Judaea Under Empire

Empires do not have a good reputation because they earned a bad one by accident. They have the reputation they have because of what they are: machines for moving other people's food, metal, timber and bodies to a centre that does not produce enough of its own. That description sounds polemical. It is actually the technical one, and no ancient empire disputed it; the boast on the monument was the tribute list.

This chapter follows one small people through a thousand years of being administered by somebody else, because their case is unusually well documented and because the religious literature it produced (the Hebrew Bible, the apocalyptic writings, and eventually the New Testament) is a literature written under occupation, by the occupied. You cannot read it correctly without that fact. Chapters 3 to 7 depend on it entirely.

What an empire actually is

Strip away the marble. An empire is a political unit that has solved its resource problem by taking the resources of others, and has then organised itself permanently around that solution. Three consequences follow, and they are structural rather than moral failings of particular emperors.

It must keep expanding, or contract painfully. Conquest pays for itself only during conquest. Rome's late republic ran on the plunder of new provinces and on the enslaved captives who worked the estates that plunder bought; when the frontier stopped moving under Augustus's successors, the fiscal machine had to be replaced by systematic taxation of the already-conquered, which is a much harder political problem and one Rome never fully solved.¹ The empire's crisis of the third century is, among other things, what that arithmetic looks like when it comes due.

It must maintain a moral boundary between the taker and the taken. Extraction on this scale cannot be justified between equals, so it is never justified between equals. Rome's vocabulary is explicit: barbarus, provincia, servus. Aristotle had already supplied the philosophical version (the doctrine of the natural slave, the person for whom servitude is fitting), and it was still being quoted by Spanish jurists two thousand years later to defend the conquest of the Americas.² That is the machinery of chapter 1, running at imperial scale.

It is enormously wasteful. This is the least appreciated point. Empire is not efficient; it is extractive, which is a different thing. Roman silver and lead production at Rio Tinto and in the Spanish north-west is legible today as a pollution spike in Greenland ice cores, and the Las Médulas gold workings were made by demolishing entire mountains with water pressure; the Romans called the technique ruina montium, the wrecking of mountains, and Pliny the Elder, who administered mines in Spain, described the result with something close to horror.³ Add the deforestation of North Africa and Iberia, the grain fleets that turned Egypt into a single-purpose granary, and an estimated one to one and a half million people enslaved in the Gallic wars alone. None of this was a by-product. It was the business model.

A thousand years of somebody else's administration

The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were small highland polities on a corridor between the great powers of the Nile and Mesopotamia, which is a geographic sentence that determines everything else. Archaeology now places their emergence largely in the Canaanite highlands rather than through a mass arrival from outside, and dates the composition of most of the biblical historical narrative centuries after the events it describes, in the kingdom of Judah and in exile.⁴ That matters here for one reason: the texts are not neutral chronicles. They are national literature written by people processing catastrophe.

What that literature was written against matters as much as what it says. The religion actually practised in Iron Age Israel and Judah was not the religion the Bible prescribes. Ziony Zevit's synthesis of the archaeological, epigraphic and textual evidence (the blessings from Kuntillet ʿAjrud and Khirbet el-Qom invoking "Yahweh and his asherah", the household figurines, the standing stones, the many local shrines) describes not a monotheism with lapses but a plural cult: Yahweh worshipped alongside other powers, at many sites, in forms that varied by region and by household.⁵ Zevit's point about method is the one that matters here. There was no single "religion of ancient Israel" to be faithful or unfaithful to; there was a contested field, and the exclusive monotheism that later empires would inherit was the programme of one faction within it, written back over the record by the scribes who compiled that record after the catastrophes in the table below. The losing side survives in the text only as apostasy.

The same caution applies to the passages later quoted as the foundation of Western moral anthropology. Zevit's reading of Genesis 2–3 argues that, in its own language and its own ancient Near Eastern setting, the garden story is not an account of a fall, an original sin, or a curse laid on women; that those are doctrines read back into it centuries afterwards, largely by Christian interpreters with their own problem to solve.⁶ His philological case is contested in its particulars, and this chronicle does not need it to be right in every detail. The general point is not contested: the texts that would later be cited to justify hierarchy (in chapter 7, where the assembly is examined, and in chapter 8, where it is put to work) acquired those meanings long after they were written, and acquired them because somebody needed them to.

Read the right-hand column as a whole and a religious history becomes explicable. A literature obsessed with exile, with the justice of God against foreign kings, with a coming reversal in which the mighty are pulled from their thrones, is not the product of a peculiar national temperament. It is what a subject people writes.

The mechanics of Roman occupation

Rome's rule in Judaea had a small footprint and a heavy hand, and it worked through four instruments.

Tribute. Provincial tax was the point of the province. The standard denarius (the coin used in the Gospel exchange about paying tax to Caesar) carried Tiberius's portrait and the legend naming him son of the deified Augustus, which is to say the tax coin was also an object of imperial cult.⁷ Under the client kings and then the prefects, the combined burden of Roman tribute, Herodian taxation and Temple dues fell hardest on Galilean smallholders, and the resulting debt drove land consolidation and tenancy, the background condition of every parable about debt, day-labourers and absentee landlords in the Gospels.⁸

Collaborating elites. Rome ruled through the high priesthood and the Herodian family. The high priest served at the prefect's pleasure (Rome physically held the vestments), which made the Temple hierarchy simultaneously the centre of national religion and an organ of the occupation. That double status is the key to chapter 3.

