BETHAR (FORTRESS)

Betar was the last standing Jewish fortress in the Bar Kochba revolt of the 2nd century AD, destroyed by the Roman army on Tisha B'av.

The site of historic Betar (also spelled Beitar or Bethar), next to the modern Palestinian village of Battir southwest of Jerusalem, was known as Khirbet al-Yahudi, Arabic for "the Jew's ruins".
The destruction of Betar put an end to the last great revolt against Rome, and effectively quashed any Jewish dreams of freedom. Accounts of the event in Talmudic and Midrashic writings thus reflect and amplify its importance in the Jewish psyche and oral tradition in the subsequent period. The best known is from the Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 57a-b:

"Through the shaft of a litter Bethar was destroyed." It was the custom when a boy was born to plant a cedar tree and when a girl was born to plant a pine tree, and when they married, the tree was cut down and a canopy made of the branches. One day the daughter of the Emperor was passing when the shaft of her litter broke, so they lopped some branches off a cedar tree and brought it to her. The Jews thereupon fell upon them and beat them. They reported to the Emperor that the Jews were rebelling, and he marched against them.

[In explanation of the verse] "He hath cut off in fierce anger all the horn of Israel." R. Zera said in the name of R. Abbahu who quoted R. Johanan: These are the eighty thousand battle trumpets which assembled in the city of Bethar, when it was taken and men, women and children were slain in it until their blood ran into the Great Sea [=Mediterranean]. Do you think this was near? It was a whole mil away.

It has been taught: R. Eleazar the Great said: There are two streams in the valley of Yadaim, one running in one direction and one in another, and the Sages estimated that [at that time] they ran with two parts water to one of blood.

In a Baraitha it has been taught: 'For seven years [after the massacre at Beitar] the gentiles [Roman settlers in the land Hadrian then named Palestina] fertilized their vineyards with the blood of Israel without using manure.'

...Rab Judah reported Samuel as saying in the name of Rabban Simeon b. Gamaliel; What is signified by the verse, "Mine eye affecteth my soul, because of all the daughters of my city?" There were four hundred synagogues in the city of Bethar, and in every one were four hundred teachers of children, and each one had under him four hundred pupils, and when the enemy entered there they pierced them with their staves, and when the enemy prevailed and captured them, they wrapped them in their scrolls and burnt them with fire.
Other Midrashic sources can be seen here.

Literature

David Ussishkin: "Archaeological Soundings at Betar, Bar-Kochba's Last Stronghold", in: Tel Aviv. Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 20 (1993) 66ff.

See also

Battir (Arab village near Betar ruins)
Betar Illit (Jewish city near Betar)
Mevo Betar (Jewish town near Betar)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betar_%28fortress%29"
Categories: Archaeological sites in the West Bank Jewish history

SIMON BAR KOKHBA

Simon bar Kokhba (Hebrew: שמעון בר כוכבא, also transliterated as Bar Kokhva or Bar Kochba) was the Jewish leader who led what is known as Bar Kokhba's revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE, establishing an independent Jewish state of Israel which he ruled for three years as Nasi ("prince," or "president"). His state was conquered by the Romans in 135 CE following a two-year war. He became the last king of Israel in history.

Originally named Simon ben Kosba (Hebrew: שמעון בן כוסבא or ben Koziba, בן כוזיבא), he was given the surname Bar Kokhba (Aramaic for "Son of a Star", referring to the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17, "A star has shot off Jacob") by his contemporary, the Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva.

After the failure of the revolt, many, including rabbinical writers, referred to Simon bar Kokhba as "Simon bar Kozeba" ("Son of the lie").


Second Jewish revolt

Main article: Bar Kokhba's revolt

Despite the devastation wrought by the Romans during the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE), which left the population and countryside in ruins, a series of laws passed by Roman Emperors proved the incentive for the second rebellion. The last straw were laws enacted by Roman Emperor Hadrian, including an attempt to prevent Jews from living in Jerusalem, and a new Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, being built in its place. The second Jewish rebellion took place 60 years after the first and re-established an independent state lasting three years.

