‘I will lay waste your cities, and you will become a desolation’. Insurgency and counter-insurgency in Judaea

ABSTRACT

This article examines the two major and prolonged insurgencies that the Roman empire faced in Judaea in the first and second centuries C.E. It seeks to explain the historical contexts for these conflicts and to discuss the strategies pursued by both the imperial power and its insurgent enemies. In each case, once insurrection had broken out, the Roman authorities proceeded in a methodical manner involving the concentration of maximum force to achieve the goal of suppression. On the other hand, their Jewish enemies sought out adaptive responses that took account of the overwhelming imperial strength and applied the lessons learned from the failure of the First Revolt to re-imagine the course of opposition in the Second. The use of exemplary violence as a coercive tool of policy is discussed as is the challenge of dealing with an internally fractured and factionalized population.

KEYWORDS:

• Bar Kokhba Revolt
• factionalism
• insurgency
• Jewish Revolt
• Flavius Josephus
• Judaea
• Rome
• Exemplary Violence

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the external referee for the suggested improvements to the paper and to Dr. Rafael Goldstein for reading the draft with a critical eye.

Disclosure statement

No conflicts of interest arise from the writing or publication of this paper.

Notes

1. The quotation in the title is from the Book of  Ezekiel 35.4.

2. See Jacobson and Kokkinos, Herod and Augustus for multiple perspectives on this imperial-client relationship.

3. Russell, “Roman Counterinsurgency Policy,” 261–5; and Josephus, Jewish War (hereafter JW), 1.304.

4. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (hereafter AJ) 18.121–2.

5. Ibid., 20.114–7.

6. Ibid., 18.62.

7. Ibid., 20.97–9.

8. JW, 2.305–8.

9. JW, 2.453. The ineffectual response to the breakdown of order in Jerusalem can be compared to the situation in Kabul during the First Afghan War, when isolated elements of the British garrison were massacred and the retreat of the remainder in 1842 ended in a disaster reminiscent of the fate of the Roman army under Cestius Gallus withdrawing from Jerusalem after failing to overawe the defenders in a display of imperial power (see below).

10. For an accessible narrative of the First Jewish Revolt see Faulkner, Apocalypse and for a recent thought-provoking analysis, Mason, A History of the Jewish War.

11. This was not a homogenous revolutionary movement but, rather, a grouping of mutually antagonistic factions with wildly divergent aspirations united only temporarily in their desire to be free of the Roman yoke.

12. For an interesting perspective as to the nature of Gallus’ ‘blunder’ see Mason, A History of the Jewish War, Chap. 5.

13. The chaos of the retreat is graphically captured in the Josephan narrative, JW, 2.540–55.

14. For events before Ascalon JW, 3.13–26.

15. Jospehus tallies 23 infantry cohorts and 6 cavalry alae; Tacitus mentions 20 cohorts and 8 alae and Suetonius 10 cohorts and 8 alae:, JW, 3.67; Tacitus, Histories, 5.1; and Suetonius, Vespasian, 4.6.

16. JW, 4.658.

17. Ibid., 5.41–3.

18. See Price, Jerusalem Under Siege.

19. JW, 5.278.

20. Ibid., 7.216.

21. For the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the best popular account is still Yadin’s, Bar Kokhba; Applebaum’s, Prolegomena, though superseded in part by modern scholarship, remains useful; and Mor’s, The Second Jewish Revolt, provides a valuable up-to-date discussion.

22. See Gambash, Rome and Provincial Resistance, 151–6; and Russell, “Roman Counterinsurgency Policy,” 272–6.

23. Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt, 51–75 sums up the evidence and casts a skeptical eye over claims of prolonged and serious unrest.

24. See Horsley and Hanson, Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs, Chap. 2.

25. For an exposition of the Marxian position see Hobsbawm, Bandits, Chap. 1.

26. For a comprehensive bibliography of more recent work on the causes of the Revolt see Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt, Appendix, 536–41.

27. Isaac, “Cassius Dio on the Revolt of Bar Kokhba” concisely situates the author’s approach.

28. Dio, Roman History, 69.14.1–2.

29. Ibid., 69.14.3.

30. For a ‘minimalist’ perspective see Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt, 289–306, 326–7; and for a ‘maximalist’ position see Eck, “The Bar Kokhba Revolt.”

31. The deployment of these vexillations was an affordable luxury given the mostly stable strategic situation elsewhere in the empire; a military discharge certificate (diploma) that gives a snapshot of the composition of a province’s auxiliary garrison at any one time, lists 15 auxiliary formations in Syria-Palaestina in 139 (CIL XVI 87).

32. For an acceptance of this loss see Gichon, “Insight into the Bar Kokhba War,” 22; for a refutation, see Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt, 198–209.

33. Dio, Roman History, 69.13.3.

34. JW, 2.333; 2.345.

35. Josephus laid his own causative trail for the catastrophe to come and, through the mouth of his interlocutor Agrippa II, provided a rational, ex post facto prefiguring of the disaster that was about to unfold, JW, 2.345–401.

