Christians think the rest of us are jealous because the voices talk only to them.

The Star of Bethlehem 1

The Oppression of the Jews

Abstract

From Jesus’s birth, Jewish rebels were leading armed struggles against the Romans and claiming to be the Messiah, a king. Yet in the midst of all this, God chose to send Jesus as the Messiah, a king. God might have intended to sacrifice himself as His son but he chose a strange time to do it, a time when Jesus the true Messiah could not be distinguished from deluded men who suffered the same fate—crucifixion. Jesus looks to be one of many messianic pretenders to the throne of Israel. If he was, then someone has deceived us. If he was not, God looks incompetent, for if He wanted to save mankind why did he do it in a way that leaves deception, or simply error, a large possibility? Nor did the Jewish War end these messianic claims, several more arose, until bar Kosiba, the Son of the Star, another messiah, led a four year rebellion with disastrous results for all Jews. Notes on the meaning of the Star of Bethlehem

The Oppression of the Jews

Despite the impression given by the gospels, Palestine in New Testament times was not a rural idyll ruled by a benign foreign Emperor. The region was politically and socially unstable. Palestine was at the crossroads between Asia and Africa and its proudly religious Jewish inhabitants, who believed themselves the Chosen People of God, had been harassed by mighty armies moving in either direction at various times in history. As an important trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) the mighty empires that periodically arose in those countries plotted and fought incessantly over the land between. Add to that divisions within the nation, partly self-induced and partly fostered by foreign powers, and the sum was turmoil.

The land of the Israelites was originally known as Canaan. Far from being a place for captured Egyptian slaves to escape to, it was, for the period when Moses was supposed to be active, an Egyptian Asian colony. Only when the Egyptians weakened and were unable to keep a hold on its Asian territories did small kigdoms emerge in what later became called Palestine after the Philistines occupied its coastal areas to form one of the new kingdoms, Philistia. Vowels were omitted in writing the languages of the Middle East in those days so the two words are the same.

Galilee was not a Rural Idyll. Picture by Lynne Pittard

So, the Israelites were not a unified nation from Egypt as the Old Testament story states, though the superpower of Egypt always had a strong influence on its smaller neighbour. There was no conquest of Canaan that matches the biblical description. Mainly the Israelites, if they were not simply native Canaanites adapting to living in arid hills that previously had not been viable, were a mixture of Semitic tribes from Arabia where they kept goats. Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian claimed the Israelites were the Hyksos, for 200 years rulers of Egypt, but rulers are not slaves as they were in the bible. Joshua did not conquer Canaan in a swift campaign in which he knocked down the walls of Jericho. His exploits are an invention of the Jewish sages colonising Yehud from Babylon some seven hundred years later, then later magnified by the Egyptian Ptolemies to divorce Judah from Persia. In the earlier period, it seems, Arabian nomads who settled in the Palestinain hills adapted from a predominantly pastoral life to one which was largely agricultural, and largely adapting their culture to that of the locals, the Caananites who mainly lived in the valleys. Only in about 850 BC, when Egypt could no lobger maintain any rule over Canaan, did locals form the small kingdoms of Judah, Israel and nearby Amman, Edom and Moab.

When the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar conquered Palestine in about 600 BC, they used it as a source of slaves and skilled labour and many Jews were carried away captive to Babylon. The large empires of the time had a policy of deporting the ruling class of troublesome countries. They were sent somewhere else, not as slaves, but to rule the peasants of some distant country where they would have to concentrate on not being overthrown themselves by the local people. The bible says they were allowed to return when Babylon, in its turn, was defeated by the Persians under their king, Cyrus, in 538 BC.

In fact, the Persians had the same policy as previous imperial countries of deporting people. The Judahites who “returned” were culturally different from those who had remained in Palestine. They were really not the people who had left at all after several generations in a richer country, they could hardly have wanted to return, anyway but were some other people told to get on with the job of setting up a temple state in Yehud, as the Persians called it. The “returners” brought with them the sophistication and scholarship of a mighty civilisation, and assistance from the Persian chancellery. Then it was that Ezra brought the law, and the history in the Old Testament began to be set, drawing upon Mesopotamian records and myths as well as some Canaanite ones. It praised the kindness of the Persian monarch who had liberated them, calling him their messiah.

