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The Bible's Cutting Room Floor
The Holy Scriptures Missing from Your Bible
By Joel M. Hoffman St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 Joel M. Hoffman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-4826-9
CHAPTER 1
JERUSALEM: AN ETERNAL CITY IN CONFLICT
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
— MARK TWAIN, ON HERODOTUS, THE FIRST HISTORIAN
Let others praise ancient times; I'm glad I was born in these.
— OVID, FIRST CENTURY A.D.
By local reckoning, the year was that of Roman consuls Antonius and Cicero, during the 179th olympiad cycle. Only later would we date the events to 63 years before the birth of Christ, or to the 3,697th year of Creation.
It was three months into the siege.
In Jerusalem, the hot summer sun had yet to give way to the relative cool of winter — Jerusalem's weather fits nicely into three seasons, not four — and the sacrificial rites of the first millennium B.C. had yet to mutate into more modern forms of worship. So following a thousand years of tradition, Jewish priests in the great temple oversaw the slaughter of animals for God twice each day, in the morning and again around the ninth hour.
The menu for sacrifice was varied. A wealthy man, thankful for a particular stroke of good fortune, brought a bull. Another arrived with a lamb for the same reason. For a third denizen of Jerusalem, a lamb was to atone for a wrongdoing. The poor brought doves when they couldn't afford mammals.
The cacophony of so many animals in one place — bulls, lambs, goats, and even pigeons — combined with the general hubbub of the masses: bellows and bleats, merchants and middlemen, sacrificial incantations and everyday conversations. It was a spectacle, part circus, part sacrament, and part barbecue.
The stench of animals both living and dead mixed with the smoky aroma of burnt flesh and blood. The blood from the sacrificial animals was considered particularly important, for in it was the sacred power of life. The priests collected the blood from the slain animals, saving it to be sprinkled by hand on the altar.
This particular day, the priests' job was made incomparably harder by the onslaught of an invading Roman army as part of the siege. The world's mightiest fighting force had set its sights on the holy city of Jerusalem, leaving human blood running alongside that of the animals.
That same year, some 1,400 miles to the northwest, a Roman woman named Atia gave birth to a sickly son whom she called Gaius Octavius. Though his poor health would work against him, his grandmother was Julia, sister to Julius Caesar. This family connection would later help Gaius Octavius earn the title Augustus and become Rome's first emperor.
In the same year that Gaius Octavius was born, Caesar himself — Gaius Octavius's great uncle — was elected pontifex maximus, high priest of the Roman College of Pontiffs. Later he would be called a god. Though in retrospect the signs of Rome's decline are clear, Caesar was apparently unaware of the violent upheavals just around the corner, and equally unaware that he would be assassinated within two decades.
Similarly, the Jewish priests' power in Jerusalem was dimming, and, like Caesar, they did not know it. The siege in Jerusalem was only part of the problem. The more significant threat to the priests' power was internal Jewish turmoil. Sacrifice had been the binding force behind Judaism for nearly a millennium. Now that approach to serving God was being called into question. Maybe, some said, God didn't want sacrifices after all. And maybe the priests weren't as holy as they claimed.
A few decades earlier, the Roman Republic's greatest times were waning as that world power struggled through military defeat, political upheaval, and civil war.
In 82 B.C., a dictator named Sulla ruthlessly took power. (In one particularly gruesome gesture, he publicly posted the names of his political opponents, signifying that anyone who was able should kill them.) Sulla had a protégé named Pompey, who began his own military career at the young age of seventeen. By the time Pompey was in his twenties, his mentor was ruling Rome. This is how Pompey came to command an army, which he took to Damascus — part of modern-day Syria — in 64 B.C.
Pompey had been sent to conquer the region. And with so few armies able to stand up to the fighting force that he had at his disposal, currying favor with the Roman general was seen as a hugely important diplomatic task among the soon-to-be-conquered. Ambassadors from Syria, Egypt, and the Jewish province of Judea (which contained Jerusalem) came to greet Pompey.
In fact, two Jewish kings arrived in Damascus. The first was Hyrcanus II, who claimed to be ruler of Jerusalem and king of Judea. The second was his younger brother Aristobulus II, who also claimed to be ruler of Jerusalem and king of Judea.
In a not atypical situation for Jerusalem at the time, even as both brothers claimed the holy city as their own, they were utterly despised by the Jews they presumed to rule. Though Hyrcanus and Aristobulus hailed from a priestly family, and though they were descendants of the great Hasmonean Maccabees who revolted against the Syrian Greeks a century earlier to establish an independent Judea, they had both become increasingly Roman in their ways, adopting the lifestyle of pagan monarchs instead of comporting themselves in the familiar Jewish fashion. The Jewish population saw them as representing too sharp a break with tradition. The Jews served priests, who in turn served God. Kings were for other nations.
