Apocalypse Then
Okay, last time I said that we were finally going to get to an Angelic Block Buster. I hinted that we were going to see Angels everywhere...doing all sorts of good things...and Michael was going to be headlining the whole enterprise.
But...before I get there...I have to talk about something horrible. To wit, the Jewish-Roman Wars. (*)
About the image: This is a stock photograph of Masada, site of one the more horrific battles of the Jewish-Roman Wars.
We go back, now, to a period not long after the life of Christ, say, about 60 AD. Things are really tense in Judea. The Romans are occupying Jerusalem and the countryside around it. For a century or more, they’d bent over backwards to avoid offending Jewish religious sensitivities. Jews were exempt from certain taxes, and from participating in the Imperial Cult (that is, overt worship of the Emperor). And Jews in the diaspora -- Antioch, Alexandria, Rome itself -- were granted a certain degree of self-government.
But, it just wasn’t enough. The Judeans continued to long for true independence, and, indeed, they saw it as a divine right. God Himself had degreed that there would be a reformed, Holy, and Pure, and Powerful nation of Israel.
Plus, not every Roman was as skilled at governing as they should have been. In 39 BCE the Emperor Caligula--never too tightly wrapped at the best of times--ordered his own statue placed in the Temple. There might have been a revolution after that, but history stepped in to save the situation and the Emperor was assassinated by officers of his own Praetorian Guard, among others.
Things hung on for a few more decades. Roman and Jewish authorities did their best to keep a lid on it. But it was only a matter of time before someone did something stupid and everything came apart.
That something happened in 66 BCE. There were a series of street brawls in the Judean city of Caesarea Maritima. Local Greeks and local Jews clashed over a variety of issues. The Greeks set up a pagan temple near a Jewish synagogue. The Jews objected. The local Roman governor, a singularly incompetent individual by the name of Gessius Florus, took the side of the Greeks, and used the dispute to raid the Temple in Jerusalem. Of course, massive riots broke out more or less instantly.
Soon rebels were in the streets. The Romans were driven out of Jerusalem. The Roman Legate of Syria, Cestius Gallus, responded by raising a huge army and marching to Judea. It should have been a slam-dunk, but it wasn’t. He and his army were ambushed and destroyed in the Battle of Beth Horon.
Nero (yes, the chap who fiddled while Rome burned) then appointed another commander, Vespasian, who collected up an even bigger army and came back. This time there were no slip ups. Vespasian conducted a war which looks, to modern eyes, like a genocidal conflict. But, then, the Jews gave as good as they got. It was a war without mercy, with no quarter asked or given, and no distinction made between soldiers and civilians, combatants and non-combatants, adults...and children.
The Jewish insurgents might have done a better job if they hadn’t been busy killing each other. As they realized the war might be lost, they turned on each other, with various groups attacking the others for insufficient zeal.
When it was all done, huge swaths of the country had been turned into wasteland and desert. And the city of Jerusalem was in ruins, its population slaughtered, taken into slavery, or scattered to the winds.
It was, of course, horrible. And the surviving Judeans stood listlessly in the nightmare landscape that their country had become, and wondered at the meaning of it. How could their God let this happen?
Alas...
It wasn’t over yet.
In fact, it was about to get much, much...
Worse.
Footnotes:
*There were three major Jewish-Roman Wars. This section will focus on tthe First Jewish–Roman War. I am using as my major source “First Jewish-Roman War,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish-Roman_War
For the Wikipedia article on all three wars, see “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-Roman_wars
For reasons of space, I’m leaving out a great number of terrible and/or amazing things. For instance, there was a brief intermission in the War while Vespasian returned to Rome and became emperor. (Nero had followed Caligula to the grave. We are not at all sure if he killed himself, or was executed after a military revolt. But, either way he was gone.)
However, Vespasian’s absence didn’t matter in the long run. His son, Titus, took over the army command and finished the job of taking Jerusalem. He would go on to be Emperor, succeeding his father.
I’m also leaving out several cataclysmic battles--for instance, at Masada, where a band of fanatical Jews, the Sicarii, gathered for a last stand. After a long siege, they were either defeated and butchered by the Romans, or they committed a mass suicide. Either way, they became symbols for the Zionists of today. See “The Masada Myth,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_myth.
Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker
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