Judaism in the Hellenistic period

Excerpt from Hans Kung's brilliant synthesis of Jewish history in his book: Judaism: Between Yesterday And Tomorrow (1992), cited here with the author's kind permission. There are four subdivisions:

1. Influence of Hellenistic culture on Israel's Wisdom Writers

2. Crisis of theocracy: from the revolution to the 'church state'

3. The apocalyptists - warning and interpreting the time

4. The fall of Jerusalem and the end of theocracy

1.

Influence of Hellenistic culture on Israel's Wisdom Writers

The place of the prophets was initially taken by the wisdom teachers, whose concerns were entirely practical. However, these wise men were no longer charismatic individuals, but representatives of a school. They no longer proclaimed Yahweh's revelation and liberation, but attached importance to observing the ordinances of life, to pedagogical applications of them in the everyday world. The focus of their interest was not God and his action in history but human beings and how they were to act correctly in a great variety of spheres in life. Wisdom theology does not presuppose the recognition of the mighty acts of God in 'salvation history' (exodus and settlement play no decisive theological role here). What is important is, rather, the confidence that all of creation rests on a wise order, and that human beings are capable of correct conduct by observing this order which has been appointed by God and thus can find their place in the divine world order. In complete contrast to the prophet, in Israel the wise ma is primarily an empiricist, a detached observer, one who maintains a clever balance between the extremes, though his work is focussed on the communication of existential experience.

Where are the beginnings of Israelite wisdom teaching, a kind of wisdom which can be detected throughout the whole of the ancient Near East at that time? Individual proverbial material may well go back to the time of King Solomon. In that case the term used is 'earlier wisdom'. Throughout the monarchy there were individual wisdom teachers, and as early as the time of the prophet Jeremiah, alongside the king and the court, the priests and the prophets, there is express mention of a group of wise men. During the Exile, though, both in Mesopotamia and in Egypt the exiles were exposed to an international wisdom culture; this means that the flourishing of wisdom literature after the Exile is not as surprising as all that. Nowadays it is described as 'later wisdom': proverbs, admonitions and instructions were now reshaped or compiled and collected in books. Through the inclusion of creation and revelation, wisdom became a comprehensive theological system, wisdom theology: divine wisdom was the teacher of human beings.

However, the crisis of wisdom which is recorded in books like Job and Koheleth shows how little Jewish piety had really been consolidated, despite all attempts at restoration, all institutionalization and canonization. A good century after the return from Exile, above all one of the fundamental doctrines of Jewish belief in God, the doctrine of retribution, of God's righteousness which rewards and punishes, and which was advocated both by wisdom theology and by the piety of the law, had been shattered: this was the theory that there is a connection between how one does and how one fares which human beings can recognize. Do we really reap what we have sown? This is precisely what is vigorously disputed in the book of Job, and even more in a book like Koheleth, which was probably accepted into the canon only because it was attributed to Solomon. For Koheleth, a man who was more a sceptical philosopher than a theologian, the break with ancestral belief in retribution has already become a fundamental problem. Koheleth embodies the thought of the parting of the ways, the boundary between two times, in which under the impact of the spiritual crisis of early Hellenism, his critical thought could no longer make sense of traditional wisdom and traditional piety and the cult; but even Koheleth, with a more Socratic and conservative disposition, avoided breaking with the religion of the fathers and identifying God, say, with incalculable fate. In view of this crisis of wisdom, the Book of Proverbs, like Jesus Sirach, seeks a new trust in the divine order, in the wisdom of God the Father, in the universality and reliability of God's plan. To this degree these are books of restoration, the restoration of traditional belief in Yahweh.

