by Simon Schama
In this alternative scripture, the One God is not alone in celestial space but surrounded by a host of angels over whom He exercises imperfect control. There are good angels, commanded by Michael who survives in the Testaments, but then there are also bad and insubordinate angels led by Belial, whose name is everywhere in these books, including in one of the very beautiful pseudo-biblical Thanksgiving Hymns, XV: ‘As for me I am dumb; [my arm] is torn from its shoulder and my foot has sunk into the mire. My eyes are closed by the spectacle of evil and my ears by the crying of blood. My heart is dismayed by the mischievous design for Belial is manifest in their [evil] inclination.’73 For their disobedience (in particular for refusing to accept the presence of godlike appearances in created man), they are ejected from heaven and sent, as ‘Sons of Heaven’ – or more ominously in 1 Enoch, as ‘The Watchers’ – to earth. There they copulate with human women who give birth to monstrous giants, the Nephilim. Evil is at large in the world and God retires in miffed splendour surrounded by the angels of Light to leave it to its fate. Enoch, the first man of language, wanders from one end of the earth to the other, a witness to the horror and havoc, reporting that wickedness has overcome the earth. The deluge is summoned to wipe out the giants, but demonic spirits survive. They too are targeted, but the satanic master figure Mastema, a counter-Creator, successfully pleads for only nine-tenths of their presence to be confined to the deep places of the earth. Enough of them are unchained to work more mischief and sorrow.
Peculiar alterations to the biblical account follow, especially in the Genesis Apocryphon. Not only does Israel receive the covenant at Creation, but Abraham’s wife Sarah – described with the warm-blooded sensuousness of the Song of Songs – so whets the appetite of a pharaoh that he abducts her and takes her as his wife for two years. Abraham escapes trouble by claiming she is his sister.
Strange but weirdly riveting anecdotes sprout. Lamech, the son of Methuselah, doubts that a son is actually his offspring. Oddly, this is not because he fathered him at the spry age of 182, but rather because he fears his wife Bathenosh may have been inseminated by an angel-watcher or one of the wicked Sons of Heaven: ‘Very emotionally and weeping she answered me “O my Lord . . . remember the pleasure, the moment of intercourse and my ardent response.”’ And assures him, in effect, that their orgasm guarantees that the seed that grew into Noah was indeed his. Lamech remains unconvinced and runs to the even older Methuselah for reassurance.
The Sons of Heaven winkle their way into the biblical plot with disturbing regularity. Their prince and leader Mastema masterminds the sacrifice of Isaac, a suggestion God accepts, and Moses receives the law (again) from a band of angels as well as God. The cumulative impression is not that God has relinquished His creation but that, generation after generation, its sovereignty is contested between the forces of good and evil, with the certainty that, ultimately, in the last climactic battle heralding the End of Time (recounted in astounding, almost Homeric, detail in the longest scroll of all, twenty-eight feet of it), the Sons of Light will prevail over the Company of Darkness. ‘On the day when the Kittim fall there shall be battle and terrible carnage before the God of Israel for that shall be the day appointed from ancient times for the battle of destruction of the sons of darkness.’74 This is to continue for thirty-three years!
How eccentric were the writers and readers of this alternative story of the Jews and the world? Evidently they were made to disappear entirely from scripture and their recovery is something of an accidental miracle. Battle still rages between scholars like Geza Vermes who continue to believe that the Qumran community was entirely Essene, and the view argued by Norman Golb that the sheer diversity and size of the manuscript collection suggests a more eclectic Jerusalem library hurried from the besieged city for its own preservation. Though I’m still unpersuaded by Golb, his is, in fact, not such a wild theory. The distance was just thirty-five miles east, in a territory which, after the seizure of Masada to the south, was more or less controlled by the Zealots. Qumran would have been known to have been occupied by the ascetic yachad for many generations. So there is a possibility that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a combination (written, after all, in many hands and even languages) of Essene Rules and discipline, plus additional copies of what would be the Bible canon, plus apocrypha and mythic-scripture brought in from the outside.