The state minted its own coins, which were inscribed "the first (or second) year of the redemption of Israel". Bar Kokhba ruled with the title of "Nasi". The Romans fared very poorly during the initial revolt facing a completely unified Jewish force (unlike during the First Jewish-Roman War, where Flavius Josephus records three separate Jewish armies fighting each other for control of the Temple Mount during the three weeks time after the Romans had breached Jerusalem's walls and were fighting their way to the center). A complete Roman legion with auxiliaries was annihilated. The new state knew only one year of peace. The Romans committed no less than twelve legions, amounting to one third to one half of the entire Roman army, to reconquer this now independent state. Being outnumbered and taking heavy casualties, the Romans refused to engage in an open battle and instead adopted a scorched earth policy which decimated the Judean populace, slowly grinding away at the will of the Judeans to sustain the war. Bar Kokhba took up refuge in the fortress of Betar. The Romans eventually captured it and killed all the defenders. According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed. Yet so costly was the Roman victory that the Emperor Hadrian, when reporting to the Roman Senate, did not see fit to begin with the customary greeting "I and my army are well", and is the only Roman general known to have refused to celebrate his victory with a triumphal entrance into his capital.

In the aftermath of the war, Hadrian consolidated the older political units of Judaea, Galilee and Samaria into the new province of Syria Palaestina (Palestine). The new provincial designation was derived as an insult from the name of the enemies of the Jews, the Philistines who had occupied the coastal plain in ancient times.

Over the past few decades, much new information about the revolt has come to light, thanks mainly to the discovery of several collections of letters, some possibly by Bar Kokhba himself, in the caves overlooking the Dead Sea.[1] These letters can now be seen at the Israel Museum.[2]

Bar Kokhba in the Arts

Since the end of the nineteenth century, Bar-Kochba has been the subject of numerous works of art (dramas, operas, novels, etc.), [3] including:

Harisot Betar: sipur `al dever gevurat Bar Kokhva ve-hurban Betar bi-yad Adriyanus kesar Roma (1858), a Hebrew novel by Kalman Schulman

Bar Kokhba (1882), a Yiddish operetta by Abraham Goldfaden (mus. and libr.). The work was written in the wake of pogroms against Jews following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia.

Bar Kokhba (1884), a Hebrew drama by Yehudah Loeb Landau
The Son of a Star (1888), an English novel by Benjamin Ward Richardson
Le fils de l’étoile (1903), a French opera by Camille Erlanger (mus.) and Catulle Mendes (libr.)
Bar-Kochba (1905), a German opera by Stanislaus Suda (mus.) and Karl Jonas (libr.)
Rabbi Aqiba und Bar-Kokhba (1910), a Yiddish novel by David Pinsky
Bar-Kokhba (1929), a Hebrew drama by Saul Tchernichovski
Bar-Kokhba (1939), a Hebrew drama by Shmuel Halkin
Bar-Kokhba (1941), a Yiddish novel by Abraham Raphael Forsyth
A csillag fia (1943), a Hungarian drama by Lajos Szabolcsi
Steiersønne (1952), a Danish novel by Poul Borchsenius
Prince of Israel (1952), an English novel by Elias Gilner
Bar-Kokhba (1953), a Hebrew novel by Joseph Opatoshu
If I Forget Thee (1983), an English novel by Brenda Lesley Segal

Kokav mi-mesilato. Haye Bar-Kokhba 1988), a Hebrew novel by S.J. Kreutner

Ha-mered ha-midbar. Roman hstoriah mi-tequfat Bar-Kokhba (1988), a Hebrew novel by Yeroshua Perah

My Husband, Bar Kokhba (2003), an English novel by Andrew Sanders

Another operetta on the subject of Bar Kokhba was written by the Russian-Jewish emigre composer Yaacov Bilansky Levanon in Palestine in the 1920s.

John Zorn's Masada Chamber Ensemble recorded an album called Bar Kokhba, showing a photograph of the Letter of Bar Kokhba to Yeshua, son of Galgola on the cover.

The Bar Kokhba game

According to a legend, during his reign, Bar Kokhba was once presented a mutilated man, who had his tongue ripped out and hands cut off. Unable to talk or write, the victim was incapable of telling who his attackers were. Thus, Bar Kokhba decided to ask simple questions to which the dying man was able to nod or shake his head with his last movements; the murderers were consequently apprehended.