Terror as routine administration. Crucifixion was not an exceptional punishment. It was the standard public penalty for sedition and for slave insurrection, chosen for its visibility and duration. After the death of Herod in 4 BCE, Varus crucified two thousand men in a single operation; at the siege of Jerusalem in 70, Josephus reports up to five hundred a day, until, he says, the soldiers ran out of wood.⁹ Any reading of the crucifixion of Jesus that treats it as a religious or judicial anomaly has misunderstood what the Romans were doing on that hill.

Ideology. Rome called the arrangement pax. The Res Gestae, Augustus's own account of his reign, is a list of peoples subjected written in the vocabulary of peace-bringing, and Virgil supplied the mission statement: to spare the conquered and crush the proud. Tacitus is the exception that proves the rule: he gives the empire's clearest condemnation to a barbarian enemy in a speech he wrote himself, which is how a Roman senator could say the unsayable and keep his career.¹⁰

What a subject people produces

Second Temple Judaism was not one thing. The sources describe a crowded religious field: Sadducees drawn from the priestly aristocracy and invested in the existing order; Pharisees, a lay movement expounding an oral tradition alongside written law; Essenes, likely including the community whose library survived at Qumran, who had withdrawn from a Temple they considered polluted; and, by the first century, armed factions for whom collaboration was itself apostasy.¹¹

Two products of that field matter for the rest of this chronicle.

Apocalyptic. The genre (Daniel, 1 Enoch, and later Revelation) reads as fantasy only if you do not know what it is. It is resistance literature written in code: present empires are beasts, their fall is scheduled, and the judgement of God is coming to invert the current order. It is written in symbol because writing it plainly gets you killed.¹² When the Gospels have Jesus announcing a kingdom that is imminent and not Caesar's, they are speaking this language, and Rome's officials were entirely capable of understanding it.

A portable, textual religion. The destruction of the Temple in 70 removed the sacrificial centre of Judaean religion permanently. What replaced it (rabbinic Judaism, organised around study, law and the synagogue) proved catastrophe-resistant in a way that a temple cult could not be. It is one of the most successful institutional adaptations in the historical record, and it happened because an empire destroyed the alternative.¹³

The inheritance

Three things pass from this chapter into the rest of the chronicle.

First, the template. Rome supplied later European empires with their self-image, their vocabulary, and their legal furniture: imperium, colonia, the province, the client king, the civilising mission, the natural slave. When Belgium ruled Rwanda through a court it had first hollowed out and then rebuilt to its own design, it was running a technique with a Roman name.

Second, the literature. The New Testament was written inside this occupation and in the decades immediately after its most catastrophic phase. Every one of its political statements (about kingdoms, about tribute, about who is exalted and who is brought low) was written by and for people living under the boot described above.

Third, the irony that organises chapters 3 through 7. Within three hundred years, the movement founded by a man whom this empire executed as a rebel would be the official religion of that same empire, issuing edicts, convening councils under imperial authority, and, in time, blessing the ships.

Footnotes

1. Keith Hopkins, "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C.–A.D. 400)," Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), pp. 101–125, remains the standard analysis of the fiscal machine. On the plunder economy of the late republic, William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford, 1979). ↩
2. Aristotle, Politics I.4–7. Its afterlife in the conquest debates is the subject of Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (Chicago, 1959); see chapter 9. ↩
3. Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXXIII.70–78, on ruina montium at Las Médulas. For the pollution record, Sungmin Hong et al., "Greenland Ice Evidence of Hemispheric Lead Pollution Two Millennia Ago by Greek and Roman Civilizations," Science 265 (1994), pp. 1841–1843, and the higher-resolution reanalysis by Joseph R. McConnell et al., PNAS 115:22 (2018), pp. 5726–5731. ↩
4. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press, 2001). For a survey of positions rather than one camp, see William G. Dever, Beyond the Texts (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017). ↩
5. Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001), esp. parts II–III on the cult sites and the epigraphic corpus. The plural in Zevit's title is the argument. For the inscriptions themselves, see also Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), and, for the wider case, Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). ↩
6. Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For a sense of the disagreement it provoked among Hebraists, see the review discussion in Review of Biblical Literature (2014). ↩
7. Mark 12:13–17 and parallels. On the coin and the cult, see Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London: Duckworth, 1977), on the ubiquity of imperial image and titulature. ↩
8. Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), chs. 1–2; and Sean Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), on the Galilean agrarian economy. ↩
9. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVII.295 (Varus); The Jewish War V.449–451 (the daily crucifixions). Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (London: SCM, 1977), is the standard study of the penalty and its social meaning. ↩
10. Tacitus, Agricola 30; Virgil, Aeneid VI.851–853; Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti. ↩
11. Josephus, The Jewish War II.119–166, is the primary description of the parties and should be read as a partisan one. For a modern survey, E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM, 1992). ↩
12. John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016); on Revelation as anti-imperial writing, Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). ↩
13. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 3rd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014). ↩