Owning Disaster : coping with catastrophe in Abrahamic narrative traditions [1 ed.] 1032454741, 9781032454740

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OWNING DISASTER COPING WITH CATASTROPHE IN ABRAHAMIC NARRATIVE TRADITIONS Aaron M. Hagler

Owning Disaster

Delving into the intertwined tapestry of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred texts, exegesis, philosophy, theology, and historiography, this book explores the similar coping mechanisms across Abrahamic communities in reconciling the implications of disasters without abandoning their faith. Belief in a single, omnipotent God carries with it the challenge of explaining and contextualizing disasters that seem to contravene God’s supposed will. Through explorations of Jewish responses to the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, Christian responses to the Arab Muslim conquests, Muslim responses to the Crusades, and a variety of responses to the Mongol conquests, Aaron M. Hagler unveils the shared patterns and responses that emerge within these communities when confronted by calamity. Initial responses come in the forms of horrified lamentations, but as the initial shock dissipates, a complex dance of self-blame and collective introspection unfolds, as writers and theologians seek to contextualize the tragedy and guide their communities toward hope, resilience, and renewal. Of interest to scholars, theologians, and individuals seeking to explore interconnected notions of resilience within Abrahamic communities, Owning Disaster will resonate with readers eager to contemplate the intricate relationship between religious dogma, human resilience, and the profound questions that emerge when confronted with calamity. Aaron M. Hagler is a Research Associate at Hebrew Union College and a History Educator at Geffen Academy at UCLA. He is a former Associate Professor of History at Troy University with a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Owning Disaster Coping with Catastrophe in Abrahamic Narrative Traditions

Aaron M. Hagler

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Aaron M. Hagler The right of Aaron M. Hagler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hagler, Aaron M., author. Title: Owning disaster : coping with catastrophe in Abrahamic narrative traditions / Aaron M. Hagler. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032587 (print) | LCCN 2023032588 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032454740 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032454764 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003377191 (ebook) | ISBN 9781003812050 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781003812074 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Disasters--Religious aspects. | Abrahamic religions--Historiography. Classification: LCC BL65.D57 H34 2024 (print) | LCC BL65.D57 (ebook) | DDC 200.72/2--dc23/eng/20230927 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032587 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032588 ISBN: 978-1-032-45474-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45476-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37719-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

This book is written in loving memory of my grandparents: Ernie, Norma, Sidney, and Ann and is dedicated to my wife Elana, who creates beauty everywhere.

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction

x xii 1

Methodology 5 Disclaimer 8 Notes 12

1 The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism

13

What Is Monotheism? 13 Cyrus, God’s Messiah 16 Different Religions? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Intertwined 18 Islam’s Relationship to Judaism and Christianity: A Jerusalem Story 22 Later Cultural Interactions: Was The Guide of the Perplexed a Purely Jewish Book? 24 Conclusions 26 Notes 28

2 The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile (576 BCE) The Sack of the Temple 32 Historical Context 34 The Downfall of Assyria (Late Seventh Century BCE) 34 The Egyptian-Babylonian Conflict (609–605 BCE) and Judah’s Bad Gamble 37 Early Reactions to the Catastrophe 38

32

viii Contents Lamentations: “Why Have You Forgotten Us Utterly?”  39 Jeremiah: “For Your Gods Have Become as Many as Your Towns” 46 Conclusion 54 Notes 55

3 The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE)

58

History Repeats Itself: Another Temple Is Destroyed  58 On the Sources for the Temple’s Destruction  69 A Brief History of the Jewish Rebellion and the Destruction of the Temple  72 Josephus’ Dramatic History: “He Who Rushes to Obvious Destruction with Eyes Open Earns Contempt”  77 The Echoes of Destruction: Later Jewish and Christian Reactions to the Temple  87 The Adversus Judaeos Genre  90 Adversus Judaeos and the Temple: A Convenient Catastrophe 91 Rome, the Jews, and Judaea after 70 CE  97 The Birth of Rabbinic Judaism: The Academy at Yavneh 101 The Rabbis of Babylon: The Exiled (by Choice) Elites 106 Rabbinic Narratives of the Temple’s Destruction in the Talmud 108 Notes 111

4 The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant A New Monotheism  117 Historical Context: The Early Islamic Conquests  119 The World of Classical Antiquity: Byzantium and Persia on the Eve of the Islamic Conquests  120 The Conquests of Syria and Iraq: Islamic Perspectives 124 Contextualizing the Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Near East: Calamity or Continuity?  126 Apocalyptic Visions of the Arab Muslim Conquests  128 Sophronius’ Lamentation, and the Blame Game after the Arab-Muslim Conquest  129

117

Contents ix The Jewish Response to the Muslim Conquests  135 From the Byzantines to the Muslims: Contextualizing the Jewish Reaction to the Arab-Muslim Conquests 141 Some Jeremiah-phase Christian Responses to the Conquests 143 The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Letter of Maximus the Confessor: The Functions of Jews and Muslims in Christian Eschatology  145 Apocalyptic Responses in Non-Apocalyptic Works  153 Conclusion 156 Notes 159

5 Muslim Responses to the Crusades

164

The End of Late Antiquity  164 Historical Context: The Crusades  166 Jerusalem, Again: Frankish Conquest and Muslim Responses 170 Notes 179

6 Gog and Magog

181

A Brief History of the Mongol Conquests  182 The Account of Ibn al-Athīr: In Anticipation of the End, a Plea for Leadership  184 The Afterlife of The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius: The Mongols in the First Chronicle of Novgorod 188 “May God Destroy Them:” Jūzjānī’s Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī’s Presentation of the Mongols  194 In Defense of Gog and Magog: Juvayni and Rashīd al-Dīn 197 Notes 204

General Conclusions

207

Bibliography211 Index221

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a lot of people being kind to its author. The idea for it came to me while I was a professor at Troy University, Troy, Alabama. Its beginnings were written there, but the bulk of it was composed during my sabbatical in 2021–2022, when I had a visiting researcher appointment at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, where I maintain an affiliation as a visiting researcher. Thanks for arranging that position go to Lisa Ansell, Rabbi Dr. Reuven Firestone, and Dean Joshua Holo on the HUC end; and to my department chair at Troy University, Dr. Allen Jones, and our Dean, Dr. Steven Taylor, who approved the sabbatical and allowed me to spend the year with access to the resources of Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California. Access to the library of the University of Pennsylvania, my doctorate-granting alma mater, was provided through the good graces of my onetime-dissertation advisor and mentor, Dr. Paul M. Cobb, whom I still struggle to call by his first name, and the inimitable Linda Greene in the NELC office. I am further indebted to HUC faculty members and staff including Rabbi Dvora Weisberg, Rabbi Neil Scheindlin, Leah Hochman, Taylor Dwyer, Sheryl Stahl, Rabbi Joshua D. Garroway, Walter Jackson, Ricky Sims, and Andrew Durbin for assistance conceptual, bibliothetic, and technical. Conversations with Dr. Jim Lindsay, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Dr. Reyhan Durmaz, Dr. Kelly Shannon-Anderson, the Reverend Dr. Betsy Jennings Powell, Father Thomas Nathan Smith, and the Reverend Damon Gibbs (who requested, but was denied, the title “Florida Man” in these acknowledgments) were enlightening, illuminating, challenging, and fun. I am further indebted to Betsy, as well as to Ricki Wovsaniker, Adi Zarchi, and Rabbi Scott Kramer, for their comments on various drafts of this project. Arranging our life in Los Angeles was assisted by Robin and Neil Kramer, Rob Kerr, Judy Mitoma, John Montgomerie, Tam and Annie Baig, and my colleagues at Geffen Academy at UCLA. My students at Cornell College, Troy, and Geffen Academy are the audience I imagine when writing this book. I hope they enjoy it.

Acknowledgments xi I am indebted to my parents, Jim and Vivien, for raising me to follow a plan I set for myself. My children, Asher and Dina, are the motive for every project I undertake; without them, this work would never have been started, let alone completed. And my wife, Elana, is the center of my world, the model for hard work, dedication to her family, and the kind of detailedoriented excellence as an artist and designer that I aspire to as a scholar. I’m really, really fortunate.

Foreword

In the summer of 2000, as a Sophomore at Brandeis University, I was working as an unpaid intern at the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles. In exchange for permission to park at its location on Wilshire, an area of LA where finding a parking spot would otherwise have fallen somewhere between a shock and a miracle, I gained valuable insight into the diplomatic world (I was considering a career in diplomacy at the time) and the ins and outs of consular life. My internship was in the Public Affairs Department. Like any mission abroad, Israel’s Los Angeles consulate wanted to know what was being said in the press about Israel, and my task was to scour the major newspapers in the Consulate’s zone—an area including Southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado—for editorials and opinion pieces that related in any way to Israel or to American Jewish Communities. I would prepare a report daily, with a summary of the articles for the Public Affairs Consul. Often, this took very little of my day; often, there was nothing written about Israel at all. The Los Angeles Times was and is a major global paper, of course, but the editorial boards of The Salt Lake Tribune, The Deseret News, The Arizona Republic, The Rocky Mountain News, The Denver Post, The Las Vegas Review Journal, and The Albuquerque Journal (to name a few) rarely had relevant thoughts on my assigned areas of interest. The op-ed pages of the American West often had little to say about the Middle East. “What should I do,” I asked the Public Affairs Consul my third day, “when they have nothing to report?” He promised to assign me some projects to work on—these included discussing with shipping companies the potential cost of shipping potable water from Turkey to Israel, in the event of an extreme drought—he told me to just be available for whatever seemed to need doing. “Don’t worry!” he assured me boisterously. “You’ll figure it all out as you go. No need to plan so much. Kol tachnit zeh basis la-shinui.” Every plan is just the basis of the change. Inasmuch as it was an unpaid internship, it was still a heady position for me to be in as a 20-year-old, and certainly a busier time for Israel in the media, even those media locally focused on their Western-US communities,

Foreword xiii than usual. Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister, was leading the Israeli delegation for peace talks at Camp David with the Yasser Arafat-led Palestinian delegation. These seemed to be the “final status” talks I’d heard vaguely about since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, an event I watched live in my math class in seventh grade; peace would soon be a reality, I thought, and I happily helped communicate Israel’s positions on the ongoing talks to the press. Alas, for a variety of reasons, it was not to be, but that is another discussion. The naïve euphoria of the moment was interrupted by a profoundly offensive public statement from Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s ultraOrthodox Shas Party and Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi, on the Monday of my last week there—as it turned out, the most memorable day of my summer position. I had, as my supervisor had promised, figured some of my duties out as I went along, and as I walked into the office and cleared security, I saw the office was buzzing in an unusual way. The Public Affairs Consul’s door was closed—which was itself quite unusual—and the others who shared my office space were all on the phone. One of them gave me a meaningful glance and pointed to her computer screen, where I saw Yosef’s statement from his sermon the night before: The six million Holocaust victims were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things which should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.1 I had no idea who this Ovadia Yosef was at the time—though I learned within seconds—but this was a man who also called the Palestinians (actually, he referred to all Arabs) “snakes.” Some years later he called Islam and Muslims “ugly,” and blamed Hurricane Katrina on George W. Bush’s support of the evacuation and uprooting of the Jewish settlements in Gaza at Gush Qatif, after the failure of Camp David 2000 talks. Like only a college sophomore can, I rolled my eyes as I educated myself about his role in Israeli politics; clearly, an ignorant person had said an ignorant thing. Well, what does everyone expect? I put it out of my mind, opened a blank Microsoft Word document, and myopically began to click through my browser’s bookmarks, scanning the titles of op-ed pieces. The phone was ringing. The phone did not stop ringing. I had never picked up the phone in the consulate—I still was not comfortable with actually speaking to a member of the public for Israel, a country I knew well, but for which I was no official representative nor even a citizen—but all the other people in the office were on the phone, too. I decided that this would be my task for the day. Be available for whatever seemed to need doing. The gentleman on the other end, in his 60s or 70s, was calling from Los Angeles, and he was furious. His voice was quavering with anger and indignation. I remember glancing belatedly around the room, noticing the postures and vocal tones of my office mates in the corner of my mind; I gathered

xiv Foreword that each of them was on a similar call. The man on the other end of the phone was demanding an explanation. “I lost my whole family in the shoah,” he said with accented but perfect English, “my brothers, my parents, my cousins.” He asked me how Rabbi Yosef could have come to that conclusion about his family, and all the victims of the Nazi genocide, but for more colorfully than that; as I said, his English was perfect. Blame my callousness on my privileged youth: I’m embarrassed to say it took me until that moment to really internalize the impact Yosef’s statement might have. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I understand your anger. I’m very offended too. I’m so sorry.” I think he must have inferred that he was speaking with someone young, and low in the Consulate’s chain of command—he certainly had not reached the Consul, and in fact, there was no link below me on that chain—and he softened somewhat, perhaps realizing he was yelling at a kid having a conversation far above his pay grade. “I don’t understand it,” he said quietly to me, before hanging up. “How a Rabbi in Israel could blame the Jews for the Holocaust, and not the Nazis. I would expect it from skinheads and Holocaust deniers. But a Rabbi? A Jew? An Israeli? Never.” He ultimately thanked me for taking his call (he had been trying to get through for half an hour) and wished me a good week in Hebrew before ending the call. The phone rang all day. I took a bunch of them. His was the first and is the only one I remember clearly. I left my potential career in diplomacy aside and went the academic route instead. I rarely thought about that summer in the ensuing years, but that conversation came back to me when I was having a discussion with my own Rabbi a couple of years ago. He brought up a certain tractate in the Talmud, Tractate Gittin, that blamed the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem—a Holocaust-level catastrophe for the Ancient World, the loss of the physical center of the religion, which threatened first-century CE Judaic society with extinction—on the sins of the Jews. Specifically, the sin was one of inhospitality, the result of a case of mistaken identity. The story of Kamza and Bar Kamza (the names of the two men mistaken for each other) is a convoluted tale, but it wends its way from a dinner invitation gone awry to—as one thing leads to another—the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the resulting destruction of the Temple. Some in the Talmud laid the blame on the host of the party; some on the mis-invited Bar Kamza; and some on the Rabbis at the time, who did not respond appropriately, or who were too meek or inflexible to avert catastrophe. The Romans are never blamed. So, untactfully delivered as it was, as it turned out, Ovadia Yosef’s ascription of the Holocaust to the sins of its victims was not unique in Jewish history, or in the history of the Land of Israel, nor even in Rabbinic discourse. As I read further, it turned out that such self-blame was a common response in Christian and Muslim theological responses to community-threatening catastrophe as well.