In Hungary, this legend spawned the "Bar Kokhba game", in which one of two players comes up with a word or object, while the other must figure it out by asking questions only to be answered with "yes" or "no". The verb "kibarkochbázni" ("to Bar Kochba out") became a common language verb meaning "retrieving information in an extremely tedious way".[4]
In English speaking countries, this is known as Twenty Questions.

See also

Cave of letters
Ulam's game

References

1-^ "Texts on Bar Kochba: Bar Kochba's letters", retireved 25 May 2007.[1]
2-^ "Bar Kokhba", Israel Museum:Jerusalem, retrieved 25 May 2007.[2]
3-^ G. Boccaccini, Portraits of Middle Judaism in Scholarship and Arts (Turin: Zamorani, 1992).
4-^ (Hungarian) kibarkochbázni

Bibliography

W. Eck, 'The Bar Kokhba Revolt: the Roman point of view' in the Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999) 76ff.

David Goodblatt, Avital Pinnick and Daniel Schwartz: Historical Perspectives: From the Hasmoneans to the Bar Kohkba Revolt In Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Boston: Brill: 2001: ISBN 90-04-12007-6

Richard Marks: The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature: False Messiah and National Hero: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 1994: ISBN 0-271-00939-X

Leibel Reznick: The Mystery of Bar Kokhba: Northvale: J.Aronson: 1996: ISBN 1-56821-502-9

Peter Schafer: The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: Tübingen: Mohr: 2003: ISBN 3-16-148076-7

David Ussishkin: "Archaeological Soundings at Betar, Bar-Kochba's Last Stronghold", in: Tel Aviv. Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 20 (1993) 66ff.

Yigael Yadin: Bar Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome: London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 1971: ISBN 0-297-00345-3

External links

The Bar-Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) by Shira Schoenberg (Jewish Virtual Library)
Bar Kochba with links to all sources (livius.org)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_bar_Kokhba"

Categories: Ancient Jewish Roman history Ancient people Jewish film and theatre Jewish Messiah claimants Year of birth missing 135 deaths Jews and Judaism-related controversies

THE BAR KOKHBA REVOLT

Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135) (Hebrew: מרד בר כוכבא‎) against the Roman Empire was a second major rebellion by the Jews of Iudaea and the last of the Jewish-Roman Wars.

Simon bar Kokhba, the commander of the revolt, was acclaimed the Messiah, the king prophesied to restore Israel. The revolt established a Jewish state for over two years, but a massive Roman army finally crushed it. The Romans then barred Jews from Jerusalem.

Jewish Christians hailed Jesus as the Messiah and did not support Bar Kokhba. They were barred from Jerusalem along with the rest of the Jews. The war and its aftermath helped differentiate Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism.

The revolt is also known as The Second Jewish-Roman War, The Second Jewish Revolt, or The Third Revolt (counting the Kitos War, 115 - 117, as second).

Background

After the failed Great Jewish Revolt in the year 70, the Roman authorities took measures to suppress the rebellious province. Instead of a procurator, they installed a praetor as a governor and stationed an entire legion, the X Fretensis.

In 130, Emperor Hadrian visited the ruins of Jerusalem. At first sympathetic towards the Jews, Hadrian promised to rebuild the city, but the Jews felt betrayed when they found out that his intentions were to rebuild the Jewish holiest city as a Roman metropolis, and a new temple upon the ruins of the Second Temple, which was to be dedicated to Jupiter.[1]

An additional legion, the VI Ferrata, was stationed in the province to maintain order, and the works commenced in 131 after the governor of Judaea Tineius Rufus performed the foundation ceremony of Aelia Capitolina, the city’s projected new name. "Ploughing up the Temple" was a religious offense that turned many Jews against the Roman authorities. The tensions grew higher when Hadrian abolished circumcision (brit milah), which he, a Hellenist, viewed as mutilation. A Roman coin inscribed Aelia Capitolina was issued in 132.

Because the Great Jewish Revolt had resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin at Yavne provided spiritual guidance for the Jewish nation, both in Judea and throughout the diaspora.

Revolt

The Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva (alternatively Akiba) regarded the chosen commander Simon Bar Kokhba to be the Jewish Messiah, according to the Star Prophecy verse from Numbers 24:17: "There shall come a star out of Jacob" ("Bar Kokhba" means "son of a star" in the Aramaic language).