However, the crisis of wisdom simply reflected a more deep-seated structural crisis of the era. In order to understand its political dimensions we must look at northern Greece, from where the greatest danger now began to threaten for the Persian empire. For the Macedonian king Philip II (359-336) had been astonishingly successful in bringing together the Greek city-states, engaged in constant rivalry after the battle of Marathon, in the Corinthian Alliance against the Persians; at the same time he developed a new military unit, the tightly-packed phalanx, into a feared Greek battle formation. The focal point of world history began to shift from east to west: for the first time a major European power appeared on the scene of world history.

However, it was not Philip, but his son, who was to take up the war against the Persians finally and succesfully, in 336, after Philip's murder. Alexander, twenty years old, educated by the brilliant philosopher Aristotle, and known as the Great, changed the face of the earth, both politically and culturally, in no more than thirteen years. The first European invasion of Asia was the work of Alexander, who was a strategist on a grand scale. After the conquest of Asia Minor, in 334 he turned south, occupied the coastal cities of Phoenicia (including Tyre, the mother city of Carthage, after a seven months' siege), Palestine, and finally Egypt. There, crowned with the double crown of the Pharaohs, he had the city built which bears his name to the present day - Alexandria. What about Jerusalem? Jerusalem seems to have surrendered voluntarily on Alexander's march through the land to Egypt - in contrast to Samaria, which also tried to rebel later.

Back from Egypt, Alexander turned northwards, defeated the last Persian Great King Darius III at the battle of Gaugamela in 331, and entered Babylon without a fight. After also capturing Susa, Persepolis, and Ecbatana, and after the murder of Darius by one of his satraps, Alexander had achieved his goal. He entered into the heritage of the Achaemenids, only to press on immediately to the ends of the earth, the foot of the Himalayas. However, Alexander wanted more than mere military conquest. He imposed the union of Greek and Eastern blood, ceremonial and culture. He had ten thousand Greek officers and soldiers married to Persian women in Susa, in a kind of mass wedding. So although he died in Babylon in 323 BCE - completely unexpectedly, at the age of thirty-three, of a fever, without any heirs capable of ruling - he had forcibly introduced a new age: after the Persian era came the Hellenistic: era.

This Greek cosmopolitan Hellenism, deliberately encouraged by Alexander, this mutual interpenetration of Greek and Eastern culture in the states which succeeded to Alexander's empire, and the consequent religious universalism and syncretism, represented an enormous challenge ito the Jewish religion. Was a new paradigm shift perhaps announcing itself here? Would Judaism now also become a world religion with a universalistic orientation as a result of its encounter with the universalistic world culture of Hellenism, since its ethical monotheism already exercised a strong fascination on many non-Jews everywhere, and therefore the Jewish mission was also increasingly successful?

What we find, rather, is the opposite development. Certainly there was a by no means insignificant collection of Hellenistic Jewish writings: alongside the historian Jason of Cyrene and the philosopher Aristobulus in the second century BCE there is the towering figure of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (15/10 BCE - 40/50 CE), a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, who attempted to reconcile the Jewish religion with Greek philosophy by interpreting the Pentateuch in his commentaries with the help of allegorical methods of interpretation taken over from the Greek Stoa. He also attempted to discuss the creation story, the legislation of Moses and the patriarchal narratives systematically in a Hellenistic spirit. But in the end, all these efforts remained episodes. In the middle and longf term the consequence of the encounter with Hellenism was, rather, a strengthening of the traditional Jewish piety of Temple and Torah.

Does all this no longer belong to the theme of the history of the people of Israel? No, the history of the people does not come to an end here. But it does enter into a long-drawn-out, fundamental crisis, which will finally result in a further epoch-making paradigm shift.

