Caesar's decrees marked the culmination of Roman tolerance, and the Jews enjoyed their privileges for but a short time. It is related by the historian Suetonius that they lamented his death more bitterly than any other class.[1] And they had good reason. The Republicans, who had murdered him, and his ministers, who avenged him, vied with each other for the support of the Jewish princes; but the people in Palestine suffered from the burden that the rivals imposed on the provinces in their efforts to raise armies. Antipater and his ambitious sons Herod and Phasael contrived to maintain their tyranny amid the constant shifting of power; and when the hardy mountaineers of Galilee strove under the lead of one Hezekiah (Ezekias), the founder of the party of the Zealots, to shake off the Roman yoke, Herod ruthlessly put down the revolt. But when Antigonus, the son of that Aristobulus who had been deprived of his kingdom by Hyrcanus and Pompey, roused the Parthians to invade Syria and Palestine, the Jews eagerly rose in support of the scion of the Maccabean house, and drove out the hated Idumeans with their puppet Jewish king. The struggle between the people and the Romans had begun in earnest, and though Antigonus, when placed on the throne by the Parthians, proceeded to spoil and harry the Jews, rejoicing at the restoration of the Hasmonean line, thought a new era of independence had come.
[Footnote 1: Suetonius, Caesar, lxxxiv. 7.]
The infatuation of Mark Antony for Cleopatra enabled Antigonus to hold his kingdom for three years (40-37 B.C.E.). Then Herod, who had escaped to Rome, returned to Syria to conquer the kingdom that Antony had bestowed on him. He brought with him the Roman legions, and for two years a fierce struggle was waged between the Idumeans, Romans, and Romanizing Jews on the one hand, and the national Jews and Parthian mercenaries of Antigonus on the other. The struggle culminated in a siege of Jerusalem. As happened in all the contests for the city, the power of trained force in the end prevailed over the enthusiasm of fervent patriots. Herod stormed the walls, put to death Antigonus and his party, and established a harsher tyranny than even the Roman conqueror had imposed. For over thirty years he held the people down with the aid of Rome and his body-guard of mercenary barbarians. His constitution was an autocracy, supplemented by assassination. In the civil war between Antony and Octavian, he was first on the losing side, as his father had been in the struggle between Pompey and Caesar; but, like his father, he knew when to go over to the victor. The master of the Roman Empire, henceforth known as Augustus, was so impressed with his carriage and resolution that he not only confirmed him in his kingdom, but added to it the territories of Chalcis and Perea to the north and east of the Jordan. Throughout his reign Herod contrived to preserve the friendship of Rome as effectually as he contrived to arouse the hatred of his Jewish subjects. "The Imperial Eagle and some distinguished Roman or other," says George Adam Smith,[1] "were always fixed in Herod's heaven." He ruled with a strong but merciless hand. He insured peace, and while he turned his own home into a slaughter-house, he glorified the Jewish dominion outwardly to a height and magnificence it had never before attained. Yet the Jewish deputation that went to plead before Augustus on his death declared that "Herod had put such abuses on them as a wild beast would not have done, and no calamity they had suffered was comparable with that which he had brought on the nation."[2] Beneath the fine show of peace, splendor, and expansion, the passions of the nation were being aroused to the breaking-point.
[Footnote 1: Jerusalem, ii. 504.]
[Footnote 2: Ant. XVII. xi. 2.]
Augustus himself, following the example of his uncle Julius Caesar, yet lacking the same large tolerance, held towards Judaism an ambiguous attitude of impartiality rather than of favor. He caused sacrifices to be offered for himself at the Temple at Jerusalem,[1] but he praised his nephew Gaius for having refrained from doing likewise during his Eastern travels.[2] He was anxious that the national laws and customs of each nation should be preserved, and he issued a decree in favor of the Jews of Cyrene; but he initiated the worship of the Emperors, which necessitated a conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar, and in the end destroyed the religious liberty that Julius Caesar had given to the Empire. His aim was at once to foster the veneration of the Imperial power and establish an Imperial worship that should replace the effete paganism of his subjects. He made no attempt to force this worship on the Jews, but its existence fanned the prejudice against the one nation that refused to participate. And the Jews could not but look with distrust on a government that "derived its authority from the deification of might, whereof the Emperor was the incarnate principle."[3]
[Footnote 1: Philo, De Leg. ii. 507.]
[Footnote 2: Suetonius, Aug. 93.]
[Footnote 3: Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, p. 108.]
Marcus Agrippa, the trusted minister of Augustus, was also an intimate friend of Herod, and served to link the two courts. But on the death of Herod, in 4 C.E., the friendship of Rome for the Idumean royal house was modified. Archelaus, who claimed the whole succession, was appointed simply as ethnarch of Judea, while Herod's two other sons, Philip and Herod Antipas, divided the rest of his dominions. The Zealots, rid of the powerful tyrant who had held them down, sought again to throw off the hated yoke of Idumea, which, not without reason, they identified with the yoke of Rome. With their watchword, "No king but God," they attempted to make Judea independent, and a fierce struggle, known as the War of Varus, ensued. Jerusalem was stormed once again by Roman legions before the Zealots were subdued. Archelaus was deposed by his masters after a few years, and the province of Judea was placed under direct Roman administration. The Roman procurator was at first less detested than the Idumean tyrant, since he interfered less with the legal institutions, such as the Sanhedrin and the Bet Din; but his presence with the legionaries in the Holy City and his constant, though often involuntary, affronts to the religious sentiments of the people roused the hostility of the nationalist party, who looked forward to the day when Israel should "tread on the neck of the Eagle." The Pharisees, who were anxious for the spiritual rather than the political independence of the Jews, counseled submission to Rome, and were willing "to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," so long as they were not compelled to give up the Torah. But the Zealots desired political as well as religious freedom, and they fomented rebellion. They have been compared by Merivale to the Montagnards of the French Revolution, driven by their own indomitable passion to assert the truths that possessed them with a ferocity that no possession could justify. They were continually rousing the people to expel the foreign rulers, and in the northern province of Galilee, where they found shelter amid the wild tracts of heath and mountain, they maintained a constant state of insurrection.[1]