Unable to achieve a popular victory at home, both brothers tried to enlist the help of Pompey. Hyrcanus explained that, as the older brother, he was the rightful king. The younger Aristobulus countered that Hyrcanus was too placid a ruler. Aristobulus explained that he was forced to overthrow his older brother in order to prevent other, nonpriestly forces from wresting control of Jerusalem and pulling it completely out of Jewish hands. It was sibling rivalry playing out on a world stage.
In the end, Pompey condemned Aristobulus's behavior as a coup d'état but urged both men to exercise restraint. Pompey promised to come to Jerusalem at a later date to settle things. But, bypassing his brother, Aristobulus ignored Pompey and rallied an army. He marched it into Judea, a provocation that infuriated the Roman general with whom he and his brother had just met.
In response, Pompey marshaled his legions and set out for Judea himself. Along the way, he took command of a fortress in a place called Corem. Atop a mountain named Alexandrium, due east of Jerusalem and just a dozen miles north of Jericho, Corem was an ideal staging point for an assault on the Jewish capital. From there, Pompey offered Aristobulus one last chance for peace. But Aristobulus, worried that Pompey would give Judea back to his older brother Hyrcanus, refused the peace offer and, instead, prepared for war.
So Pompey pitched camp in Jericho and from there marched two dozen miles west into Jerusalem. Seeing the Roman troops, Aristobulus pleaded for peace, surrendering Jerusalem and offering Pompey money. Pompey called off his attack. But Aristobulus reneged. Enraged, Pompey imprisoned Aristobulus and ordered a full assault on Jerusalem.
The population of Jerusalem, now left completely without leadership, split into two camps. Some people, fearing Rome's might in the form of Pompey's army, were glad that Aristobulus was out of the picture. This way, they thought, a peaceful settlement with Pompey could be negotiated. Other people feared Rome's rule more than its wrath and hoped to forcibly keep Pompey out of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem at the time was fortified on the east, south, and west by walls — the north side was more vulnerable — and encompassed by a defensive ditch. The Temple itself was also surrounded by walls.
Amid the power vacuum and confusion in Jerusalem, Pompey was let into the city from the north, but soon afterward the bridge he had used to enter was destroyed. Even though Pompey was near the Temple, his all-important battering rams and catapults were stuck beyond the ditch, outside Jerusalem. Pompey couldn't yet take the Temple — the Jewish seat of religious and political power. But the siege had begun.
Pompey's army had to slowly raise a bank, gathering rocks and whatever else they might find to fill in the massive ditch and gain access to Jerusalem from the north. In the meantime, the Jews had not only a tactical problem but a religious one as well. Jewish law at the time prohibited work on the Sabbath. An exception was made for active defense, but not for more general meddling in the enemy's preparations — for war or for anything else.
The Romans used this to their advantage. While they attacked Jerusalem for six days a week during the siege, on the seventh they ceased all active hostilities, devoting their energies instead only to bridging the ditch. And the Jews, in religious observance, did nothing to interfere. So even though it is usually easier to knock down a hastily built bank than to build one up, the Romans had one day each week during which their progress was essentially unimpeded.
Eventually Jerusalem fell. Pompey took the city, brought Aristobulus back to Rome as his captive, and restored the older Hyrcanus to power. Pompey once again made Judea part of the province of Syria (basically the same political power from which the Hasmonean Maccabees had fought for freedom less than a hundred years earlier but now under Roman control). The tax revenue formerly earmarked for the priests was now paid to Rome.
Jerusalem had become a pagan city.
It was the beginning of the end. The Temple itself — the very core of over a thousand years of Jewish service to God — would soon be destroyed by Roman forces, never to be rebuilt (to date). The Jews would be exiled. The practice of sacrifice would end.
It was also the start of a new beginning. Scripture, already a focus from the first exile of 586 B.C., would take on new importance as the only remnant of pre-exilic Judaism: a sacred souvenir, as it were.
Other seeds had been planted in Roman Jerusalem, perhaps most important the precursors of Christianity and of rabbinic Judaism.
In short, the thousand-year tradition of Temple-based Judaism was about to end, simply because Hyrcanus and Aristobulus couldn't get past their petty sibling rivalry, prompting Rome to invade.
This story of the people and events leading up to the fall of the Temple is well known, even if it seems in some ways unsatisfactory. Of all of the problems presented by this narrative — and, certainly, there are many — the biggest is this: We don't know how much of it is true.
Our fundamental issue is that most of our knowledge about these events comes from a man named Joseph ben Mattityahu, better known simply as Josephus, and his evidence, as we discuss in chapter 4, is suspect for a variety of reasons. He sometimes made things up, for example. So even though we have a compelling and detailed narrative, we also have reason to doubt almost all of it.
We do know the broad strokes, though, not just starting in 63 B.C., but even going back to about 1000 B.C., when King David reigned over the fledging nation of the Hebrews in Jerusalem. The short version is that over the next thousand years, Jerusalem would be ruled by Jewish kings; Babylonians, who would exile the Jewish people; Persians; various Greeks based in Greece, Egypt, and Syria; the Jews themselves, in the form of the spectacularly incompetent Maccabees; Romans; Persians again, very briefly; and finally Romans again, who would exile the Jews for the second time.
