The Hasmoneans were as ruthless as any foreign rulers. They annexed Galilee by force: pillage, enslavement, and massacre. And like Solomon hundreds of years before, they destroyed the rebuilt northern temples of Yahweh so that the only one remaining would be the Judean one, in Jerusalem.
The peasant farmers of Galilee hunkered down to wait. There is an Arabic word, samud, used by Palestinians today, that translates as "steadfast" or "staying put." It expresses a simple resolution: not to budge, not to leave the land. But it also reflects a deep historic sense. Rulers come and rulers go, to be ticked off on one's fingers by the decade or by the century, but if the people stay on the land, the land is theirs, no matter what the powers-that-be care to call it.
The Galileans remained samud. The Hasmoneans were just another in the long line of foreign rulers, no matter what they themselves claimed. Sure enough, they were just as short-lived. Weakened by internecine feuding, they were defeated just three generations later by Herod with Rome's blessing.
Galilee stayed officially part of Judea, but its people still did not see themselves as Judeans. As ever, they considered themselves Israelites, the true people of Israel. And many were never more aware of the cultural difference than when they heard the stories about the new Jerusalem temple. The elders may have been awed into submission, and the children dazzled as though by fairy tales. But the younger adults, those whose ideals had not yet been eroded by hard work and infirmity, were more likely to be incensed. Like the purist Essenes down in the desert fastness of the Dead Sea valley, they saw the Judean temple as a corruption of Israelite values and faith. They may have been living "under the laws of the Judeans," as the historian Josephus put it, but then as now, laws could not control minds, especially stubbornly independent minds like those of John the Baptist.
The Sadducees were destined to disappear by the end of the first century. The disastrous rebellion against Rome that began in the late sixties A.D. resulted in the destruction of Herod's temple, the banishment of Judeans from Jerusalem, and the end of Sadducee hegemony. Without the temple, they had no power. Only then would the word Yehudi—"Ioudaios" in Greek—begin to mean anyone who venerates Yahweh and observes his laws, instead of a nation or people from Judea. Religion as we know it today was about to come into being.
In the absence of the physical temple, the rabbis of the second and third centuries would inherit the mantle of the Pharisees and began the process of rebuilding the temple in their minds, creating the Mishna.
But even before the temple buildings went up in flames—the limestone cement burning so fiercely between the huge stone blocks that the stones cracked, exploded, and collapsed—another temple of the mind was already in the making.
The real revolution of the Jesus movement was that where the temple had once been seen as the center of all power and sacredness, that center could now be found within each person. This idea originally surfaced with the Essenes and the early Judean gnostics, but John the Baptist was the first to bring it to a mass audience, not as an intellectual or a metaphysical concept, but as part of a widespread peasant revolt of the mind and soul. With baptism, each person could become a part of the temple, regardless of class, ethnicity, clan, gender, wealth. The temple was made of people—the community of Israel—not of stone.
This was a radical notion. It was deeply subversive of the existing order of things, since it made no distinction between rich or poor, sinful or innocent, man or woman; everyone could be part of the temple on equal terms. Inevitably, the very idea would become heresy as the Jesus movement developed into institutional Christianity in the second and third centuries. It would re-emerge only a millennium later in mystical Judaism, with the idea that the whole world is imbued with points of divine light, fragments from the vessel of creation.
The kabbalistic story of how these fragments came to be dispersed still seems especially comforting, even endearing, in times of trouble. Essentially, God tripped. The world is the result of a divine mistake, a moment of awesome clumsiness, in which God dropped the vessel containing the light of creation. The vessel broke into shards, scattering the divine light into darkness and chaos, and the world will be made whole again only when these shards of divine light have been rescued from the darkness and reunited. That is the task for which the Messiah will come—the ultimate tikkun olam, repairing the world.