At the time Jewish Christians were still a minor sect of Judaism, and most historians believe that it was this messianic claim in favor of Bar Kokhba that alienated many of them, who believed that the true messiah was Jesus, and sharply deepened the schism between Jews and Christians.
The Jewish leaders carefully planned the second revolt to avoid numerous mistakes that had plagued the first Great Jewish Revolt sixty years earlier. In 132, a revolt led by Bar Kokhba quickly spread from Modi'in across the country, cutting off the Roman garrison in Jerusalem.

"The Era of the redemption of Israel"

Bar Kokhba's tetradrachm. Obverse: the Temple facade with the rising star. Reverse: A lulav, the text reads: "Year one of the redemption of Israel"

A sovereign Jewish state was restored for two and a half years that followed. The functional public administration was headed by Simon Bar Kokhba, who took the title Nasi Israel (ruler or prince of Israel). The "Era of the redemption of Israel" was announced, contracts were signed and coins were minted in large quantity in silver and copper with corresponding inscriptions (all were overstruck over foreign coins).

Rabbi Akiva presided over the Sanhedrin. The religious rituals were observed and the korbanot (i.e., sacrifices) were resumed on the Altar. It has been believed that attempts were made to restore the Temple in Jerusalem, but the evidence—letters written in Jerusalem and dated to the revolutionary era—has turned out to belong to the revolt of 66–70.

Roman reaction

The outbreak took the Romans by surprise. Hadrian called his general Sextus Julius Severus from Britain, and troops were brought from as far as the Danube. The size of the Roman army amassed against the rebels was much larger than that commanded by Titus sixty years earlier. Roman losses were very heavy. Among its losses it is believed that an entire legion, the XXII Deiotariana was completely wiped out. [2] Roman losses were so heavy that Hadrian's report to the Roman Senate omitted the customary salutation "I and the legions are well" [1].

The struggle lasted for three years before the revolt was brutally crushed in the summer of 135. After losing Jerusalem, Bar Kokhba and the remnants of his army withdrew to the fortress of Betar, which also subsequently came under siege. The Jerusalem Talmud relates that the numbers slain were enormous, that the Romans "went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils" (Taanis 4:5). The Talmud also relates that for seventeen years the Romans didn't allow the Jews to bury their dead in Betar.

Outcome of the war

A cluster of papyrus containing Bar Kokhba's orders found in the Judean desert by modern Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin.

According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed, 50 fortified towns and 985 villages razed.[3] [4] The Talmud, however, claims a death toll in the millions. The latter figure is unlikely, because there were simply not that many Jews in the region at that time. Cassius Dio claimed that "Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war. Therefore, Hadrian, in writing to the Senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors: 'If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the army are in health.'" [1]

Hadrian attempted to root out Judaism, which he saw as the cause of continuous rebellions. He prohibited the Torah law, the Hebrew calendar and executed Judaic scholars. The sacred scroll was ceremoniously burned on the Temple Mount. At the former Temple sanctuary, he installed two statues, one of Jupiter, another of himself. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea, he wiped the name off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina, after the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Jews; previously similar terms had been used to describe only the (smaller) former Philistine homeland to the west of Judaea. Since then, the land has been referred to as "Palestine," which supplanted earlier terms such as "Iudaea" (Judaea) and the antiquated "Canaan." Similarly, he re-established Jerusalem as the Roman pagan polis of Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden from entering it.

Long-term consequences and historic importance

Expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem during the reign of Hadrian. A miniature from the 15th-century manuscript "Histoire des Empereurs".

Constantine I allowed Jews to mourn their defeat and humiliation once a year on Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall. Jews remained scattered for close to two millennia; their numbers in the region fluctuated with time.

Modern historians have come to view the Bar-Kokhba Revolt as being of decisive historic importance. The massive destruction and loss of life occasioned by the revolt has led some scholars to date the beginning of the Jewish diaspora from this date. They note that, unlike the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War chronicled by Josephus, the majority of the Jewish population of Judea was either killed, exiled, or sold into slavery after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, and Jewish religious and political authority was suppressed far more brutally. After the revolt the Jewish religious center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. Judea would not be a center of Jewish religious, cultural, or political life again until the modern era, though Jews continued to live there and important religious developments still occurred there. In Galilee, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the 2nd–4th centuries. Eventually, Safed became known as a center of Jewish learning, especially Kabbalah in the 15th century.