The really startling adjustment to our assumptions about Jewish piety demanded by the scrolls is not whether they were the work and library of the Essenes or a more eclectic collection brought from Jerusalem, but the fact that Jews read together both the authorised and unauthorised, the rigidly montheist and the mythically dualist, sharply contradictory versions of their ancestral story. Some of the scrolls, like the Temple Scroll, are both a reworking of many of the sacrifice commandments and purity rules already detailed in the Torah, but with up-do-date rulings. Neither the wall gecko nor the sand gecko nor the ‘great lizard’ nor the chameleon, all found around Qumran, for example, are kosher. The scroll visualises an even more magnificently ornamented Temple. These hybrid forms, partly drawn from the Torah, partly not, open up the possibility of a Jewish learning and piety more richly various, loosely organised, mythically attuned, mystically driven, solar-obsessed, than the later Hebrew Bible canon and Talmud allow. But it returns all the rest of Jewish culture – the wilder shores of mystical tales, the existence of incantatory magic in late antiquity (known through thousands of Babylonian incantation bowls) – from the esoteric margins to the centre of Jewish religious practice and storytelling.
Some of it is mesmerisingly, crazily, wordy. The War Scroll, for example, would not have helped much as a manual of arms against the Romans since it spends an inordinate amount of space detailing exactly what must be inscribed on trumpets, banners and even weapons in the battle array of the Sons of Light. ‘On the point of their javelins they shall write “Shining Javelin of the Power of God” . . . and on the darts of the second division they shall write “Bloody Spikes to Bring Down the Slain by the Wrath of God”.’ We are going to write the enemy into capitulation! Surrender to our verbosity or else! Precise measurements are issued for the size of polished bronze shields, and the spike of the spear ‘made of brilliant white iron, the work of a craftsman, in its centre, pointing towards the tip shall be ears of corn in pure gold’.75 If the Ultimate Battle could only be decided by literary excess and sumptuous schmeckerei it would be a cakewalk for the Sons of Light.
It never was. But if the stirring call to arms recorded in the War Scroll, with its invincible belief in eventual victory, was, in fact, shared in the common culture and not just in one separatist community on the Dead Sea shore, then even an annihilation as total as Titus’ could be treated as but a prologue to the ultimate triumph of the Lord of Hosts and His covenanted people. Hope was not extinct. Freedom (and the word was used on the coinage of the next generation of rebels) was round the corner along with the Messiah. The Temple would be restored once more. The Lord of Hosts would saddle up and ride on the side of His People. It’s not over till it’s over. To be continued.
Hence the recurrence within sixty years of not one but two immense Jewish insurrections against Rome, both of which, to the astonishment of the empire, required many legions to put down. More remarkably still, the first took place in the reign of Trajan between 115 and 117 ce across a broad swathe of the Mediterranean diaspora, from Cyrenaica, sweeping through Egypt, reaching a terrible paroxysm in Alexandria that all but wiped out that great community, and also affecting the Syrian cities of Antioch and Damascus. We have even less to go on for an account on the Jewish side of the revolts than our dependence on Josephus, but it seems likely that they must have owed something to the widespread messianic ferment that pulses on the unorthodox Qumran scrolls; the perfervid belief that the End of Days was at hand; that the Sons of Light would triumph over the Sons of Darkness; that in some immense battle God the Redeemer would fight for His Children. Certainly we know from Roman sources like Cassius Dio
and Diodorus Siculus about the scale of the uprising, the ferocity of the violence and the horrifying massacres, looting and arson that did for those Jewish cities what Titus had done in Jerusalem.
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, given the trauma of 70 CE, the Jews of Palestine did not rise while their brethren and sisters were being slaughtered in Libya, Egypt and Syria. But around 132, a rebellion broke out in Judaea which, according to sources like Cassius Dio, took 50,000 troops and three years to suppress.76 Even allowing for hyperbole, there is no doubt that the magnitude of the insurrection took the Romans by surprise. The emperor Hadrian himself at one point assumed command when things seemed to be going badly, and the orator Fronto compared this second Jewish War to the long slogging battles the Romans had fought in damp and misty northern Britain.
There is no Josephus to give us even an approximation of how the revolt started, nor its immediate causes, although Hadrian’s institution of a city he called Aelia Capitolina on the site of mostly destroyed Jerusalem was almost certainly the greatest provocation. It was once thought this was the result and not the cause, but coins minted around 130–1 with that new Roman name for the obliterated Jerusalem make it clear that this was indeed a prime cause. Whether or not the leader of the rebellion, Simon bar Kosiba, imagined himself to be the Messiah, the kind of fervent expectations documented in the Qumran scrolls (not to mention the existence of a truly messianic Christian religion) made his claim plausible, even to the likes of a Pharisee like Rabbi Akiba, who became committed to the rebellion and was, after Simon, its most famous victim.
