Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

II

JERUSALEM

63

BC

: J

ERUSALEM

A violent shuddering of masonry, the collapse of an entire tower, and a great rent was left in the line of fortifications. As the dust cleared, so legionaries were already piling into the gap. Officers, eager to secure the glory of the feat for themselves, led their men over the mounds of rubble, scrambling up through the breach. Eagles – the battle-standards of the Roman army – bobbed over the fray. The defenders, whose obduracy and courage had been powerless in the final reckoning to stop the advance of Pompey’s battering rams, knew themselves doomed. Many chose to torch their own homes rather than leave them to be looted by their conquerors; others to hurl themselves from the battlements. Some twelve thousand in all, when the work of killing was finally done, lay littered as corpses across the city. ‘Roman casualties, though, were very light.’¹ Pompey was an efficient general. Four years had passed since his meeting with Posidonius, and in that time he had swept the Mediterranean clear of pirates, humbled a succession of Near Eastern potentates, and brought their kingdoms directly under the sway of Rome. Now, after a three-month siege, he had added another victory to his stunning roster of battle-honours. Jerusalem was his.

The city, distant as it was from the sea, and isolated from major trade routes, was in many ways a backwater. Judaea, the kingdom of which it was the capital, ranked as very much a second-rate power. To Pompey, a man who had swaggered his way around much of the Mediterranean, it could hardly help but seem a bit lacking in glamour. Nevertheless, Jerusalem was not entirely without interest. Its conqueror, who had a connoisseur’s fascination with monumental architecture, and viewed the oddities of defeated peoples as so much grist to his own fame, took considerable delight in the exotic. The Jews, for all that they looked and dressed much like other people, were renowned for their peculiarities. They refused to eat pork. They circumcised their sons. They rested every seventh day, to mark what they termed the Sabbath. Most perversely of all, they refused to pay respects to any god save for the single one they acknowledged as their own. Even the dues of worship demanded by this jealous and exacting deity were liable to seem to Greeks or Romans bizarrely exclusive. In all the world, there stood only a single shrine regarded by the vast majority of his devotees as legitimate. The Jewish Temple, raised on a plateau of rock named Mount Moria on the eastern flank of Jerusalem, had for centuries dominated the skyline of the city. Naturally enough – now that the siege had been concluded – Pompey was keen to pay it a visit.

In truth, his attention had been fixed on the Temple complex ever since he first appeared with his legions before the walls that surrounded it. Long after the rest of Jerusalem had surrendered, defenders there had persisted in defying him; and now the great rock on which it stood was piled with bodies and sticky with blood. That Jews might be dogmatic in their eccentric beliefs was something of which Pompey was well aware; for the refusal of his opponents to fight on the Sabbath had greatly eased the task of his engineers in constructing their siege works. Now, though, the Temple was secured; and Pompey, as he approached its gateways, did so in a spirit of respect as well as of curiosity. That the Jews gave their god a barbarous name and ascribed perplexing commandments to him did not mean that he was any less worthy of reverence for that. To scholars learned in the study of the heavens, it appeared plain that ‘the Jews worshipped the supreme god – who was to be identified with the king of all the gods’.² Jupiter, the Romans called him – just as the Greeks knew him as Zeus. This practice, of identifying the gods worshipped in one land with those honoured in another, was a venerable one. For a millennium and more, diplomats had depended upon it to render practicable the very concept of international law. How, after all, were two powers to agree a treaty without invoking gods that both parties could acknowledge as valid witnesses to their covenant? Different rites might be practised in different cities; but Pompey, like other conquerors before him, never doubted that more united the various peoples of the world in their worship of the gods than divided them. Why, then, should he not inspect the Temple?

‘It was as a victor that he claimed the right to enter it.’³ That the Jews, jealous of the sanctity of their shrine, banned outsiders was hardly a consideration fit to perturb the conqueror of Jerusalem. His men, in capturing the Temple, had already stormed its outer courtyard. The priests, surprised as they were pouring libations and burning incense, had not so much as paused in their rites. Throughout the entire siege, twice a day, once in the morning and once at twilight, trumpets had sounded: the signal for the burning of a lamb on a great square altar. Now, though, piled up in the outer courtyard, priests lay slaughtered; and it was their blood, borne on the water that gushed from the base of the altar, that was being sluiced away. Pompey could not help but admire their fortitude in the face of death; but nothing about their ministrations would have struck him as particularly deserving notice. Sacrifices were practised across the Mediterranean, after all. The mystery for which the Temple was notorious awaited Pompey deep within the complex: a chamber treasured by the Jews as the single holiest place in the world. With such reverence did they regard this room that no one was permitted to enter it except for their high priest – and even then only once a year. To Greek scholars, the question of what might be found within this ‘Holy of Holies’ was a tantalising one. Posidonius, never knowingly without a theory, claimed that it contained a golden ass’s head. Others believed that it held ‘the stone image of a man with a long beard sitting on a donkey’.⁴ Others yet reported that it served as the prison of a Greek captive, who, after a year of being fattened up, would then, amidst awful solemnity, be sacrificed and devoured. Pompey, pausing before the curtain that screened the room from a treasure-filled antechamber, could have no certain idea what lay beyond.

