The heroic resistance in Gaza today has tragic echoes of another anti-imperial uprising from antiquity, writes Sean Ledwith

In the last few months of 2023, the world has looked on in horror at a pitiless assault on Gaza by the Israeli military machine. Palestinian civilians have been massacred in huge numbers by a technologically superior force, acting with the tacit support of the US, the global hegemon of the West. Despite massive protests around the world, the callous indifference of the Zionist state to the suffering of innocents has been breathtaking. The tragic historical irony of the situation is that over two thousand years ago, it was the Jewish people who were the victims of a pitiless and callous campaign by an imperial force in the same territory. In 66CE, the Roman province of Judaea was the site of a vast and heroic insurrection by the brutalised Jewish population against the exploitation and tyranny they were enduring at the hands of the imperial hegemon of the era. 

Iron fist

Despite the savagery of the Roman intervention – estimated to have killed a million people in the climactic siege of Jerusalem – the anti-imperial resistance in the province sustained implacable opposition over a seven-year period and played a role in bringing down the infamously cruel reign of the Emperor Nero. In 132CE, rebellion re-ignited and provoked another disproportionately violent response from Rome, leading to the expulsion of the Jewish people from the region for centuries.

The smashing of the Jewish Revolt would have huge repercussions across the Mediterranean world in the first century CE and is the crucial political backdrop to the rise of Christianity. The non-violent message of Jesus would resonate with terrorised populations throughout the region, who had witnessed the barbarism inflicted by the Roman legions on anyone who stood up to them. Engels studied the early years of Christianity and reflected on how it was indubitably shaped by the legacy of failed revolution:

For all of them paradise lay lost behind them, for the ruined free men it was the former polis, the town and the state at the same time, of which their forefathers had been free citizens; for the war captive slaves the time of freedom before their subjection and captivity; for the small peasants the abolished gentile social systems and communal landownership. All that had been smitten down by the levelling iron fist of conquering Rome.‘

The Gospel of St Matthew, probably written in the period after the insurrection, retrospectively incorporates Jesus prophesying the bloody events of 70CE:

‘Ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars … For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. … When ye shall therefore see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place … Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains.’

Qumran

As the Roman army conducted mopping up operations in the aftermath of the rebellion, one of the places it appears to have encountered further resistance is the isolated settlement of Qumran, on the northwest edge of the Dead Sea. Modern excavations discovered Roman arrowheads in the ashes of the site, most likely the remnants of a clash between the legions and die-hard elements of the Jewish anti-imperial resistance from the first century. Qumran is frequently cited as a stronghold of the Essene religious movement, one of the multiple politico-religious factions that sprang up in Judaea during the turbulent era preceding and following the traditional timeline for the life of Jesus from about 4BCE to 30CE. 

The enigmatic Essenes adopted a behavioural code that could be termed proto-communist and puritanical, with strong emphases on washing, ritual meals and abstinence. The monk-like and male-only lifestyle of the Essenes even brought them to the attention of the contemporary Roman historian Pliny who commented: ‘they inspire our admiration more than any other community in the whole world. They live without women … without money and without any company save that of the palm trees.‘

Survival of the Scrolls

The movement sprang into the consciousness of the twentieth-century media with the spectacular discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, starting in 1947 and continuing for the next decade or so. The story of their re-emergence after centuries of being hidden from view resembles scenes from an Indiana Jones movie. As the Nakba was being planned by the Zionist leadership in then British-controlled Palestine, a Bedouin shepherd by the name of  Muhammed edh-Dhib was looking for a lost goat in the hills surrounding Qumran. In desperation he threw a rock into an elevated cave. To his surprise, the projectile produced a sound that he recognised as breaking pottery.