It was Rabbi Akiba, invoking prophecy given in Numbers 24:17 that ‘a star shall shoot forth out of Jacob and a sceptre out of Israel’, who consecrated the rebellion by endowing the leader with the Aramaic, more messianically fitting name ‘Simon bar Kochba, Son of a Star’. But Bar Kochba also styled himself ‘nasi’, or prince, and played to the messianic insistence that – unlike the Hasmoneans, for example – a true redeemer of the Jews had to come from the line of David (as indeed was said of Jesus of Nazareth). He was a stickler for Sabbath observance, and presented himself as a kind of neo-Davidian leader of the holy nation. Much less is known about the course of the revolt than the first war against Rome, although a cache of letters to and from the leader was discovered in a cave in the Judaean desert in the 1960s.77 The portrait they offer is of an effectively brutal guerrilla leader, with a well-organised chain of command, dividing his territory into seven commands and subdivided again into local districts, all presumably taxed to support the revolt. More revolutionary than mere rebel, Bar Kochba exhibits the necessary punitive ruthlessness without which he would barely have lasted. He signs his own curt, direct, adamant letters and even in their tersest form they breathe a kind of intensely charismatic force, palpable after two millennia. But the inscription on his coinage – ‘For the Freedom of Jerusalem’ – was wishful thinking as it is evident from the distribution of those coins that he never took the city. Yet even more than the great war two generations before, the rebellion showed a consciousness of being fought for the ‘Jewish Freedom’, also inscribed on the coinage. It was, obviously, a defiant response to the famous Roman coinage minted after Titus of the forlorn ‘Judaea Capta’ weeping beneath a palm.
The tears would still come. At the height of his success, around 133, Bar Kochba held only Judaea and Samaria, his capital established at Betar. Galilee as well as Jerusalem seems to have remained under Roman control throughout. In the end, and wisely, the Romans opted for a war of attrition, pushing the rebels back towards the fortified desert caves facing the Dead Sea where the letters were found, many of them from the last years of the revolt increasingly desperate about food and supplies before the end came in 135. With its extinction came the end of Judaea itself, renamed by Hadrian before his death the province of Syria Palestina.
But was it possible, even if you weren’t one of Yohanan ben Zakkai’s disciples, to sidestep history altogether? Along with the remains of a group of thirty, apparently well-to-do Jewish fugitives from the Romans found in a cave in the Judaean desert, was the correspondence of someone who tried to do that, or rather just go about her business while the javelins were flying. Her name was Babatha and she came originally from the village of Maorza in Nabatea, across the Jordan and the south-eastern end of the Dead Sea, not far from the great rosy-pink Nabatean city of Petra. Ethnically Babatha was Idumean, but that people had been converted more than two centuries before, and when she bore a son to her first husband he was identified specifically as Jewish in the Roman legal archive.
Her world and her fortune were the dates which, as anyone who has eaten them from the tree in that part of the country will tell you, are beyond compare for fleshy succulence and honeyed intensity of flavour. You take your time with a Dead Sea date. Babatha inherited a grove from her father and, as a result of her first marriage to a man called Jesus, expanded her property. In 124 she was a widow; in 125 a wife again to another grower named Judanes who had already had a wife called Miriam and a daughter with the rather beautiful name of Shelamzion. The Torah sanctioned polygamy, but since Judanes had date palms in Ein Gedi on the western shore of the Sea, where at some point Babatha settled, it is entirely possible that Judanes kept wives and date groves in both places.
In any event Babatha had what it takes to look after herself. In 128 she lent her husband the princely sum of 300 denarii so that he could make a good dowry for Shelamzion’s marriage, and on terms in which she was able to ask for repayment whenever she chose. When Judanes died, suspecting she might have trouble with that repayment Babatha immediately seized the Ein Gedi date groves as collateral. This did not make Miriam, the first wife, at all happy. She sued in the Roman court for restitution, and she had one big card to play: a connection with the new Bar Kochba regime through a kinsman or friend, Yehonatan, who was the Star’s commander at Ein Gedi.
