THE ROMANS COME TO TOWN

Even under the first decades of Roman rule, the warring factions of the Hasmonean princes still continued to create civil strife until a quarter century later in 37 BCE, when a new Jewish dynasty of rulers came into being under King Herod the Great who, with Roman help, put an end to the Hasmoneans. His thirty-three year reign brought a great peace and a flowering of both spiritual and material culture. With Herod’s death in 04 BCE, however, the chaos would return once again.

The millions of Jews spread throughout the Roman empire at this time were given special privileges under a fairly liberal Roman rule – they had their own independent system of taxation and courts, and were also the only subjects of Rome not required to recognize the divinity of the Roman Emperor and offer sacrifices to him. Out of respect for the Jews’ prohibitions against “graven images,” Roman legions, by edict, were not allowed to enter the city of Jerusalem carrying their golden eagle standards. Because of these liberal and respectful conditions, most of the Jews living in the Roman province of Judaea, and throughout the Roman Empire, did not see the Romans as enemies and oppressors in the same way that a relatively substantial minority of persistent, militant zealots among them did. It was this violent minority of Jewish extremists and nationalists that periodically provoked the Romans throughout their rule, and by so doing, ultimately purchased for themselves and the Jewish population of Jerusalem a one-way, no-return bus ticket to ‘Final Exile’ in 135 BCE. Ungovernable and irrationally turbulent is how the Romans came to eventually view the Jews of Palestine. Case in point - the three groups of underground Jewish guerilla groups who opposed the Romans, also bitterly hated each other.(19)