In the event, he found only emptiness. There was no statue in the chamber, no image of any kind, and certainly no fattened prisoner – just a bare block of stone. Yet Pompey, although bemused, left not unimpressed by what he had seen. He refrained from stripping the Temple of its treasures. He ordered its custodians to scrub the complex clean of the marks of battle, and permitted them to perform the daily sacrifices. He appointed a new high priest. Then, freighted with prisoners, he departed Jerusalem, bound for a hero’s welcome back in Rome. Pompey could reflect with double satisfaction on his achievements in Judaea. The Jews had been roundly defeated, the boundaries of their kingdom redrawn in accord with Roman interests, and a swingeing tribute imposed. Simultaneously, due respect had been paid to their god. Pompey could bask in the assurance that he had fulfilled his duty, not just to Rome, but to the cosmos. Taking ship for home, he stopped off in Rhodes, where for a second time he called on Posidonius, presenting to the philosopher a living reassurance that the forging of a universal dominion, one that reflected the timeless order of the heavens, was proceeding apace. Posidonius, refusing to let an attack of arthritis deny him the chance to grandstand, signified approval of his visitor by delivering an oration from his sickbed. His theme, explored amid numerous flamboyant groans: ‘only what is honourable is good’.⁵

Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem, the perspective on Pompey’s conquests was – unsurprisingly – rather different. When Jews sought to make sense of their city’s fall, they did not look to philosophy. Instead, in pain and bewilderment, they turned to their god.

When the sinner became proud he struck down the fortified walls

with a battering ram,

and You did not restrain him.

Foreign nations went up to Your altar,

in pride they trampled it with their sandals.⁶

This howl of anguish, addressed to the god who had permitted his house to be stormed and his innermost sanctuary intruded upon, was not one that Pompey could ever realistically have hoped to calm. The respect that he believed himself to have shown the Jewish deity cut little ice with most Jews. The very idea of equating the Temple with the shrines of foreign gods was unspeakably offensive to them. Perhaps, had the man installed by Pompey as high priest met with his patron as an equal, he might have sought to explain why. That there was only the one God; and that the Temple stood as a replica of the universe that he alone had brought into being. In the robes worn by the high priest were to be seen mirrors held up to the cosmos; in the rituals he performed an echo of the divine labour of creation at the beginning of time; on the golden plate he wore on his forehead an awesome inscription, that of the name of God himself, which sacred custom ordained should only ever be uttered by the high priest – and even then only once a year, when he went into the Holy of Holies. To desecrate the Temple was to desecrate the universe itself. The Jews, no less than Posidonius, recognised in the expansion of Roman power an event that reverberated to the heavens.

‘To the victor is granted the right to lay down laws.’⁷ Such was the maxim that Pompey, as he deposed kings and redrew boundaries, took for granted. The Jews, though, in defiance of earthly power, claimed a status for themselves that no empire, not even one as mighty as Rome, could ever hope to emulate. Once, many generations back, when Troy was yet to be founded, and Babylon was still young, a man named Abram had lived in Mesopotamia. There, it was taught by Jewish scholars, he had come by a profound insight: that idols were mere painted stone or wood, and that there existed, unique, intangible and omnipotent, just the single deity. Rather than stay in a city polluted by idolatry, Abram had chosen instead to leave his home, travelling with his wife and household to the land that would one day be called Judaea, but was then known as Canaan. All was part of the divine plan. God, appearing to Abram, had told him that, despite the great age of his childless wife, she would bear him a son, and that his descendants would one day inherit Canaan: a ‘Promised Land’. As token of this, Abram was given a new name, ‘Abraham’; and it was commanded by God that he and his male heirs, all of them, down countless generations, be circumcised. Abraham, obedient to every divine instruction, did as he was told; and when, sure enough, he was rewarded with a child, and God told him to take this child, Isaac, to a high place, and there to sacrifice the boy, ‘your son, your only son, whom you love’,⁸ he showed himself willing to do it. Yet at the very last moment, even as Abraham was reaching for the cleaver, an angel spoke from the heavens, telling him to hold his hand; and Abraham, looking to where a ram had been caught in the thickets, had taken the animal and slain it on the altar. And God, because Abraham had been willing to offer in sacrifice the most precious thing that he had, confirmed the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. ‘And through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.’⁹

Where had this fateful episode taken place? Many generations later, when Abraham’s descendants had come to settle the Promised Land and to name it Israel, an angel had materialised for a second time over the site where Isaac had almost perished – and this site, so it was recorded by Jewish scholars, had been none other than Mount Moria. Past and future, earth and heaven, mortal endeavour and divine presence: all had stood revealed as conjoined. Jerusalem itself, at the time of the angel’s appearance, had only recently come under Israelite control. The man who had captured the city, a one-time shepherd boy and harpist by the name of David, from a small town called Bethlehem, had risen to become king over the whole of Israel; and now, at the very moment when he had established it as his capital, an angel had been sent to its heights, there to ‘show him the spot where the Temple was to be built’.¹⁰ David himself had been forbidden by God from embarking on the project; but under his son Solomon – a king of such wealth and wisdom that his name would ever after serve the Jews as a byword for splendour – Mount Moria had become ‘the mountain of the house of the Lord’.¹¹ It was Solomon, after the completion of the Temple, who had placed in the Holy of Holies the greatest treasure that the Israelites possessed: a gilded chest, or ark, made to precise specifications laid down by God himself, and in which his presence was manifest on earth. This, then, was the glory of Israel: that its Temple was truly the house of the Lord God.

But such a glory was not merely given; it had to be earned. The charge laid upon his people by God, to worship him as was his due, came hedged about with warnings. ‘See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse – the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse, if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God.’¹² Over the centuries that followed Solomon’s building of the Temple, the people had repeatedly strayed – and sure enough, after four hundred years of disobedience, they had reaped a bitter harvest. First, the Assyrians conquered the north of the Promised Land: ten of the twelve tribes who traced their lineage back to Israel had been taken into captivity, and vanished into the maw of Mesopotamia. Not even the fall of Assyria to Babylon in 612 BC had seen them return. Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel, and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. ‘And he burnt the house of the Lord and the house of the king and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great house he burnt in fire.’¹³ Nothing of the Temple built by Solomon, not its fittings of cypress wood, nor its gilded gates, nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates, had been spared. Only ruins and weeds remained. And when in her turn Babylon had fallen, and the Persians had wrested from her the mantle of empire, and Cyrus had given permission for the Temple to be rebuilt, the complex that arose on Mount Moria was merely a shadow of what had stood before. ‘Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing?’¹⁴ Starkest of all the reminders of vanished glories was the Holy of Holies. The Ark, upon which the glory of God Himself, in a cloud of impenetrable darkness, had been accustomed to descend, was gone. No one could say for certain what its fate had been. Only the block of stone seen by Pompey when he stepped into the chamber, bare and unadorned, served to mark the spot where it had once stood.

