How to Think About (Historical/Biblical) Israel IV

A Guide for the Perplexed

This essay continues a series begun last year in three entries, here, here, and here, tracing out the history of Ancient Israel and Judah, Samaritans and Jews of the postexilic period, and carrying on through to the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. It will likely require at least one to two more posts to wrap up in full, but I currently have no guarantees about when those will come out.

We cannot explain the history of Syria-Palestine in the first centuries BCE and CE without zooming out from them to consider the gradual transformation of Rome across the same period. What became of the region and people of Judea during this period, and especially the social movements that became Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, cannot be understood except by reference to the epochal shift that the ancient world experienced in the spread of the Roman Empire.

By the time of the Maccabean Revolt in 167 BCE, Rome was already the superpower of the Western Mediterranean world, displacing Carthage in the during the Punic Wars (the first from 264-241 BCE, the second from 218-201 BCE; the third, from 149-146 BCE, had not yet been fought by this time, but it was mainly a preventative conflict, meant to keep Carthage from regaining the requisite strength to challenge Roman rule). Around the same time, the Fourth Macedonian War (150-148 BCE) concluded, leading to the Roman annexation of the Antigonid kingdom as a collection of provinces in what is now mainland Greece, as well as an influx of Greek slaves to Rome, who provided tutoring to elite Roman young men and initiated the birth of Latin literature as we know it. We sometimes talk about “the Greco-Roman world” unconsciously, without pausing to realize that there was in fact a distinct point at which the Roman world came to be existentially Hellenized, and a period across which the Greek world was absorbed into the growing apparatus of the Roman state, and it was during this same century in which the fledgling Hasmonean kingdom was getting its start and, as we’ve had chance to discuss, Judaism as we know it was beginning to be formulated.

Then, in 133 BCE, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum, a once-mighty city-state on the Anatolian coast (the site, in fact, of one of the seven churches of the Johannine Apocalypse) was willed by the last king of the dynasty, Attalus III, to the Roman people, which they took possession of beginning in 129. Rome was now a major presence on three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and not just in the Italian peninsula, where it had still not yet resolved fundamental questions about the relationships between Romans, other Latins, and Italian allies, much less the way that a growing population of the enslaved was changing Roman society and economy. Indeed, Rome’s domestic issues in this century were on par with its foreign successes: the First Servile War in Sicily (135-132 BCE) left Romans mindful of the vulnerability their dependence on slavery created for them; Roman political polarization between wealthy aristocrats and populist politicians was becoming increasingly unstable, as evidenced in the death of Tiberius Gracchus at the hands of angry senators in 133 BCE and the later tribunates of his brother Gaius, ending with his own suicide (123-122 BCE). The Gracchi were personae non gratae specifically because of their advocacy of land reform bills meant to curb the growing wealth and power of the aristocracy at the expense of the ordinary Roman citizen: by kicking this particular can down the road, Rome effectively doomed itself to the crisis of the following century.

Traditional norms of the Roman political constitution were also breaking down. Marius’s successive, nearly consecutive, and unconstitutional, consulships (in 107, 104, 103, 102, 101, and 100) proved that the Republican system could be manipulated by strong men of sufficient accomplishment and intent with relative impunity. The Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, waged after numerous failed proposals to extend Roman citizenship to all Italians, proved additionally that the restrictive character of who had rights in the Roman state was in fact too exclusive for Roman security: the war lasted from 91-88 BCE, concluding with the Lex Iulia and the Lex Plautia Papiria which provided the legal basis for Italian inclusion as citizens, the first to those not in arms against Rome and the second to all of them collectively.

In 88, the breakdown of the republican constitution continued with Sulla’s march on Rome, followed the next year by Cinna’s siege of Rome, the year after that by Marius’s reign of terror, seventh consulship, and death, and later, in 83, after Sulla’s return to Italy, a civil war that lasted for a year and led to Sulla’s dictatorship, prescriptions, and reforms until the year 80, when he resigned the dictatorship for the consulship before retiring from public life the following year and dying in 78.

As though all of this were not enough, Rome’s interventions and expansions abroad were continuing apace. Most notably, the Jugurthine War in Numidia, North Africa, from 112-106 BCE and the First Mithridatic War, in Asia Minor, from 89-85 BCE, both of which were partly precipitated by local resentment and the growing power of the Romans, further established Rome’s dominance in Africa and Asia, and the importance of Roman consent even for notionally independent local states to function effectively.

This was also the period in which many of our most significant players from the the first century BCE were born: Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gn. Pompeius, later Magnus, were both born in 106, the year that Marius defeated Jugurtha in Numidia; in 100, the year Marius had his sixth consulship, Gaius Julius Caesar was born; in 95, Cato the Younger was born. Caesar and Cicero were both coming of age during the rule of Sulla, with Cicero telling us that he abandoned public life as a lawyer for a period under Sulla’s rule, learning instead from the orator Molon of Rhodes and the Academic Skeptic philosopher Philo of Larissa who were in Rome fleeing from the Mithridatic War (Brut. 305). The stage is being set, in other words, for the Rome we know.