2.
The crisis of theocracy: from the revolution to the 'church state'

Beyond doubt the culture of the Hellenistic world also exerted a strong influence on Palestine, especially after the second century BCE, above all in the cities, which were becoming increasingly more numerous, and among the educated and well-to-do, particularly in Jerusalem, where the rich aristocratic priestly families lived. A marked increase in building activity and the creation of works of art, a heightening of efficiency in the economy, administration and among the military were a mark of Hellenistic culture anyway, and led to a general raising of living standards. People were concerned to show that they were enlightened. Even high priests now increasingly often had Hellenistic names. On the other hand, not only in the Diaspora but also in Judaea, powerful circles loyal to the law stood firm against Hellenistic influence, at least in their own religious sphere. After the first power struggles among Alexander's generals, known as the Diadochoi (=successors), with their changing fortunes, this was already true for the rule of the Egyptian Ptolemies (the Thirty-First and last Egyptian dynasty) over Palestine for about a century (300-200/198 BCE).

The centre was now the rapidly growing new city of Alexandria. Here the Hellenization of Judaism was to find its most visible expression. For as the knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic had declined in the great Jewish community of Alexandria, in succession first the Pentateuch and then the whole of the Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek. As we heard, legend attributes this work to seventy translators - hence the name Septuagint (Greek for seventy).

However, the periods of harmony and cultural interaction were soon to be disrupted when the Seleucids, advancing from the region of Mesopotamia and Syria, displaced the Ptolemies from Palestine. After five Syrian wars over the land-bridge of Syria-Palestine, the Seleucids took possession of Palestine. And after initial tolerance there were increasingly sharp attempts to advance the Hellenization of Jerusalem (Greek language, constitution, theatre, stadium, gymnasium...). The question was whether a reformed Judaism, adapted to the new time, could not be a significant possibility. At the time this possibility was also affirmed by some Jewish reformers.

For those who were faithful to the law, however, any such reform was apostasy. At all events, opposition to this process of Hellenization grew among the people. There was an explosion in 169 BCE when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes appropriated the Temple treasure to improve the state's financial position for a campaign in Egypt. He twice had to occupy Jerusalem. Then he made the city a Hellenistic military colony, which in effect amounted to a forcible Hellenization of Israel. In 167 there was a ban on cultic worship in accordance with the law, circumcision and the observance of the sabbath; those loyal to the Torah were persecuted; and pagan cults were forced on the people. There was even what the book of Daniel calls the abomination of desolation: an altar to Zeus on the altar of burnt offering in the Temple.

The conflict between traditional Jewish and Hellenistic culture now escalated enormously, and the hour had come for a revolution by the people of the land, those of the old faith, inspired and led by the priest Mattathias and his five sons from the family of Hasmon: the Hasmonaeans. The third son, Judas, called Maccabaeus (Aramaic maqqabay = the 'hammer man'), managed to defeat the Syrian Seleucid troops in three battles. In 164 BCE he entered Jerusalem and removed thepagan abomination - but without attacking the Seleucid garrison in the citadel (Akra) of Jerusalem, the sign of Syrian supremacy. On 14 December of the same year the desecrated Temple was solemnly reconsecrated, and to the present day Jews throughout the world mark this date by the feast of Hanukkah (the 'purification' of the Temple), which as the 'Feast of Lights' (with the eight-branched Hanukkah lampstand) has turned into a kind of Jewish Christmas.

What were the political consequences? Reaction among the people was split. The group of the 'pious' (Hasidim), from which the party of Pharisees was later to come, was content with spiritual and religious autonomy under Syrian and Seleucid supremacy. The same was even more!true of a group of radically pious Jews, called Essenes, who probably broke away in protest as early as this; some of them even began to emigrate into the wilderness. The Maccabaean movement took precisely the opposite view: they were now also intent on the political autonomy of Judaea - among other things by means of a dangerous defence treaty made in 161 with the rising great power of Rome! The result was a series of wearisome struggles.