And now foreign invaders had desecrated Mount Moria again. Even as the high priest and his acolytes sought to cleanse it of the traces of the Roman siege, and to restore to the Temple its accustomed rites, so were there Jews who scorned their efforts. Why, after all, would God have permitted an alien conqueror to trespass within the Holy of Holies unless it were to express his anger with its guardians? To critics of the Temple priests, the explanation for the catastrophe appeared manifest: ‘it was because the sons of Jerusalem had defiled the Lord’s sanctuary, they profaned the offerings to God with lawlessness’.¹⁵ Just as centuries previously, amid the calamities of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, men known as nevi’im, or ‘prophets’, had appeared, to urge their countrymen to reform their ways or else risk obliteration, so now, in the wake of Pompey’s conquests, were there Jews who in a similar manner despaired of the Temple establishment. ‘Because you have plundered many nations, the peoples who are left will plunder you.’¹⁶ Moralists convinced of God’s anger did not hesitate to apply this warning, delivered many centuries earlier, to the priests in Jerusalem. That Pompey had spared the treasures of the Temple did not mean that the troops of some future Roman warlord might not seize them. ‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong, their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour.’¹⁷ Only if the priests repented of their greed, and of their avarice for gold harvested from across the world, would they be spared. Otherwise, the judgement of God would be swift and certain: ‘their riches and loot will be given into the hands of the army of the Romans’.¹⁸

Most Jews, it was true, did not despair of the Temple and its guardians. The very scale of the wealth banked on Mount Moria served as the witness of that. As critics of its priests pointed out, the offerings made to the Temple derived not just from Judaea, but from across the civilised world. Many more Jews lived beyond the limits of the Promised Land than within them. For the vast majority of these, the Temple remained what it had ever been: the central institution of Jewish life. Yet it was not the only one. Had it been, then it would have been hard for Jews settled beyond the Promised Land to remain as Jews for long. Distance from the Temple, from its rituals, and sacrifices, and prayers, would gradually have seen their sense of Jewish identity blur and fade. But as it was, they did not need to travel to Jerusalem on one of the three pilgrim festivals held every year to feel themselves in the presence of God. Rather, they had only to go to one of the numerous houses of prayer and instruction that were to be found wherever Jews were congregated: a ‘house of assembly’, or ‘synagogue’. Here, boys would be taught to read, and adults schooled throughout their lives in the interpretation of some very specific texts. These, lovingly transcribed onto parchment scrolls, were kept, when they were not being studied, in a box that deliberately echoed the long-vanished Ark: an awesome marker of their holiness. Other peoples too could claim possession of texts from gods – but none were so charged with a sense of holiness, none so attentively heeded, none so central to the self-understanding of an entire people as the collection of writings cherished by Jews as their holiest scripture.

Torah, they called it: ‘teachings’. Five scrolls portrayed the original working of God’s purposes: from the creation of the world to the arrival on Canaan’s borders, after many hardships and wanderings, of Abraham’s descendants, ready at last to claim their inheritance. The story did not end there, though. There were many other writings held sacred by the Jews. There were histories and chronicles, detailing everything from the conquest of Canaan to the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple. There were records of prophecy, in which men who had felt the word of God like a burning fire within their bones gave it utterance. There were collections of proverbs, tales of inspirational men and women, and an anthology of poems named psalms. All these various writings, by many different hands over the course of many years, served to provide Jews beyond the Promised Land with a much-craved reassurance: that living in foreign cities did not make them any the less Jewish. Nor, three centuries on from Alexander’s conquest of the world, did the fact that the vast majority of them spoke not the language of their ancestors but Greek. A bare seventy years after Alexander’s death there had begun to emerge in Alexandria large numbers of Jews who struggled to understand the Hebrew in which most of their scriptures were written. The commission to translate them, so the story went, had come from none other than Demetrius of Phalerum. Keen to add to the stock of the city’s great library, he had sent to Jerusalem for seventy-two scholars. Arriving in Alexandria, these had set diligently to work translating the holiest text of all, the five scrolls, or pentateuch, as they were called in Greek.* Other texts had soon followed. Demetrius, so it was improbably claimed, had defined them as ‘philosophical, flawless – and divine’.¹⁹ Not merely books, they were hailed by Greek-speaking Jews as ta biblia ta hagia – ‘the holy books’.†

Here was the manifestation of a subtle yet momentous irony. A body of writings originally collated and adapted by scholars who took for granted the centrality of Jerusalem to the worship of their god was slipping its editors’ purposes: the biblia came to possess, for the Jews of Alexandria, a sanctity that rivalled that of the Temple itself. Wherever there existed a scribe to scratch their verses onto parchment, or a student to commit them to memory, or a teacher to explicate their mysteries, their sanctity was affirmed. Their eternal and indestructible nature as well. Such a monument, after all, was not easily stormed. It was not constructed out of wood and stone, to be levelled by a conquering army. Wherever Jews might choose to live, there the body of their scriptures would be present as well. Those in Alexandria or Rome, far distant from the Temple though they were, knew that they possessed in their holy books – and the Torah especially – a surer path to the divine than any idol could provide. ‘What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to Him?’²⁰

The Romans might have the rule of the world; the Greeks might have their philosophy; the Persians might claim to have fathomed the dimensions of truth and order; but all were deluded. Darkness covered the earth, and thick darkness was over the nations. Only once the Lord God of Israel had risen upon them, and his glory appeared over them, would they come into the light, and kings to the brightness of dawn.

