Download When Rome Ruled Palestine

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WHEN ROME RULED PALESTINE
In the twelfth year of Emperor Tiberius’s reign, a new Roman
procurator was sent to the eastern Mediterranean to govern the
subject land of Judaea. Some ten years later, he was removed
from office for a misdeed and exiled to Gaul, where he may
have committed suicide. The man, Pontius Pilate, could never
have imagined that his name would be forever fixed in history
through a minor event of those years in Judaea - his sentencing
to death of an accused rebel, a Jew named Jesus.
The Holy Land, as Judaea, or Palestine, came to be known, was
the scene of great political, social, and religious upheaval in the
two centuries surrounding the life of Jesus. The Romans under
Pompey arrived as conquerors in 63 BCE. Not until CE 135, two
centuries later, was Roman mastery of the troublesome Jewish
homeland made complete. The Jews, inheritors and guardians
of an ancient belief in a single, all-powerful God, were dispersed to many lands. But from this trial - and from the cruel
persecutions of subsequent generations - emerged a stronger
Jewish faith.
The followers of Jesus, originally a minor sect within Judaism,
eventually forged a powerful religion out of the belief that he
was the Christ, or Messiah. As different as they remain, Judaism and Christianity share a common reverence for the Old
Testament and for the Holy Land, where Jesus once walked,
and where, since 1948, the Jewish state of Israel has flourished.
The story of a land in ferment and of the growth of these two
faiths forms an absorbing and important historical chronicle.
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WHEN ROME RULED PALESTINE
In the first century BCE, Rome gained control of the Mediterranean world. Its invincible legions had marched across parts of
three continents, conquering kingdom after kingdom and plundering venerable cities that had been rich and powerful when
Rome was still a cluster of hill settlements. Rome’s enemy
Carthage, the proud maritime city on the North African coast,
had been leveled to the ground and salt strewn over its soil so
that nothing would ever grow again. Athens, in Greece, and the
great Egyptian temple-cities beside the Nile had seen the Roman troops parade by, their javelins and eagle standards held
high and the feathers on their crested helmets waving in the
wind. Roman legionaries had traveled as far as Britain to the
north, and to the east as far as the edge of the great desert
that separates the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea from
the rest of Asia.
The armies of Rome subjugated farmers and city dwellers and
wandering tribesmen; they gathered beautiful works of art from
Greek cities and shipped them home to adorn the luxurious villas of Roman aristocrats; and everywhere they went, they
requisitioned gold and stripped the temples of treasures.
But they also established order and the rule of Roman law.
Where before there had been squabbling city-states, constantly
at war with one another, princes murdering their brothers to
gain thrones, petty monarchs vying for a few square miles of
land, pirates terrorizing the sea lanes, and highwaymen robbing
travelers, there was now peace and safety.
Most of the conquered nations accepted Roman rule. The conquerors taxed their subjects heavily, but once tax money was
collected, they usually respected local customs and local traditions. Roman generals even offered sacrifices to honor the local
gods and entertained the population with gladiatorial games
and circuses. Roman governors erected aqueducts to bring water to the cities and built highways to foster travel and trade.
Under Roman protection, the Mediterranean world grew prosperous.
In at least one part of their empire, however, the Romans
found themselves hated. That was in the land that came to be
known as Palestine, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean
Sea. Its four regions, Idumaea, Judaea, Samaria, Galilee 4
stacked from south to north like boxes one on top of another were conquered in 63 BCE by the Roman general Pompey. The
conquerors allowed Palestine’s rulers to exercise limited power
as long as they promised to enforce peace and remain loyal to
Rome. It was not easy to maintain peace and loyalty, however,
for the population of Palestine was divided. In Judaea and Galilee, the people were mostly Jews, who fiercely upheld their
ancient religion and refused to mingle with other men, men
who worshiped idols instead of a single, invisible God. They
found it intolerable that Roman law should take precedence
over the laws of the Torah - the first five books of the Bible which they believed had been given to them by God Himself.
In Idumaea and Samaria, however, the population welcomed
the Romans. The Idumaeans were forced converts to Judaism,
and the Samaritans were a racially mixed people who observed
part of the Jewish religion. The two peoples saw no reason to
hold themselves apart from the rest of the world. They believed
that the unification of the shores of the Mediterranean under
Roman rule brought prosperity, and they were anxious to share
in it.
But most of the Jews refused to cooperate with the Romans.
They were determined to maintain their own identity and not be
swallowed up in the vast and expanding imperial power of
Rome. They knew they could do this only by remaining apart
and by following their own traditions. For two centuries (63 BCE
to CE 135) conflict raged between the Romans and the Jews,
sometimes breaking into open warfare but more often seething
under the surface. Whenever war broke out, the Jews eventually lost, but they were never really defeated. Indeed, the great
conflict that the Romans thought they won had unexpected
consequences. It made the Jewish religion over into a newly
strengthened faith capable of surviving for centuries in the future, wherever the Jews might wander in a hostile world. It also
fostered the birth of another religion - Christianity - which
began as a tiny sect within Judaism but was eventually adopted
by the entire Roman Empire and spread to the ends of the
earth.
The Romans of the time could not foresee these developments,
of course. All they knew was that the Jews stubbornly insisted
on holding to their own ways.
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