The Jewish uprising against the Romans at Masada

Lets make plans to surround Israel and hopefully god willing they will repeat the process and kill themselves. What a day to look forward to.

Glorified suicide zealots if the story is to be believed.

The only literary source is Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian who had himself taken part in the revolt before joining the Roman side. His account says that the defenders of Masada took no part in the war against Rome during the siege of Jerusalem, but instead plundered local villages including En Gedi on the Dead Sea, where “women and children, more than 700 in number, were butchered”.

“In the zionist entity, so called archaeological finds plays an important role in affirming the links of the intrusive population by trying to justify the right of that population to the land. Ma(s)sada has developed from a relatively obscure incident in the past, ignored in the Talmud & medieval Jewish literature, to represent the paradigm of national identity. It emerged of scholarly interest only in the 19th ce on association with the zionist movement, representing an important symbolic event for new settlers.” –
“The Invention of Ancient Israel – the Silencing of Palestinian History” – Prof Keith W. Whitelam.

With regards to the fortress of Masada in Idumea, the fortress or Tower of Antonia (the “Wailing Wall”) in Jerusalem, the Jews’ INVITATION to the Romans to eventually manage the unruly country of Judea, and the very interesting history of the family of General and then King Herod, in Flavius Josephus’ “The Antiquities of the Jews” (Books 12-14), the very detailed historical narrative of the Jewish Maccabean/Hasmonean Dynasty’s rise to power in Judea is given. Space here does not permit me to lay out all the details of all the various warring parties and international conflicts of this one hundred and twenty-six year history, but here are a few highly interesting and relevant items nonetheless.

After the wicked high priest Alcimus died, the people made Judas Maccabeus the high priest and administrator of public affairs, and his brother Simon Maccabeus took over command of the army of Judea. At this time, Judas Maccabeus made an alliance of friendship with the growing power of Rome against the dominion of the Greeks, whereby, if anyone attacked the Judeans, Rome would come to their aid, and if anyone attacked the Romans, the Judeans would be required to lend their military assistance to Rome. This was the beginning of relations between the Romans and the Jews. The Romans did not invade Judea. They were invited in.

John Hyrcanus, who succeeded his father Simon as high priest and king, and ruled Judea for thirty-one years, had a wealthy Idumean friend named Antipas, later called Antipater, who despised Hyrcanus’ younger brother Aristobulus for his arrogance and hunger for material power, a hunger that culminated in his disrespecting the rule of his elder brother by attempting to seize power from him. The father of this Antipas/Antipater had been made general of all Idumea by the Jewish King Alexander Janneus and Queen Alexandra Salome. Antipater married Cypros, daughter of an Idumean noble, and they had four sons and one daughter – Phasael, Herod, Joseph, Pheroras, and Salome. Antipas’ second son became Herod the Great, who, in due course, brought about the end of Hasmonean rule and, under Roman power, became “king of the Jews.”

When the Jewish Queen Alexandra Salome became ill with a fatal distemper, Aristobulus, who commanded the army, began his plans to seize the monarchy and toss the Pharisees from power. To prevent the prince from seizing power and inflicting punishment on them, the Pharisees seized Aristobulus’ wife and children as hostages and kept them in the fortress called the “Tower of Antonia,” which was originally built by King John Hyrcanus (18.4.3) and rebuilt by Herod the Great (15.11.5). This citadel fortress overlooked Jerusalem’s temple, and one of its remaining stone walls has long been MISIDENTIFIED as the last remaining wall of the Second Temple, and is known as the “Wailing Wall.”

After the death of General Pompey, Antipater managed “Jewish Affairs” under Julius Caesar (14.8). Antipater then made his eldest son Phasaelus the governor of Jerusalem and made his second son Herod the governor of Galilee. Herod then proceeded to round up and exterminate a large gang of robbers headed by a man named Hezekias. This gang was oppressing, through theft and murder, the Syrian people living in the areas bordering Judea (14.9). This is a very similar situation to the biblical David heading a troop of mercenary robbers and murderers who oppressed the people of the countryside on behalf of a Philistine king.

The principals of Jewish nobility, however, became envious of the power, prestige, wealth, and legitimate honors held by Antipater and his two sons, Phasaelus and Herod, and these elites lodged their complaints before the priestly king John Hyrcanus. They also protested Herod’s slaying of the robber baron Hezekias who, according to Jewish law, could only be sentenced to death by the decree and authority of the Sanhedrin court. However, based upon these complaints, the Pharisaic Sanhedrin pronounced a sentence of death on Herod himself, and at the advice of his father’s close friend Hyrcanus, he was advised to flee Jerusalem and take shelter in Damascus under the protection of Julius Caesar’s relative, Sextus Caesar, now the “president of Syria.” Sextus then made Herod the general of the Celesyrian army, at which point, he decided to have his revenge on the Pharisees of the Sanhedrin, as well as Hyrcanus, and brought his army into Judea to assault Jerusalem. He was met, however, by his father Antipater and his older brother Phasaelus, who pacified him and told him he should be grateful to Hyrcanus for saving his life by warning him to flee before the Sanhedrin’s death sentence trial commenced. Nevertheless, Herod’s father did wisely advise him to display a show of potential military force in order to frighten the treacherous members of the Sanhedrin and envious nobility of Jerusalem from taking any further actions against their family.