For there was no other god but him.

Like Humans You Shall Die

Half a millennium and more before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians stormed the original Temple and burnt it to the ground, they transported the elite of the conquered kingdom to Babylon. There, in a city vast beyond their wildest imaginings, the exiles found themselves amid temples so steepling that they seemed to brush the sky. The greatest of them all, the Esagila, was hailed by the Babylonians as the oldest building in the world, and the very axis of the cosmos. No earthly hand had raised it. Instead, it was the gods who had erected its stupefying bulk, to serve as the palace of Marduk, the king of the heavens. Within it stood sculptures fashioned by Marduk himself, and a mighty bow: ‘marks never to be forgotten’²¹ of a victory won by the god at the beginning of time. Then it was, so the Babylonians claimed, that Marduk had fought with a dragon of terrifying size, a monster of the heaving ocean, and split her in two with his arrows, and fashioned the heavens and the earth from the twin halves of her corpse. Next, rather than condemn the gods to perpetual toil, Marduk had commissioned a further act of creation. ‘I will make man,’ he had declared, ‘who shall inhabit the earth, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.’²² Humanity, moulded out of dust and blood, had been bred to labour.

It would have been easy for the exiles from Jerusalem, numbed by defeat and a sense of their own puniness before the immensity of Babylon, to have accepted this bleak understanding of man’s purpose. But they did not. Rather than fall to the worship of Marduk, they clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, had been endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, which had seen heaven itself, and earth, and everything within them brought into being, had been created on the sixth day. Humans shared in the dignity of the one God, who had not, like Marduk, fought with a monster of the seas before embarking on His labour of creation, but had crafted the entire cosmos unaided and alone. To priests transported from the ruins of Jerusalem, the story provided a desperately needed reassurance: that the object of their worship still reigned supreme. Generation after generation, versions of it were retold. Written down, spliced together, fashioned into a single, definitive account, the story came to serve as the opening of the Torah itself. Long after the greatness of Marduk had been humbled into the dust, and the Esagila become the haunt of jackals, the book known to its Greek translators as Genesis continued to be copied, studied and revered. ‘And God saw all that he had done, and it was very good.’²³

Yet this assertion – for Jews struggling to make sense of the ruin that had periodically overwhelmed them, and of the humiliations visited on them by a succession of conquerors – raised a problem. Why, if the world created by God was good, did he permit such things to happen? Jewish scholars, by the time that Pompey came to storm the Temple, had arrived at a sombre explanation. The entire history of humanity was one of disobedience to God. Making man and woman, he had given them a garden named Eden to tend, filled with every kind of exotic plant; and all its fruit was theirs to eat, save only that of a single tree, ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.²⁴ But the first woman, Eve, had been tempted by the serpent to taste the fruit of the tree; and the first man, Adam, had taken it from her, and tasted it as well. God, to punish them, had expelled the couple from Eden, and cursed them, decreeing that from that time on women were to suffer the agonies of childbirth, and men to labour for their food, and die. A grim sentence – and yet not, perhaps, the full limit of humanity’s fall. Banished from Eden, Eve had borne Adam children; and Cain, their eldest, had slain Abel, their second-born. From that moment on, it was as though the taint of violence were endemic to mankind. Blood had never ceased to splash the earth. Jewish scholars, tracking the wearying incidence of crimes down the generations, could not help but wonder from what – or who – such a capacity for evil derived. A century before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem, a Jewish sage named Jesus Ben Sirah had arrived at the logical, the baneful, conclusion. ‘From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.’²⁵

For Jews, this inclination to disobedience, this natural proclivity for offending against God, represented a particular challenge. After all, it was they alone, of the many peoples of the world, who had been graced with his especial favour. They had not, as others had done, forgotten the Creator of the universe. The same God who had walked with Adam and Eve in Eden had appeared to their ancestors, and given them Canaan to be their own, and wrought a multitude of miracles on their behalf. All this was known to every Jew. Recorded in the scrolls that constituted the very essence of Jewish identity, it could be read in any synagogue. Yet these scriptures were a chronicle of mutiny as well as of submission; of whoring after idols as well as of faithfulness to God. The narratives of the conquest of Canaan portrayed a land filled with altars that demanded to be smashed, and sanctuaries that required to be despoiled – but which, even as they were destroyed, exerted an awful fascination. Not even the gift of the Promised Land had been able to keep Israel from idolatry. ‘They chose new gods.’²⁶ In book after book the same cycle was repeated: apostasy, punishment, repentance. Jews, reading of how their forebears had been seduced by the gods of neighbouring peoples – the Canaanites, the Syrians, the Phoenicians – knew as well what the ultimate, the crowning, chastisements had been: Israel enslaved; Jerusalem sacked; the Temple destroyed. These were the traumas that haunted every Jew. Why had God permitted them to happen? Such was the question, in the wake of the Babylonian exile, that had done more than anything to inspire the compilation of the Jewish scriptures. Jews who read the scrolls that told of their people’s history could be in no doubt as to the retribution that might again be visited on them were they ever to abandon the worship of God; but there was hope in their scriptures as well as warning. Even if ruin were to be visited on Jerusalem again, and the Jews dispersed to the ends of the earth, and salt and brimstone rained down upon their fields, God’s love would endure. Repentance, as it ever did, would see them forgiven. ‘And the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you.’²⁷