History was suddenly closing on Babatha and her tenaciously made and precariously held fortune. Undaunted, she took herself off to Ein Gedi to defend herself in the case and was swept away by the acrid wind of calamity. Fleeing the Romans all the way into the caves at Nahal Hever (with their soldiers perched right above them on the cliff face), Babatha knew enough about how the world works to hang on to her little legal archive, if need be to the bitter end. If God was kind and she survived, she knew that she would need the archive to be the mistress of the precious groves of date palms in her own right. But some Son of Heaven had fouled her destiny and there she perished along with the well-off Jews from Ein Gedi amid their few mirrors and combs and little black pots of unguent.
Not much remains of the Bar Kochba revolt, that last spasm of Jewish defiance, except for the coins that numismatists collect and some of them even prize, minuscule overstrikes though many of them are. Often, they are poignantly beautiful, for they represent what had been lost: the colonnaded Temple in particular, and often the four species brought to it on the Feast of Tabernacles. One silver coin brings together imagery, Temple memory, messianic redemption and the first slogan of revolutionary liberation known to the world, for encircling the trumpets that once blew from the walls is the slogan, written in self-consciously archaic Hebrew characters, linking it to the first writing of the Bible: ‘To the Freedom of Jerusalem!’
Other coins bear on their face tamar – or date palm – echoing the menorah candlestick, one of the most repeated emblems in Jewish imagery. It is a commonplace that the date palm was a symbol of the fruitfulness that God had promised His covenanted people.
The date palm had another association too. It had been known to the Egyptians and to all successive cultures as the tree that never died but endlessly renewed itself, new leaves replacing those that withered and browned, hanging loose down the trunk before falling. You can see this for yourself, especially in Israel and Egypt. In that sense at least, the date palm was immortal, and became an image of redemption and resurrection. Which is one more reason why the pious pseudo-Messiah, Simon, guided by t
he priests we know surrounded him, might have chosen it.
But so did another set of messianic believers, much preoccupied with resurrection, which is why, when the image of the Christian cross first appears, it does so as a date palm.78
Part Two
mosaic, parchment, paper
5
The Menorah and the Cross
I. Side by Side
November 1933: not a good time for the Jews, not in Berlin. Not an especially happy time to be an American for that matter. One in four of the workforce was unemployed, more in places of desperation like Chicago. Could the new president be the messiah of the slump or was the American economy, the hope of untold millions, done for? The gloom even leaked into places where life went on much as it had before the crash: Yale, for example, where boys with Roman numerals pinned to their surnames ra-ra-ed over cocktails.
Clark Hopkins was not one of them. Archaeology was where he went to restore his strong spirits in the midst of so much melancholy. If only, he thought, as he shuffled photographs from the site of his dig in the Syrian Desert, some astonishment would materialise, something as spectacular as Carter’s Tutankhamun, it might give those stuck in despair something to boggle at, another time and place to go to, far from the present pit of dreariness. Now what would be wrong with that?
It was touchingly unworldly, this faith in the elixir of archaeology. But then Hopkins was an optimist. He’d become director of excavations at Dura-Europos, an ancient fortified frontier town on the upper Euphrates, hidden for centuries beneath high embankments of sand. When the sand was swept away in the late 1920s, a great city, packed with walled streets and temples, revealed itself. Calling Dura ‘the Pompeii of the desert’ was overreaching for public recognition, but there was no question that the place was an unexpected marvel. How those frontier soldiers lived! Founded by the Seleucid Greeks around 303 BCE as a citadel against threats from Iran, and sited squarely on the trade route between Babylon and Palestine, ‘Europos’, as it was known, fell to the Persian Parthians late in the second century BCE. As was their wont, this latest edition of Persian imperialists was relaxed about the flourishing of any and every cult, so that alongside their own temples, shrines to local Syrian gods sprang up alongside the Hellenistic ones. Through the Parthian centuries, the new power in the region – Rome – knocked on the doors of Dura, but it was not until 165 CE that Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius’ co-emperor, staved them in entirely. In their turn, the Romans held it for barely a century, before finally and terminally Dura fell to the immense army of the new Sassanian Persian king, Shapur I, in 256 CE.