Foreword xv “I don’t understand it,” the gentleman had said. “How a Rabbi in Israel could blame the Jews for the Holocaust, and not the Nazis.” This book is my attempt not only to answer that question, but to demonstrate that not only do monotheists blame themselves for the real catastrophes, but that regardless of era, the nature of the catastrophe (natural or manmade), and the specific monotheistic tradition, be it Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, they come to this conclusion in remarkably similar ways. Note 1 Ovadia Yosef, Radio Sermon, August 2020.

Introduction

Whatever else it may be, a monotheistic world is a doggedly orderly one. When drilling down into the essentials of each of the three major historical monotheistic traditions, we find assertions about God’s relationship to the world and to humanity that are distinct in their narrative functions, but similar in kind. Jewish dogma proclaims that God made a covenant with Abraham, fulfilled his role in the covenant when he rescued the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, handed down the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, and delivered the Jews into the Holy Land, where they were to live according to his law (disagreements about the nature of the law, and how best to live in accord with it, followed). Christian dogma proclaims that the same God planted himself in the womb of the Virgin Mary and incarnated himself in the person of Jesus, who took the sins of the world upon his head before his sacrifice at the hands of the Romans, thus offering a path to salvation for those humans born with the taint of original sin on their heads (disagreements about the nature of Jesus, and how best to follow him to ensure salvation, followed). Muslim doctrine proclaims that the very same God spoke to humanity through the medium of the Prophet Muḥammad, offering humanity one last chance to turn from wickedness and idolatry, calling humans to piety and virtue (disagreements about the nature of the community and its rightful leadership, and historiographical questions about the true course of the Prophet’s life and example, followed). All these dogmatic statements of historical narrative tell different stories about the concerns of God, his desires, and his plans for the world, but each of them presupposes something fundamental about his nature: that he is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, and that he created a world that is orderly to him, although we mere mortals may often struggle to perceive or to comprehend that order. God can make covenants with specific groups, incarnate himself, and communicate directly to his creations, while at the same time controlling nature from the macro to the micro levels—here stopping the sun in the sky and there hardening Pharaoh’s heart in his chest. While much of what God is said to do may seem mysterious, it is worth noting that any notion that the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religious communities is DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-1

2 Introduction something less than all-powerful has never gained mainstream acceptance in any of the three traditions. Alternatively, if that idea has emerged, it has not made a significant impact on them. No matter what else may happen, the monotheistic God’s omnipotence was clearly not up for serious debate (or, at least, was not up for serious debate until relatively recently). The monotheistic faiths agree on the question of God’s omnipotence. Almost by definition, a single creator God must be all-powerful, as each of these traditions asserts his ex-nihilo creation of the entire universe. Ascribing creation to some spiritual, magical, numinous, or divine force is common across most religious traditions. However, unlike the Yoruba creator Olodumare, who had the help of Obatala and Oduduwa and a cadre of divine underlings, or the chief Babylonian deity Marduk, who used the bodies and lifeblood of his enemy gods, especially Tiamat and Kingu, to fashion humans and their environment, the Abrahamic God’s creation of the world was an act of pure, unitary divine will. This God had no helpers, no underlings, and no physical matter with which to work, other than what he himself created. Only a truly all-powerful and all-encompassing being could quite literally create something—everything—out of nothing. Descriptions of the limits of such a God’s power constitute sophistic wordplay in the form of purposeful paradoxes such as “can God make a rock so big he himself cannot lift it?” Such attempts to point out contradictory notions of God’s power are easily dismissed by believers as puerile. With the monotheistic God, it seems one may question (in some eras and places, with extreme consequences for such uncertainty) his existence, but it also seems that the concept of a monotheistic God itself has been definitionally all-powerful, each and every time it has been proposed as the central figure of a long-lasting monotheistic faith tradition. On the other hand, asserting the omnipotence of God seems to fly in the face of the observed human historical experience. Save the sacred events, stories, and persons that literally gave rise to different religions—the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the revelation of the Qurʾān to the Prophet Muḥammad—monotheistic traditions remember and commemorate nothing so ardently or ritualistically as the catastrophes that befell them. Among many other remembrances of historical tragedies, Jewish tradition commemorates the destruction of both Temples and a great number of other historical calamities that befell them, on the unlucky date of the ninth of Av.1 Different Christian sects commemorate their persecutions and their martyrs. Shīʿī Muslims remember the tenth of the month of Muḥarram, also known as ʿĀshūrāʾ, the date of the infamous battle of Karbalāʾ, at which the Prophet’s grandson al-Ḥusayn and 70 of his followers were slaughtered and desecrated, with self-flagellation, weeping, and penitence. Even some of the “happier” holidays, like Hanukkah and Purim for the Jews and Easter for Christians, commemorate potential catastrophes that happened to turn out well in the end. In the Hanukkah narrative, the Hasmoneans defeated the Seleucids, thus staving off the dissolution of Judaism into the culturally dominant Hellenistic paradigm and reestablishing

Introduction 3 Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel. On Purim, the Jews of Persia’s escape from Haman’s genocidal plan is celebrated with costumes, revelry, and pastries. At Easter time, Christians celebrate the miracle that Jesus died but rose from the dead. Celebrating salvation from the jaws of looming fatal defeat implies the possibility of actual fatal defeat. If God is omnipotent and the traditions of these monotheistic faiths maintain that he is faithful to the well-being of their group, how could fatal defeat even be a possibility? Inevitably, eventually, events are going to occur which seem to contravene God’s omnipotence or his favor, or both. Why would an all-powerful God dedicated to the well-being of Jews allow a Haman to arise, or allow a Babylon or a Rome to destroy the Temple, or in modern times allow a Holocaust to occur? Why would an all-powerful God dedicated to the universal religion of Christianity allow it to suffer persecutions, or allow its early adherents to be shunned and tortured, or allow its communities of belief to become riven by schism and bloodshed? Why would an all-powerful God dedicated to the success and prosperity of Islam allow it to succumb to fitna (civil strife), to suffer the indignity of the depredations of 11th-century infidel Crusaders, the carnage of 13th-century “barbarian” Mongols, and in modern times the manipulation and domination of 19th- and 20th-century imperialists? These questions are thorny ones for any monotheistic tradition, but barring an unending run of success and peace, which was evidently not in the cards for any of these traditions, raising them seems inevitable. The answers to these questions about catastrophe have had both dogmatic and utilitarian applications to each tradition’s remembered history. Rather than call each tradition’s primary assumption, the omnipotence of God, into question, or even to grapple with the secondary, but no more debatable, assumption of God’s favor, monotheistic traditions perform logical contortions to explain such catastrophes within the framework of God’s unquestioned omnipotence and favor. How do monotheistic religions explain catastrophic events, given that they believe in an all-powerful God who favors certain groups? One’s first instinct might be to blame the perpetrators, whether they be Egyptians, Babylonians, Hellenists, Romans, Crusaders, Mongols, Imperialists, or Nazis. After all, it makes sense to blame a human-caused catastrophe on the humans who caused it. The problem with blaming the human perpetrators is that doing so does not solve the host of theological problems generated by the initial disaster. For example, if the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, were they acting in contravention of God’s will? Is acting against God’s will even possible? How could any human or group of humans supersede the will of the omnipotent? If the Romans were acting in accordance with God’s will, why would God want his own Temple destroyed? Had God shifted his favor to these victorious pagans? None of the implications of these questions could have seemed satisfying, or even possible, to the believing monotheist. When we examine the explanations for community- or religion-threatening cataclysms that these traditions produced, we find that neither God’s omnipotence

4 Introduction nor his favor is ever really questioned by the mainstream of each tradition. This fundamental feature of the memory of catastrophe—that monotheistic thinkers question neither God’s power nor his favor—occurs both when such catastrophes are remembered and narrated from centuries after the fact, and also when a writer can see the approaching disaster and writes from within the stress of a looming calamitous historical moment. The perpetrators are not blamed but rather recast as unwitting tools in the hands of the stern but loving, all-powerful God. The incidence of catastrophe thus does not call God’s favor or his power into question, but rather serves to call into question the recent behavior of the favored group itself. Monotheological certainty means that when disaster strikes, the only explanation that thinkers in these traditions seem to assert alleges that the catastrophe is the result of misdeeds performed by some members of the group in question. Catastrophe forces self-reflection, not a reevaluation of God’s nature or his relationship to the group. This book examines the elements of self-blaming narratives of great catastrophes in the monotheistic religious and historical traditions. This research began with a relatively simple observation: that catastrophes do not seem to cause reevaluation of deeply held religious beliefs about the nature of the universe or of God. A study on the type of event that might cause such a reevaluation of God’s nature is not the focus of this work; for many believers, it probably does not exist. Furthermore, such a study would be beyond the bounds of the field of history and into the realms of psychology and sociology, and this is a historical study. It is likely that any conclusions would be highly individual: that which makes one person doubt or reject an inherited faith tradition would strengthen the faith of another. For that doubt to spread from one peripheral member of the group, and then become something that is adopted by the tradition’s mainstream, is a process that has been described elsewhere,2 and of course, we do see such reevaluations in history. The initial spread of both Christianity and Islam, as new doctrines of monotheistic faith, may be at least partially understood using this model, as can purposefully revolutionary moments like the ʿAbbāsid Revolution,3 or reform movements like the Protestant Reformation. However, the omnipotence and favor of God seem to be particularly immune to the kinds of theological and doctrinal reexaminations that accompany such movements. While Christianity asserts the coming of the Messiah in the form of Jesus and Islam proclaims the seal of the Prophets in Muḥammad, the supremacy of God’s will, as a point of dogmatic truth, endures despite the change in branding. This book also explores how monotheistic communities have held onto their dogmas in the face of catastrophic events in ancient and medieval history. The first chapter discusses the origins of monotheistic traditions, as well as some of the reasons why God’s omnipotence is such a durable notion. The subsequent chapters examine several premodern catastrophes in chronological order, including destruction of Solomon’s Temple in the second chapter, the destruction of the Second Temple in the third, Byzantium’s experience of the Islamic invasion in the fourth, the Islamic experiences of the Crusades in the fifth, and the

Introduction 5 Mongol invasions in the sixth. While other premodern disasters, such as the 1453 Ottoman sack of Constantinople, the Christian reactions to which would fit seamlessly into this analysis, could have been included, the book’s length and aim to balance the perspectives of each tradition limited the selection. On that point, for all their relevance to the topic at hand, modern catastrophes (such as European imperialism in the Middle East and the Holocaust, which have already been mentioned) will not be discussed in detail in this study. This is also partly due to space concerns, but really it is because the impact of such events is still very much an active question. With such events still potentially in the memory of people living today, understanding their long-term influence is hindered by the lack of historical distance and perspective. Indeed, many people did question the omnipotence of God as a result of such recent calamities. Although many people throughout history likely questioned the omnipotence of God in the face of disaster, this book focuses on the mainstream perspectives of each tradition. For recent matters like European imperialism in the Middle East and the Holocaust, their impact on faith is still being evaluated. As such our attempt to evaluate them is hindered by a lack of historical perspective. It is, quite simply, too early to tell. Methodology In a work that spans different periods and historiographical traditions, there is no single methodology, beyond a very basic one, that can be applied universally. The sources for the information we will treat in this study are compositionally, stylistically, linguistically, and historiographically diverse. The Tanakh (Old Testament), the Talmud, Early Christian Literature, Arabic Chronicles, and other medieval chronicles constitute the bulk of the primary source literature. These sources, originally, are in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Russian. Each of these sources presents its own set of historiographical challenges and methods, and each requires a different approach. For example, the Tanakh and the Talmud, which are utilized in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, demand singular methodologies, even though both emerged out of the same Judaic tradition. The Tanakh is, according to the tradition, the word of God himself, but historiographically understood as the crystallization of a long process of the oral evolution of the stories contained in it. It was gradually collected, edited, and canonized, and ultimately fixed, but that calcification of its form did not prevent the Hebrew text from being variously translated (and mis-translated), commented upon, and individually interpreted over the centuries. The Talmud, on the other hand, is a self-conscious grappling with the Tanakh and the vicissitudes of Jewish/ Israelite history. In its earliest incarnation, it was nothing but the Mishnah, a Rabbinic commentary from the post-Temple communities of Yavneh and Babylon. However, over a span of a few centuries, it grew to include diverse perspectives, recorded mostly in Aramaic, on a variety of legal, ethical, business, culinary, sexual, and historical matters. Even within one tradition,