Here, in this demanding, emotional and volatile deity, was a divine patron like no other. Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no god had ever cared for a people with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel. Wise, he was also wilful; all-powerful, he was also readily hurt; consistent, he was also alarmingly unpredictable. Jews who pondered the evidence of their scriptures never doubted that he was a deity with whom it was possible to have a profoundly personal relationship; but the key to his identity, vivid though it was, lay in its manifold contradictions. A warrior, who in his wrath might panic armies, annihilate cities and command the slaughter of entire peoples, he also raised the poor from the dust and the needy from dungheaps. Lord of the heavens and the earth, ‘the Rider of Clouds’,²⁸ he served too as a comfort to those who called upon him amid dark nights of misery and dread. A creator and a destroyer; a husband and a wife; a king, a shepherd, a gardener, a potter, a judge: the God of Israel was hailed in the Jewish holy books as all these things, and more. ‘I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.’²⁹ A historic vaunt. Recorded in the wake of Babylon’s fall to Cyrus in 539 BC, it asserted a proposition that had never before in history been made quite so baldly. Just as Marduk had claimed the credit for the Persian victory, so too – in almost identical terms – had the God of Israel; but Marduk, despite the insistence of his priests that it was he who had chosen Cyrus to rule the world, had ranked as only one of an immense multitude of gods. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: ‘you are less than nothing.’³⁰ Long after the death of Cyrus, with the temples of Babylon in ruins, and their idols lost to mud, Jews could read in their synagogues assurances given centuries previously to the Persian king – and know them to be true. ‘I will strengthen you,’ the One God of Israel had announced to Cyrus, ‘though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord, and there is no other.’³¹

Yet if their scriptures, in the age of the spread of Roman power, were understood by Jews to demonstrate the truth of this vaunting statement, so also, scattered throughout them, were vestiges of assumptions older by far. The immense tapestry woven by priests and scribes in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple had been fashioned from numerous ancient threads. Nothing better illustrated the variety of sources from which these had been spun than the sheer range of names given throughout the Jewish biblia to God: Yahweh, Shaddai, El. That these had always referred to the same deity was, naturally enough, the guiding assumption of every Jewish scholar; and yet there lingered hints enough to suggest a rather different possibility. ‘Who among the gods is like you, O Lord?’³² Such a question was an echo from a distant, barely imaginable world – one in which Yahweh, the deity to whom it was put, had ranked as only one among various gods of Israel. How, then, had he evolved to become the universal Lord of the heavens and earth, without peer or rival? The priests and scribes who compiled the writings that told their story would have been appalled even to contemplate such a question. Nevertheless, despite all the care and attentiveness of their editing, not every trace of the deity that Yahweh had originally been was erased from Jewish scripture. It was still possible to detect, preserved like insects in amber, hints of a cult very different from that practised in the Temple: that of a storm god worshipped in the form of a bull, sprung ‘from the land of Edom’³³ in the land to the south of Canaan, and who had come to rule as supreme in the council of the gods.* ‘For who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the sons of the gods?’³⁴

That there existed a strict hierarchy in the heavens was taken for granted by peoples everywhere. How otherwise would Marduk have been able to press his fellow gods to labour for him? Zeus too, enthroned on the summit of Olympus, presided over a court. Nevertheless, the radiance of his glory had its limits. The other gods on Olympus were not consumed by it. Zeus did not absorb various of their attributes into his own being, and then dismiss their phantasms as demons. How different was the God of Israel! From what did all the manifold complexities and contradictions of his character ultimately derive? Perhaps from a process that had been the precise opposite of that celebrated by the Jewish holy books: a process by which Yahweh, to a degree unparalleled by any other deity, had come to contain multitudes within himself. When, in the very first sentence of Genesis, he was described as creating the heavens and the earth, the Hebrew word for God – Elohim – was tellingly ambiguous. Used throughout Jewish scripture as a singular, the noun’s ending was plural. ‘God’ had once been ‘gods’.

That the Israelites, far from announcing their arrival in Canaan by toppling idols and smashing temples, might originally have shared in the customs of their neighbours, and indeed been virtually indistinguishable from them, was a possibility that Jewish scripture emphatically, and even violently, rejected.* But did it, perhaps, protest too much? Indeed, had there even been a conquest of Canaan at all? The account preserved by the Jews, which told of a succession of spectacular victories by the general Joshua, narrated the downfall of cities that had either been long abandoned by the time the Israelite invasion was supposed to have occurred, or else were yet to be founded.† The conviction of those who composed the Book of Joshua, that God had bestowed lands upon his Chosen People in return for their obedience, reflected the perils of their own age: for it was most likely written in the spreading shadow of Assyrian greatness. Nevertheless, it also reflected something more. The insistence in the Book of Joshua that the Israelites had come as conquerors to Canaan hinted at a nagging and persistent anxiety: that the worship of their god might originally have owed more to Canaanite practice than Jewish scholars cared to acknowledge. Customs they condemned as monstrous innovations – the worship of other gods, the feeding of the dead, the sacrifice of children – were perhaps the very opposite: venerable traditions, compared to which their own evolving cult constituted the novelty.

The revolutionary quality of this – the way in which, from the cocoon of Canaanite, and Syrian, and Edomite beliefs, a new and portentous conception of the divine had come to unfold its wings – was veiled by Jewish scripture. Not entirely, though. In the Book of Psalms, one poem in particular served to dramatise the confused and lengthy process by which elohim – ‘the gods’ – had become the one supreme Lord: Elohim.

God presides in the great assembly;

he gives judgement among the gods.³⁵

Injustice; favouring the wicked; scorning the poor, the lowly and the wretched: such were the crimes of which the assembled gods stood guilty. Their offences had cast the world into darkness and made it totter. Their punishment: to be dethroned from the heavens for ever more. Elohim himself pronounced their sentence.

I said, ‘You are gods;

you are all sons of the Most High.

But you will die like mere men;

you will fall like every other ruler.³⁶

In the council of the heavens, there would henceforward rule only the single God.