The third party, the Hellenizing Sadducees, composed of the leading priests and aristocratic families, under pressure from both sides, eventually called on the Seleucids for help: initially, the Seleucids even defeated the Maccabees, and Judas lost his life. But his brother Jonathan continued the struggle, first as a guerrilla leader, then as high priest, and two years later also as strategos (general) of Judaea (150 BCE). Thus in Judaea, for the first time for more than four hundred years, spiritual and secular power were combined in one person. In 141 Jonathan's older brother and successor Simon - who in 142 had been recognized as high priest and independent ruler by the Seleucid rulers - also captured the Akra of Jerusalem and forced the evacuation of the Syrian occupying forces. A year later the people bestowed on him the hereditary honours of general, prince and high priest. After his murder these] passed to his son John, with the name Hyrcanus I (135/4-104); he thus de facto became the first king (and high priest) of the Hasmonaean dynasty. Under him, Judaea became politically independent and was only nominally under Seleucid supremacy. So with Simon and John the Maccabees had achieved their great aim: not only religious but political autonomy. But how was the religious renewal faring?

With such a priest-king, theocracy now seemed to have found its most marked expression. Yet in the land of Israel people were anything but content with the Hasmonaeans. The opposition became increasingly vociferous: the 'pious', the popular 'Pharisees' (= Aramaic perisbayya, from the Hebrew peruskim, those 'set apart' by their piety). For these, observance of the law, interpreted in a binding way by oral tradition, was more important than any nationalism. For this group the new priest-kingship had for a long time already been all too secular, by no means religious enough.

Faced with this pious opposition, John Hyrcanus was forced to rely completely on the Hellenistic party of the Sadducees, for whom only the Pentateuch, and not just any tradition, was binding. He was able to hold the line, but his son and successor, Alexander Jannaeus (103-76), who now also formally took the title of king - which according to the views of the orthodox was reserved for a son of David - had to maintain his rule with bloody terror. After his victory, Alexander ended a rebellion by the Pharisees which had gone on for several years by crucifying 800 of the rebels. The wars of faith had long since become wars of conquest: not only the coastal cities and Galilee, but also large parts of Transjordan, had been seized.

The two books of Maccabees - which were not included in the Jewish canon - recount the history of the rebellion and the rule of the Maccabees from 175-135, without glossing anything over or playing it down. This is a history which in our day has again become a symbol of the Jewish concern for self-assertion. As Norman Gottwald has pointed out, it is an irony of history that while Judas, the first Maccabee, had led a majority of Jews against a small but powerful group of Jewish Hellenizers and their Seleucid backers, in a turnabout, a successor of the Maccabees, Alexander Jannaeus, now led a small but powerful group of royal supporters in a desperate battle against a majority of his countrymen who saw him as an embodiment of Hellenistic corruption and oppression. Thus any exploitation of the Maccabees for contemporary political ends is questionable.

The almost eighty years of Jewish independence under the Hasmonaeans (142-63) was to remain an interlude - it lasted only as long as there was a power vacuum on the land-bridge of Palestine. That was not to be very long. The Roman empire had long since pushed forward its Eastern frontiers to Greece and Asia Minor, and Pompey, Caesar's rival, now chief commander in Asia, was intent on having a new order in Asia Minor. Called in as an arbitrator by Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, who were at odds over the Hasmonaean succession, Pompey in fact acceded to the request of delegates from the Jewish people: having had more than enough of any Hasmonaean royal rule, these once again called for a separation betwen religious and political rule. In other words, they wanted a restoration of priestly rule, to be limited to the religious and cultic sphere. They were ready to cede political rule to the new world power, Rome. The supporters of Hyrcanus agreed to this and handed Jerusalem over to Pompey; but Aristobulus entrenched himsef on the Temple Mount, which was captured after a three-month siege. Thus after almost a century of struggle, of temporary political freedom and a Jewish state, the Maccabean movement had come to grief on the selfishness of a Hasmonaean ruler from within its own ranks.

