I Observed across the abyss of years, the rebellion in which Joseph ben Mattathias was to play a leading part appears like a remake of the story of David and Goliath. Despite the fact that, this time, Goli- ath won, the Jews'' defiant last stand, in 73 c.e., while defending the gaunt mountaintop fortress of Masada, in the southern desert, has been used, especially in modern Israel, to illustrate how the flower of the Jewish nation, having risen en bloc against imperial oppression, resisted to the last man. For some Zionists at least, the lesson of "the Jewish War" is that the only people Jews can trust are other Jews. The long story that Flavius Josephus lived to tell is less romantic and more complicated. Ever since Alexander the Great conquered and appropriated the Persian Empire, only to have it break up into fractious kingdoms after his early death in 323 b.c.

e., the Fertile Crescent had been a patchwork of fiefdoms, religions and antagonisms. Lacking gorgeous and impassable rivers or a bulwark of mountains, Judaea was regularly at the mercy of armies, which marched through it or chose to garrison its cities. Two of Alexander''s Macedonian marshals, Seleucus and Ptolemy, founded Middle Eastern empires. Their royal successors--Seleucids in Syria, Ptolemies in Egypt--played tug-of-war with Palestine for almost two centuries. The Romans were only the last, the best disciplined and the most tenacious of the foreign invaders. As Josephus recalls in Jewish Antiquities, Rome''s intrusion into Judaea was the result of an unwise invitation from contending Jewish factions: in 63 b.c.

e., Pompey the Great, who was playing for bigger stakes in nearby Syria, was called in as arbiter during a fraternal feud between Aristobulus (the last king of the Maccabean dynasty) and his ineffectual brother Hyrcanus, the High Priest. The latter served as a front for a rich, nominally Hellenized Idumaean called Antipater, who coveted the throne for himself. Pompey had also been petitioned by a third group of Jews: the pious Zealots, who craved a return to a hermetic life that acknowledged no secular authority. Ultra-Orthodox, often lower-class, they advocated a purified theocracy, free of alien corruption and, of course, under their own leadership. It was their regular charge against the High Priest and his council, the Sanhedrin, that they habitually faced both (or several) ways. Zealots were vehement in accusing the hierarchy of being willing to trade Jewish independence in order to maintain their own standing. This did not inhibit fundamentalists from seeking to recruit Pompey to their cause.

The three Jewish parties had in common only the naïve presumption that the Romans would come in, cancel their enemies and then leave. In the event, Pompey did not give priority to a profitless squabble between native pretenders. First he completed the annexation of the Seleucid Empire to the greater glory of the Senate and the Roman people, and to his own and his soldiers'' financial advantage. Only after Aristobulus dared to anticipate his judgment, by raising an army of his own, did the Roman grandee march on Jerusalem. The supporters of Hyrcanus opened the gates. Aristobulus and his men barricaded themselves in the Temple precinct. Neither then nor in Josephus''s day did the city''s Jews react with solidarity to external force. After a three-month siege, there was a massacre in which, Josephus says, twelve thousand Jews died, including those unresisting priests engaged in the exercise of their office.

1 Josephus adds a bitter detail: "Most who fell were killed by their own countrymen of the rival faction; others beyond number threw themselves over the precipices." Pompey became the first Roman to stride into the curtained inner sanctum of the Temple. Perhaps in superstitious awe of its numinous vacancy, he touched nothing. Just over a century later, the curtain would be only a small part of the booty Titus took to Rome to swag his father''s triumph. The survivors among the priesthood, either because of their dignity or by virtue of the revenue at their disposal, had a chastening effect on Pompey. Inclined to fastidious gestures (malicious contemporaries accused him of being effeminate because he would scratch his head with one finger, in order not to distress his coiffure, which was set to resemble that of Alexander the Great), Pompey consented to the Temple being cleansed of blood and then licensed the resumption of the rites. He was remembered by the Jews more for his sacrilege than for his belated courtesy. Two centuries later, a gang of Jews desecrated the Egyptian tomb containing his headless corpse.

In 61 b.c.e., the evicted Aristobulus and his family, having been shipped to Rome, were obliged to walk in front of Pompey''s triumphal chariot; but they were spared the customary chains. A large contingent of Jews was also paraded in the ritual of the triumph. Such occasions had the allure of a mobile circus, complete with "floats" representing scenes from the victorious campaign.2 The festivities usually ended with the execution of defeated leaders, but the Judaeans appear to have been released when the metropolitan circuit was complete. A number remained to swell the Jewish community in Rome.

