And so it proved. Monarchy in Jerusalem was extirpated in 587 BC by the triumphant king of Babylon; but Torah endured. Great powers rose and fell, and conquerors came and went; but still, amid all the ebb and surge of the passing centuries, the Jews held fast to the Covenant. Without it, they, like so many other peoples, would surely have been dissolved in the relentless churning of empires: Babylon, Persia, Macedon, Rome. Even as it was, though, many Jews could not escape a nagging dread. What if they forgot the precise details of the Covenant? As justification for this anxiety, moralists would point to the people who inhabited what had, until its destruction by the Assyrians, been the kingdom of Israel, and who presumed, like the Jews, to lay claim to a Pentateuch. The similarities between the two peoples, though, only emphasised their differences. The Samaritans dismissed the holiness of Jerusalem; scorned the authority of the scriptures written since the time of Moses; insisted that they alone had preserved the untarnished law of God. No wonder, then, that they should have appeared to the Jews a race as mongrel as they were perverse – and as such a standing warning. To abandon God’s law was to cease to be ‘a wise and understanding people’.64 It was the Covenant, and the Covenant alone, that enabled the Jews to make sense of the world’s affairs. That infractions would be punished as swiftly as they had ever been was evident from the legions’ capture of Jerusalem; that the Lord God held to his own side of the bargain was evident from Pompey’s miserable end.
Yet it was not merely the flux of past events that Jewish scholars, when they contemplated the implications of the Covenant, believed themselves able to explain. There was the future as well. Vivid in the books of the prophets were visions of what, at the end of days, was to come: of ruin visited on the earth, of new wine drying up and the vine withering; of the leopard lying down with the goat, and a little child leading ‘the calf and the lion and the yearling’.65 A universal kingdom of righteousness was destined to emerge, with Jerusalem as its capital, and a prince of the line of David as its king. ‘With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.’66 It was as God’s Anointed that this prince was destined to rule: as his ‘Messiah’, or – translated into Greek – his Christos. Already, in the visions of a prophet named Isaiah, the title had been applied to Cyrus; but now, in the wake of Pompey’s desecration of the Temple, it had come to possess a far more urgent significance. Anticipation of a messiah sprung from David’s line, who would impose the covenant with a new vigour, winnowing the wheat from the chaff and restoring the lost tribes to Jerusalem, crackled in the air. All foreign practices were to be purged from Israel. The messiah would smash the arrogance of unrighteous rulers like a potter’s vessel. ‘And he shall have the peoples of the nations to serve him under his yoke, and he shall glorify the Lord in the sight of all the earth, and he shall purify Jerusalem in holiness as it was at the beginning.’67
And briefly, in the wake of Pompey’s murder, it seemed as though the end of days might indeed be drawing near. The rivalries of Roman warlords continued to convulse the Mediterranean. Legion clashed with legion, battle-fleet with battle-fleet. Nor were the Jews alone in looking to the heavens and dreaming of better times to come.
Now virginal Justice and the golden age returns,
Now its first-born is sent down from high heaven.
With the birth of this boy, the generation of iron will pass,
And a generation of gold will inherit all the world.68
These lines, written by a Roman poet named Virgil, spoke loudly of the hopes for a golden age that were as common in Italy as in Judaea; and when, a few years later, they came to be answered, it was not a Jewish messiah who sat enthroned as the master of the world, but a man who claimed descent from a god.
Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, the vanquisher of Pompey and a man whose feats had seen him, in the wake of his death, installed by official proclamation in the halls of heaven. Nor was that alclass="underline" for there were those who claimed, just for good measure, that Augustus had been fathered by Apollo in the form of a snake. Certainly, it was not hard to believe that he might indeed rank doubly as Divi Filius: ‘Son of God’. The dominion of the Roman people, which had seemed as though it might be on the verge of disintegration, was set by him on a new and formidable footing. Peace, to a man like Augustus, was no passive virtue, and the order he brought to the world was imposed at the point of a sword. Roman governors, charged with maintaining order in the Empire’s various provinces, wielded a monopoly of violence. Fearsome sanctions were theirs to command: the right to condemn anyone who offended against Rome to be burnt alive, or thrown to wild beasts, or nailed to a cross. In ad 6, when direct rule was imposed on Judaea, the prefect sent to administer the province was ‘entrusted by Augustus with full powers – including the infliction of capital punishment’.69 The Jews’ noses were rubbed humiliatingly in the brute fact of their subordination. Rather than dull their expectation that some great change in the world’s affairs was approaching, however, and that the end days might well be drawing near, the Roman occupation served only to heighten it. The Jews responded in various ways. Some, taking to the wilderness east of Jerusalem, withdrew from the world; others, cleaving to the Temple, clung for their hopes of salvation to the rites and services ordained of the priesthood. Others yet – scholars known as ‘Pharisees’ – dreamed of an Israel in which obedience to the laws given by God to Moses would be so absolute, so universal, that every Jew would come to serve as a priest. ‘For he left no excuse for ignorance.’70
Distinctiveness, in the age of an empire that proclaimed itself universal, might well rank as defiance. The more that different peoples found themselves joined together under the rule of Rome, so the more did Jews, hugging the Covenant close to their hearts, assert their status as a people apart. To the Roman elite, schooled in the range of human custom as only the masters of the world could be, they appeared paradigms of perversity. ‘Everything that we hold sacred they scorn; everything that we regard as taboo they permit.’71 Yet these idiosyncrasies, while they certainly provoked suspicion, were capable of inspiring admiration as well. Among Greek intellectuals, the Jews had long been viewed as a nation of philosophers. Their presence in Alexandria, in the bustling streets that lay beyond the city’s library, rendered the story of how the Israelites had escaped Egypt – the Exodos, as it was called in Greek – a topic of particular fascination. Some philosophers claimed that Moses had been a renegade priest, and his followers a band of lepers; others cast him as a visionary, who had sought to fathom the mysteries of the cosmos. He was praised both for having forbidden the portrayal of gods in human form, and for having taught that there existed only a single deity. To scholars in the age of Augustus, he appeared a thinker fit for a rapidly globalising world. ‘For that which encompasses us all, including earth and sea – that which we call the heavens, the world and the essence of things – this one thing only is God.’72
That such an interpretation of Moses’ teachings owed more to the Stoics than to Torah did not alter a momentous truth: that the Jewish conception of the divine was indeed well suited to an age that had seen distances shrink and frontiers melt as never before. The God of Israel was a ‘great King over all the earth’.73 Author of the Covenant that bound him uniquely to the Jews, he was at the same time capable of promising love to ‘foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord’.74 Of these, in the great melting pot of the Roman Mediterranean, there were increasing numbers. Most, it was true, opted to lurk on the sidelines of the synagogue, and rest content there with a status not as Jews, but as theosebeis: ‘God-fearers’. Men in particular shrank from taking the ultimate step. Admiration for Moses did not necessarily translate into a willingness to go under the knife. Many of the aspects of Jewish life that appeared most ridiculous to outsiders – circumcision, the ban on eating pork – were dismissed by admirers of Moses’ teaching as much later accretions, the work of ‘superstitious tyrants and priests’.75 Jews themselves naturally disagreed; and yet there was, in the widespread enthusiasm for their prophets and their scriptures, a hint of just how rapidly the worship of their god might come to spread, were the prescriptions of the Torah only to be rendered less demanding.