The result of this policy was that Judaea was now a vassal state of Rome, very much reduced, without the coastal cities and without access to the Mediterranean. The high priest was stripped of his power, denied the title of king and the right to levy taxes. Now he ruled only over the faith community in Jerusalem, and temporarily still as ethnarch by courtesy of the Romans. And what about the Hasmonaeans? Because of their dangerous political connections with the Parthians - Rome's great opponents in Asia Minor - the Romans later allowed the whole family to be exterminated. A Judaized Idumaean was to get the credit for this cruel business, a district governor of Galilee who had fled to Rome, a son of Antipater Hyrcanus II by the daughter of an Arabian prince, who had shortly beforehand been appointed by the Roman senate as 'allied king' (rex socius) of Judaea - which meant that he was its vassal king. This was Herod, later also called 'the Great'. In 37 he captured Jerusalem with Roman help and - sly, cruel and purposeful as he was - established a state which, while dependent on Rome (indirectly under the senate), was nevertheless relatively independent, and was no smaller than the Hasmonaean kingdom.

In Jerusalem Herod ostentatiously acted as a Judaean; he did not attack the Jewish cult and supported Diaspora Judaism: he developed Jerusalem and the Temple to give them great splendour, and secured peace and prosperity for the city and the whole country through the Pax Romana. However, he was deeply hated by the people, and particularly by those with a strict faith. As king he was virtually the counterpart to the great David. Why? A Roman and of mixed birth, he built or enlarged Hellenistic palaces, temples and cities everywhere (for example, Samaria was renamed Sebaste Augusta, 'imperial city', in honour of Augustus), encouraged emperor worship, and built or rebuilt numerous fortresses - signs of his reign of terror (the citadels of Jerusalem, Machaerus and Masada on the Dead Sea). Worse than that, he manipulated high priests at will, encouraged the separation of state and religion, violently nipped any opposition in the bud, and just on suspicion killed all potential successors both in the Hasmonaean family and his own (from eight marriages in all). The victims included his second wife Mariamne, great-niece of the high priest Hyrcanus; Hyrcanus himself, at the age of eighty; and three of his own sons, the third murdered just a few days before his own death. All this forms the background to the New Testament legend of the murder of the children at Bethlehem (carried out on Herod's orders) in the Gospel of Matthew, and also provided material for the great dramatists of world literature, from Hans Sachs and Calderon through Voltaire to Friedrich Hebbel...

From the time of the Hasmonaeans, the internal political struggle in Judaea was mainly dominated by the battle between the rich Hellenized upper class of the Sadducees, who collaborated with the Roman forces of occupation,: and those pious people who were anti-Greek, the Pharisees; these were interested in a life under the law, righteousness, and judgment. The Pharisees now gained increasing support from the people. There is no question that under Roman supremacy, with its religious toleration, the theocratic paradigm consolidated itself further and had become a kind of church-state - again with the Temple as an economic, political and religious centre. Even Herod and his successors (after Herod's death in 4 BCE, the emperor Augustus divided the Herodian kingdom among his three younger sons), and also the Roman governors (procurators) with a seat in Caesarea Maris (they included the well-known Pontius Pilate, 26-36 CE), in general respected the structure of theocratic power and rule represented by the prietly hierarchy, which the Jews regarded as having been legitimated by God himself, the supreme Lord. Religion, the dispensation of justice, administration, and to a limited degree also politics, are here indissolubly bound up together. The central organ of government, administration and justice, responsible for all religious matters and matters of civil law, was not a Jewish king but the Supreme Council in Jerusalem - in Greek synhedrion (=assembly, hence Aramaic sanhedrin) - with the high priest at its head. The ruling classes of the country were represented in it; in addition to the Sadducaic priests and aristocrats these were above all the 'scribes' (theologian-lawyers) of both the Sadducaean-priestly and Pharisaic-popular trends. The Sanhedrin consisted of precisely seventy men under the presidency of the high priest, who, although utterly dependent on the king and the occupying forces, was still regarded as the supreme representative of the Jewish people. However, whether they were expressed openly orin secret, the expectations widespread among the people were quite different from those in the hierarchical establishment.

3.