6 Introduction the Ancient and Classical Judaic tradition, we must apply different language knowledge and cultural lenses to understand the nature and meaning of these different texts. Similarly, the literature of the Church Fathers (Chapters 3 and 4), including the genre known as Adversus Judaeos, requires understanding of multiple linguistic and historiographical traditions. Furthermore, the Arabic/Islamic chronicles with which we will engage in Chapter 5 have their own methods deemed appropriate by the relevant field of study. Not all texts are equally useful in terms of their modes of expression, their utility for achieving a historical picture in which we may feel confident, or even their authenticity. Many of the texts we utilize are demonstrably not from the eras they claim, but rather from later periods. Bluntly, this is a wide-ranging, challenging topic. To the extent that such a diverse body of sources can have a unified methodology through which they may be approached, it is through the basic assumption that all texts of all stripes have messages to convey to particular audiences. With that in mind, our methodology is to engage with the texts according to our best scholarly understanding of them and compare their messages to each other. By doing so, we can discern similarities and differences that can help us understand the power and utility of continued faith in the face of catastrophe. Of course, each case examined in this book—the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the destruction of the Second Temple, the Arab-Muslim conquests, the Crusades, and the Mongol conquests—has its own historiographical corpus. In cases where multiple historiographical traditions reflect the experience of the same traumas (such as the Mongol conquests), there are comparable sets of historiographical corpuses. This study provides compelling evidence that the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam respond remarkably similarly to communitythreatening catastrophe. Each tradition comes to assert that, in a world that is supposed to be managed by an omnipotent, good God, such catastrophes can only be explained by blaming the sins of their own communities; to lay the blame anywhere else, especially on the actual perpetrators of the calamity, would serve as an implicit refutation of God’s goodness or his power. Over time, the writers and thinkers of the victimized community set to work answering the most difficult and, to their minds, most important of all questions: the nature of the sin that had been so offensive to God. After all, if such a partisan divinity as God has seen fit to destroy the Temples built to him, or to deliver the believers into the hands of blasphemers, or to allow a brutally efficient army of steppe nomads to ride roughshod over the known and unknown world, the infraction committed by his people must be no mere misdemeanor (unless the believers wished to expunge the notion of God’s perfect justice from the theological concept of God’s nature; generally speaking, they did not). The answers naturally varied, and the amount of time it took for these communities to posit those answers varied, too. In earlier catastrophes, the monotheistic reactions seemed to generate two distinct phases of soul searching. We

Introduction 7 may call these the “Lamentations” phase and the “Jeremiah” phase, as those are the records of the first case we will discuss: the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. In the Lamentations phase, the community reels from the shock of the destruction. They lament their misfortune (hence the title of “Lamentations”) and grapple with its theological implications. The literature or historical writing produced during a Lamentations phase is characterized by fear, anger, and bitterness. It may flirt with anger directed at God, but ultimately, the Lamenters, the creators of Lamentations-phase writing, simply express the anguish of their suffering. They do point a reflexive finger at their own communities, instinctively appealing to the all-powerful God for relief and forgiveness. But while the Lamenters may begin the internal audit of the community’s sins, they come to no conclusions. The literature they produce is too steeped in trauma for the kind of perspective that would permit conclusive answers. Over time, the pain of the trauma fades from the community: babies are born into the after times and grow up with the memory of the catastrophe existing in their communities as an indelible, perhaps even mundane, fact of the world. Even for those unfortunates who were witnesses to the disaster, the passage of time eventually allows for an introspection that is not overshadowed by the immediate grief of the event. And—most importantly—in each case examined in this study, the community, the tradition, and the people were not ultimately destroyed. Of course, if a community or a tradition were to be destroyed by, or shortly after, a catastrophic event, it is doubtful that their literature would come down to us. This is especially true for communities in the more distant past, many of which undoubtedly disappeared into the mists of history, leaving us nary a trace of their societies. Even the Achaemenid Persians, by all accounts a wildly successful, long-lived ancient empire whose existence is well-attested by a variety of sources, provided precious few historical sources of their own devising that survive to the present day. But in the case of the Temples, the Arab-Muslim conquests, the Crusades, and the Mongol conquests, the afflicted communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims eventually found themselves reflecting on those events from the future, acutely aware that, despite what may have seemed to be God’s utter abandonment of the faithful at the time, they had survived the disaster. The wounds of the trauma had scabbed over, and their communities had at least begun to heal. Secure in the knowledge of their survival, but now cognizant of God’s adeptness at delivering stern warnings, they could approach the topic of the catastrophe from a more secure emotional footing as a key part of the healing process. Puzzling out the nature of the sin to avoid a repeat punishment (a second punishment that would probably be sterner than the first one), rather than responding to the trauma of the initial divine lesson, is characteristic of the “Jeremiah” phase. The book of Jeremiah, for which this phase is named, was initially composed perhaps half a century after Lamentations, but may not have reached its current form until a few centuries later, by which time the immediate danger of Babylonian destruction had passed. The Jeremiah phase thus comes after the trauma of the catastrophe has abated. In practical terms,

8 Introduction that means that the catastrophe itself has changed into a useful memory of the catastrophe. At that point, it needs no longer be reckoned an existential threat to the continuity of the community, but can now be regarded as the consequence in a divine morality tale—one which the Jeremiah or Jeremiahs (the authors of Jeremiah-phase literature) may combine with their knowledge of the historical record to create a narrative that serves whatever purpose they wish. There is an obvious post facto logical fallacy in the creation of Jeremiah phase morality narratives: the Jeremiah gets to start constructing his story from the catastrophe, and then has at his disposal any pre-catastrophe sin or sins he wishes to excoriate, and any pre-catastrophe person or family he wishes to denigrate. Any social or political priority of his own may become, with just a little creative context building, God’s social or political priorities for the whole community. The years-past catastrophe may become a pre-fabricated narrative divine stick, a deus ex calamitate, with which the Jeremiah may threaten his readers, lest they stubbornly persist in whatever wickedness he wishes them to discontinue. The “Lamentations” phase and the “Jeremiah” phase are most easily discernible in the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians, which is the event that produced the books that bear those names. While the other catastrophes examined in this study do not always have exact analogs to those works as primary sources, the phases (that is, responding to trauma and then constructing the morality narrative) are indeed discernible, and so the categories of Lamentations and Jeremiah remain more or less applicable. As the catastrophes become more recent to us, we may perceive the two phases coming closer and closer together in time; by the time of the Mongol conquests, for example, Ibn al-Athīr responds to the invasion with a Jeremiahstyle assessment of specific, clear, individualized Muslim culpability before the Mongols even invade the Jazīra, from which he receives with horror reports of their atrocities in Persia and Transoxania. This shrinking of the time between the two phases may be explained by the monotheists living in times where those who view the world similarly have already responded to calamities, and they are thus baked into the existing religious traditions. It may also be because, as events get closer and closer to our own times, we simply have more sources to examine. Disclaimer It is likely that the literature produced at the time of Solomon’s Temple’s destruction was far more multifaceted and complex than this simple model of a “Lamentations” phase and a “Jeremiah” phase suggests. Perhaps contemporaneous observers of the Temple’s destruction had immediate, Jeremiah-style explanations of the event and its causes. It certainly seems that in subsequent disasters, the distance between the event and the Jeremiah-phase explanation shrank, eventually to nothing, as we shall see. To surmise that there were similarly specific Jeremiah-type responses in ancient times is not unreasonable.

Introduction 9 But if the eyewitnesses to those events did record such reactions at that time, we do not have them. This study necessarily focuses only on such sources as we have and not on such sources as we guess may have existed. In the case of Solomon’s Temple, it was the books of Lamentations and Jeremiah that became canonized as the exiled Jews’ central reactions to its demolition and their ejection from Jerusalem. If there were written responses that offered specific explanations for the catastrophe, they did not survive. The fact that Lamentations and Jeremiah did, while those hypothesized other sources did not, is significant in and of itself. One explanation is that it was simply too soon for the Jews of the First Temple period to accept that anyone had a satisfactory explanation for its destruction. As far as we know, these Jews were, after all, the first monotheists forced to grapple with a divine setback of that magnitude, and as such the first humans who had to fit the square idea of omnipotent, omnipresent, and benevolent God into the round hole of a world that seemed to allow such a God to be defeated (at least, at first glance). It must have been a profound shock. Initially solving that theological problem of theodicy may have taken some time. This problem of possessing an incomplete set of responses from the time does not stop with the First Temple Jews. For every era of history that we will discuss, and for every disaster, we possess nothing like the full spectrum of the victimized communities’ reaction. Especially for the earlier catastrophes, we may have only one or two very important sources. Any other reactions that might have been recorded, let alone felt or discussed, are simply gone. Perhaps they never existed in the first place, or were never written down, or recorded with physical material that is less than museum-grade in quality. Maybe they were lost in a flood, destroyed in a fire, or absentmindedly scribbled over with some obscure bookseller’s inventory. More ominously, perhaps, somewhere along the way, they were deemed heretical by some God-fearing zealot, or ahistorical by some intensely detail-oriented, methodologically inflexible chronicler, and destroyed, lest they lead a righteous person or credulous history buff astray. Perhaps they are still buried underground somewhere, or, thanks to unlikely climatic conditions, surviving in a Qumran-style cave, awaiting discovery. The vicissitudes of historical fortune afflict our sources as much as ourselves, and there is any manner of misfortune that may befall them, keeping them from our knowledge. As always with historical analysis based upon surviving primary sources, the discovery of new sources has the potential to render every word of this study wrong. That some of those sources, if they ever existed, are already gone means that we cannot ever hope to have anything like a complete picture of monotheistic responses to any of these catastrophes. So, we proceed with caution and with a few assumptions. The first assumption is that the survival of the textual material we use is prima facie evidence of its importance to the community that took care to record it, of its popularity at the time, and of its “fit” for the community as an explanatory model for the disaster it had experienced. The second assumption is

10 Introduction

Map I.1  Ancient and Medieval Cities Discussed Herein. Map by Elana Hagler.

Introduction 11

Map I.1 (Continued)

12 Introduction that any material that did not continue to imagine an all-powerful, single God was likely expunged from the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim religious tradition (whichever is appropriate) as heretical or pagan, and therefore did not survive to the present day. Admittedly, the approach flirts with a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. However, if it is such, then those guilty of engaging in the fallacy are those who may have purged the source from the record, not those of us who today comb through the record for reactions. I believe that no such fallacy was committed, though: monotheism is fundamental to each of those traditions, and so the deletion of non-monotheistic responses from the textual tradition is to be expected (in fact, in some cases, the abandonment of strict monotheism will be blamed for the catastrophes); and, for our part, responses that abandon monotheism would be out place in a study about monotheistic responses to catastrophe. With these disclaimers in mind, we cautiously proceed. We begin with the variable that forced the Jews, and then the Christians and the Muslims, to solve the problem of explaining and contextualizing a terrible calamity by blaming themselves: monotheism, the belief that one all-powerful God created a world in which events play out according to his divine will. Notes 1 A joke about Jewish holidays is that they are divided into two types: “They tried to kill us, but they failed; let’s eat!” and “They tried to kill us, and they succeeded; let’s fast.” 2 Damon Centola, How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 3 Moshe Sharon, Black Banners from the East: The Establishment of the ʿAbbasid States-Incubation of a Revolt (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983) and Black Banners from the East II: Revolt: The Social and Military Aspects of the ʿAbbasid Revolution (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990).