Climbing into the cave, Muhammed and two cousins came across six cylindrical storage jars, containing seven carefully wrapped linen scrolls. Thankfully, the scrolls made their way to biblical scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who had to navigate their safe passage through the dual threats of a deteriorating political situation as British rule disintegrated into partition, and the challenges of the lucrative black-market trade in antiquities. The dryness of the desert conditions had fortuitously preserved the texts in a remarkably good state and the scholars were able to date some of them back as far as the first century BCE.

Jesus at Qumran?

The Scrolls have acquired a Dan Brown-style aura of conspiracy and cover-up in the decades since their unearthing, largely thanks to the decision of the Vatican to restrict access them for many years, except to approved scholars. As their creation probably overlapped with the lifetime of Jesus, theories inevitably developed that they contained evidence that undermined the credibility of Church doctrine. It was even suggested that the founder of Christianity himself might have been a resident at Qumran at one point. The scrolls do contain intriguing references to an unnamed ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ who appears to have played a leadership role in the activities of the Essenes. Most scholars today, however, believe this refers to a figure from an earlier period, and not to Jesus, as Qumran is never mentioned in the Gospels. Only following a leak by the American academic, Robert E Eisenman in 1989, did a full set of the Scrolls come into public view.

Treasure trove

Not all modern commentators accept that the Scrolls are the work of the Essenes, and it is noticeable that the group are nowhere referred to within the texts. However the proximity of the caves to Qumran certainly makes some form of connection between the two likely. It is also likely the Scrolls were placed in the caves for safe keeping shortly before the Roman attack. One of the rooms at Qumran is referred to as a scriptorium by some archaeologists and may have functioned as a library and place of study. Clearly the owners of the Scrolls never got the chance to return for them.

For biblical scholars, the Scrolls were an unprecedented treasure trove of documentation as, before their discovery, the earliest surviving version of the complete Hebrew Old Testament could only be traced back to about 1000CE. One of the documents unearthed from Qumran was a copy of the Book of Isaiah that can dated from 100BCE, virtually a millennium earlier therefore than the previous earliest complete copy. Of the eight hundred partial or complete texts that have been identified, most fall into one of three classifications: most are versions of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the OT), or other biblical books such as the Prophets and the Psalms.

The Community Rule scroll exhorts its readers to pursue a spirit of spiritual and intellectual inquiry and ‘to do what is good and right before Him as He commanded by the hand of Moses’. A second group is religious literature that would seem to be specific to the Essenes such as poems, calendars and even horoscopes (excluded by more traditional Jewish movements). This collection includes a denunciation of  the Second Temple constructed by Herod the Great in the early first century as part of his policy of appeasing the Roman occupiers and trying to make them more acceptable to the Jewish population: ‘They shall not profane the city where I abide for I, the Lord, abide amongst the children of Israel for ever and ever.‘

End of days

The third group of texts, intriguingly, relate to politico-military aspects of Essene organisation, including the War Scroll which outlines battle plans in remarkable detail. These vary from the order of advance by the soldiers of the Lord to the more prosaic requirements of battlefield latrines! The authors of the Scroll explicitly anticipate some form of apocalyptic confrontation with what they term the Sons of Darkness:

‘The first attack of the Sons of Light shall be undertaken against the forces of the Sons of Darkness, the army of Belial: the troops of Edom, Moab, the sons of Ammon, the Amalekites, Philistia, and the troops of the Kittim of Asshur. Supporting them are those who have violated the covenant. The sons of Levi, the sons of Judah, and the sons of Benjamin, those exiled to the wilderness, shall fight against them with all their troops, when the exiles of the Sons of Light return from the Wilderness of the Peoples to camp in the Wilderness of Jerusalem.’

The War Scroll is difficult to date, but the Essenes are generally regarded to have been active between about 150BCE to the smashing of the Jewish Revolt in the 70sCE. The Sons of Darkness or Kittim (the enemy) noted above could therefore refer to any of the hostile invaders who plagued Palestine in this era: from the Greek Seleucids who tried to exterminate Judaism as a political force at the beginning of that timeline to the Romans who practically succeeded at the end of it. If there was a climactic battle at Qumran, the Jewish forces might have died with the words of the War Scroll on their lips: ‘This is the day appointed by Him for the defeat and overthrow of the Prince of the kingdom of wickedness.’