An insignificant people the Jews may have been, peripheral to the concerns of great powers; and yet the deity of their scriptures, who had toppled gods much as conquerors like Alexander or Pompey toppled kings, was one whose dominion spanned the whole of creation, and brooked no rival. ‘My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun.’³⁷ This, very consciously, was to echo the Persian king. The magnanimity shown by Cyrus towards the exiles from Jerusalem had not been forgotten. Unlike the rulers of Egypt, or Assyria, or Babylon, he had shown respect for the God of Israel. More than any other foreign monarch in the annals of the exiles’ history, Cyrus had provided them with a model of kingship. The heavens, in the wake of their return from Babylon, had taken on something of the appearance of the Persian court. ‘From where do you come?’ So asked God, in the Book of Job, of an official in his retinue titled the Adversary – the Satan. Back came the reply: ‘From roaming through the earth and going to and fro in it.’³⁸ In Athens, dread of the Great King’s secret agents had inspired Aristophanes to portray one of them as a giant eye; but in Jewish scripture there was no laughing at the royal spies. They were far too potent, far too menacing, for that. When God points to Job as ‘blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil’,³⁹ the Satan responds mockingly that it is easy for the prosperous to be good. ‘But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’⁴⁰ So God, accepting the wager, delivers Job into the Satan’s hands. Innocent of fault though he is, all his worldly goods are destroyed; his children slain; his skin covered with boils. ‘Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.’⁴¹

A criminal sentenced to the scaphe had no free hands with which to scrape himself, of course; and yet the power to make flesh rot on the bones was, in the age of Persian greatness, a peculiarly terrifying marker of royal power. What, though, of the claim made by Darius and his heirs, that when they put their victims to torture they did so in the cause of truth, and justice, and light? Job, as he lay hunched among the ashes, was approached by three companions, and after sitting with him in silence for seven days and seven nights, they sought to make sense of the torments inflicted on him.

Would God pervert justice,

would Shaddai pervert what is right?

If your children offended Him,

He dispatched them because of their crime.⁴²

Such was the assurance offered elsewhere in Jewish scripture: that God only ever punished wrong-doers, just as he only ever favoured the righteous. Job, however, dismisses this comforting notion. ‘Why do the wicked live, grow rich and gather wealth?’ Most startlingly of all, the story ends with God himself speaking to Job from a whirlwind, and flatly rejecting the proposition put forward by his companions. ‘You have not spoken rightly of Me,’ he informs them, ‘as did My servant Job.’⁴³ Yet to the question of why – despite his innocence – Job had been punished so cruelly, no answer is given. God restores to him everything that he had lost, and doubles it, and blesses him with new sons and daughters. But those children he had lost are not redeemed from the dust to which they had been returned. The bereaved father does not get them back.

When Apollo slew the children of Niobe, no one thought to complain that his vengeance had been excessive. Lord of the silver bow, he dealt with those who offended him as he pleased. It was not by answering the complaints of mortals that Apollo made manifest his divinity, but by performing deeds infinitely beyond their scope. Like Marduk, he had even felled a dragon. In Canaan, too, stories were told of how gods had fought with dragons and sea serpents – and thereby demonstrated their worthiness to rule the heavens. Such a conceit was, to the writers of Genesis, a nonsense and a blasphemy; and so it was, in their account of the Creation, that they made sure to specify that Elohim had fashioned, not fought with, the creatures of the deep. ‘And God created the sea monsters.’⁴⁴ Yet the surface calm of the Jewish holy books was deceptive. Every so often, stirring from the depths of memories and traditions that not even the most careful editing could entirely erase, the sinuous bulk of a monster that had indeed fought with God would hove into view. Named variously Rahab, Tanin and Leviathan, it was the same seven-headed serpent that had twisted and coiled in poetry composed almost a millennium before the Book of Job. ‘Could you draw Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord press down his tongue?’⁴⁵ The question, demanded of Job from the whirlwind, was, of course, rhetorical. Only God could tame Leviathan. If he was portrayed in the Book of Job as ruling in the manner of a Persian king, the Lord of agents who post o’er land and ocean, then so also, when he spoke to a man who had arraigned him of injustice, did he draw on vastly more ancient wellsprings to articulate his power. No wonder that Job ended up brow-beaten. ‘I know You can do anything.’⁴⁶

Yet Job had never doubted God’s power – only his justice. On that score, God had nothing to say. The Book of Job – written when, for the first time, the existence of a deity both omnipotent and all-just was coming to be contemplated – dared to explore the implications with an unflinching profundity. That Jewish scholars should have included it in their great compilation of scripture spoke loudly of their struggle to confront a novel and pressing problem: the origin of evil. For other peoples, with their multitudes of deities, the issue had barely raised its head. After all, the more gods there were in the cosmos, the more explanations there were for human suffering. How, though, to explain it in a cosmos with just a single god? Only the devotees of Ahura Mazda – who, like the Jews, believed in a universe created by an all-wise, all-good deity – had ever had to wrestle with a question of this order. Perhaps, then, in the presence before God’s throne of the Satan, who inflicts such sufferings on Job and then vanishes mysteriously from the story, there was a hint of the solution proposed by the Persians to explain the potency of evil: that it existed as a rival and equal principle to good. Yet if so, it was not one that Jewish scholars were willing to countenance. Deeply though they might revere the memory of Cyrus, they had no place in their scriptures for anything resembling the cosmic battle between Arta and Drauga. There could be only the one God. Less blasphemous to attribute to him the creation of evil than to imply that it might ever be a threat to his power. Yahweh, speaking to Cyrus, was portrayed as scorning the notion of a universe contested by the Truth and the Lie. ‘I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.’⁴⁷

Nowhere else in Jewish scripture was there anything resembling this bald assertion. If God was omnipotent, then so too was he all-just. These were twin convictions that the Jews, no matter the patent tension between them, had come to enshrine as the very essence of their understanding of the divine. That God might have sponsored the Roman storming of the Temple, not as a punishment for the faults of his chosen people but because he was as much the author of chaos as of order, was a possibility so grotesque as to be inconceivable. All his works served the cause of order. That his purposes might sometimes be veiled in mystery did not prevent him from fathoming human despair, from caring for the wretched, and from providing comfort where there was grief.

