The Ark

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Stephen Llewelyn discusses the Bar Kochba Revolt and its consequences for Jews and Christians.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Messiah

Rachael Kohn: Handel's Messiah proclaims the birth of Jesus, the child who was to become the anointed of his people.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

There were others who were proclaimed Messiah before and after the rise of Jesus. One of them is Bar Kochba, who led an armed revolt against the Romans in the 2nd century. Bar Kochba made the news recently, as some scroll fragments from his time were found by archaeologist Hanan Eshel. What followed surprised everyone, police questioning and a threat of criminal charges being laid.

Stephen Llewelyn of Macquarie University explains why the reaction was so harsh.

Stephen Llewelyn: What prompted it, I think, is that they want to discourage the trading in antiquities in an illegal way. They want to stop the black market, because it encourages people to go out and unlawfully dig and sell antiquities. But of course Eshel was acting in good faith in what he did.

Rachael Kohn: He encountered a Bedouin selling fragments somewhere in the desert?

Stephen Llewelyn: That's right, yes. And nothing came of that. However he went away for a while, he had to go to America. When he returned, they were still for sale, and he says that they were in a worse condition, and so he acted to save them and bought them, and in due course handed them over to the antiquities authority in Israel.

Rachael Kohn: Who should have been grateful.

Stephen Llewelyn: At no cost to them, and $3,000 to his own university.

Rachael Kohn: You mentioned four fragments. What exactly were they?

Stephen Llewelyn: Yes, they were four fragments from a scroll, the book of Leviticus, which is one of the Torah scrolls, basically four fragments, only three which could be read, two of them could be joined together and they were only very small parts of chapters 23 and 24. These being not a documentary text, but a literary text, means that it cannot be dated in any date on itself, it is dated by handwriting. So he must have, when he first saw it, been able to date it to be Bar Kochba period by its handwriting. As such, it is significant because it is just an attestation of the text at an important time.

Rachael Kohn: Now you mentioned Bar Kochba, who was quite a figure in ancient Palestine, Roman Palestine. Can you explain what prompted his revolt against the Romans which made that period so important?

Stephen Llewelyn: Well it's hard to determine what exactly was the motivation, as the historians do differ in terms of the alleged causes. We have no Josephus that gives an in-depth account of this revolt, and we have him telling a very full account of the first revolt between 66 and 70 AD.

Rachael Kohn: And the Bar Kochba revolt was, what, about 60 years later?

Stephen Llewelyn: Yes, from about 132, 133 to 135 AD. Now the causes are various. You have the loss of the Temple, the loss of statehood, so both the religious loss and the political loss occurred in AD 70. There was still a Messianic movement current amongst the Jews of Palestine, and this surfaced right around the Roman Empire in around 115 AD, and there were revolts in Egypt, in Cyrene, in Cyprus, in Mesopotamia, and also in Palestine itself in the years 115 to 117.

Rachael Kohn: When you say Messianic, you're talking about Jews who are expecting the Messiah to save them, these being the Jews who haven't followed the Christian Messiah?

Stephen Llewelyn: That's right. It is those who are still waiting for the redemption of Israel through a Messianic figure. I mean after all, Messiah just means 'anointed', and in the period of the Hebrew Bible, various figures were anointed: the High Priest, the King for example, and Prophets also, and the Messiah engendered all these and in fact the sectarians at Qumran, those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed in two Messiahs, one a Davidic or kingly Messiah and another a priestly Messiah.

Rachael Kohn: Well there's the Messianic hope, but Jews at that time under the Romans were struggling under various oppressions; was that also one of the reasons for the rise of this figure?

Stephen Llewelyn: Oh yes indeed, there was economic hardship at the time, but there were more direct and immediate causes of the revolt. Firstly, in around about 131 AD, Hadrian issued a decree forbidding on pain of death, castration of males, and this caught up the act of circumcision as well within it. It may have been well-intentioned, but it had a consequence for the Jews that they could not practice circumcision. So that was an added dimension in the mix.

Another problem was that Hadrian, when he took over from Trajan, toured his empire. He was practising a different policy, one of consolidation rather than expansion. When he came to Jerusalem he decided to rebuild the city as a Roman city, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and he was going to build, supposedly on the Temple Mount itself, a temple to Jupiter, and of course this would inflame the situation because this was a holy site for the Jewish people.

Rachael Kohn: What do we know about Bar Kochba himself? Are there archeological remains that tell us something about how he saw himself?

Stephen Llewelyn: Oh yes. We have the histories themselves, which tell us some interesting stories, and we also have the rabbinic literature that do comment on it also. We know that the major, or most significant rabbi of the day, Rabbi Akiva claimed that he was the Messiah, and that gave rise to his name, changed from Bar Kosibar to Bar Kochba which is 'Son of the Star', which is a Messianic expression of a Messianic hope. We know something of him from the histories. For example, to assure the dedication of his soldiers, they had to remove a finger.