In first-century Palestine, that is exactly what John the Baptist was trying to do, as would Jesus after him. And his enemies were quick to realize the revolutionary threat. The temple cult was essentially exclusive; its practices were restricted to the priestly few, and everyone else simply paid for them to officiate. What the Baptist preached was inclusive; every person mattered, registered on the grand scale of things, and made a difference in the world. The temple cult depended on birth, wealth, and influence; the populist one, on faith and commitment.
Each person an expression of the divine? No matter who they were? The very idea was an outrageous challenge to those who claimed a monopoly on God: to the high priests, to the aristocracy, even to the emperor, who had proclaimed himself divine. And this was the real reason the Baptist was killed.
The story of Salome and the seven veils is a tempting one, full of the kind of detail guaranteed to keep a legend alive. Also convenient, in that it places the blame yet again on a woman: Herodias, the mother of the dancing Salome.
The gospel version has it that Herodias was angling for John's head when he criticized her marriage to Herod Antipas, Herod the Great's
son and the ruler of Galilee after his father's death in 4 B.C. Since she had formerly been married to Antipas' stepbrother, such a marriage would have been against the laws of Yahweh, and the Pharisees certainly would have criticized it on that account. But in fact it was Herod Antipas himself who wanted John's head, not because of personal criticism, though that may certainly have been an irritant, but because the Baptist represented a threat to his authority. He was killed because Antipas saw him, correctly, as dangerous: the more popular his preaching became, the more he challenged the status quo.
And of course the Baptist was popular. His notion that God was inside you, not inside a temple, was an early manifestation of the democratic spirit. It was, in a way, the democratization of religion. It meant that every person was potentially godlike, created in a divine image. And that every person was a son or daughter of God.
Dangerous teachings in politically dangerous times.
III
The Arbel gorge is a narrow cleft in the hills of southern Galilee, less than an hour's walk from the lake known as the Sea of Galilee. The cliff walls are honeycombed with caves, the perfect refuge for anyone in trouble with the authorities. Tall, steep, unscalable for all but the most agile, they are natural fortifications. Take control of them, and you are just about impregnable. Which is why the Arbel was the headquarters of Galilean armed resistance for well over a hundred years.
The caves are still there: whole complexes of rooms carved into the rock, connected by tunnels and stairways. Getting to most of them is still impossible unless you are an experienced rock climber. Surviving in them, even today, would require assistance: people to provide baskets of food and water that could be hauled up on ropes or let down from the top.
Guerrilla fighters can only succeed if they have popular local support, and that the Arbel fighters had. For these men were not strangers. They were known. They were kinsmen. Sons of the dispossessed, they seethed with rage and resentment, no longer willing to heed the elders' assurances that "This too will pass" or helpless reiterations of "That's the way it is; there's nothing to be done." Unable to stomach the idea of laboring for Herod or on any of the aristocratic estates established on what had once been their families' land, they took to the hills and waged an ongoing guerrilla war against the Herodian regime, attacking soldiers and disrupting whatever they could of the state machinery. They'd swoop down to raid the major caravan routes to the north and east, then funnel the take from these raids ba
ck to their home villages. And whenever the military was sent out against them in force, they retreated to their Arbel stronghold.
The powers-that-be—first the Hasmoneans, then the Romans, then the Herodians—called them bandits. Maryam, like most Galilean villagers, called them heroes: brave men resisting the occupiers, fighting for their land.
Guerrillas or thugs? Freedom fighters or thieves? It's a problem every newspaper editor still tussles with today. The way a group is described depends on who is doing the describing, and on who is listening.
Take, for instance, a familiar figure from our memory of the gospels: Barabbas, the thief released by public acclaim in preference to Jesus. What could possess such a people to insist that Pontius Pilate release a good-for-nothing like Barabbas instead of Jesus? The contrast is so stark: good and evil, worthy and unworthy. Clearly a perverse choice on the part of the assembled Jerusalemites. So long, that is, as you insist on calling Barabbas a thief.
Who was he really? As an individual, it's hard to know. His name, Bar-Abbas, means "son of his father"—the Aramaic equivalent of John Doe. An alias, perhaps, or a nom de guerre, like Yassir Arafat's Abu Ammar, "father of the people."