The poor and needy search for water,

but there is none;

their tongues are parched with thirst,

But I the Lord will answer them,

I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.⁴⁸

Never before had such incongruities been so momentously combined within a single deity: power and intimacy, menace and compassion, omniscience and solicitude.

And this god – all-powerful, all-good, who ruled the entire world, and upheld the harmony of the cosmos – was the god who had chosen for his especial favour the Jews. Helpless before the might of Rome’s legions though they might be, unable to prevent a conqueror from intruding upon even their holiest shrine, a people with no prospect of ever winning global rule, they had this consolation: the certitude that their God was indeed the one, the only Lord.

Covenant

Hard proof was not long in coming. Divine punishment caught up with Pompey. In 49 BC, the Roman world collapsed into civil war, and the following year, in Greece, the man who had dominated Rome for two decades was routed in battle by a rival warlord: Julius Caesar. Barely seven weeks later, Pompey the Great was dead. The speed and scale of his downfall stunned the world – and was greeted in Judaea with exultant delight. Just as God had triumphed over Leviathan, so now had he crushed ‘the pride of the Dragon’.⁴⁹ A poet, writing in emulation of the Psalms, chronicled the details: how Pompey had sought refuge in Egypt; how he had been run through with a spear; how his corpse, bobbing on the waves, had been left without a grave. ‘He had failed to recognise that God alone is great.’⁵⁰

The scene of Pompey’s death was a particularly potent one in Jewish imaginings. Nowhere had more spectacularly, or more momentously, borne witness to the power of their God than Egypt. Once, before they came into their inheritance and took possession of Canaan, the Children of Israel had been slaves there. Pharaoh, fearful of their growing numbers, had ‘worked them ruthlessly’.⁵¹ He and all his gods, though, had been humbled into the dust. Ten plagues had devastated his kingdom. The Nile had turned to blood; vermin had variously slithered or swarmed across every corner of the land; the entire country had been cast into darkness. For a long while, though, Pharaoh had remained obdurate. Only after a climactic horror, when the firstborn of every Egyptian was struck down in a single night, ‘and the firstborn of all the livestock as well’,⁵² had he finally let the Israelites go. Even then, he had soon recanted. Pursuing the fugitive slaves, he and his squadron of chariots had cornered them on the shores of the Red Sea. Still the miracles had not ceased. A mighty east wind had blown up, and the waters split apart; and the children of Israel, crossing the seabed, made it to the far shore. Onwards in pursuit of them Pharaoh and his warriors had sped. ‘The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen – the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived.’⁵³

Here, then, in a world where the gods tended to bestow their favours upon kings and conquerors, was yet another mark of the distinctive character of the God of Israel: that he had chosen as his favourite slaves. The memory of how he had set their ancestors free would always be tended and treasured by the Jews. As cloud by day, and fire by night, he had been more visibly present than at any time before or since: first as a column guiding them through the desert, and then imminent within a tent fashioned to serve as his throne-room. Upon one man in particular he had bestowed an exceptional grace: ‘for,’ as the Lord God told him, ‘you have found favour in My eyes and I have known you by name’.⁵⁴ No other prophet in Israel’s history would have a bond with God such as Moses had enjoyed. He it was who had spoken for the Lord before Pharaoh, who had summoned the plagues that harrowed Egypt, who had raised his staff to split the waters of the Red Sea. Most awesome of all, and most intimate, was the meeting of God with Moses upon a mountain named Sinai.* As the Israelites gathered on the plain below, heavy cloud concealed its heights, and there had been thunder and lightning, and the great blaring of a ram’s horn. ‘Watch yourselves not to go up on the mountain or to touch its edge. Whosoever touches the mountain is doomed to die.’ But as the ram’s horn sounded ever louder, and the mountain began to shake, and the Lord God himself descended upon it amid smoke and fire, Moses was summoned to climb its slopes. Heaven met with Earth; the celestial with the human. What followed was to prove the axle on which the course of history itself would turn.

The Jews did not hold to this conviction lightly. They could be confident of what had happened when Moses climbed Sinai, for the fruits of it were still in their charge. Inscribed in the Torah were commandments that had originally been written by the finger of God himself on tablets of stone. ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’⁵⁵ Nine similarly lapidary instructions followed: orders to obey the Sabbath and to honour one’s parents; to refrain from carving likenesses and taking the name of God in vain; never to murder or commit adultery, nor to steal, bear false witness or covet. All ten commandments, though, were dependent for their potency on the first. There were other gods, after all, who did not put the same value on moral principles as did the God of Israel. Some placed a premium on beauty; some on knowledge; some on power. The Ten Commandments were not merely instructions, but an expression of the very identity of the God of Israel. His Chosen People were being called to live, not as his slaves, but as men and women brought closer to him, to share in his nature. This was why, even as he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, he warned that he was ‘a jealous God’.⁵⁶ His love was of an order that might, if betrayed or rejected, turn murderously coercive. When Moses, descending Sinai after an absence of forty days and forty nights, discovered that the Israelites had set up a golden calf, and fallen to worshipping it, so angry was he that he smashed the tablets of stone, and ordered the slaughter of three thousand men. Yet God’s anger was even more terrible. His initial intention was to wipe out the Israelites altogether. Only after Moses had climbed Mount Sinai again and implored him for mercy did he finally relent.

