A missing chapter · The classical world

Judea in the Classical World

Return, revolt, and survival, the small province that lived inside the Greek and Roman empires, and what it left behind.

Standards alignment
New York State Social Studies Framework, Key Idea 9.3, Classical Civilizations (the Greek and Roman era). Grade 9, Global History & Geography I.

For six centuries, a small people lived in the land of Judea while the great powers of the classical world rose and fell around them. The Persians ruled them, then the Greeks, then the Romans. Alexander the Great passed through their land. The Roman Empire governed it. It was here, in Roman-ruled Judea and Galilee, that the movement that became Christianity began. Through all of it, the Jewish people of Judea kept their own history, one of return, revolt, and survival.

The six hundred years after the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE brought the return home and life under one empire after another. They brought a daring revolt against a Greek kingdom, the long rule of Rome, and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The period left evidence you can still see: a coin minted by Jewish rebels, a Roman monument carved with the looting of Jerusalem, and the oldest copies of biblical books ever found.

Where this picks up

In 586 BCE the Babylonian empire destroyed Jerusalem, burned the First Temple, and carried much of the population of the Kingdom of Judah into exile in Babylonia, in what is now Iraq. The exile lasted about fifty years, long enough that many who returned had been born in Babylonia. In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylonia, and the next year, according to the Book of Ezra, he allowed the exiles to return and rebuild their temple. The Second Temple was finished around 516 BCE.

The people who returned were now usually called Judeans, or Jews. Both words come from “Judah.” For the next six centuries they lived in their land, but rarely ruled it themselves. They were governed by a succession of empires: Persian, then Greek, then Roman.

Living inside the Greek world

In 332 BCE Alexander the Great of Macedon passed through the region on his way to Egypt, and Judea became part of the Greek-speaking world he left behind. After his death his generals divided his empire, and Judea was ruled first by the Ptolemies of Egypt and then by the Seleucids, the Greek dynasty centered in Syria.

This is the world historians call Hellenistic: Greek language, Greek cities, and Greek gods spreading across the eastern Mediterranean. Many Judeans adopted Greek ways, and others resisted. The tension came to a head in 167 BCE, when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV tried to ban Jewish practice and rededicated the Jerusalem Temple to the Greek god Zeus. The result was a revolt.

A revolt against a Greek empire

The Maccabean revolt (167–160 BCE) was led by a priestly family, the Maccabees, against the Seleucid Greek empire that ruled them. Against the odds, it worked. In 164 BCE the rebels retook the Temple and rededicated it, the event that became the holiday of Hanukkah. A Seleucid garrison still held Jerusalem’s citadel for another twenty years. Over the following decades the brothers of the revolt’s leader, Judah the Maccabee, used the Seleucid dynasty’s own weakness to win full independence, recognized around 142 BCE. They founded a Jewish kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty that lasted until Rome took Jerusalem in 63 BCE.

Under Rome

In 63 BCE the Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem, and Judea passed into the Roman orbit, first as a kingdom under Roman control, then directly as a Roman province. Rome governed through client-kings, the most famous of whom was Herod the Great (ruled 37–4 BCE), a ruthless ruler and an ambitious builder.

Herod rebuilt the Second Temple on a scale that made it one of the great structures of the Roman world. The enormous stone platform he built to support it still stands in Jerusalem. One of its retaining walls is the Western Wall, where people pray today. The wall belongs to Herod’s platform. The Temple itself stood above it.

Jews of this period did not all read the Torah the same way. Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote in Rome after the revolt of 66–73 CE, describes three schools of thought among the Jews. He is the chief ancient source on them. The Pharisees held that an oral tradition of interpretation carried authority alongside the written Torah. The Sadducees, a priestly group that ran the Temple worship, accepted only what the written Torah itself commanded. The Essenes lived in close communities that held their property in common. Many scholars identify the Essenes with the community whose library became the Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran and described below, though the scrolls never use the name and the identification is still debated.

In this Roman-ruled land, in the first century CE, lived a Jewish teacher from Galilee named Jesus. He was executed in Jerusalem by Roman authority. The Roman historian Tacitus records that “Christus” was put to death in the reign of the emperor Tiberius “by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus.” The movement that grew up around him became Christianity, a religion that began among Jews in the land of Judea and Galilee before spreading across the empire.

The evidence in the ground

Like Greece and Rome, this period left a material record archaeologists can read.

The oldest known copies of biblical books

Between 1947 and 1956, in caves above the Dead Sea near a site called Qumran, shepherds and then archaeologists found scrolls sealed in jars in the first cave. Tens of thousands of loose fragments followed from ten more caves, together some 900 manuscripts: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Written between roughly the third century BCE and the first century CE, they include the oldest surviving copies of biblical books, about a thousand years older than any copy known before. The Great Isaiah Scroll is nearly complete. These are the actual writings of Judean communities of this period, in their own hands.

The catastrophe of 70 CE, and what came after

In 66 CE the province rose against Rome in the Great Revolt. Rome crushed it. In 70 CE the Roman army took Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple. By the count of the historian Josephus, ninety-seven thousand people were carried off as captives over the course of the war. The last rebels held out on the desert fortress of Masada until 73 or 74 CE.

Rome treated the victory as a triumph worth carving in stone. In Rome, the Arch of Titus still stands in the Forum, built around 81 CE to celebrate the defeat of Judea. Inside its archway, a carved panel shows Roman soldiers carrying the spoils of the Jerusalem Temple through the streets, including its great seven-branched lampstand, the menorah. Its carved menorah later became the model for the official emblem of the modern State of Israel.

The Temple was gone, and this time it would not be rebuilt. According to rabbinic tradition, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai left the besieged city and, with Roman permission, gathered teachers in the coastal town of Yavneh. In that account, they began there to rebuild Jewish life around study, prayer, and the text of the Torah, in place of a temple and its sacrifices. Over the following centuries, the synagogue, an institution that already existed, and the rabbi took the center that the Temple and the priest had held. Jewish life continued in this form, without a temple, for the next two thousand years.

A coin that is also an argument

The last great ancient Jewish uprising against Rome, the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE), minted its own coins, by hammering new designs over circulating Roman coins, literally striking the rebels’ images on top of the empire’s. The design carries an argument: the Jerusalem Temple, already destroyed by Rome sixty years earlier, appears on one face, the temple they were fighting to restore. The lettering uses paleo-Hebrew, a deliberately revived ancient script. Rome crushed the revolt in 135 CE. By the count of the Roman historian Cassius Dio, the Romans razed 985 villages and killed 580,000 men in raids and battles, and those who died of famine, disease, and fire were past counting. The defeat brought massacres and the sale of Jews into slavery, and the center of Jewish life moved north to the Galilee. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from entering it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina. Dio names the plan for Aelia as a cause of the revolt.

The Judaism of study and prayer that took shape after 70 CE links the ancient Israelites to the Jewish communities that came after, a history of more than 3,000 years.

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