But whatever his real name may have been, Bar-Abbas was no simple thief. Our memories of the gospels are skewed. In Luke, he is wanted for sedition; in Mark, for insurrection. Matthew describes him as "a notable prisoner." Again, one man's resistance fighter is another's terrorist, and a national hero to one group of people—to Israelis or to Palestinians—is a criminal to the one it opposes. Calling Bar-Abbas a thief is a convenient way to demonize him, and so to demonize those who called for his release over that of Jesus.
In fact, Bar-Abbas was both popular and well known in Judea, while Jesus was an unknown from what the Judeans thought of as the boondocks: Galilee. Given the choice between a guerrilla leader who had fought against the authorities for justice, and an unknown from the provinces—yet another preacher who had merely caused a small fracas in the temple—the Jerusalemites loudly chose freedom for the proven hero they knew over the unproven one they did not.
Bar-Abbas was not the only such figure of his time, however. His was just one of many brigand bands roaming Palestine in the populist phenomenon identified by British historian Eric Hobsbawm as "social banditry."
Like the Galileans in the Arbel, these bandits were neighbors and relatives. Many had had their land taken in payment of tax debt. Others had dared to speak, even act, against injustice and so had become wanted men. Some had undoubtedly stolen to feed their families. For all these reasons and more, they had taken to the hills in a kind of pre-political rebellion that quickly gained political dimensions, thanks to the brutal reaction of the powers-that-be. Then as now, totalitarian authorities hunted down resisters so ruthlessly that they turned them into heroic martyrs.
It didn't make much difference whether the authorities were Hasmo-nean or Herodian, Judean or Roman. This was a matter more of class warfare, peasantry against gentry, than of nationalism. Or at least it began that way. A fugitive from the alien justice of the rich and powerful was seen as an honorable victim. If he turned to active resistance, honor grew into heroism. And the hero, as always, represented hope. He personified the idea that oppression was not inevitable. That justice could be fought for. That there were options.
The famed Pancho Villa in Mexico was such a bandit leader, taking from the rich and giving to the poor in what you could call either criminal theft or a socially conscious redistribution of wealth—or was it simply political savvy?—and evolving with other former "bandits" into a leader of the Mexican revolution of 1910.
Galilee's greatest bandit leader in Maryam's time was Hezekiah, even though by the time she was born, he had been dead for some forty years. He had turned outlaw when he and his followers were evicted from their land by the Hasmoneans after a disastrous two-year famine. Under his leadership in 53 B.C. the lakeshore town of Magdala rose in a mass revolt against the Hasmoneans and the young military governor they'd appointed in the Galilee, an Idumean by the name of Herod. The revolt was quickly and ruthlessly put down. The lake turned red with blood, and it stank for weeks afterward as bloated bodies decomposed in the water. Thousands of survivors were led away in chains to be sold as slaves. Hezekiah himself was killed. But far from suppressing resistance, the brutality of Herod's troops and the bravery of the rebels became legendary—and inspiring.
Hezekiah's name alone was a call to action. His exploits, and those of his sons and grandsons who carried on the resistance after him, became part of the repertoire of the story-tellers who acted as the mass media of the day. If he became braver with each telling, if the odds against him were stacked higher and his fighters held out for longer, those who listened would have it no other way. No matter how many spies and informers a ruling regime might employ, there was no preventing the spirit of rebellion sinking deep into the consciousness of Galileans. And among them, Maryam.
She would have heard the stories many times, so many that they had become part of her, memorized word for word. Some of the elders of Nazareth had been alive then; they'd seen everything as children, if not with their own eyes, then through the eyes of those who had been there. So Maryam would have known the gory details of the massacre at Magdala as though it had happened yesterday, not fifty years before. She could tell how the brave mothers of hundreds of those killed made the long trek to Jerusalem to demand that the high priest have Herod tried for massacring their sons, and so forced him to flee to Rome. And how, just a few years later, Hezekiah's men, now under the leadership of his sons, resisted fiercely when Herod returned to fight his way to the throne in Jerusalem.