The apocalyptists - warning and interpreting the time

The apocalyptists had already taken the place of the prophets and the wise men, warning and interpreting the time, as visionaries, seers and dreamers, in the crisis of the Maccabaen period. And it was the book of Daniel in which - after a number of preliminary stages in prophetic literature - the apocalyptic proclamation came to be fully elaborated.

A book by the prophet Daniel? It has been demonstrated that because of its language, its theology (the later theology of angels) and its unitary composition, the book of Daniel cannot in any way come from the seer at the Babylonian court in the sixth century BCE. Rather, its author comes from the second century, concealed behind the mask of Daniel, and writes in the time of that brutal Hellenizer, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Moreover, in the Jewish canon the book is not put among the Prophets, but among the Writings.

The book of Daniel represents another (less political than theological) form of reaction to political repression and the cultural struggle between Judaism and Hellenism, which now called above all for a new answer to the meaning of history. The extraordinarily aggressive Seleucid expansionary pressure southwards, bound up with the seductions of Hellenistic culture, which in Jerusalem led to massive though often concealed apostasy among the clergy and aristocracy - even to the point of doing away with the Torah - caused such fundamental crisis among pious circles in Judaism that it gave rise to that completely novel theology of history which we call apocalyptic. This novel theology of history, often bound up with the expectation of a final cosmic catastrophe and the coming of the kingdom of God, had two momentous consequences. One consequence was that for the first time in the history of the Jewish people, belief in an indivdual resurrection from the dead came into being. That is understandable, since in the face of such a time of persecution - for the author of the book of Daniel it was an emergency in which men, women and children were being cruelly tortured for holding firm to the law - the old problem of just retribution posed itself far more sharply than it had done generations before. New questions emerged - different ones from those in the time of Koheleth, who in his melancholy delight in this world (enjoy life while it lasts!) was already far removed from the traditional theology of retribution in the wisdom literature, but equally far removed from any joyful hope for a world to come. Now, in the face of the loyalty of many martyrs to the faith, who had been faced with the crazy alternative of apostasy or death, unprecedented new questions emerge. What can be the significance of a martyr death if those who are loyal to the faith no longer receive any recompense? They do not receive it in this life, since they are already dead, nor in the life to come, since that is only a shadowy existence. Where is the just God with his righteousness, in particular for those who are most righteous of all?

The answer of the apocalyptist Daniel is that this emergency will be followed by the end-time, now! Israel will be saved and - here is the new element - the dead will rise again: both the witnesses to the faith and their persecutors. The dead who have slept in the land of dust will awaken. They will return to life as whole human beings (and not just, say, Platonically as 'souls'), in a this-worldly existence, but that existence will now last eternally, without end: for the wise in the form of eternal light, for the others in the form of eternal shame (this is not elaborated on). 'The wise will shine like the splendour of the firmament and the many will be led to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.' This text from Daniel is the earliest, indeed the only undisputed evidence for a resurrection from the dead in the whole of the Hebrew Bible! However, outside the Hebrew canon, in the Greek Septuagint, there are further testimonies to this hope of resurrection which emerged at so late a stage - especially in 2 Maccabees, which contains the oldest Jewish accounts of martyrs, accounts which became the model for the Christian acts of martyrs. Thus belief in the resurrection became a main theme of Judaism in the century and a half before Christ.

A second development is just as important. In view of the way in which history had gone completely astray, the traditional messianic expectation among the Jewish people, the coming of a 'Son of David', had lost its power of conviction - and that was as a result of history itself. Apocalyptic circles in Palestine had now become convinced that help could now come only from God's emissary sent directly from heaven: another, pre-existent bringer of salvation, kept hidden with God. So, strikingly, the Davidic messiah is completely absent from a number of apocalyptic writings. The place of the Davidic, earthly messiah is taken by the pre-existent and transcendent judge and saviour figure of the Son of Man: only later in Palestine was there a fusion of the Son of Man with the traditional messiah figure.