Yet that love was what their divine patron felt for them the Jews never doubted. ‘For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You the Lord has chosen to become for Him a treasured people among all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.’ As token of this he had given to Moses, after the Ten Commandments, an altogether fuller body of ordinances. Among these were instructions on how altars were to be constructed, and priests to purify themselves, and sacrifices to be conducted; but priests were not alone in being subjected to his instructions. So too were all the Children of Israel. The laws given by God to Moses specified what foods they could and could not eat; with whom they could and could not have sex; how they were to keep the Sabbath; how they were to treat their slaves; that they were to leave gleanings for the poor in orchards; that they were not to sport pudding-bowl haircuts. To contravene these dictates was to call down upon Israel the most terrifying punishment; and yet, like the Ten Commandments, they served as an expression not of tyranny, but of devotion. The Lord God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, had granted to the Children of Israel a momentous and unprecedented honour: a covenant. No other people had so much as contemplated that such a thing might be possible. Gods served to witness treaties, after all – not to enter into one themselves. Who were mortals, to imagine that they might contract an alliance with a deity? Only the Jews had dared entertain such a novel, such a blasphemous conceit. That they had entered into an accord with the Lord God provided the foundation-stone of their entire understanding of the divine. It was the Covenant, written on the tablets borne by Moses, that the Ark had been built to contain; it was the Covenant, reverently placed in the Holy of Holies, that lay at the heart of the Temple raised by Solomon. Nor, even after the ruin visited on Jerusalem by the Babylonians, had the treaty between the Lord God and His Chosen People been rendered void. The terms of it endured. The Jewish scriptures, edited and re-edited in the centuries that followed the disappearance of the Ark, had been compiled in large part to enshrine them. Every Jew who studied it renewed the Covenant in his heart.

Moses, so it was recorded at the end of the Torah, had died on the eve of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. Despite having freed the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, and then led them for forty years in the wilderness, he never set foot in the Promised Land. ‘And no man has known his burial place to this day.’⁵⁷ The mystery that veiled the location of his tomb helped to veil as well how his story came to be told in the way that it did. No mention of Moses was to be found in Egypt; no mention of the plagues; no mention of the miraculous parting of the Red Sea. It was as though, outside Jewish scripture, he had never existed. Yet the quality of myth that attached itself to Moses, the degree to which he was – in the words of one scholar – ‘a figure of memory but not of history’,⁵⁸ was precisely what endowed his encounter on the summit of Sinai with its transcendent and incomparable power. The authors of the Torah, when they formulated the covenant that bound them to the Lord God, naturally drew on the conventions of the age. ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’⁵⁹ Such was the custom in the Near East: for a king to begin a proclamation with a ringing vaunt. When the Lord God threatened that disobedience would see the heavens over Israel’s head turn to bronze, and the earth beneath her feet turn to iron, he echoed the menacing terms of an Assyrian conqueror. When he promised that he would scourge ‘all the peoples whom you fear’,⁶⁰ he offered protection much as a pharaoh committing himself to an alliance might have done. Yet the record of his covenant, couched though it may have been in terms familiar to the diplomats of the Near East, gave to the Jews something utterly without parallel: legislation directly authored by a god.

It needed no mortals to supplement this. Such was the clear lesson of the Jewish holy books. Even the oil with which David and Solomon were anointed, as the mark of their election, did not endow them with what Hammurabi and his heirs in Babylon had always taken for granted: the right of a king to issue laws. Monarchy in Israel, compared to that of Mesopotamia, was a pallid and a gelded thing. Only by abandoning the Covenant altogether could it hope to assert itself – and this, so Jewish scripture recorded, was precisely what had happened. Kings had grown uppity. They had burned incense to gods other than the Lord God, and issued laws of their own. Then, a few decades before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, a king named Josiah reported the discovery in the Temple of something astonishing: a long-lost ‘Book of the Law’.⁶¹ Summoning the priests, ‘and all the people from the least to the greatest’,⁶² he read them what it decreed. The mysterious book proved to be the record of the Covenant itself. Josiah, calling his people to the proper worship of the Lord, did not do so in his own name. He, no less than the meanest of his subjects, was subject to the dictates of God’s law. Legislation was the prerogative of the divine. Repeatedly in Jewish scripture, doubts were expressed as to whether Israel, as God’s people, needed kings at all. ‘The Lord will rule over you.’⁶³

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 all: 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.

Even as it was, there were converts. In an age where more Jews spoke Greek than Hebrew, it was perfectly possible for a Greek – or indeed anyone else – to become a Jew. Nowhere was this more evident than in Alexandria, the original cosmopolis; but increasingly, wherever there were synagogues, there converts were to be found as well. In Rome, where the elite’s suspicion of foreign cults had long been the measure of their appeal among the masses, suspicions of this trend were particularly strong. Conservatives did not need to consult the Torah to recognise the fundamental incompatibility of the Jewish god with those of their own city. ‘The first lesson absorbed by converts is to despise the gods, to renounce their country, and to view their parents, their children and their brothers as expendable.’⁷⁶ Jews were hardly alone in dreading where a multi-cultural world might lead.

A tension that had always existed within Jewish scripture was being brought to a head. How was the deity whose words and deeds it recorded best understood: as the God of the Covenant or as the Creator of all humanity? The question had long been brewing; but the rise to greatness of a dominion as globe-spanning as Rome’s could not help but give it an added urgency. Mutual suspicion between Jews and Gentiles – all the various other peoples of the world – co-existed with an equally mutual fascination. The wilderness east of Jerusalem, where men gathered among lonely hills to live in accordance with the Torah, and to tend a hatred of the unrighteous, had its counterpoint in Alexandria, where Greek-speaking scholars of Moses might have no hesitation in expressing admiration for Roman order, or hailing Augustus as ‘an instructor in piety’.⁷⁷ Just as the Pharisees dreamed of an Israel become a nation of priests, so were there scholars who imagined peoples everywhere brought to obey the laws of Moses: ‘barbarians, and Greeks, the inhabitants of continents and islands, the eastern nations and the western, Europe and Asia; in short, the whole habitable world from one extremity to the other’.⁷⁸

Perhaps, far from speaking of God’s anger, the absorption of the Jews into the universal empire ruled by Augustus signalled something very different: the imminent fulfilment of his plan for all humankind.