Josephus | Page 9

actually arose out of a feud between the Jewish and the Gentile inhabitants of Caesarea. The Hellenistic population outnumbered the Jews in the Herodian foundations of Caesarea, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Paneas, etc., as well as in the old Greek cities of Doris, Scythopolis, Gerasa, Gadara, and the rest of the Decapolis. This population regarded religion only as the pretext for public ceremonials and entertainments; it was scornful of the Jewish abstention from these things, and was aroused to the bitterest hatred by the social aloofness of their neighbors. Violent riots between Jew and Gentile were constantly taking place, and whether they were the aggressors or merely fighting in self-defense, the Jews were the scapegoats for the breaking of the peace. Stung by constant outrage on the part of their neighbors, the Jews turned upon them at Caesarea, and drove them out of the town. Thereupon Florus called them to reckoning, marched on Jerusalem, and plundered the Temple treasury. This event happened on the tenth day of Iyar in the year 66 C.E. The war-party determined to force the struggle to a final issue. Hitherto they had only been able to arouse a section to venture desperate sporadic insurrection against the might of Rome. Now they carried the people with them to engage in a national rebellion.
[Footnote 1: Pesahim, 57a.]
Agrippa II, who was amusing himself at Alexandria when the first outbreak occurred, hurried back to Jerusalem, and sought to quiet the people by impressing upon them the invincible power of Rome. But he failed, and the Romanizing priests' party failed, and the peaceful leaders of the Pharisees failed, to shake their determination. Messianic hopes were rife among the masses, and were invested with a materialistic interpretation. The Zealots, it is alleged by the pagan as well as the Jewish authorities for the period, believed that the destined time was come when the Jews should rule the world. The people looked for the realization of the prophecy of Isaiah (41:2), "He shall raise up the righteous one from the East, give the nations before Israel, and make him rule over kings."
The belief in the approach of the Messianic kingdom was undoubtedly one of the mainsprings of the revolt. There had been a series of popular leaders claiming to be Messiahs, but in the final struggle it was not the claim of any individual, but the passionate faith of the whole people, that inspired a belief in the coming of a perfect deliverance. Some events appeared to favor the fulfilment of their hopes of temporal sovereignty, bred though they were of despair. Rome under the corrupting influence of Nero seemed to be passing her zenith; national movements were stirring in the West, in Gaul and in Germany; in the East the Parthians were again threatening the security of the Roman provinces. The Jewish cause, on the other hand, seemed to be gaining ground everywhere. Its converts, numerous in the West, were still more numerous and important in the East. Among those recently brought over to the true faith as full proselytes were Helena, the queen of Adiabene, a kingdom situate in Mesopotamia, and her son Izates, who built themselves splendid palaces at Jerusalem. In Babylon the Jews had made themselves almost independent, and waged open war on the Parthian satraps. A large section of the people cherished a somewhat simple theodicy. How could God allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosen people to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles and the Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiah and Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph of good. Evil had reached its acme in Nero, and the time had come when God would break the "fourth horn" of Daniel's vision (ch. 8), and exalt his chosen people.
The fight for national independence was bound to have come, for nothing could have prevented the Romans from their attempt to crush the spirit of the Jews, and nothing could have held back the Jews from making a supreme effort to obtain their freedom from the hated yoke. For one hundred and twenty years Palestine had been ground beneath the iron heel of Roman governors and Romanizing tyrants. The conditions of the foreign rule had steadily grown more intolerable. At first the oppression was mainly fiscal; then it had sought to crush all political liberty, and finally it had come to outrage the deepest religious feeling and menace the Temple-worship. As Graetz says, "The Jewish people was like a captive, who, continually visited by his jailer, rattles at his fetters with the strength of despair, till he wrenches them asunder." It was not only the freedom of the Jew, but the safety of Judaism that was imperiled by the misrule of a Claudius and a Nero. The