1

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism

What Is Monotheism? The standard view, common among modern-day Monotheists, is that belief in one God, as opposed to many gods, is the culmination of the natural progression from the superstitious and mythological, in the form of the worship of many gods, to the logical worship of just one (or assertion of the existence of only one). However, the truth of the monotheistic idea’s evolution is far more syncretic than this. Just as elements of animistic worldviews found their way into polytheistic pantheisms, so, too, did elements of the polytheistic worldview find their way into the three1 major monotheistic traditions.2 From a pious perspective, the notion that monotheism developed gradually out of one particular Eastern Mediterranean branch of polytheism, rather than a from-the-heaven revelation of the divine truth (or Truth, with a capital T) is probably offensive. However, the midrash of Abraham smashing the idols of his father Terah,3 becoming the “first” monotheist, and denying, in a moment, the power and/or the existence of other divinities, does not reflect the historical reality. Even within the Jewish tradition itself, the process was by no means so sudden as the mythical midrash makes it seem. The Hebrew Bible itself makes frequent reference to other gods; the first commandment reads “You shall have no other gods before me,” not “There are no other gods besides me.” The distinction of very early Israelite thoughts about God from their neighbors, such as the Canaanites, was not that the Israelites were necessarily monotheistic as such, but rather that they ultimately became monolatrous: they were willing to acknowledge the existence of other gods, but eventually they refused to worship them or suffer them to be worshipped. This “idea of an exclusive and emphatic Truth that sets God apart from everything that is not God and therefore must not be worshiped,” Assmann writes, is what “sets religion apart from what comes to be shunned as superstition, paganism, or heresy.”4 The early Israelite worship of the God whose Hebrew name has been Anglicized as “Yahweh,” from the Hebrew tetragrammaton yud-heh-vav-heh, has been much studied in recent years; Smith sums up the debate, emphasizing that while Yahweh was certainly the most popular god and the national God of the Israelites, DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-2

14  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism the acknowledgment and even worship of other deities typically associated with the Canaanites or the inhabitants of Ugarit, including El, Asherah, Baal, and Anat, was far from unknown.5 Smith points out that “as the Bible itself suggests, the historical context for understanding the Biblical God includes other gods and goddesses.”6 Among other purposes, the text of the Hebrew Bible narrates an epic in which Yahweh became the sole God of the Israelite people. Historically, the rise of Yahweh as the assumed only God, as opposed to just the preferred Israelite god, can be dated with some certainty to the reign of Josiah (r. 640–609 BCE), which roughly coincides with the collapse of Assyria. Josiah, according to the Book of Kings, instituted reforms that sought to purge the Yahwistic cult, essentially a proto-Judaism, of its Assyrian influences. The success of these reforms first led to Yahwistic monolatry, and ultimately centered Jerusalem. The Temple in the center of town became the one place to worship him. From there, it was a short journey to genuine monotheism.7 Thematically, a few factors distinguish Yahweh from these other gods. First, unlike Marduk of Babylon or Ashur of Assyria, Yahweh, God of the Israelites, was not originally considered to be “from” the land of Israel: he was not “native” to the land where he was worshipped. The relationship between Yahweh and the Israelites began with a mythological interaction between him and Moses, either at Mount Horeb8 or in Egypt,9 which are both outside the land of Israel. There are other hypotheses, but Yahweh’s origin outside of the land is generally the consensus of modern scholarship.10 Second, the relationship between the Israelites and Yahweh is based upon a mutual compact, known as the Covenant, or brit. According to this Covenant, the Israelites agreed to worship Yahweh and keep his commandments, and in return, God would deliver them from their slavery in Egypt. Other references elsewhere in the Bible, including in the books of the Prophets Hosea (9) and Ezekiel (20), affirm that Yahweh and Israel were not always bonded in this way, but rather that the relationship was the result of Yahweh’s initial encounter with Moses in the desert.11 Upon reaching the land of Israel following their exodus from Egypt, the Israelites converted their mobile Yahweh carriage, known in Hebrew as the aron and in English as the “Ark of the Covenant,” into a large Temple atop Mount Zion. The establishment of this Temple was a gradual process. It was the result of two developments: the political establishment of a kingdom traditionally associated with the three kings Saul, David, and Solomon, the last of whom is credited with the construction of the Temple, and the integration of the cults of other deities within the Israelite territory into Yahweh worship. Such integration included the identification of El with Yahweh, the rejection of Baal-worship, and complex ritualistic negotiation with the cults of local gods and goddesses like Asherah, Ishtar, and Anat, as well as foreign (perhaps Phoenician) deities like Chemosh, Astarte, and Bethel. The specific timeline through which the polytheistic Israelites became the monolatrous, and eventually monotheistic, Jews is not conclusively defined,

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  15 but Smith does an excellent job of painting this process in the abstract context of Israelite political periodization.12 The period the Judges (1200–1000 BCE) gave rise to Israelite literature and a sense of ethno-cultural, perhaps “national,” consciousness, centered upon Yahweh as the exclusive deity. During the first half of the Davidic dynasty (1000–800 BCE), Yahweh’s exclusivity was deepened as the monarchy associated itself with Yahweh’s legendary covenant with the Israelite people. It was during this period that David is said to have established the capital of the united Kingdom of Israel in Jerusalem. His son Solomon constructed the Temple, and further kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, instituted programmatic homogenization of Yahweh worship (which included many of the assimilations of the polytheistic deities cults mentioned above). Smith associates the second half of the Monarchy (800–587 BCE) with increasing legal and literary sophistication, and the further marginalization of non-Yahwistic cultic practices and symbols. This period’s end date is so specific because the Israelites were conquered by the Babylonians in 587/586 BCE, and Solomon’s Temple was destroyed. During the Babylonian Exile (586–538 BCE), the evidence suggests that the monotheism of the Israelites was fully baked; by the time Deutero-Isaiah13 enters the canon, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God”14 seems to be the general view of the Yahwist Israelites.15 The Israelites were now confronted with a problem, one with which polytheists do not need to grapple. The issue, which is at the heart of this book, was: if Yahweh was the only God, and he had made a Covenant with Israel to protect them, how could he let his Temple be destroyed and allow his people to be exiled to Babylon? For polytheists, the notion that another god might just be stronger than their preferred deity, and as such bestow victory upon his own people, does not much challenge their worldview. Military defeat did not require a theological response. However, for the exiled Israelites, the apparent defeat of the one-and-only God’s favored people called for, demanded, just such an explanation. Their recorded writings indicate that they believed Babylon would receive its comeuppance, and the form of that comeuppance—the Messiah, God’s anointed one—would set the world aright and restore both the Temple and Israelite (perhaps the appellation “Jewish” is now appropriate) sovereignty over their lost land.16 As an aside, the first inkling of the Messianic notion was but one major impact generated by the Israelites’ period of exile. The Babylonian exile also caused the foundation of a Jewish community in Babylon, in modern-day Iraq, that lasted from then until about 1950 CE, when civil strife associated with the foundation of the modern State of Israel forced the Jews to flee Iraq. Although the Jews of the Babylonian exile were permitted to return to Israel after the Persian conquest of Babylon, some remained, and the Babylonian Jewish community remained the intellectual center of the Jewish world for centuries. As it happens, a great historical figure did rise and deliver to Babylon precisely the comeuppance that the Jews had expected. It was only a minor

16  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism theological inconvenience for the Jews that this figure, Koresh (or Kūrosh), was not a Jew himself. Despite this, the Bible heaped praise upon him for his actions on behalf of the Jews. Today, he is known as Cyrus the Great. Cyrus, God’s Messiah Ko-amar YHWH limshikho l’Koresh asher-he-khezakti biymino l’rad l’fanav goyim umatnei m’lakim afateaḥ liftaḥ l’fanav d’latayim usheʿarim lo yisgeru. Thus says Yahweh [YHWH] to his Messiah, to Cyrus, whom I took by his right hand, to subdue nations before him and loosen the armor of kings, to open before him the double doors, so that the gates shall never shut.17 These words are generally agreed to have been written by Deutero-Isaiah, the author or authors of the later chapters of the Book of Isaiah. This writer knew far too much about the future to have been written by the original Isaiah, who lived in the eighth century BCE.18 What is important for us here is the appositive relationship between the words mshikho—“his Messiah”— and Koresh—“Cyrus.” Clearly, the author of Isaiah 45 considers this Cyrus to be God’s Messiah. We must not get overexcited about what this might mean, however. The modern usage of “Messiah” certainly does not have the same implications as Deutero-Isaiah’s use of the term. We need to set aside notions of a son of God or salvation from sins (after all, Christian notions) as intrinsic to the prototypical Messianic role. Deutero-Isaiah’s “Messiah,” which means “anointed one” in Hebrew, “refers only to the one selected by YHWH to be the legitimate ruler of the Judaean people, either under the United Monarchy or in Judah alone.”19 “Anointing” in general is referenced by the word mashiakh, Messiah, without any overtly spiritual implication. It might just mean divine assignation of a specific task, and anyway, anointing with oil was used throughout the ancient Near East as a simple mark of selection.20 For Deutero-Isaiah, Cyrus “is the one who will defeat Judah’s enemies, Babylon in the first place, impose an international order based on justice and peace (42:1–4), allow, even facilitate, the repatriation of those forcibly deported (42:7; 45:13), and make possible the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple (44:28; 45:13). These tasks are to be discharged under the direct inspiration of Yahweh.”21 But Deutero-Isaiah’s Yahweh-faithful optimism was certainly not the only response of post-Davidic dynasty Jews. Josiah, evidently the last ruler of any executive skill, had died in 609 BCE, and the strings of his sons and grandsons who succeeded him were sufficiently incompetent and divisive to invite the Babylonian conquest. The Psalms decry the catastrophe of God’s abandonment of the Jews,22 and Jeremiah23 indicates that at least some of the people were prepared to abandon Yahweh in favor of “the Queen of Heaven,” who apparently had allowed no such calamities

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  17 during the times when she had been offered sacrificial offerings. However, Deutero-Isaiah instead placed his hopes in the rising King of the Persians, whom he asserts to be selected by God. For what task was Cyrus selected? The simplest answer is that DeuteroIsaiah is providing a post facto “prophecy” concerning Cyrus, the son of Cambyses, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Alas for the historian, the career of Cyrus the Great is shrouded in mystery. While no historical source can be free of bias, it would be helpful if even some Achaemenid Persian sources beyond the occasional rock inscription survived to the present day. 24 Since such sources did not survive, or at least still await our discovery, we are forced to rely on what others wrote about him, and those others—Greeks like Herodotus and Xenophon, Jews like Deutero-Isaiah— had their own, typically ethnocentric, agendas when relating Cyrus’ life.25 For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that Cyrus led the Persians to dominance over the great empires of the Ancient Near East, including the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and, during the reign of Cyrus’ son Cambyses, the Egyptians. When the Persians took over an area with a specific tradition of kingship, like Egypt’s “Pharaoh,” the routine was for the Persian Kings of Kings (as they styled themselves) to assume the regnal titles of their satrapies.26 This could be why Deutero-Isaiah referred to Cyrus as the Messiah, conferring upon him the kingship of Israel in the same style.27 This explanation of the use of the term “Messiah” for Cyrus would be even more credible if we assume that Deutero-Isaiah lived in the post-Cyrus period. By then, the Persian tradition of adopting local royal titles was well-established (as both Cambyses and Darius, two of the next three Persian kings, were recorded in Egyptian annals as Pharaohs).28 Regardless of whether the meaning of “Messiah” in this context was indeed a conferral of God’s favor on Cyrus as the rightful ruler of Israel, Cyrus “was able to do what a legitimate king must do: he brought back the status quo ante [that is, the status of the Jews before the Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple]. He rebuilt the temple, ordered the Temple vessels replaced in it,29 and permitted the Jews to return to worship their God in Zion restored.”30 Not only did Cyrus allow the Jews of Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, but he financed the reconstruction with funds from the Persian treasury. This favorable Persian imperial treatment was not uncommon; Cyrus apparently treated all the conquered peoples’ gods with the same respect, earning high marks from priests of Marduk and Ra and many others for his reverence. Under Cyrus and his immediate successors, the society of Judah was thus restored and the Temple of Yahweh (the “Second Temple”) was rebuilt. This restoration could have been seen as a validation of the faith Deutero-Isaiah placed in both Cyrus and the one and only God, Yahweh. Alternatively, and more likely, the events of the Persian conquest, followed by the restoration of Judah and the Temple, may have given shape to Deutero-Isaiah (it all depends on when it was written). Regardless,

18  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism the restoration of Judah under the Persians cemented forever not only the monolatry but also the strict monotheism of Jewish ritual belief and practice. While it may initially seem outrageous to do so, we here may skip over the life and society of the Jews under the Achaemenids (the Empire would last around 200 years), the conquest of Alexander the Great, the rule of the Seleucids, the brief restoration of Jewish sovereignty under the Hasmoneans, the Roman conquest, and much of Roman rule. This is not because these periods are unimportant—two major Jewish festivals, Purim and Hanukkah, commemorate events in these periods, and they are critical facts of historical context, some of which will be discussed in later chapters. But, for the purposes of this chapter, which focuses on the development of monotheistic communities, such a chronology would be distracting. Monotheism had become the rule for the Jews, and although these periods profoundly impacted Jewish society, none of them significantly impacted Jewish monotheism.31 The next major challenges to Jewish monotheism occurred within a few decades of each other in the first century CE: the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew whose followers espoused a different model of monotheistic exclusivity, and the destruction of the Second Temple, which transformed cultic Judaism into Rabbinic Judaism, a more recognizable form to us today. Ultimately, both of these events, the life of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple, opened the door for Islam, a third monotheistic model, some 600 years later. Different Religions? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Intertwined The emergence of Christianity in the first century and Islam in the seventh century introduced varied spiritual, intellectual, theological, and cultural currents to the ever-complexifying monotheistic community. The easy temptation is to consider the three most famous of the Monotheistic, “Abrahamic” communities as categories that remained hermetically sealed from each other: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Certainly, in their present-day forms, while it would be wrong—a methodological catastrophe, in fact—to speak of any of these categories as monolithic in and of themselves, there are some characteristics that each community has that at least separates it from the other two, although rarely are these total and unqualified. Almost all forms of Judaism reject the notion that the Messiah has yet come. While some movements are engaged in active discussion about modern candidates to the role, nearly all modern self-identifying Jews reject Jesus as divine, Messiah, son of God, or God Himself, as they deny the Prophethood of Muḥammad. Christians, of course, do believe in those things about Jesus—albeit with some heated Christological disagreements—but reject the notion that God continued sending Prophets after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Muslims largely accept the Torah and the Gospels as divinely inspired texts, agree with the Christians about Jesus’ status as Messiah while rejecting his divinity or Christian claims