This period, which was largely shaped by apocalyptic, saw the birth, barely noticed by the wider world and not listed in its chronicles, of that Jew who was to become the destiny of Judaism and Christianity: Jesus of Nazareth, called the Son of Man. There was already vigorous controyersy over him in his lifetime, and a small but rapidly growing group of Jews was firmly convinced of his resurrection to new life after a violent death. We shall hear more of him later in this book. Here I want to recount further the history of the Jewish people, which is exciting enough, given a new shift in the times.

4.

The fall of Jerusalem and the end of Theocracy

Quite independently of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth around the year 30 BCE - the Romans liquidated him as one of the numerous Jewish troublemakers - the political and religious crisis of Judaism had heightened dramatically in subsequent decades. Jewish freedom fighters above all in Galilee, and urban guerrillas in Jerusalem, Zealots and Sicarii (dagger men), had already for a long time been carrying out attacks on the Roman forces of occupation. These forces were represented by rapacious, insensitive and politically incompetent procurators, who allowed themselves some very stupid incursions into the religious sphere.

However, the great rebellion against Roman power only came around forty years after Jesus' death, in the years 66-70 of our era. We are well informed about the course of events, since the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus, who was himself involved in the rebellion in Galilee but later became a protégé of the Flavian emperors, described the ultimately breath-taking events in his book On the Jewish War. His account is detailed, but biassed throughout (against the Zealots and in favour of Rome). At that time there was not just a conspiracy by a single revolutionary group or party, which then kept snowballing, as Josephus suggests to excuse the Jewish people. Rather, a general political, social and religious confrontation was in the making in the 50s and 60s. The consequence was a national popular war against the rule of Rome, a war which was at the same time a social class struggle against the rich aristocratic establishment friendly to Rome and thus for that very reason in a most profound sense also a religous struggle. As a chosen people the Jews believed they had the right to political freedom, and the renewed loyalty to the national religious institutions - zeal for Temple and law - seemed to guarantee them victory with the help of their God. Here are the most important dates on which historians are in agreement.

66 CE: Provocation by the governor Gessius Florus, riots in Caesarea and Jerusalem, seizure of the Temple Court and the Antonia citadel by Eleazar, the son of the high priest, who was himself later executed (his palace and that of the Hasmonaeans was burned down); unsuccessful intervention in Jerusalem by the Roman governor of Syria; preparations for war on both sides.

67 CE: On the orders of the emperor Nero a slow recapture of the country under the command of the general Flavius Vespasianus and his son Titus - both later emperors and protectors of 'Flavius' Josephus. There are clashes resembling a civil war in Jerusalem; the earliest Christian community emigrates (according to certain traditions) from Jerusalem to Pella in Transjordan.

68 CE: Nero's death and the encirclement of Jerusalem by Vespasian. As Vespasian begins to lay siege to Jerusalem in the following year, he is proclaimed emperor by the legions of the East. He hands over command to his son Titus and hastens to Rome.

70 CE: At the beginning of the year the attack on the city of Jerusalem is launched, but there are months of vigorous Jewish resistance in house-to-house fighting. In August the Temple is burned down, and in September the citadel and the upper city are finally captured. There is an enormous blood-bath, plundering, and destruction of the city.

71 CE: Triumphal procession of Titus in Rome. He brings with him as victor's booty the menorah, the seven-branched lampstand from the Temple. This is depicted on the triumphal arch of Titus in the Roman Forum (the original menorah disappeared in 455 during the Vandal attack on Rome).

74 CE: Only now was the fortress of Masada, long besieged and completely starved out, captured, after the whole 960-person Zealot garrison (apart from two women and five children) had committed suicide. Masada was long forgotten, but in our time has been identified and excavated. Against it the tremendous Roman siege ramp can still be seen. Masada today is a monument of the Jewish state, and recently has become a sign of Jewish bravery to the death. For the Jews of the time it was a senseless catastrophe without parallel. For we must not forget that all in all, around a quarter of the Jewish population of Palestine - according to Josephus and Tacitus around 600,000 people - may have perished in the first Jewish-Roman war.