Then also began the idea that their tribal god, Yehouah, one of many Semitic gods, was the one true god, absolute and universal, who had entered into a Covenant with the Jews, his specially Chosen People—specially chosen by the Persian officials! Under the umbrella of the Persians, the exiles built a new temple in Jerusalem and set up a theocracy in Judah—the holy people were to be ruled by God through his recognized priesthood. Then the Greeks under Alexander the Great and his generals defeated the Persians and took control of Palestine from 332 BC. They set about removing Persian influence and substituting their own in a process of Hellenization, the imposition of Greek culture—Greek cultural imperialism. For the next few hundred years, especially when the Greek Ptolemies ruled Egypt, and Canaan again, the Jewish priests rewrote and reinterpreted their legends creating the scriptures, known to us as the Old Testament.

The Greek kings of Babylon and Syria, the Seleucids, got control of Palestine from the Ptolemies about 200 BC. One of their kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, wanted to hurry along the process of culturation by setting up a common religion. Abandoning patience and diplomacy, in 167 AD, he unilaterally set up statues of Greek gods in local shrines including one of Zeus in the temple at Jerusalem. The Jews, by now devoted to their own god, Yehouah, given to them by the Persians and like theirs, hidden, objected strongly to an idol in their holy place. The author of the Book of Daniel called the outrage the Abomination of Desolation. Thereafter the phrase Abomination of Desolation became a technical term for pollution of the temple by images of foreign gods, and a sign of God’s impending vengeance.

The Jews objected strongly to it and rebelled. A family nicknamed the Maccabees or “Hammers” after the Hebrew word for a mason’s hammer, successfully rose against their Greek masters and set up a Jewish state for a short time, but the kingdom divided again and fell under Roman domination first under Pompey in 63 BC and then under the Roman vassal monarch, Herod the Great, who reigned as a tyrant for 33 years from 37 BC. Herod was an Idumaean who defeated the Jewish opposition, successfully petitioned the Romans for the throne and sought popularity by becoming Jewish and rebuilding the Temple. After years of war and civil war, Herod kept the peace and put the Jews back to work, but they did not like him. Though he had adopted Judaism, they did not regard him as Jewish and, though he took decades to build a magnificent temple, he was not thanked for it. The building projects that provided employment and economic stability, the peace he imposed and the competent administration of his regime were the reasons for his title the “Great” but he was cruel and immoral and despite his greatness remained unpopular with his Jewish subjects.

With Herod’s death in 4 BC, the interlude of tranquillity ended. Before the birth of Jesus, history had not been smooth for the Jews for 200 years. The birth of the saviour was not going to make it any smoother. Herod’s death started a long period of civic unrest punctuated by rebellion and repression and ending in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. Succeeding as Ethnarch to half of Herod’s kingdom, Judaea, Herod’s son, Archelaus, began by butchering thousands of his subjects. Iin every part of Palestine there were uprisings of the poor under a variety of leaders. The Romans deposed Archelaus in less than a decade and in 6 AD imposed direct rule from Rome under the governorship of military administrators titled Prefects. Later governors were financial administrators titled Procurators.

The Jews had tolerated Herod, who was a foreigner, because he had at least converted to Judaism, but to be governed by godless gentiles was impossible to tolerate. It violated the Royalty Law. The sages who had compiled the Old Testament, fresh from the years of exile under the Babylonians, had written in Deuteronomy 17:15 that Jews had to be ruled by a Jew and not by any foreigner:

One from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee, who is not thy brother.

The priests who returned from exile in Babylon and their successors had rewritten the Jewish traditional lore such that it supported the theocracy they sought to build. Conscious of the years of oppression under the Babylonians they hoped to prevent it in future by making it a command from God that the Children of Israel should refuse to accept foreign rule. Naturally, it would also give the hereditary priests a degree of security too!

But such a law is easier to write than to enforce and the Jews had grudgingly submitted to foreign domination for hundreds of years—but the Romans were particularly hated. In the first century AD a succession of Roman governors were put in charge of Judaea to quell the discontent of the population. God’s Law forbade the Jews to accept foreign rule, in the first century AD providing a constant spur to Jewish nationalists to rise against their Roman rulers even in the most adverse circumstances—God must be on their side, it was His command! Throughout New Testament times rioting and insurrection were commonplace in Judaea.

And so we come to the time of Barabbas, with Pontius Pilate the Prefect of Judaea, when the events of the gospel occurred. Uprisings had been occurring regularly for over twenty years and would continue to occur even beyond the destruction of Jerusalem forty years in the future. In the midst of this the gospels tell us that a gentle wandering holy man was falsely picked on by jealous priests, unfairly turned over to the Romans as a pretender to the throne of Judaea and unjustly tortured to death on a cross.

Page Tags: Oppression of the Jews, Jesus, Christianity, Essenes, Qumran, Apocalypticism, Kingdom, God, Star Prophecy, Bar Kosiba, Bar Kocheba, Israel, Jewish, Jews, King, Messiah, Romans

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.