Reading the historical accounts and myths penned by some ancient Jews, one becomes convinced that their finest hour had come and gone in the very distant past, when their god, the creator of the universe, changed many of the laws of nature on their behalf while leading them out of Egypt and into the promised land, and granting them his divine law on the way (see esp. Exodus 3-24). And it was only a few centuries later, under David and Solomon, that they acquired their greatest empire (see, e. g. 1 Kings 3:1; 5:1-14, etc.; 2 Chronicles 8-9, etc.). But this was long ago, and it had been mostly downhill ever since, the decline culminating in the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 bc, the extirpation of the Davidic royal line, and the exile of much of the Jewish nobility, and numerous other Jews, to Babylon (2 Kings 25). From this time onwards, Jewish political history would depend not so much on what the Jews themselves did, but on what happened in the wider historical arena, and in such distant cities as Babylon, Susa, Pella, Rome and Medina.
The first major shift came with Cyrus’s spectacular destruction of the Babylonian empire in 539 bc, and his dramatic reversal of older Babylonian policies. Those Jews who were exiled to the East were now allowed to return to Judaea, and some of them indeed seized the opportunity to do so; they also were granted permission to rebuild their temple in the same place it had once stood, and to reinstate their priestly caste (Ezra 1-3; 6:3-5; 2 Chronicles 36:22-23). For the next 200 years, the Jews paid their taxes to the Persian rulers and governed their internal affairs by means of their native priesthood, headed by a line of high priests. Then came Alexander the Great, whose lightning conquest of the East and untimely death ushered a long period of political instability, with the Jews’ own homeland becoming one of the favorite battlegrounds between the Ptolemies, based in Alexandria, and the Antioch-based Seleukids. Throughout the third century Judaea remained under Ptolemaic rule, in spite of major Seleukid incursions, but in 200 bc Antiochos III the Great beat Ptolemy V at Panion, and the Jews of Judaea acquired a new master (Jos. AJ 12.129-46). As we shall see below, it is from about this period that the amount of evidence for the Jews’ own views of things begins to rise exponentially, perhaps because for the first time these views became hotly contested among the Jews themselves. For the time being, we may note how, one generation later, Antiochos IV invaded Egypt and lay siege to Alexandria. Repelled by the threats of Roman envoys, he returned home and vented his anger on the Jews of Jerusalem (Daniel 11:30-31), who soon responded with open revolt (167 bc). Within another generation the Jews, led by the five sons of a provincial priest (the Maccabees, or Hasmonaeans), managed to establish their political independence (143/142 bc), which soon acquired many of the trappings of a minor Hellenistic kingdom, including territorial expansion, kingship, the minting of coins, and fierce dynastic warfare which reached its height in the mid-60s bc, and much facilitated the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BC (Jos. BJ 1.36-158; AJ 12.246-14.79). Judaea was now governed by Roman clients, first by Hasmonaean dynasts, then by King Herod, whose long reign (37-4 bc) was characterized by frantic building activities (including rebuilding the Jerusalem temple itself), economic development (including the construction of a new port-city, Caesarea Maritima), and endless struggles within the royal court, during which Herod eliminated most of his family members and potential rivals (Jos. BJ 1.282-673; AJ 14.381-17.199). Upon his death, he was replaced by one of his sons, Archelaos, but the Romans soon annexed Judaea and subjected it to direct Roman rule (ad 6). This ushered a period of ever-growing religious and social tensions - between the Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, between Jews and Romans, and among the Jews themselves - which exploded in the great revolt of ad 66 (Jos. BJ 2.284-486). Successful at first, especially because the Romans had their own troubles to worry about (the year 69 saw four different emperors!), the revolt soon climaxed in the inevitable Roman victory and the complete destruction of Jerusalem and its temple (Jos. BJ 6.68-442, cf. fig. 28.1). Two generations later, another major revolt, led by the Messianic pretender Simon bar Kokhba, culminated in another major defeat (ad 135), bringing an end to the Jewish uprisings and ushering a long period of peace and prosperity for the Jews of Palestine (with few Jews now in Judaea proper). But with the Christianization of the empire, the growing Christian presence in Palestine, and, finally, the Muslim conquest, the Jewish population of Palestine suffered a blow from which it would not recover until the Zionist revolution.
In addition to the Jews of Judaea, any history of the Jews in antiquity must take into account the growing Jewish diaspora, which for many centuries existed side-by-side with the Jewish communities in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. Going back perhaps to the Babylonian period, and certainly to the Persian and early Hellenistic periods, the Jewish communities in Alexandria, Egypt, Rome, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere saw extensive growth and prosperity throughout much of antiquity (Barclay 1996). Unfortunately, a history of these Jewish communities - with the possible exception of the Jews of Egypt - cannot be written, as the evidence for each of these communities often is quite scanty. In several cases, we hear of Jewish struggles for civic rights or civic equality with their non-Jewish neighbors, and we also hear of a Jewish revolt in ad 115-117, which seems to have been centered in Egypt and to have caused much damage to Jews and Egyptians alike (Meleze Modrzejewski 1995). From the fourth or fifth century ad, the Jewish diaspora communities also had to contend with a growing Christian pressure, and with an increasingly hostile imperial legislation, both laying the foundations for the pariah status of the Jewish people in the Christian middle ages (Linder 1987; Millar 1992 and 2004). Yet what is perhaps most striking about the Jewish diaspora is the ability, and even the desire, of many Jews to retain their unique ethnic and religious identity even in faraway lands.
Many of the Jews who left Palestine - as war-captives and slaves or of their own free will - probably assimilated into the non-Jewish society within which they settled so that their descendants were no longer Jewish. But some Jews apparently insisted upon, and sometimes even succeeded in, transmitting their Jewish identity to their children, and this at a time when there were no external pressures that served to isolate the Jews from non-Jewish society and force them to huddle together. Thus, whereas forced and voluntary migrations were a constant feature of the ancient world, the development of elaborate mechanisms which enabled the migrants to retain their separate identity after they gave up their ancestral homeland and even their ancestral language, was far from common (Bohak 2002b). It is for this reason that the Jewish diaspora gradually evolved into a loose network of local Jewish communities, a structure quite unparalleled by those created by other migrants in the Hellenistic or Roman periods.
World History