We also know a lot of the particulars.
We start around the year 1000 B.C., because we have very little reliable historical evidence for anything earlier, but we have good reason to believe that King David established the Israelite capital right around the start of the first millennium B.C. We also essentially skip over the first four hundred years of his kingdom. They are fascinating in their own right, exhibiting intricate power balances among kings, prophets, and priests, for example, and admitting no small degree of palace intrigue. But ultimately these years have little to do with what Jerusalem looked like at the end of the millennium.
So we skip to the year 605 B.C., about four hundred years into the reign of King David and his descendants; the Israelite King Jehoiakim was on the throne, and the great prophet Jeremiah walked the streets of Jerusalem. And we jump to a city on the Euphrates River called Carchemish, by the modern-day Syria-Turkey border, not far from the modern Turkish city of Kargamis.
For several hundred years, the major force in the region had been the Assyrian Empire, ruling from their capital of Nineveh, across the Tigris River from modern-day Mosul. Around 705 B.C., the Assyrian king Sargon II had established Carchemish as an Assyrian province.
The Babylonians, to the south of the Assyrians, had their own empire, which dated back at least to the days of Hammurabi from the first half of the second millennium B.C. He had established Babylon as the capital of southern Mesopotamia. While the Babylonians had once been the primary power, their power had waned in comparison with the Assyrians.
Around 612 B.C., a group of Babylonians joined forces with other local armies in an alliance against the ruling Assyrians. They sacked the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, pushing the Assyrians westward to Harran (in modern-day Turkey), then finally to Carchemish.
In 605 the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II (whose name is also spelled Nebuchadrezzar, with an r instead of an n) set out to defeat the Assyrians in Carchemish. Unfortunately for Jerusalem, Egypt had been allied with the Assyrians. Egypt lies to Jerusalem's south, and Carchemish roughly to its east. Or to look at things differently, Jerusalem lies between Egypt and Carchemish. So when Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt set out to help the Assyrians in Carchemish, he had to pass by Jerusalem.
When Pharaoh Necho, along with the Assyrians, lost the famous battle of Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar II reestablished the primacy of the Babylonian Empire, in what is commonly called the Neo-Babylonian Empire, to distinguish it from the original Babylonian Empire of the second millennium B.C.
Having emerged victorious, Nebuchadnezzar set out to annex all of Egypt to his growing Babylonian Empire. Again unfortunately for Jerusalem, the path from Babylonia back to Egypt, obviously, also runs almost directly through the holy city. This is how David's descendants got caught in the middle of a struggle to rule the world, establishing a pattern that would repeat itself many times.
As the Egyptians fought back against the invading Babylonian Empire, they used Jerusalem as a proxy: They urged the Jewish capital to rise up against Babylonia.
A few years later, according to both Babylonian and biblical records, Nebuchadnezzar therefore replaced the ruling king in Jerusalem (who at this point was Jehoiakim's son Jeconiah) with a monarch who would, he hoped, be more friendly to Babylonia. His name was Zedukia. And he was Jehoiakim's younger brother. But, perhaps influenced by Pharaoh Psametichus II, Zedukia sided with Egypt, or, at least, refused to side with Babylonia.
So around 587 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar, no longer content to play the role of puppet master in Jerusalem, conquered the city, put an end to Zedukia's rule and with it the Davidic monarchy, exiled the Jews, and destroyed the Temple that had served as the symbol and center of Jewish life for nearly half a millennium. This is commonly known as the first exile.
One primary destination for the exiled Jews was Babylonia (modern-day Iraq). This is why we have a biblical lament (from Psalm 137), now immortalized in song, about lying down to weep by the waters of Babylon. The weeping was prompted by forced exile from the holy land. This is also why Jews in modern-day Iraq trace their lineage in that country back over 2,500 years.
Less than forty years later, in 549, a man named Cyrus ("the Great" or "Cyrus II") was building his own empire some thousand miles east of Jerusalem. He took over Persia (modern-day Iran) from a people called the Medes and then set his eyes both westward, toward Babylonia and Jerusalem, and eastward, toward what is now Afghanistan. He was successful in the west, and as part of his victory he eventually put an end to Babylonian rule in Jerusalem.
Cyrus's predecessors in Jerusalem had thought that an empire should impose a uniform culture. So Jerusalem under the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar was supposed to be a Babylonian city. Cyrus disagreed with this approach and conceived of an empire in terms of a pluralistic union of different cultures. It was perhaps this mentality that helped Cyrus's Persian Empire grow larger than anything the world had seen before. It was also this mentality that, in 538, led Cyrus to promote the return of the Jews from exile and to encourage the rebuilding of the Temple.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Bible's Cutting Room Floor by Joel M. Hoffman. Copyright © 2014 Joel M. Hoffman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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