Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

east and the steep, forbidding Valley of Gehenna in the south, Jerusalem, at the
     time of the Roman invasion, was home to a settled population of about a hundred thousand
     people. To the Romans, it was an inconsequential speck on the imperial map, a city
     the wordy statesman Cicero dismissed as “a hole in the corner.” But to the Jews this
     was the navel of the world, the axis of the universe. There was no city more unique,
     more holy, more venerable in all the world than Jerusalem. The purple vineyards whose
     vines twisted and crawled across the level plains, the well-tilled fields and viridescent
     orchards bursting with almond and fig and olive trees, the green beds of papyrus floating
     lazily along the Jordan River—the Jews not only knew and deeply loved every feature
     of this consecrated land, they laid claim to all of it. Everything from the farmsteads
     of Galilee to the low-lying hills of Samaria and the far outskirts of Idumea, where
     the Bible says the accursed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah once stood, was given by
     God to the Jews, though in fact the Jews ruled none of it, not even Jerusalem, where
     the true God was worshipped. The city that the Lord had clothed in splendor and glory
     and placed, as the prophet Ezekiel declared, “in the center of all nations”—the eternal
     seat of God’s kingdom on earth—was, at the dawn of the first century C.E ., just a minor province, and a vexing one at that, at the far corner of the mighty
     Roman Empire.
    It is not that Jerusalem was unaccustomed to invasion and occupation. Despite its
     exalted status in the hearts of the Jews, thetruth is that Jerusalem was little more than a trifle to be passed among a succession
     of kings and emperors who took turns plundering and despoiling the sacred city on
     their way to far grander ambitions. In 586 B.C.E . the Babylonians—masters of Mesopotamia—rampaged through Judea, razing both Jerusalem
     and its Temple to the ground. The Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, who
     allowed the Jews to return to their beloved city and rebuild their temple, not because
     they admired the Jews or took their cult seriously, but because they considered Jerusalem
     an irrelevant backwater of little interest or concern to an empire that stretched
     the length of Central Asia (though the prophet Isaiah would thank the Persian king
     Cyrus by anointing him messiah). The Persian Empire, and Jerusalem with it, fell to
     the armies of Alexander the Great, whose descendants imbued the city and its inhabitants
     with Greek culture and ideas. Upon Alexander’s untimely death in 323 B.C.E ., Jerusalem was passed as spoils to the Ptolemaic dynasty and ruled from distant
     Egypt, though only briefly. In 198 B.C.E ., the city was wrested from Ptolemaic control by the Seleucid king Antiochus the
     Great, whose son Antiochus Epiphanes fancied himself god incarnate and strove to put
     an end once and for all to the worship of the Jewish deity in Jerusalem. But the Jews
     responded to this blasphemy with a relentless guerrilla war led by the stouthearted
     sons of Mattathias the Hasmonaean—the Maccabees—who reclaimed the holy city from Seleucid
     control in 164 B.C.E . and, for the first time in four centuries, restored Jewish hegemony over Judea.
    For the next hundred years, the Hasmonaeans ruled God’s land with an iron fist. They
     were priest-kings, each sovereign serving as both King of the Jews and high priest
     of the Temple. But when civil war broke out between the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus
     over control of the throne, each brother foolishly reached out to Rome for support.
     Pompey took the brothers’ entreaties as an invitation to seize Jerusalem for himself,
     thus putting an end to the brief period of direct Jewish rule over the city of God.
     In 63 B.C.E .,Judea became a Roman protectorate, and the Jews were made once again a subject people.
    Roman rule, coming as it did after a century of independence, was not warmly received
     by the Jews. The Hasmonaean dynasty was abolished, but Pompey allowed Hyrcanus to
     maintain the position of high priest. That did not sit well with the supporters of
     Aristobulus, who launched a series of revolts to which the Romans responded with characteristic
     savagery—burning towns, massacring rebels, enslaving populations. Meanwhile, the chasm
     between the starving and indebted poor toiling in the countryside and the wealthy
     provincial class ruling in