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  19 about his divine parentage, “downgrading” him to a “mere” Prophet of God of the same type (well, almost) as the Prophet Muḥammad. However, even these communal categories, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have gray areas. Modern “Messianic Jews” observe Jewish holidays, pray in Hebrew, and consider themselves Jewish, all while accepting Jesus as the Messiah. And while many more-typical Jews react with strong skepticism to the movement, calling it “Christianity in disguise,”32 its mere existence highlights the blurred lines between Christianity and Judaism. These lines of delineation between Judaism and Christianity were particularly fuzzy for the first several centuries after Jesus, which were roughly coequal with the first several centuries of Rabbinic Judaism. Paula Fredriksen does an excellent job of placing the Jesus-as-Messiah movement within late-Second-Temple Judaism33—not a self-conscious heretical rejection of an established religious orthodoxy, like the 19th-century CE Bāb rejecting Islam in anticipation of another Prophet (ultimately, the Bahāʾuʾllāh of the Bahāʿī faith), but Jews grappling in a Jewish way with a potential Jewish Messiah. We do not need to address debates about the historicity of Jesus as presented in the Gospels and in the few non-confessional sources we possess, as it has been done,34 and, ultimately, is beyond the scope of our discussion. Whether a man named Jesus really existed or was merely a later literary creation, and if he did exist, whether he was the son of God and Messiah or not, we may at least say with certainty that within a few generations, perhaps a single generation of his reported death, the movement that revolved around the Jesus narrative had begun to attract some Jews as followers (we may call such early followers Christian Jews, as today we speak of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews, among other denominations), and shortly thereafter, gentile followers, too. A few centuries later, the Jesus story conquered Rome, spread throughout the Middle East and Europe and other points east, and is today the world’s largest faith tradition in terms of the number of adherents, although it is theologically diverse. Whether Jesus lived or not, from a purely historical perspective, the proliferation of his narrative and its propensity to spur its believers to identification and action far outweighs the question of a single man’s life.35 The work of Boyarin in his groundbreaking work Border Lines is essential to understanding the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in the early years after Jesus’ death.36 At that time, “Christianity” was indistinguishable from the larger Jewish community, except perhaps as a minority opinion. A separate community of “Christians” did not even exist as such. With the death of Jesus and the destruction of the Second Temple—the first preceding the second by just a few decades—Rabbinic Judaism and Christian Judaism (later, Christianity) evolved alongside, against, and in conversation with one another. Boyarin shows that the boundaries between the two were porous, and the heresiographers of the Christians and the Rabbis of the Jews self-consciously constructed their own communal identities by contrasting them against the emerging ideas of the others. Christianity’s writers, starting

20  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism with Justin Martyr, increasingly asserted that Judaism was a non-believing ethno-religion, and contrasted it with the multi-ethnic Christian community of believers. Not to be outdone, the Rabbis of the Talmud ultimately leaned more into the tradition of ethno-cultural praxis that had no requirement of “religious faith,” thus defining the dispute not as a religious question, but rather as an ethnic or national one. The Rabbis argued that the Jews of the Jesus movement had left the Jews for the gentiles and that the Jesus movement was, at last, a gentile movement. The interplay between Judaism and Christianity gave rise not only to Christian heresiographies and theologies but also influenced the construction of the Mishnah and the two Talmuds, the Tosefta, the Baraita, the Midrashim, and a whole slew of Rabbinic writing. Over the generations, the once-porous membrane between the two communities hardened and became increasingly impermeable and hostile. This dichotomous monotheistic family feud was complicated by the arrival of Muḥammad and the birth of Islam, whose adherents relatively quickly found themselves ruling over a vast territory that included both Christian and Jewish communities. Both Christianity and Judaism contained traditions of divine revelation that the Qurʾān commanded the Muslim rulers of the Middle East to accept as legitimate, from the one true God. Christians and Jews, after their long divorce from each other, now had a third tradition to consider in their theological grappling. In much the same way that the existence of Judaism and Christianity forced some Jews and Christians to define themselves against each other, now the discussion was joined by a growing, justifiably self-confident, and itself increasingly diverse profession of monotheistic exclusivity in the form of Islam. According to Gregg, “from the first century on, Jews and Christians were in continuous dialogue over scriptures. This became a trialogue” when the Muslims arrived.37 In contrast to the coincidental evolution of late Second Temple Jewish society into Christian and Rabbinic Judaism, Islam emerged later, but by no means independent of Judaism and Christianity. When the Prophet Muḥammad received his revelation from God, it was understood to be the very same God worshiped by the Christians and Jews. The Qurʾān, Islam’s holy book, believed by Muslims to be the word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad through the Angel Gabriel, makes numerous references to figures in both the Torah and the Christian Bible. Jesus (ʿĪsā) is mentioned repeatedly. As Parrinder sums it up, “the Qurʾān gives a greater number of honourable titles to Jesus than to any other figure of the past. He is a ‘sign’, a ‘mercy’, a ‘witness’ and an ‘example’. He is called by his proper name Jesus, by the titles Messiah (Christ) and Son of Mary, and by the names Messenger, Prophet, Servant, Word and Spirit of God…. Three chapters or sūras of the Qurʾān are named after references to Jesus (3, 5, and 19); he is mentioned in fifteen sūras and ninety-three verses.”38 As far as the Jewish tradition goes, Noah (Nūḥ), Moses (Mūsā), and Joseph (Yūsuf) are also frequently referenced in the Qur’ān, with the latter receiving his own sūra. Sūra 12, sūrat Yūsuf, is a narrative familiar to those knowledgeable of the Torah. In the

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  21 Qurʾānic context, it is a tale about the morality of the hanīfs, or pre-Islamic Prophets, whose number include Abraham (Ibrāhīm), as well as Noah, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, and others. Briefly, Islam was born into a world that was already steeped in the Jewish and Christian divine narrative. Firestone asserts that “there is no neutral context for the birth of religion, for religions are always born into a world in which some already exist. And those established religions predictably resent the appearance of competition … the burden rests on the new faith to demonstrate to a mixed public of potential joiners and sceptics that it embodies authentic representations of the divine will.”39 There are, to use Firestone’s term, three theses of the relationship between Islam and Judaism and Christianity. The first is the “borrowing thesis,” which asserts, in different forms, that Muḥammad lifted those elements of the existing monotheistic tradition that were of use to him (in this non-pious view, as the Qurʾān’s creator). There is disagreement in the scholarship concerning the extent to which Judaism, Christianity, or a combination of the two was Muḥammad’s predominant source.40 The “borrowing” idea has fallen out of style, perhaps for obvious reasons: it assumes insufficient innovative capabilities within the new faith and categorically precludes the possibility of actual divine revelation. The second thesis, the “cultural diffusion thesis,” asserts that the movement of Christian and Jewish communities into Arabia before Islam made the Qurʾān’s reflection of Christian and Jewish traditions, norms, and stories explicable, even predictable, whether “as a human product that reflect[ed] the contemporary literary realia of its culture” or “as a divine message articulated via the language and culture, images and metaphors current among its receiving population.”41 Similarly, the “Semitic civilization thesis” posits the existence of earlier writings on which the Torah, the Christian Bible, and the Qurʾān were all based.42 This thesis calls on readers to reject Greek forms of rhetoric in favor of earlier Semitic styles, which naturally had more relevance to a text like the Qurʾān. Regardless of how Islam initially came by its Christian and Judaic elements, the intellectual interplay of the three communities generated libraries of works of self-definition, in opposition to the others. In the Islamic tradition, entire literary genres came into being, aiming at just this kind of differentiation. These genres included the isrāʾīlīyyat (“Legends of the Jews”)43 and taḥrīf (claims of Jewish and Christian falsifications of their sacred texts, with the purpose of denying the truth of Islam). Likewise, faḍāʾil literature (which discussed the religious virtues of people and places) was commonly written about Jerusalem, sacred to all three traditions, with due notices for Jewish and Christian holy sites.44 As Islam quickly grew in political power, population, and intellectual output, it in turn influenced the cultures and societies of the Christians and Jews it had come to dominate. Each community wrote polemics and apologetics about the other communities for centuries. As each sought to answer the theological critiques of the others, they all internalized some of the arguments, stories, and emendations of the others. The communities intertwined. But the intellectual and cultural fruit of the encounter was

22  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism not limited to sacred tales, or to polemics and apologetics. The interaction among these three monotheistic traditions reshaped cities. Islam’s Relationship to Judaism and Christianity: A Jerusalem Story The Dome of the Rock is many things. Perhaps Jerusalem’s most iconic, most recognizable building, the gold-domed shrine dominates the skyline of the Old City. While many physical and cosmetic aspects of the building have changed over time, it is today more or less the building commissioned by the Umayyad Caliph ʿAbd al-Mālik (r. 685–705), though his name was later scratched out of the inscription and replaced by the name of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Maʿmūn (almost ridiculously, the dates in the relevant inscription were not changed at the same time).45 But “the meanings associated with the Dome of the Rock have changed considerably, as have the functions it was expected to fulfill…. The building’s basic purpose was commemoration with the Haram al-Sharif, a restricted Muslim compound of unusually large dimension.”46 Serving diachronically as a commemoration of God’s presence and the first qibla (Muslim direction of prayer, later changed to Mecca) and a bulletin board upon which successive caliphs and sultans could tout their virtues with new inscriptions upon its façade, the original writing inscribed around the Dome’s exterior possessed an explicit critique of Christianity, including the Qurʾānic verses most overtly addressing what the Islamic tradition considers Christianity’s gravest theological errors. These include “Say, He is God, the One, God, He does not beget nor is He begotten and there is none like Him.”47 The last two verses—lam yalid wa-lam yūlad, wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan ʾaḥad(un)—indicating that God never procreated nor was he ever born—is an explicit refutation of Christianity’s central doctrine about Jesus. But just in case it was too subtle, the inscription adds further verses: “Oh people of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians], do not go beyond the bounds of your religion and do not say [anything] about God except the truth. Indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was an envoy of God and his word he bestowed on her as well as a spirit from him. So believe in God and in his envoys and do not say ‘three;’ desist, it is better for you.”48 It is not, therefore, critical of Jesus himself, but rather of the Christians who make too much of him. The inscription advises: “Bless your envoy and your servant Jesus son of Mary and peace be upon him on the day of birth and on the day of death and on the day he is raised up again. This is Jesus son of Mary. It is a word of truth in which they doubt. It is not for God to take a son. Glory be to him when he decrees such a thing. He only says ‘be’ and it is. Indeed God is my lord and your lord. Therefore serve him, this is the straight path.”49 Islam’s adoption of Jerusalem as a holy city reflects the city’s prestige in Judaism and Christianity. While the Qurʾān does not even mention Jerusalem by name, al-arḍ al-muqaddasa (“the Holy Land”)50 and al-arḍ allati barakna fīha (“the land we blessed”)51 are generally understood to refer to Jerusalem and Palestine. The Prophet Muḥammad’s Night Journey, known as al-isrāʾ,

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  23 in which a winged steed flew him to “the furthest Mosque” (masjid al-aqṣā), from which he ascended to heaven (this ascent is known as the miʿrāj) and met a lineup of angels, Jewish prophets (like Moses), and Jesus, culminating in a meeting with God, is asserted to have embarked from Jerusalem. But even this story does not explicitly evoke Jerusalem; the al-Aqṣā Mosque that sits just a few meters south of the Dome of the Rock was only constructed after the Muslims conquered Jerusalem. It did not yet exist in the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. Mourad argues that verse 17:1, which discusses this incident, “seems to denote a sacred area of worship rather than a specific building.”52 Regardless, it is undeniable that Jerusalem attained a high status early in the life of the Islamic tradition. The historian Al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897) reported that the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r. 684–705) sought to replace the Kaʿba as the site of the Ḥājj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which was constructed under his aegis. While there remains debate, both classical and modern,53 about the veracity of this report (which may have been motivated by al-Yaʿqūbī’s fiercely anti-Umayyad bias; the replacement of the Kaʿba, explicitly denoted in the Qurʾān as the site of the Ḥājj, would have been a shocking heresy), the fact that Jerusalem was the city and the Temple Mount the site of this potential shift is telling in and of itself. “The sacred status of Jerusalem in Islam,” Mourad writes, “[may have been] shaped, and perhaps even instigated, by the Umayyads.” An Umayyad-era origin for Jerusalem’s exalted place in Islamic geography is intuitively plausible. Occam’s razor suggests that Jerusalem’s holiness likely entered Islam through the interactions the early Muslims had with the Jews and Christians who populated the territories they conquered, including Jerusalem and its environs. The cultural interaction between the nascent Muslim community and empire, and the Jewish and Christian communities the Muslims found themselves ruling following their seventh-century CE conquest, was a conversation that took several generations, very much like the interaction between Rabbinic Judaism and Christian Judaism/Christianity. Mourad’s comment about Jerusalem’s status (and with it, the status of the Temple Mount under Islam) being shaped by the Umayyads is a statement about the span of time that initial conversation took. The Umayyads are known for establishing the first Islamic dynasty after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad. They ruled over a vast empire, expanding it into North Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. Their reign was characterized by stability and prosperity, but it was also marred by controversies and uprisings, including the succession crises that ultimately split the Muslim community into Sunnī and Shīʿī branches. Today, nobody remembers them fondly, but the Shīʿa, in particular, hold a negative view of the Umayyads, considering them illegitimate rulers who seized power from the rightful leaders of the Muslim community, the Shīʿī Imāms, who were descended from the Prophet’s first cousin and son