Rachael Kohn: That wouldn't help you as a warrior, would it?

Stephen Llewelyn: I don't know, probably on their left hand. And we know other things, but we actually have surviving letters, and you can try to read between the lines to see what sort of personality he has. He does appear a quite demanding leader.

Rachael Kohn: There were a lot of coins that he minted, and they are amongst the most popular things you can buy in Israel today, many of them probably not as authentic as people claim.

Stephen Llewelyn: Yes, a lot of coins turn up. It's important to realise that coinage in the ancient world was a form of propaganda, and so this features on the coins, both the image and the text that was printed there. Texts like 'For the redemption of Israel' and so forth, appear on the text. It was a statement of Bar Kochba's aim.

Rachael Kohn: Are there any other interesting findings in caves around the Judean desert?

Stephen Llewelyn: Oh, of course important finds occurred around the Qumran area and of course we know those as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Moving further south, there were finds at a place called Wadi Murabaat and also Nahal Darga. Further down, at Marabat and Nahal Darga, they are coming from the Bar Kochba period, so they are later than the Dead Sea Scroll finds, so they are coming from the 130s and so forth.

Rachael Kohn: Stephen, do you think the Bar Kochba revolt was in any way inspired by the revolt of the Maccabees against the Greeks 300 years before?

Stephen Llewelyn: No doubt it was. They both had the same objective: primarily to overthrow a foreign rule that had become oppressive. According to the Maccabees' literature, it was Antiochus Epiphanes who had actually imposed an edict against the religion which forbade amongst other things, circumcision, which Hadrian had just effectively done, and the Temple had been desecrated. So one of the moves was to re-dedicate the Temple. So that revolt started in 167 BC and the Temple was dedicated some three years later in 164 BC, which of course is celebrated at this season in Hanukkah.

Rachael Kohn: Stephen, in Roman Palestine, neither Jews nor Christians were very fond of the Romans. What did the Christians think of the Bar Kochba revolt?

Stephen Llewelyn: Well it's hard to know exactly. The Jewish Christian church had left Jerusalem by the time of its fall and their attitude towards it is not recorded, because in a sense, much of their literature and so forth dies out in time. There may be occasional references in the church fathers to the issue, but the evidence is not much as to their attitude.

As far as their attitude to the Romans of course, you can see it in the attitude of the Book of Revelation where Rome is Babylon, and the harlot, and so they are sharing in fact, in the same Messianic, apocalyptic expectations as the Jews of their time, which gave rise to such events as the Bar Kochba revolt.

Rachael Kohn: Except for the main difference that Christians had their Messiah, and the Jews still believed that there was one to come. So they would have had some difficulty with the claims of Bar Kochba being the Messiah.

Stephen Llewelyn: Oh yes, and of course the ways had been parting for some years. With leaving Jerusalem, with the fall of the Temple and Jerusalem, the pluralism and the open tolerance of various forms of Judaism and Christianity would have fallen within one of the forms perhaps of Judaism, in fact they still attended the Temple. When the Temple fell, and the political institutions fell, there was a limiting of power, there was a limiting of the array that Judaism could take. Power structures naturally changed, and the Pharisaic movement came gradually to the fore.

In many ways they were close to the Christians, but this does not necessarily lead to a friendship, and so for some time, they had been going their separate ways. Christians also felt excluded from the synagogues, and of course they entered into polemic with the Jews as well, and this of course is shown most clearly in the polemic, the unjust polemic of John's gospel.

Rachael Kohn: Finally I guess one could say that Jews paid the highest price after the Bar Kochba revolt.

Stephen Llewelyn: Oh indeed they did. Over half a million dead, a lot enslaved, and the authorities say that so many Jews went on to the slave market that they were being sold at less than the price of a horse. And then of course there was the physical damage, the destruction to the towns and cities.

Rachael Kohn: And expulsion.

Stephen Llewelyn: Yes, indeed. One consequence of the revolt was that they were excluded from entering to Jerusalem and its environs. And I wonder whether that is the cause in the Passover service, the Seder, when they say at the end of the service, 'Next year in Jerusalem', the hope that one day they would return and be able to practice their religion in their national capital.

Rachael Kohn: Stephen Llewelyn is senior lecturer at Macquarie University's Ancient History Department in Sydney, specialising in Greek papyri and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Next week, we revisit the Blue Eyed Jesus, the making of a popular icon. That's on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Dr Stephen Llewelyn
teaches in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University in NSW. His research interests include New Testament Studies; Papyrology; Qumran and Second Temple Judaism; The Dead Sea Scrolls and Greek and Hebrew languages.