The eschatological language of the scroll highlights the feverish politics of the Eastern Mediterranean as the vast empire of Alexander of Macedon, created in the Fourth Century BCE fragmented and then crumbled before the rising power of Rome from about the Second Century BCE. The historic importance of the Fertile Crescent as a crossroads of civilisations and trade made it a battleground, as these competing imperial systems clashed in a conjunctural struggle for hegemony. 

Powder keg 

Amongst the Jewish people, there were inevitably diverse responses to the imperial incursions, with some of these variations founded on class differences. The Hasmonean royal dynasty, who drove out the Greeks around 150BCE, initiated a line of aristocratic priest-kings that dominated Judaean politics until the decisive Roman takeover in 4BCE. The family of Herod the Great – known as the Herodians – unashamedly presented itself as a collaborationist faction that the occupiers could rely on to enforce a strict regime of internal repression and punitive taxation. Similarly, the Sadducees are familiar to readers of the New Testament as a Jerusalem-based priestly caste who slavishly followed a non-political form of Jewish orthodoxy that frequently brought them into conflict with Jesus’ more radical ideas about the centrality of the law.

Also featured in the Christian Gospels are the Pharisees, a marginally more liberal group that prioritised education and a willingness to engage in philosophical debate. Jesus, however, noticeably also clashed with this group, memorably denouncing them as ‘whitened sepulchres’. The most radical of the Jewish sects featured in the New Testament are the Zealots, an explicitly political faction, rooted in the indebted peasantry, dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the Roman state in Judea by armed insurrection. The volatile interactions of these groups, along with the Essenes, turned the Roman occupation of Judaea into a powder keg that detonated in 66CE.

Renegade

Our main historical source for the Jewish Revolt is a renegade commander in the Jewish military resistance. Josephus was born into an aristocratic Jerusalem family in 37CE and had spent time in Rome and also among the Essenes. When the rebellion erupted in the spring of 66CE – triggered by the egregious tributary demands of a Roman governor – Josephus was dispatched to Galilee, in the north of the province, to fortify the town of Jotapata. After defying the legions for a few months and facing inevitable defeat, Josephus infamously devised a suicide pact with his fellow officers – one which he somehow managed to survive! He submitted to the Roman general Vespasian and cannily predicted the latter would shortly be crowned as the new emperor. Josephus’ acquaintance with Roman politics served him well at this point, as the downfall of Nero in 68CE was eventually followed by the accession of Vespasian the following year. Having saved his own skin with cynical but well-timed manoeuvring, Josephus observed the climactic and merciless Roman assault on Jerusalem in 70CE. The city fell in September of that year with a catastrophic loss of Jewish lives and the destruction of Herod’s Temple. Josephus described the aftermath: 

‘And truly, the very view itself was a melancholy thing; for those places which were before adorned with trees and pleasant gardens, were now become desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change. For the war had laid all signs of beauty quite waste. ’

Masada and beyond

The rebellion that commenced in 66CE was decisively ended at the desert fortress of Masada, about thirty miles south of Qumran, seven years later. About one hundred Zealots and their families committed suicide – according to Josephus – rather than submit to the iron fist of Rome. In the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness in that era, the outcome was a devastating defeat for the former.

Twenty-one centuries later, the clash between oppressed and oppressor is now on a global scale, with the future of the planet at stake, not just a province of the Roman Empire. As the latter-day descendants of Nero and Vespasian threaten to plunge humanity and the whole of nature into ‘the abomination of desolation,’ not all the Sons (and Daughters) of Light in the twenty-first century need the guise of religion in order to fight for a better world. The common purpose of all those participating, in multiple forms and locations, in the global struggle for equality and liberation is to ensure a different outcome this time.