24  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism in law, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib. The Shīʿa believe that the Umayyads represented an unjust and oppressive regime that marginalized and persecuted the Prophet’s family and also hold the Umayyads responsible for the death of the Imām al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, the Prophet’s grandson, who was killed in the Battle of Karbalāʾ in 680 CE. Regardless of the Umayyads’ actual virtues or flaws, they happened to be the dynasts in power when Islam had many of its most formative moments: the life and death of each of the Shīʿī Imāms occurred under Umayyad rule (the Shīʿa would say “oppression”), and the conquests of the Muslim armies reached their high points, from North Africa all the way through Spain in the West (in fact, an itinerant branch of the Umayyad family would rule Spain for some time after the ʿAbbāsid Revolution), to the borders of India in the East (the Muslims would penetrate further in subsequent millennia through both military conquest and religious and cultural expansion, but it was under the Umayyads that the initial conquering wave reached its zenith). But most importantly to the present study, it was in the Umayyad period that Islam had its formative interactions with Judaism and Christianity. The construction of the Dome of the Rock, complete with its anti-trinitarian inscriptions directly facing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, atop the Temple Mount, once the site of the destroyed Jewish sacred center, was part of those interactions. They occurred as Islam was growing from a small, pious community to a global, faith-based empire, and the strenuous rejection of elements of earlier monotheisms was part of Islam’s coming-of-age. The physical geography of Jerusalem even unto this day is a living testament to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim trialogue.

Later Cultural Interactions: Was The Guide of the Perplexed a Purely Jewish Book? The initial interactions between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam involved appropriation, polemic, and adaptation, whether it be in the form of sacred tales or architecture. Interpreters and writers confronted with versions of their tales from the other communities sought to retain their own communities’ “sense of uniqueness,” and also to hearten their own to “stand firm in any altercations with its competitors,” to draw boundaries that delineated the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic traditions from the other two traditions.54 Gregg concludes that “being questioned and engaged by their competitors had profound results. Each faith community, so challenged, was compelled to penetrate more deeply a familiar story—and to create new tellings of it that sharpened and bolstered its own sense of being Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.”55 Gregg’s interpretation rejects the notion that there was an initial “familial closeness and concord that enwraps Jews, Christians and Muslims,”56 but this interpretation misses the fact that the “[Rabbinic] Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” we look to today, even in their earliest

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  25 historically accessible forms, were already deep into the process of theological and intellectual disambiguation when they came into the light of our own historical perception. There is no reason to assume, and there may be strong historiographical reason to doubt, that we can draw any conclusions at all based on the interacting narratives and inscriptions Gregg cites; many of these come centuries apart. The interactions of narrative stories themselves created the divisions; they were not necessarily the result of fundamentally different in principio understandings of God or the universe. Whether the communities were so very different from each other at the inception of the discussions is ultimately immaterial, as the social interaction among the three monotheistic communities drew their adherents closer together (whether in friendship, marriage, rivalry, enmity, or violence; whether in personal interrelationship, in commerce, in the arts, or on the battlefield). In other words, as complex as those early interactions were, the complexity pales in comparison to later cultural output. To take one clear and relevant example, the philosophical work of Moses Maimonides blurs the lines between the three traditions. While his opus, the 12th-century Guide of the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Hāʾirīn) is undoubtedly a part of the Jewish tradition, it was composed in Arabic that was rendered in Hebrew characters (this written language known as Judeo-Arabic).57 The work’s philosophical questions were similar to this asked by his contemporaries who were thinking, working, and writing in the Islamic tradition. The Guide of the Perplexed is not just an attempt to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Rabbinic theology (although Maimonides himself would have seen no distinction between the modern categories “philosophy” and “theology”). Rather, “is a compendium of medieval philosophical views between which Maimonides navigates, accepting some, critically modifying others, with few specific references. All his statements should be viewed as deliberate responses to the accepted wisdom of his time, a wisdom that is the legacy of Graeco-Islamic philosophy…. Maimonides introduces Jewish sources, both biblical and rabbinic, into this legacy, creating a Jewish philosophy cum theology. That is, the guide is not a work of philosophy only, but mingles rigorous philosophical argument with theological assertions that lack such structure.”58 It is mostly a defense of Aristotle, but it is an Aristotle that is filtered through a number of worlds, including the Roman world (Maimonides recommended reading Aristotle with the second/third-century commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the fourth-century commentary of Themistius)59 and the Islamic world. He agreed with many assertions of the Muslim Neoplatonists, including Al-Farabī (Alfarabi), Ibn Bājja (Avempace), Ibn Ṭufayl (Abubacer), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Ibn Sīna (Avicenna).60 Maimonides and the Muslim contemporaries he is happy to recommend were all part of a single cultural milieu: what Hodgson calls “Islamicate” civilization.61 The distinction between “Islamic” (referring to matters pertaining to the religious traditions of Islam specifically) and “Islamicate” (referring to aspects of the multi-communal society dominated by Islamic elites, but not

26  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism explicitly relating to Islam itself) is a crucial one: a text could be both Jewish and Islamicate, and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed certainly was one such text, firmly rooted in both. Even as the branches of the monotheist family tree grew apart through self-conscious acts of differentiation, they intertwined and re-intertwined through the sharing of the same cultural space.62 In summary, it is difficult if not impossible to find anything that is purely Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, untouched by the other traditions even after they parted theological ways with each other. Furthermore, as far as the branches may have sprung from the root, none of them were willing to accept the notion of a world that did not unfold in accordance with the will of an all-powerful God. Conclusions The monotheist idea is not, as is often assumed by modern adherents, a natural, logical evolution of polytheistic or animistic superstition. Rather, it developed as the result of a string of remembered history and mythologized memory, in the Ancient Near East, where local, ethnocentric gods were the norm. A monolatrous movement for Yahweh coincided with the period of the Prophets and the Judges in ancient Israel, which deepened toward a monotheistic rejection of even the existence of other gods through the Davidic monarchy. This process of Jewish monotheization culminated around the Persian conquest of the Babylonians and the construction of the Second Temple, in events described by Deutero-Isaiah. The Jewish God Yahweh was evidently fine with allowing the non-monotheist Persians to rule over the land of Israel, and the rest of the Near East, Egypt, and eventually extreme southeastern Europe, as well. At least, it would be fair to say that Persian rule, with its widespread permissiveness of local religious customs, did not challenge the Jewish notion that God was one and only. The next set of challenges to Jewish monotheism that had an enduring impact on its memory were first-century CE moments. This is not to say that Jewish society in Israel went unchallenged for nearly 600 years between Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Solomon’s Temple, and the accompanying exile of the Jewish leaders to Babylon, in 586 BCE, and the true birth of the Jesus movement in 33 CE, followed 27 years later by Roman destruction of the Second Temple. Indeed, the land was conquered a few more times in that period, first by Alexander’s Macedonians, and ruled by the dynasty founded by Alexander’s general Seleucus I Nicator (the Seleucids), and again by the Romans, with a century-long Hasmonean interregnum (140–37 BCE) that temporarily restored Jewish independence. Like Persian rule, none of this turmoil defeated the endurance of Jewish monotheism. The Jesus movement, which would evolve into Christianity over the course of the first century CE, was not a rejection of Jewish monotheism, but rather a piety-minded reform movement that reimagined the

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  27 relationship of Yahweh to his chosen people and, eventually expanded the identity of those chosen people to a pan-ethnic community of believers. Most Jews at the time rejected the notion that the Nazarene carpenter could be the Messiah, lacking the proper Davidic lineage and fulfilling none of the prophecies of the Messiah.63 They also rejected the new definition of the Messiah that eschewed the standard criterion of temporal Jewish political sovereignty in favor of notions of an otherworldly kingdom in heaven. The Christian redefinition shifted the religious perspective of its adherents beyond the political, communal concerns that were central to the development of Yahwist monolatry to questions of personal sin and redemption in an afterlife. The other challenge to monotheistic certainty was the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, following the ill-advised Great Revolt (a matter which will be taken up in Chapter 3). That time, there would be no Cyrus waiting in the wings; the Temple would never be rebuilt, as by the time the Jews regained control over that part of Jerusalem, in 1967 CE, another holy shrine occupied that particular square mile of real estate. The Temple, which was the center of Jewish cultic practice when its holy men were not rabbanim, rabbis, but kohanim, priests, was gone. The power of the priests was shattered along with the Temple. It became the duty of teachers, the rabbis, not only to lead the post-Temple Jewish community in the fight to survive not only the jarring change to ritual practice necessitated by the Temple’s absence and to explain how and why God had allowed this calamity but also the challenge from the Jesus movement (which was, anyway, in the process of leaving both the Temple and the Israelites behind). Another 600 years passed, and another take on the monotheistic idea emerged. Like Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism emerging out of the cultic practices of early Judaism, Islam was not a rejection of the monotheistic notion; rather, it was an even more forceful affirmation of it. The shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, begins with the artfully poetic phrase lā ilaha ilā Allāh—“there is not god except for God”64—and its early self-definitions set itself as even more monotheistic than Christianity, which had, in the intervening centuries, settled65 on the notion of a trinity—a God who is three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Summarily, once the monotheistic idea took hold, starting with the Israelites around the time of Cyrus and Deutero-Isaiah, it endured. It was not unchallenged, however, and the rest of this book is going to examine moments where monotheistic communities were, indeed, threatened with potential termination, such as one might expect the primary monotheistic axiom to be called into question. The fact that, despite a great number of calamitous, man-made incidents, the notion survived that there was one, and only one, God in the heavens, and that the world unfolded according to that God’s will. For all their ritualistic, theological, and dogmatic differences, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all developed historiographical coping mechanisms that prevented their communities’ most fundamental beliefs from collapsing,

28  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism even in the face of compelling evidence that God might not be alone, or that he might not be all powerful, or that he might not favor the group that he was thought to favor. Indeed, it might just be because of these historiographical mechanisms that the religions survived—not untouched by the catastrophes, but rather indelibly shaped by them. After all, the fortunes of communities and peoples ebb and flow, and only the wherewithal for communal systems of belief to contextualize and explain inevitable catastrophes to the believers shaken by them, and then to harness the lessons of those catastrophes for the good of the community, may provide an inoculation against utter destruction. Such destruction would not come in the form of the loss of a Temple, or a city, or a territory, or the lives of believers, but rather in the loss of the communal identity itself. Ultimately, the forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam we have today are here not in spite of the catastrophes that befell them, but because of them. Notes 1 By the number of practitioners alone, it is perhaps generous to include Judaism as a major monotheistic tradition. However, given the prominence of Judaism in the development of the later, more widely practiced monotheistic traditions of Christianity and Islam, it is included here. There is not, as will be argued later in this chapter, such a stringent division among the three traditions as is commonly supposed. 2 Yuval N. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), 209–23. 3 Genesis Rabbah, 38.13. The story also appears in the Qurʾān 21 (Al-Anbiyāʾ), 51–70, in which Ibrahīm’s father is named Azar. 4 Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 3. 5 See Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), xix–xxvi, and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10–26. 6 Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 19. 7 Thomas Romer (Raymond Guess, trans.), The Invention of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 191–209. 8 Exodus 3. 9 Exodus 6. 10 Romer, The Invention of God, 33–50. 11 Ibid., 72. 12 Smith, The Early History of God, 145–54. 13 Over the past couple of centuries, it is generally agreed upon that chapters 40–55 of the Book of Isaiah were not written by Isaiah, the eighth century BCE Judean prophet, but rather by a writer or writers more or less contemporary with the conquest of the Babylonian Empire by the Achaemenid Persians. Whether these chapters were written by a single individual or multiple individuals, where they were written, and when they were written are still very much up for debate, but “Deutero-Isaiah,” or “Second Isaiah,” is the name given to the author or authors.