36. Although the sicarii do base themselves at Masada for much of the First Revolt, it is unclear whether they were the ones responsible for the seizure of the fortress in the first place.

37. See Gichon, “Cestius Gallus’s Campaign in Judaea” and for its ignominious end: Bar-Kochva, “Seron and Cestius at Beith Horon.”

38. See Mason, A History of the Jewish War, 309.

39. JW, 2.503–13.

40. The Janjaweed militia carried out ethnic cleansing by terror in Darfur as agents of the central Sudanese government.

41. Mason’s suggestion in A History of the Jewish War, 288, that he refused to treat with those who offered to admit him because he was “steaming with anger at his treatment thus far”, contradicts his overall view that Cestius expected to achieve his objective by a display of force alone (as the proposed treachery would presumably indicate that some elements had, indeed, been intimidated).

42. JW, 2.528; loss of baggage train: JW, 2.521.

43. For an interesting argument concerning the deployment of suasion as a tool of power see Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, 2, 49; and Appendix.

44. Dio, Roman History, 69.12.2. The accuracy of the account must be questioned given that any supplier of goods to the Roman army who consistently manufactured substandard products would surely have lost the contract in short order.

45. Ibid., 69.12.3. For the installations see note 53 below.

46. On the fraught question of Hadrian’s stance towards Judaism and whether or not his policies were designed to reconcile or assimilate his fractious subjects see Bazzana, “The Bar Kokhba Revolt”; and Schäfer, “Hadrian’s Policy in Judea and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt.”

47. JW, 1.5;2.388–90; 6.343. For Parthian relations generally, see Campbell, “War and Diplomacy”; and Rajak, “The Parthians in Josephus.”

48. For example, JW, 2.520. See Mason, A History of the Jewish War, 459–61 on the Adiabenian contribution.

49. JW, 2.573–6.

50. JW, 2.583.

51. A point also made by Russell, “Roman Counterinsurgency Policy,” 259–60.

52. As per Gichon, “Insight into the Bar Kokhba War,” 20. Harkabi, The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, 28, 29 agrees, although the author of this influential work views the entire Revolt as a misconceived enterprise based on self-deception and overconfidence rather than any coldly analytical appraisal of the prospects of eventual success. This ‘realist’ position effectively portrays the Revolt as an exercise in collective self-immolation amounting to a (possibly) noble but entirely futile gesture of defiance, a criticism that was clearly aimed at the contemporary Israeli political establishment.

53. Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt, 221–49 provides a useful summary of the evidence and a modern review of the literature. As an example of the investigation of one of these complexes see Porat et al., “The ‘Caves of the Spear’.”

54. Yadin, Bar-Kokhba, 28–171.

55. Most recently: Shivti’el, Cliff Shelters and Hiding Complexes, 2019.

56. For general discussion of the shadowy line between civilian and combatant see Davies, “Prey or Participants?”

57. See Levithan, Roman Siege Warfare, 19, for the ‘blame’ that could be attributed to any enemy who resorted to ‘underhand’ methods of warfare.

58. See Gambash, Rome and Provincial Resistance, 151–61.

59. See Overman, “The First Revolt and Flavian Politics”; and Gambash, “Official Roman Responses,” 64–73.

60. Dio, Roman History, 69.13.3.

61. Yadin, Bar-Kokhba, 46–9.

62. See Sheldon, Spies of the Bible, Chap. 8.

63. For the siege of Bethar see Ussishkin, “Archaeological Soundings at Betar.”

64. JW, 2.408 and 2.484.

65. In the closing stages of the siege of Jerusalem, the Idumaean contingent attempted to surrender to Titus but when their intentions were revealed, Simon had their leaders executed and the rank and file put under tight surveillance (JW, 6.380–1).

66. JW, 2.612–3.

67. Ibid., 4.540–4.

68. Ibid., 3.263.

69. Ibid., 5.532–3.

70. Ibid., 5.540.

71. It is not possible to separate the archaeological evidence for destruction at En Gedi which may be attributable either to the attack of the sicarii or to the Roman sweep through the region in the following year (or, indeed, to both these events!).

72. JW, 3.59–63.

73. Ibid., 3.132–4.

74. Ibid., 5.449.

75. Ibid., 5.450.

76. Ibid., 5.455–6.

77. Ibid., 5.550–2.

78. Ibid., 7.200–5.

79. Tacitus, Agricola, 18; and Dio, Roman History, 77.15.1.

80. Tacitus, Agricola, 30.

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Gwyn Davies

Dr. Gwyn Davies obtained his Ph.D. in Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Florida International University. His research interests include the Roman army in the field (especially fixed-base operations) and imperial mechanisms of control exerted over mountainous and desert terrain. Davies’ publications include the monograph Roman Siege Works and his co-authored (with Jodi Magness) volume The 2003–2007 Excavations in the Late Roman Fort at Yotvata alongside a wide range of articles and book chapters in several different venues. Davies is also a regular contributor to the Archaeological Institute of America Speaker Series and was the Annual Russell Lecturer for 2019.