Some decades later, in 132-135, against all the warning signals, a second, messianically-orientated, hopeless and final Jewish rebellion took place against the Romans. We do not know much about it. It was led by a Simeon ben Koseba, who was hailed as messiah by Rabbi Akiba, the most influential teacher of his time, and given the title Bar Kokhba (= son of the star). However, he was then reviled by others as one who had led the people astray (as is attested in the Talmud) and given the name Bar Kosiba (= son of lies). This rebellion which was again put down methodically by the Romans, led to the final catastrophe after the capture of fifty fortresses and around a thousand fortified places. Bar Kokhba fell in battle and Rabbi Akiba suffered martyrdom, reciting the 'Shema' as he died. This second war is said to have claimed around 850,000 victims. Any one of the followers of Bar Kokhba who was not cut down was sold into slavery. The old Jerusalem was completely destroyed. And almost worse, after the end of the war a completely new, totally Hellenized, city was built. Even its name, Colonia Aelia Capitolina, was an entirely new one. Jerusalem became a Roman colony with sanctuaries of Jupiter Capitolinus, Juno and Minerva. Those who had been circumcised were prohibited from entering the city on pain of death.

This was an epoch-making break: virtually no other event had such a sustained influence on the history and self-understanding of Judaism as did the loss of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Was this not the final end of the holy city of Israel? Throughout the following centuries the Bar Kokhba revolt was seen as a costly and senseless catastrophe - until almost two thousand years later, after the Six Day War and the recapture of Jerusalem, it was to be glorified as a heroic action. But might not what people in Israel have called the Bar-Kokhba syndrome also bring renewed danger to the Jewish people and state, instead of peace?

It is more than nineteen centuries since Roman troops levelled city and Temple to the ground. And the city of Abraham, who is said to have met the priest Melchizedek and to have bound his son Isaac at God's behest there, the city of David and Solomon, the city of the Hasmonaeans and Herodians, has meanwhile become the holy city of three world religions in another long and eventful history. But Jerusalem, which according to Jewish popular etymology is meant to be the 'city of peace', has become a city of no peace.

There is no ignoring the fact that each of the three Abrahamic religions has a legitimate claim on Jerusalem. But at the same time none is ready to acknowledge the rights of the two others. And so today the barely thirty-five acres of the Temple Court are the most disputed piece of land on this earth, the slightest incursion into which has bloody consequences, as has been evident in recent times. But many people are asking whether a Temple is an essential part of Judaism; does it not (like the monarchy) belong to certain limited constellations of a particular period ? Is it part of the substance of the faith of Judaism, or just of a particular paradigm of that faith? The political positions and strategies of all three Abrahamic religions are very different, without any uniformity in this respect.

* A number of Jews would like to see the Temple rebuilt, and pray for that three times a day. They are already constructing a model, raising money, and training priests. However, the vast majority of present-day Jews do not want a rebuilding of the Temple, far less the resumption of bloody animal sacrifices, which would be the consequence.

* Some Christians, too, want the rebuilding of the Temple, but only because for them this would be a preliminary sign of the return of Christ. However, the majority of Christians are content with their own places of worship and do not want any rebuilding of the Temple, the result of which could quite easily be a confrontation with the Jews.

* Not a few Muslims are ready to defend the Dome of the Rock and the mosques on the Temple Court to the last drop of blood, in order to prevent the rebuilding of the Temple. However, the majority of Muslims do not want to wage any new war over the holy rock.

This is the ambiguous and highly dangerous situation early in the twenty-first century, and only one thing is certain. There will definitely be no real peace between Jews, Christians and Muslims unless a way of peaceful co-existence over Jerusalem and its Temple Mount is found.