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  29 See H. G. M. Williamson, “The Setting of Deutero-Isaiah: Some Linguistic Considerations,” in Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context, eds. Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 253–67 for a recent description of the state of the question. 14 Isaiah 45:5. 15 Smith, The Early History of God, 154–254. See also Romer, The Invention of God, 210–41. 16 It is almost certain that the texts that seem to predict the restoration of the Temple were composed after the fact and pre-dated. 17 Isaiah 45:1. 18 This problem disappears if one is willing to consider the words recorded in the books of the Prophets to be divinely inspired. That explanation will not be considered here. See note 16, above. 19 Lisbeth S. Fried, “Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1,” Harvard Theological Review 95/4 (October 2002), 379. 20 Ibid., 379, n. 22. 21 “The Theological Politics of Deutero-Isaiah,” in Divination, Politics and Near Eastern Empires, eds. Alan Lanzi and Jonathan Stökl (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), reproduced in Essays on Judaism in the Pre-Hellenistic Period, ed. Joseph Blenkinsopp (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 9. 22 Psalm 89:39. 23 Jeremiah 44:16–18 24 Other attempts to reconstruct Achaemenid Persian sources have been made, which cover not just the life of Cyrus but of all the kings of the Persian Empire. See Robert G. Hoyland, trans., The “History of the Kings of the Persians” in Three Arabic Chronicles: The Transmission of the Iranian Past from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. 25 Lanzi and Stökl, “The Theological Politics of Deutero-Isaiah,” 1–14. 26 See Lisbeth S. Fried, The Priest and the Great King: Temple-Palace Relations in the Persian Empire (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), e.g., 63. 27 Fried, “Cyrus the Messiah,” 383–89. 28 Ibid., 386. 29 The Temple vessels had been stolen at the time of the Temple’s destruction by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Apparently, the use of these vessels during a dinner party hosted by Nebuchadnezzer’s son Belshazzar was a red line for God, who saw to it that the Babylonians were conquered that very night, and Belshazzar slain. See Daniel 5:1–31. 30 Fried, “Cyrus the Messiah,” 393. 31 For an in-depth discussion of the history of the Jews in these periods, see (for Achaemenid Persia) Philip R. Davies, “Temple and Society in Achaemenid Judah,” in Essays on Judaism in the Pre-Hellenistic Period, ed. Blenkinsopp, 61–83; James Watts, “Was the Pentateuch the constitution of the Jewish ethnos in the Persian period?” in Ibid., 101–18; Diana Edelman, Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley, and Phillipe Guillaume, eds., Religion in the Achaemenid Persian empire: emerging Judaisms and Trends (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016); and a series of articles from W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, v. 1: Introduction: The Persian Period (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018), including, but not limited to, Ephraim Stern, “The Persian empire and the political and social history of Palestine in the Persian period,” 70–87; Peter Ackroyd, “The Jewish community in Palestine in the Persian period,” 130–61; Morton Smith, “Jewish religious life in the Persian period,” 189–218; and Shaul Shaked, “Iranian influence on Judaism: first century BCE. to second century CE,” 308–25; (as a starting point for the Hellenistic period) Martin Goodman, ed.,

30  The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism Jews in a Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and (also as a starting point, for the Roman period) Martin Goodman, ed., Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Martin Goodman, A History of Judaism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 91–228. 32 Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Messianic Judaism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomsbury Publishing: New York, 2000), 169–78. 33 Paula Fredriksen, When Christians were Jews: The First Generation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 34 Most famously, Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the historical Jesus; a critical study of its progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: A. & C. Black, 1954) summarizes the to-date scholarship (mostly, German) concerning the historiography of Jesus, but such studies by no means ended in 1954. A robust defense of the historicity of Jesus (if not necessarily the accuracy of the narratives about him) is presented in Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus exist?: the historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2012). A recent excellent work on the literary aspects of the historicity of the Jesus narratives is M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 35 Again, from a purely historical standpoint. Obviously, for believers in Jesus’ redemptive work, the most important part of the story is the opportunity for humanity’s salvation. This is a work of the history of religious thought and makes no presumptions about the unseen universe. 36 See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 37 Robert C. Gregg, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings: Early Encounters of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xiv. 38 Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qurʾān (Oxford: OneWorld, 1995), 16. 39 Reuven Firestone, “The Qurʾān and Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qurʾānic Studies, ed. Mustafa Shah and Muhammad Abdel Halim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 2. 40 See Richard Bell, The Origin of Islam in Its Christian Environment (London: Frank Cass, 1926); Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (Bonn, 1833); Henry P. Smith, The Bible and Islam: the Influence of the Old and New Testaments on the Religion of Mohammed (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897); and Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1887). 41 Firestone, “The Qurʾān and Judaism,” 2; Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). 42 Michael Cuypers, The Banquet: A Reading of the Fifth Sura of the Qur’an. Miami: Convivium Press, 2009. 43 For an overview of Isrāʾīlīyyat, see Shari L. Lowin, The Making of a Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 7–18. 44 Suleiman Ali Mourad, “The Symbolism of Jerusalem in early Islam,” in Jerusalem: Idea and Reality, ed. Tamar Mayer and Suleiman Ali Mourad (New York: Routledge, 2008), 86–102. 45 The author is reminded of students who fail to alter the font of plagiarized material. 46 Oleg Garber, The Dome of the Rock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 206. 47 Qurʾān, 112 (al-Ikhlās), 1–4, with the exception of the word al-ṣamadu, “everlasting,” in verse 2. 48 Qurʾan, 4 (al-Nisā’), 171. Translation from Garber, The Dome of the Rock, 92. 49 Qurʾān 19 (Maryām), 33–36.

The Birth and a Brief History of Monotheism  31 0 Qurʾān 5 (al-Māʿida), 21. 5 51 Qurʾān 7 (al-Aʿrāf), 137 and 21 (al-Anbiyāʾ), 71. 52 Suleiman A. Mourad, “Umayyad Jerusalem: From a religious capital to a religious town,” in The Umayyad World, ed. Andrew Marsham (New York: Routledge, 2020), 394. 53 See Gerald Hawting, “Ibn al-Zubayr, the Kaʿba, and the Dome of the Rock,” in The Umayyad World, ed. Andrew Marsham (New York: Routledge, 2020), 374. 54 Gregg, Shared Stories, xiv–xv. 55 Ibid., 598. 56 Ibid., 599. 57 The literature on the Guide is vast. For a single starting point, see Alfred L. Ivry, Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed: A Philosophical Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). If you decide to embark on an exploration of this work, buckle up. 58 Ivry, Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed, 33. 59 Ibid., 33–37. 60 Ibid., 38–44. 61 On the term, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 62 Occasionally, global events—like the Crusades—brought those monotheists (such as the Franks of Western Europe) who were not generally in cultural contact with other forms of monotheism into touch with the others. This encounter will be discussed in a later chapter. 63 This is bound to be a point of contention between Christians and Jews. Suffice it to say that Jesus’ Messianic credentials were rejected by most Jews at the time and that from their perspective, a Messiah was probably not really necessary: the Second Temple, after all, was still standing until 27 years after Jesus’ death. 64 “Allah” is Arabic for God. It is a contraction of “al” (the) and “ila” (god, with a lowercase g): “the god,” which implies “the only god,” or, briefer, “God.” Allah refers to the same deity as Yahweh, but it is not God’s name, the way Yahweh purports to be (it is actually an incorrect Anglicization). It is correct to think of “Allah” as analogous to the Spanish dios, the French dieu, or the German Gott. 65 Given the amount of intra-Christian polemic and even warfare in the ensuing centuries, it might be overly generous to say that any point of theology or dogma was ever really settled. The Holy Trinity might be as close to an ecumenical concept as might be found in the various Christian sects and denominations, so long as we ask no follow-up questions about the exact nature of that Trinity.

2

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile (576 BCE)

The Sack of the Temple In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Babylon mustered his army and marched to Ḫatti-land (=the Levant). He encamped against the city of Judah and on the second day of Adar he took the city and captured the king. He appointed a king of his own choice there, received its heavy tribute and sent (them) to Babylon.1 Babylonian chronicles, even recounting victories, are somewhat dry. The Jewish accounts of their catastrophe are far livelier: Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon advanced on Jerusalem and laid siege to it. And Nebuchadnezzar himself came up to the city while his officers were besieging it. Jehoiachin king of Judah, his mother, his attendants, his nobles and his officials all surrendered to him. In the eighth year of the reign of the king of Babylon, he took Jehoiachin prisoner. As the Lord had declared, Nebuchadnezzar removed the treasures from the Temple of the Lord. He carried all Jerusalem into exile: all the officers and fighting men and all the skilled workers and artisans—a total of ten thousand. Only the poorest people of the land were left…. So in the ninth year of Zedekiah’s reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army. He encamped outside the city and built siege works all around it. The city was kept under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. By the ninth day of the fourth month a famine in the city had become so severe that there was not food for the people to eat. Then the city wall was broken through, and the whole army fled at night through the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden, though the Babylonians were surrounding the city. The fled toward the Arava, but the Babylonian army pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho. All his solders were separated from him and scattered, and he was captured…. On the seventh day of the fifth month, in the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-3

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 33 commander of the imperial guard, an official of the King of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He set fire to the temple of the Lord, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. Every important building he burned down…. Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields. The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the movable stands and the bronze Sea that were at the temple of the Lord, and they carried the bronze back to Babylon. They also took away the pots, shovels, wick trimmers, dishes, and all the bronze articles used in the temple service. The commander of the imperial guard took away the censers and sprinkling bowls—all that were made of pure gold or silver.2 The scant treatment for the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in the Babylonian chronicle cited above is an indicator of how important it was to them: such victories were par for the course. Such consequences, similarly, were seen as justified without even the need for a footnote of justification. For the inhabitants of Judah, however, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and David’s capital were painstakingly recorded and eventually embedded into the community’s sacred history, in the Bible. It was an earth-shattering, community-shaping event. The destruction went beyond the physical space of the city, however. Judean society itself was disrupted, as all of the most-educated, wealthy, and politically savvy survivors of the siege were deported to Babylon itself. Only the poorest of the uneducated laborers were left behind, with the purpose of ensuring the productivity of the arable land, the last in a wave of deportations characterized the two decades of struggle against, and ultimate subjugation to, what is today called the Neo-Babylonian empire. The response to this catastrophe, likely penned by those who remained behind in Israel, quite clearly blames the Jews themselves: How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! She who was a queen among the provinces has now become a slave…. Her foes have become her masters; her enemies are at ease. The Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe.3

34  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile Historical Context The Downfall of Assyria (Late Seventh Century BCE)

Contextualizing events so deep within the fog of ancient history is no easy task. The primary challenge, of course, is one of historicity. Do we truly know what we think we know? How much of the story into which we are about to delve is the result of later ideological distortion or propaganda? Frankly, the answer is that a lot of it is probably tainted with the concerns of later eras. Fortunately, we are not here so interested in questions of historical veracity, but rather with how monotheists understood and contextualized their own histories, and particularly their catastrophes. Therefore, questions about the extent of our knowledge and the accuracy of what we now believe do not need to detain us. If we were simply to excise all matters of questionable veracity from our understood narrative of ancient history, we would have nothing with which to rebuild that narrative. What really happened is less important than what people believe happened, to the extent that what people believe happened motivates them and shapes historical trajectories. Still, a starting point must be established, and the best place to begin establishing context is with the greatest shock to hit the Ancient Near East: the disappearance of the Assyrian Empire. One might be excused for thinking of the Assyrian Empire as a kind of historical narrative prototype for Rome, at least in terms of its military power relative to its neighbors. In the eighth century BCE, the descendants of David were ruling in the two territories of Israel and Judah, which had regrettably undergone a schism and were now ruled by competing Davidic monarchs. At the same time, the Assyrians, a Semitic people from northern Mesopotamia, whose records extended back to a millennium prior, conquered or subdued the entire region of the Near East, including their rival great powers in Babylon and Egypt. In the Assyrian sources, all lands west of the river Euphrates were lumped into the Assyrian region of eber nāri, or, in Hebrew, eber hannahar—“Across the River.”4 The northern kingdom of Israel, conquered (732 BCE) during the reign of the Assyrian Emperor Tiglath-Pileser III (r. 745–727 BCE), remained under Assyrian rule until the Empire itself collapsed. Judah, the southern Israelite kingdom, seems to have maintained some form of independence from Assyria, although the extent to which a tiny, surrounded kingdom could be truly independent even of Assyrian influence is doubtful. Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE), perhaps Tiglath-Pileser III’s grandson (or, at the very least, the son of Sargon II, who took the throne from Tiglath-Pileser III’s son Shalmaneser V, and who claimed to be another of Tiglath-Pileser’s sons) attempted to conquer the Judeans and Jerusalem in 701 BCE. The nature of Sennacherib’s campaign, its success, and the motives for its undertaking remain a matter of scholarly debate. It is reasonable to assume that the Assyrian Empire had a major interest in acquiring