It grew to forty thousand in imperial times. Two years after Pompey''s parade, there were enough Jews resident in the capital for Cicero to complain--while defending Lucius Valerius Flaccus, an ex-governor of Asia--that Roman justice was under threat from a loud swarm of Jews. Since Roman trials were often conducted in the open air, star advocates attracted large, sometimes rowdy, crowds of spectators. Cicero was used to generating sympathy by affecting to fight against intimidating odds. Flaccus had been accused of siphoning off tribute, sent by Jews from all over the Mediterranean, while it was on its way to the Temple in Jerusalem. Adept at playing to the gallery, Cicero had recourse to whatever means would lead to his client''s acquittal. He did nothing to challenge the truth of the charges against Flaccus, but claimed that Pompey''s recent "victory" in Jerusalem proved that the gods had deserted the Jews, since they would otherwise have defeated him. To infer that Rome''s "Jewish lobby" acted in an unusual or improper fashion is to take Ciceronian bluster for reliable evidence.

Roman advocacy was a public performance that has been likened to bel canto: it sanctioned whatever bravura flights might impress a jury or amuse the gallery. Rome''s Jews are unlikely to have made Cicero as nervous as it served his case to pretend. Cicero''s older colleague and fellow littérateur, Marcus Terentius Varro, with no case to argue, acclaimed Judaism as a true religio. He rated it above the superstitious cults, with their fetishistic statuary, that flourished in the Rome of his day. In 48 b.c.e., the civil war between Caesar and Pompey ended with Pompey''s decisive defeat at Pharsalus, in northern Greece.

He fled to Egypt. When Caesar followed, one of the Ptolemies presented him, on landing, with the embalmed head of his late enemy and onetime son-in-law. Caesar had the grace to seem rueful, but the Egyptian queen Cleopatra''s alluring proximity made him casual about security. Boxed in at Alexandria by a large force of hostile "Egyptians," Caesar was rescued, in extremis, by the cavalry of Antipater, the Idumaean chieftain, and his ally Hyrcanus II, whose military skills, on this occasion, matched his priestly eminence. Hyrcanus was rewarded with the eth- narchy of the Jews. Antipater''s sons, Phasael and Herod, then twenty-five years old, were named governors of Jerusalem and Galilee, respectively. Neither was fully a Jew; their mother, Kypros, was a "distinguished lady from Arabia." If his generosity was its measure, Caesar had had a serious fright.

It led him to sanction Jews all around the Mediterranean to resume the dispatch of tribute to Jerusalem, thus strengthening the city''s economy, since the Temple treasury functioned as a central bank. Caesar also excused Jews from conscription. In Josephus''s view, the settlement gave the Judaeans every privilege short of independence. It was the high point of their relations with the Romans. Only the fundamentalist Zealots, vigilant for righteous grievances (and for excuses to impose their version of rectitude on others), could object to so amiable an arrangement. Caesar''s indulgence was typical of Roman methods when recruiting provincials as allies. His exemption of Jews from military service was both a grace and an acknowledgment that, as recruits, they could be more trouble than they were worth: they would not eat the same food as the other soldiers; however brave they might be on weekdays, many refused to fight on the Sabbath. As long as Caesar was busy imposing his autocracy on the rump of Pompey''s supporters, Judaea made no urgent call on Roman attention.

Seen from the Seven Hills, it was the pacified adjunct of a province under the mandate of the governor of Syria. For those who lived there, however, there was no shortage of bloody incident. Palestine was home to endless feuds, tribal antagonism and coups d''état. Local events frequently reflected what was happening at the center. In 44 b.c.e., the deified Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in Rome, under Pompey''s statue.

In 43 b.c.e., his protégé Antipater was poisoned in Judea. The killer is likely to have been one of the bounty hunters who could expect rewards for murdering the enemy of any dominant faction. Since Antipater had been Caesar''s man, his assassin could hope for profitable congratulations from the great man''s murderers. Rome had divided into two parties. "The Liberators," led by Brutus and Cassius, were confronted by Mark Antony and, very soon, by Caesar'.