:2 (2020): 289-294.
[25] Translation from Joseph Witzum, “Deaf Hishām and Esau’s Death,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112:3 (2022): 378-405, 389.
[26] Ishay Rosen-Zvi, “Rabbis and Romanization: A Review Essay,” in Jewish Cultural Encounters in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern World, eds. Mladen Popovic, Myles Schoonover, and Marijn Vandenberghe (Brill, 2017), 218-245, especially 242-243.
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