Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

nations? Who do these backward and superstitious tribesmen think they
     are? The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering
     how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws
     to the victors.”
    For the Jews, however, this sense of exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance
     or pride. It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign
     presence in the land he had set aside for his chosen people. That is why, when the
     Jews first came to this land a thousand years earlier, God had decreed that they massacre
     every man, woman, and child they encountered, that they slaughter every ox, goat,
     and sheep they came across, that they burn every farm, every field, every crop, every
     living thing without exception so as to ensure that the land would belong solely to
     those who worshipped this one God and no other.
    “As for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,”
     God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You
     shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites,
     the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy
     20:17–18).
    It was, the Bible claims, only after the Jewish armies had “utterly destroyed all
     that breathed” in the cities of Libnah and Lachish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir,
     in the hill country and in the Negeb, in the lowlands and in the slopes—only after
     every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of
     Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.
    And yet, a thousand years later, this same tribe that had shed so much blood to cleanse
     the Promised Land of every foreign element so as to rule it in the name of its God
     now found itself laboring under the boot of an imperial pagan power, forced to share
     the holy city with Gauls, Spaniards, Romans, Greeks, and Syrians—all of them foreigners,
     all of them heathens—obligated by law to make sacrifices in God’s own Temple on behalf
     of a Roman idolater who lived more than a thousand kilometers away.
    How would the heroes of old respond to such humiliation and degradation? What would
     Joshua or Aaron or Phineas or Samuel do to the unbelievers who had defiled the land
     set aside by God for his chosen people?
    They would drown the land in blood. They would smash the heads of the heathens and
     the gentiles, burn their idols to the ground, slaughter their wives and their children.
     They would slay the idolaters and bathe their feet in the blood of their enemies,
     just as the Lord commanded. They would call upon the God of Israel to burst forth
     from the heavens in his war chariot, to trample upon the sinful nations and make the
     mountains writhe at his fury.
    As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God’s chosen people to Rome for some
     coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was
     an insult to God. It was a blight upon the entire land.
    It had to be wiped away.

Chapter Two
King of the Jews
    In the years of tumult that followed the Roman occupation of Judea, as Rome became
     enmeshed in a debilitating civil war between Pompey Magnus and his erstwhile ally
     Julius Caesar, even while remnants of the Hasmonaean Dynasty continued vying for the
     favors of both men, the situation for the Jewish farmers and peasants who harrowed
     and sowed God’s land steadily worsened. The small family farms that for centuries
     had served as the primary basis of the rural economy were gradually swallowed up by
     large estates administered by landed aristocracies flush with freshly minted Roman
     coins. Rapid urbanization under Roman rule fueled mass internal migration from the
     countryside to the cities. The agriculture that had once sustained the meager village
     populations was now almost wholly focused on feeding the engorged urban centers, leaving
     the rural peasants hungry and destitute. The peasantry were not only obligated to
     continue paying their taxes and their tithes to the Temple priesthood, they were now
     forced to pay a heavy tribute to Rome. For farmers, the total could amount to nearly
     half their annual yield.
    At the same time, successive droughts had left large swaths of the countryside fallow
     and in ruin as much of the Jewish peasantrywas