The first great rebellion of the Israelites against Roman rule was as much the result of ethnic and religious tensions between Jews and Greeks as it was resentment of Roman arrogance and the hatred of the punitive taxes they imposed.

The Romans had first occupied Judea in 63 BC. It was always an uneasy occupation not helped by the Roman contempt for the Jewish people and their strange monotheistic religion. They suffered frequent indignities at Roman hands including Roman soldiers exposing themselves at religious festivals, and being mocked and jeered at as they left the Jewish Temple. The Romans chief obsession, however, was the raising and collection of taxes, the more the better, and they exploited the people mercilessly. They also took it upon themselves to appoint the Jewish High Priests from among known and favoured Jewish collaborators. The land of Israel was a tinderbox waiting to be lit.

In Jerusalem the soon to depart Roman Procurator Gellius Florus had entered the Jewish Temple and stolen valuables and silver, he said for the Emperor, but in reality to line his own pockets. This not only outraged the local populace but led to Florus being openly mocked and laughed at in the street. Roman nobles did not like being ridiculed, and the small Roman Garrison in Jerusalem was reinforced. A number of Jewish leaders were then rounded up and executed. In response the Jews attacked the Roman troops and wiped them out.

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, who is considered by many Jews to have been a traitor and was very much in the Roman camp, the revolt broke out in 66 AD in the region of Caesaria and was provoked by Greeks who were seen to be disrespectfully sacrificing birds outside a Synagogue during an important religious ceremony. Judea, which was always in a state of heightened tension, if only because the Jews seemed to hate each other far more than they hated the Romans, was at boiling point. Violence broke out and in the figure of Elianza ben Simon aka Hariana, they found someone to lead and direct it. As the violence spread the Jewish puppet King Agrippa II, perhaps knowing his own people only too well, fled to the Roman camp. The Roman Governor of nearby Syria Cestius Gallus, yet again faced with a revolt by this disputatious and troublesome of people, tried to quell the revolt. His attempt to do so ended disastrously when his complacency led to his legions being crushed at the Battle of Beth Horon. It now dawned on the Romans that this was no local affair but a full-scale rebellion, and as they scrambled around for a response the rebellion quickly spread.

The Emperor Nero, for whom politics was never his first love, dismissed Gallus and appointed the ambitious General Vespasian to crush the revolt. With his son Titus and an army of 60,000, many of whom were Jews loyal to Agrippa, he began by crushing the revolt in the north. In this he remained virtually unopposed due to the Jewish propensity to fight each other rather than the Romans, and many Jewish towns surrendered without a fight. There was also a lot of talk amongst the Jewish leadership of coming to a negotiated settlement with the Romans. Indeed, as they fled south most of the Jewish leaders of the northern revolt were murdered by Zealots and Sicarii fanatics who could not tolerate anyone who advocated surrender. The Zealots had no doubts as to the righteousness of their cause and believed that any means were justified to obtain Jewish religious and political freedom. Even so, the rebellion in Galilee was easily crushed. Josephus reported that as many as a 100,000 Jews were either killed or sold into slavery.

In the meantime, events had taken a dramatic turn back in Rome. In 68 AD the Emperor Nero had been toppled, forced to flee the city and commit suicide. His successor was the veteran General Galba but his reign lasted only a few months. His misguided attempt to root out corruption and restore discipline leading to him being murdered by his own troops. Vespasian, hearing of this immediately left Judea for Rome with the intention of taking the Imperial Purple for himself. He assigned his son Titus the task of crushing the Jews. 

The Romans under Titus met little resistance during their advance on Jerusalem, the Jews were still too busy killing each other, and by 69 AD the Romans stood outside the city’s walls and Jerusalem was effectively under siege. The Jews in Jerusalem had been expecting a long siege however, and had made provision for it by stockpiling food. The Zealots, learning of this, destroyed the stockpile believing that it would undermine the Jewish willingness to fight. It was an act of madness but one that summed up quite well the strain of insanity that seemed to infect the leaders of the Jewish Revolt. They would soon regret their decision, for Titus was methodical in his approach to warfare and was in no rush to storm the city. He was still buoyed at the good news from Rome, for on 21 December 69 AD his father Vespasian had been made Emperor following the defeat of his rival Vitellius the previous day.  

As the months wore on the people of Jerusalem starved as the suicidal civil war continued around them. Those Jews who managed to escape were killed by the Romans as rebels; those who tried to escape the city but failed were killed by the Zealots and Sicarii as traitors. By the summer of 70 AD the Romans were making incursions into the city but they were made to pay a heavy price as the Jews fought ferociously for every inch of their land. Still it wasn’t until the fall of the city appeared imminent that the two Zealot leaders Eliazar ben Simon and John of Gischala, and the Sicarii leader Simon Bar Giora at last joined forces in the defence of Jerusalem. All the people of Jerusalem took to arms, men, women and children, in these last desparate days; but the walls of the city had been breached and the outcome was inevitable. On 29 July, the Jewish Temple was ransacked and destroyed, despite Titus ordering its preservation. It was never to be rebuilt. Simon Bar Giora, who commanded the defence of the Temple, died in the fighting. John of Gischala escaped and surrendered himself to King Agrippa II and was to spend the rest of his life in prison. Those Sicarii who escaped in the last frantic and confused moments of the battle headed for the fortress of Masada.

Masada stood perched atop an 1800 foot high plateau and was a formidable structure. It was here that the last drama of the Great Jewish Revolt was to be played out. But it wasn’t until 72 AD that the new Roman Governor Lucius Flavius Silva, decided to eliminate the last remaining thorn in the side of Roman rule in Judea. Flavius set about besieging the fortress building ramparts around and leading up to it so that battering rams could be used against its walls. The Sicarii did very little to impede his progress instead they continued to raid nearby towns that they felt were uncooperative or had collaborated with the Romans, killing many hundreds more of their own people.

The fortress of Masada was commanded by Eleazor ben Ya’ir (Who may have been Eleazor ben Simon) and the people within numbered around 950, mostly women and children. The actual siege lasted 2 months and the defenders managed to repulse some half-hearted Roman assaults but once a breach in the walls had been made it was only a short matter of time before the Romans launched a full-scale assault. Eleazor ben Ya’ir gathered his people around and ordered that they must all now take their own lives.  As suicide is anathema to Judaism it was decided that people would draw lots to see who would kill whom. Then only the last man would have to commit suicide, possibly Eleazor ben Ya’ir himself. The mass-suicide was designed to show the Romans that the Jewish people would rather die than acknowledge defeat, be sold into slavery, and witness the destruction of their religion. When the Romans entered the fortress they found only 2 women and 5 children still alive, and were almost certainly sold into slavery.

The Great Jewish Revolt against Roman rule had come to an end, it wasn’t to be the last, but never again was Roman rule seriously threatened. Its consequences were severe as hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and sold into slavery, and many, many more were to die of starvation and disease. It also marked the beggining of the Jewish diaspora  as large swathes of the population fled far and wide in an attempt to escape the dead hand of Roman oppression.