Historian Shmuel Katz writes that even after the disaster of the revolt: "Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was there that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land."

The Galilee in late antiquity.

He lists the communities left in Palestine: "43 Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: 12 on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and 31 villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley". [5]

The disastrous end of the revolt also occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought. Messianism was abstracted and spiritualized, and rabbinical political thought became deeply cautious and conservative. The Talmud, for instance, refers to Bar-Kokhba as "Ben-Kusiba", a derogatory term used to indicate that he was a false Messiah. The deeply ambivalent rabbinical position regarding Messianism, as expressed most famously in the Rambam's (also known as Maimonides) "Epistle to Yemen", would seem to have its origins in the attempt to deal with the trauma of a failed Messianic uprising.

In the post-rabbinical era, however, the Bar-Kokhba Revolt became a symbol of valiant national resistance. The Zionist youth movement Betar took its name from Bar-Kokhba's traditional last stronghold, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, took his Hebrew last name from one of Bar-Kokhba's generals.

Further revolts against the Roman Empire

Main articles: War against Gallus and Revolt against Heraclius

In the year 351, the Jews launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution. [5]

In 438, when the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews' praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call "to the great and mighty people of the Jews" which began: "Know that the end of the exile of our people has come"! [6] [5]

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for five years governed the city. [5]

Sources

The best recognized sources are Cassius Dio, Roman History (book 69) and Aelius Spartianus, Life of Hadrian (in the Augustan History). The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has exposed some new historical data.

References

1-^ a b c Cassius Dio, Roman history 69.14.3
2-^ livius.org account(Legio XXII Deiotariana)
3-^ The 'Five Good Emperors' (roman-empire.net)
4-^ Mosaic or mosaic?—The Genesis of the Israeli Language by Zuckermann, Gilad
5-^ a b c d Katz, Shmuel, Battleground, (1974), page 96
6-^ Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

Further reading

Yohannan Aharoni & Michael Avi-Yonah, "The MacMillan Bible Atlas", Revised Edition, pp. 164–65 (1968 & 1977 by Carta Ltd.)

The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Judean Desert studies). Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1963–2002.

Vol. 2, "Greek Papyri", edited by Naphtali Lewis; "Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions", edited by Yigael Yadin and Jonas C. Greenfield. (ISBN 9652210099).

Vol. 3, "Hebrew, Aramaic and Nabatean–Aramaic Papyri", edited Yigael Yadin, Jonas C. Greenfield, Ada Yardeni, Baruch A. Levine (ISBN 9652210463).

W. Eck, 'The Bar Kokhba Revolt: the Roman point of view' in the Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999) 76ff.

Faulkner, Neil. Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus Publishing, 2004 (hardcover, ISBN 0-7524-2573-0).

Goodman, Martin. The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, A.D. 66–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (hardcover, ISBN 0-521-33401-2); 1993 (paperback, ISBN 0-521-44782-8).

Richard Marks: The Image of Bar Kokhba in Traditional Jewish Literature: False Messiah and National Hero: University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press: 1994: ISBN 0-271-00939-X

David Ussishkin: "Archaeological Soundings at Betar, Bar-Kochba's Last Stronghold", in: Tel Aviv. Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 20 (1993) 66ff.

Yadin, Yigael. Bar-Kokhba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome. New York: Random House, 1971 (hardcover, ISBN 0394471849); London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971 (hardcover, ISBN 0297003453).

Mildenberg, Leo. The Coinage of the Bar Kokhba War. Switzerland: Schweizerische Numismatische Gesellschaft, Zurich, 1984 (hardcover, ISBN 3-7941-2634-3).

External links

photographs from Yadin's book Bar Kokhba
The Jewish History Resource Center Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
David Pileggi, "The Bar Kochva letters": discovery of the papyri
Archaeologists find tunnels from Jewish revolt against Romans by the AP. Ha'aretz March 14, 2006
Jewish Encyclopedia: Bar Kokba and Bar Kokba War
Bar Kochba with links to all sources