The details were vivid: soldiers being lowered on ropes from the top of the Arbel cliffs to toss firebrands into the caves; the fighters in the caves trapped, some burning alive, others choking to death on the smoke; the survivors fleeing for shelter in the villages up in the hills. The largest of them, the Galilee Bethlehem, was less than twenty miles from the Arbel, but it was still a tough trek for a healthy person, let alone for a wounded man. Nazareth was small, but it was five miles closer. Here, despite the risk of savage reprisal if they were discovered, villagers like Maryam's grandmother nursed the men of the Arbel back to health, and buried the ones who didn't make it in communal tombs carved deep into the rock.
If there is one constant throughout history, it is that power-hungry rulers make their people pay. And Herod, who emerged out of the desert backwater of Hebron, the capital of Idumea, was hungrier than most.
He was especially detested in Galilee, for the good reason that the Galileans had longer experience of him than the Judeans, thanks to his years as military governor there. But even in Judea, "his" people never accepted him. Quietly, in whispers, because who knew who might be listening, they sneered at him as "the half-Judean." The other half? A. N. Wilson calls him "an Arab from the southern Palestinian province of Idumea," which is partly true—and in modern hindsight, of course, tantalizing to think that the king of the Jews was an Arab. But the whole truth is, as always, more complex.
The Herodians became Judean only in 104 B.C. when their kingdom of Idumea—the biblical Edom—was conquered by the Hasmoneans under Alexander Janneus. You might say that Janneus was carrying on a family tradition of annexation, since it was his father, John Hyrcanus, who had conquered Galilee twenty-five years earlier. Janneus allowed the Idumean elite to stay in power so long as they accepted the worship of Yahweh and agreed to be circumcised. Since the latter was not an issue—then as now, circumcision was the custom among most peoples of the area—the elite took the required vows to Yahweh, while their people went right on worshipping their own god, Kose.
It seemed an easy victory, but in fact the Hasmoneans would have done far better to forget territorial expansion and leave Idumea alone. Over the next sixty years, the Idumeans would take fitting revenge for their conquest by manipulating internecine fighting among the Hasmoneans. They played them off both against eac
h other and against the Romans until Herod—the scion of the Idumean ruling elite, the grandson of a forcibly converted Judean, and the son of a Nabatean mother—was appointed by Mark Antony in Rome as client king of Judea.
Not that Mark Antony's say-so alone made Herod king. It took him three years to fight his way to Jerusalem, making many new enemies along the way. The Arbel guerrillas were only one of his primary targets. After he'd smoked and burned them out of their caves, he went on to take the garrison of Sepphoris and the rest of the Galilee, then turned south to Jericho, Jaffa, and finally Jerusalem, where he laid siege to the city. The siege ended with his troops sacking the temple courts and priestly mansions, and butchering the aristocratic elite so that he could install his own appointees in their place.
Given the vast rift between rich and poor, this might not have been such a bad move if he'd wanted to establish himself as a populist king. But he didn't. He had far greater ambitions. He wanted to be not just Herod the king, but Herod the Great. So he built. Monumentally.
Rebuilding the Jerusalem temple on a scale grander than anything else in the Hellenic world was the most renowned of his projects, but there were countless others. He built a whole series of palaces from scratch, for instance, including the administrative palace in Jerusalem, on a hill looking down over the temple, and the luxury winter palace in Jericho replete with swimming pools, the largest of which turned out to be perfect for the "accidental death by drowning" of his Hasmonean brother-in-law Aristobulos. Then there were the palaces of Herodion and Massada, the kind of well-fortified desert escape hatches essential to a tyrant in times of mass unrest. And of course the brand new capital city of Caesarea with its huge artificial harbor and breakwater—larger even than Piraeus in Athens—and its ornate complex of marbled, porticoed, and fountained palaces shining white in the Mediterranean sun.
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