By this point, Herod had sailed back from Italy to Syria, and gathering together a small army, marched through Galilee to cut down Antigonus (the other son of Aristobulus) and remove him from the throne granted to him by the Parthian enemies of Rome. As he marched through Galilee, the people swelled the ranks of his ever-growing fighting force. On his way south to Masada in Idumea, Herod first had to conquer the pro-Antigonus city of Joppa, and then, after slaughtering those besieging his family and friends at Masada, Herod took his army to the walls of Jerusalem to take his place upon the throne of Judea. He proclaimed that he came for the good of the city and its people, and declared that he was ready to forgive the offenses of even the greatest of his adversaries. Antigonus, however, sent his reply to both Herod and the Romans who were with him that Herod, who had no “royal blood” and was an “Idumean half-Jew,” should not be allowed to sit on the Jewish Hasmonean throne (14.15).

Here, of course, we see the politics of tribal religio-ethnicity at work. Although by the time of Herod’s birth most Idumeans had already been forcibly converted to monotheistic Yahwism, the religion of the Jews (as noted in 13.7), the descendants of these converts were not accepted as “Jews” by those who claimed a ‘higher human pedigree’ having been born into families whose “Jewishness” went back many generations to the time when this tribal cult of the god Yahweh began its initial and gradual development, c. 1000 BC. Interestingly, according to Aristobulus’ definition of who is, and who is not, a “Jew,” most of those in the modern world claiming to be “Jews” are more or less in the same position as Herod the Great, i.e. descendants of Eastern European Asiatics who converted to Talmudic Judaism sometime in the 8th century AD.

Antigonus then came down from the citadel and fell at the feet of the Roman General Sossius, who would show him no mercy, but insulted him instead, calling him Antigone (“woman”) and placing him into bondage. In the aftermath of all this, Herod saved the city from being completely despoiled of its wealth by paying out of his own money all the men (Jew or Roman) who had fought with him. Sossius then carried off Antigonus in chains and brought him to Marc Antony in Rome who put him to death at the wise suggestion of Herod. Thus, the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty and government of Judea came to an end seemingly by the hand of Herod the Great and his Roman allies in 67 BC, but as Josephus mentions, their end was ultimately brought about by their own internal dissensions and constant familial battles for power.

THE MYTH OF THE DIASPORA
Aside from large communities of Jews residing in Assyria and Persia since the end of the 8th century BC, and in southern Mesopotamia (in the ancient cities of Nippur, Babylon, etc.) from the early 6th century BC, 14.7.2 of Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews” pretty much puts to bed the standard false historical narrative of the post-70 AD creation of the global Jewish diaspora, i.e. the Roman general Titus besieged Jerusalem, burned down the temple, and exiled to the four corners of the earth all the Jews of Jerusalem and Judea, whereupon they had to wander through the world homeless until the signing of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. During the last three centuries before the Christian Era (AD), Josephus describes (based upon the history of Strabo) the Jews as already living “throughout the habitable earth,” including Europe (Rome) and Asia. In the cosmopolitan Egyptian city of Alexandria, long before the lifetime of General Titus, the Jews occupied “a large part of the city,” as well as habitations throughout all of Egypt. They were also living in Cyrene (Libya). On this topic, Josephus quotes the geographer-historian Strabo:

“Now these Jews are already gotten into all cities; and it is hard to find a place in the habitable earth that hath not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by them” (14.7.2.115).

THE ROMANS BENT OVER BACKWARDS TO APPEASE THE JEWS
In this chapter (14.10), through copies of various Roman decrees, Josephus essentially illustrates how the Romans bent over backwards to give to the Jews, as a religious community, everything they requested. It also provides more informative historical clues as to the spread of the voluntary “diaspora” of Jews throughout the Roman Empire long before 70 AD. For example, Julius Caesar declared the Jews of Alexandria in Egypt to be “citizens of Alexandria.” They were not “poor persecuted exiles from their homeland,” but occupying almost half the city and living in complete freedom and prosperity. Caesar also decreed that the Jews of Delos be permitted “to gather themselves together, according to the customs and laws of their forefathers, and to persist therein” (14.10.8.216). Dolabella, the Roman prefect of Asia, decreed that the Jewish citizens of Rome who lived at Ephesus were permitted to use “the customs of their forefathers in assembling together for sacred and religious purposes, as their law requires,…” and because of their strict observance of the Sabbath (on which they were forbidden to carry weapons or travel), the Jews were decreed free from Roman military service, “on account of the superstition they are under” (14.10.12.227 and 14.10.13.228), a phrase used in four other Roman decrees cited by Josephus in 14.10. Other Roman decrees cited by Josephus mentioned that the Jews not be placed under any command, nobody should injure a Jew in any Roman province, and that, “we would do everything we could for the Jews, according to the senate’s decree” (14.10.22.253). The leaders of the city of Sardinia even imported special food for the Jews to eat, so as to allow them to freely observe their dietary laws. All of this, of course, puts to bed the biblical distortions that the Romans were a bunch of brutal Jew-hating occupiers, rather than a power that was invited into Judea by the high priest and ethnarch of the Hasmonean Dynasty, and one which acted with complete friendship and respect for the Jews and their religious practices. As one finds over and over and over again when one studies the “history of the Jews,” almost their entire standard “historical” narrative (95%) consists of falsehoods, from 1,000 BC to the present, which is, of course, why they have their own history month called Jew-lie.