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 35 new territories and tributaries, as it included directly annexed provinces and tributary vassals paying to maintain their quasi-independence.5 The Assyrian Empire of the eighth century BCE certainly had the tools to accomplish this territorial and hegemonic expansion: the Assyrian military was unrivaled, and it was through military dominance that it managed to subdue its great rivals like the Babylonians. Judah should have offered little trouble, but during the conflict between Judah and Assyria, with Jerusalem besieged, Sennacherib apparently decamped to handle a Babylonian revolt, an Egyptian army attack, or perhaps an outbreak of plague. When he left Jerusalem untaken in his rear, its king Hezekiah sent him tribute, perhaps to forestall Sennacherib’s return.6 Whatever the truth of the matter (and the Jewish and Assyrian sources naturally disagree, opting for the most biased, propagandistic explanation possible), Judah remained independent from Assyrian rule when the nearly invincible Empire fell, shockingly quickly. “In the first half of the seventh century [BCE],” Lipschits writes, the Assyrian Empire was at the height of its power. The Empire controlled the entire Fertile Crescent and had established a faithful royal dynasty in Egypt; it appeared that there was no power in the world that could withstand the Assyrian Empire’s military might. The Pax Assyriaca was the major reason for the flourishing of the economy and commerce in the Levant…. However, within several years, the Assyrian Empire collapsed and fell, never to rise again. In all of ancient history, the fall of the Assyrian Empire is one of the most impressive and renowned; the military process was rapid, and a great power was toppled from the height of its influence, might, and wealth within a short time, after which it disappeared totally from the stage of history.7 Historians generally despair of knowing what happened to Assyria, once the most powerful Empire of the Ancient Near East. Right in the midst of a war against the Babylonians and the Medes, a new geopolitical player, the Assyrian sources suddenly fall silent. We surmise that Sennacherib’s children apparently squabbled over the throne while revolts, inspired by the turmoil in the capital, broke out across the Empire. But when the sources come back into focus a couple of decades later, Assyria is clearly, simply, gone. The biblical prophet Nahum, though likely composed after their fall, provides insight into how the Assyrians were viewed at that time. Predicting that Assyria, despite its allies and military, the author of Nahum wrote this: Although they have allies and are numerous, they will be destroyed and pass away. Although I have afflicted you, Judah,

36  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile I will afflict you no more. Now I will break their yoke from your neck and tear your shackles away. The Lord has given a command concerning you, Nineveh:8 ‘You will have no descendants to bear your name. I will destroy the images and idols that are in the temple of your gods. I will prepare your grave, for you are vile.’ Look! There on the mountains, the feet of one who brings good news, who proclaims peace! Celebrate your festivals, Judah, and fulfill your vows. No more will the wicked invade you; they will be completely destroyed.9 Apparently, even the mighty Assyrians were not immune from God’s wrath. Paradoxically, the lesser power of Babylon was able to inflict such a devastating blow to Judah a century later. The Babylonians, too, had some commentary on Assyria’s collapse. A British Museum-held tablet containing a copy of a Babylonian document,10 probably from close to a century later, attributes Assyria’s fall to the crimes the Assyrians committed against the Babylonians: … you became hos[tile] to Babylon. [The booty of the] lands you plundered and [removed] to the land of the Subarians [i.e., Assyria]. [The proper]ty of the Esaglia and Babylon you exposed and sent to [Nineveh]. [You kill]ed the elders of the city; you have capture the one who rose up (against you). Your [ ] you abandoned; you filled the lands with [disorder]. [The def]eat of the Babylonians you inflicted and you brought dark[ness]. You imposed punishment; you incited [un]rest. Rebellion in the land you fomented; you did not create peace. The inscribed castigation continues on the tablet’s reverse: “I shall avenge Babylon. [The property] of Esaglia and Babylon I shall bring down from the enemy land. An encampment [….] The wall of Nineveh, which is made of strong stone, by the [command] of Marduk great lord, I shall pile up like a mound of sand. [The city] of Sennacherib, the son of Sargon, offspring of a house slave,11 the conqu[eror of Babylon, plunder]er of Akkad, its roots I shall pluck out and the foundations of the land I shall obliterate.”12 The end of Assyria was desired by all of Assyria’s enemies, whose deities’ promises of vengeance were recorded in post facto texts like Nahum and BM 55467.

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 37 The Egyptian-Babylonian Conflict (609–605 BCE) and Judah’s Bad Gamble

With Assyria gone, and the small, mountainous Kingdom of Judah granted a respite from conquest, competing powers in the region sought to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of its greatest power. The two most immediate beneficiaries of Assyria’s stunning demise were Egypt and Babylon. Egypt apparently saw the danger posed by Assyria’s full collapse and tried to support it against the Babylonian-Median alliance, but to no avail; Babylon’s King Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, delivered Assyria’s coup de grace at Harran in 609 BCE. A side effect of Assyria’s collapse was that there was now no buffer between Babylon and Egypt. War between the new neighbors was likely inevitable. From Egypt’s perspective, the decline of Assyria had allowed it to expand its influence into the Levant, as far as the Euphrates River. Both Egypt and Babylon looked to benefit from Assyria’s disappearance, and the territories of the Levant, the Mediterranean’s eastern coast, were of particular interest: not only was the northern Levant, the territory of Phoenicia, a rich repository of cedar—excellent shipbuilding wood for powers with naval ambitions for the Mediterranean—but the narrow land bridge of the Sinai Peninsula, to which the land of Israel was the only approach, made it a critical geopolitical bridgehead on the Asian side of the Red Sea. Although the conflict between Egypt and Babylon had its front lines on the Euphrates in 609 BCE, the land on which the Kingdom of Judah sat maintained tremendous strategic importance for Egypt’s defense against a potential Babylonian counter-invasion.13 The struggle lasted only four years, culminating at the Battle of Carchemish (605 BCE), which forced the Egyptians back into their own territory. The Judean Kingdom played its geopolitical cards poorly during that war. Initially constrained to support Egypt by virtue of Egypt’s existing military presence in the Levant, the Kingdom vacillated between supporting them and then the Babylonians. The Babylonians probably accepted the capitulation of the kingdom during the second half of 604 BCE, although this is uncertain; the chronologies of the Judean and Babylonian sources for Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign in the direction of Egypt that year are out of sync with each other.14 Regardless of the timing, all the Levant including Judah fell under Babylonian control by the turn of the sixth century BCE. Initially, Babylonian rule was relatively light; this might be because, while Egypt had been expelled from Asia, they had not been defeated, a point that a failed Babylonian invasion of Egypt in 601 BCE drove home. Likely inspired by Egyptian support, Jehoiakim, the King of Judah, rebelled against the Babylonians in 597 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar, thus spurned by the Judean King he had allowed to maintain his throne in 604 BCE, then deposed him in favor of Zedekiah,15 apparently with the intention of allowing the Kingdom to remain in existence in a continued state of vassalage. The Babylonians also deported the first wave of exiles, including Jehoiakim’s son Jehoiachin, to Babylon, and plundered—but did not yet destroy—the

38  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile Temple. Zedekiah turned out not to be the loyal sycophant the Babylonians hoped, but neither was he the restorer of Judean sovereignty for which his people may have wished. Nine years later, Zedekiah himself stopped paying the required tribute to the Babylonians. This time, having faced a Judah that first allied with Egypt, and then revolted against Babylonian rule twice in ten years, the Babylonians had evidently had enough. Zedekiah’s children were famously killed in front of him, and then his eyes were put out so that their deaths would be the last thing he ever saw. Most of Jerusalem’s remaining population was sent to join the first wave of exiles. The Temple of Solomon, which had stood for about four hundred years, was pulled down and burned: utterly destroyed. The Jews had, in those 400 years coinciding with the Temple’s existence, gone from a united monarchy under David and his descendants to a people divided between two Kingdoms, Israel and Judah. Then, the Assyrians conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and attacked and dominated the southern Kingdom of Judah, which included Jerusalem. The collapse of the Assyrians in the late seventh century BCE forced Judah to maintain a cautious support of Egypt during its conflict with the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar; the Egyptian defeat at the hands of the Babylonians invited Babylonian domination of Judah, which culminated in two rebellions, two waves of exiled elites (while the poor of the land remained to labor), and the destruction of the Temple. The Jews had lost their land, their elites, and their spiritual center. Their survival was by no means assured. Early Reactions to the Catastrophe The earliest reactions to the catastrophe may be found in the works of the compiler-redactor known as the Deuteronomist. These works are the Books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which have been convincingly argued16 as the collective work of a single mind.17 We should begin by acknowledging that analyzing these texts comes with a number of methodological challenges due to their enshrinement in the Bible. The first challenge is the temptation to take the text literally, rather than literarily: that is, to accept at face value what can only properly be fully understood through a poetic approach.18 Even if one takes the historiographically unsubstantiated (and nearly indefensible) view that biblical narratives provide a wie es eigentlich gewesen version of ancient events, the narrative voices within the Bible provide, at best, a biased, selective, and profoundly limited perspective on those events. To compound the difficulty to the historian, the Hebrew Bible we possess today does not represent an accurate republication of the earliest versions of the texts contained therein by any means. On the contrary, even after the Bible was originally compiled, texts were amended (sometimes multiple times, across hundreds or even thousands of years), added to it, and removed from it. Beyond that, the collection of hymns, poems, narratives, and genealogies generated an industry of Jewish exegesis in the form of midrash, law, responsa, and appendices in later generations. The births of Christianity and

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 39 Islam, and their own challenging interpretations of this text through their exegetical and intellectual responses to the ever-expanding corpus of interrelated monotheistic texts, and trying to pin down the specifics not only of the text’s meaning but even of its very composition and compilation, is a Herculean if not a Sisyphean task. Finally, when engaging with narratives in the Bible, in Rom-Shiloni’s words, “it is important to distinguish between ‘speaking persona(e)’ and ‘author(s)’ or between ‘scenarios’ and ‘authorship’ within a literary composition. Biblical scholars to a large extent are alert to evident gaps between, on the one hand, the scenarios (space, historical circumstances, sociological and theological spectrum, etc.) delineated within the biblical material and, on the other hand, the presumed point(s) at which these literary compositions are written and compiled, including the presumed processes of additional adaptations, revisions, and so on.”19 It is, in other words, difficult confidently to place any biblical text in both space and time. Despite these challenges, an exact dating of the books of the Prophets is ultimately unnecessary for us here. The Temple’s destruction, which was certainly in 586 BCE, and the start of the Babylonian exile were clear before-and-after markers of time, and so we must select those works within the Bible that were composed at the time of or shortly after the Temple’s destruction, and mine them for reactions. This is actually a relatively easy task. Some of the Deuteronomist’s work, likely those books that constitute his original writing, make clear and obvious references to the events of the Babylonian conquest of Judah and the waves of exiled Jews. Such works include Kings 1 and 2. The rest of his work—including Deuteronomy, Judges, Joshua, and Samuel—deserves attention. Even if they represent his editorial work, rather than his original writing, they were clearly texts composed during the Babylonian exile that were constructed with what would have been his own current events in mind. But the Deuteronomist is not the only word on the matter: Ezekiel, Lamentations, Jeremiah, and Daniel are all texts with a clearly Babylonian Sitz im Leben. By the time the authors of the books of Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra were writing, the restoration of the Temple and the end of the Babylonian exile (for some— some of course chose to remain) is clearly well in the past. Lamentations: “Why Have You Forgotten Us Utterly?”

The Book of Lamentations is the Bible’s most straightforward response to the Babylonian destruction of the Temple. Functioning as “a lament for the past and a prophetic warning for the future,” the Rabbis of the post-Second Temple period knew that Lamentations “prescribed the punishment which God would mete out in the future if Jews would persist in their wickedness.”20 The poetic language of Lamentations means that it cannot be treated as if it was some sort of eyewitness account. The Babylonians are never mentioned by name. Later Rabbinic commentary seamlessly applied the same text to later sufferings, including some calamities in their own times.21 Lamentations is a set of five poems about suffering through catastrophe, rather than a dirge

40  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile grieving a specific catastrophe itself. Its applicability to other, similar catastrophes speaks more to its poetic power than its supposed prophetic knowledge. Determining the exact date and authorship of the book is difficult, but most modern scholars reject the ancient notion that the book was written by Jeremiah, the most prominent Judean prophet when the destruction occurred. The traditional ascription of the book to Jeremiah is due to apparent setting and linguistic similarities, but the current notion is that each chapter of Lamentations was the work of “a different anonymous author, whose identity is impossible to ascertain. The poems were probably written shortly after 586 BCE and collected together shortly thereafter, probably by 520 BCE when the postexilic community began to rebuild the Temple.”22 Even in Lamentations, in what purports to be the immediate response to the theological challenge posed by the destruction of the Temple, there is already self-blame evident. However, unlike in later responses, the self-blame is non-specific. The book begins with a lamentation, as expected: Alas! Lonely sits the city once great with people! She that was great among nations is become a thrall. Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her of all her friends. All her allies have betrayed her; they have become her foes. Judah has gone into exile because of misery and harsh oppression; When she settled among the nations, she found no rest; all her pursuers overtook her in the narrow places.23 The first verse emphasizes the fall of Jerusalem, using feminine language to refer to the city (which is recurring motif). It does not immediately address the destruction of the Temple. It contrasts the city’s former grandeur of the city with its current thralldom, with only foes remaining where once there were friends and allies. The text notes that the sovereignty of the Jews over Jerusalem and Judah had come to an end. The reference to exile in 1:3 makes this clear, and the text asserts that the cause of this is “misery and harsh oppression,” specifically that imposed by the Babylonians. The language used to describe this period of suffering evokes memories of the Egyptian captivity, particularly the phrase bayn hamṣarim, “in the narrow places.” Bayn hamṣarim is a homographic twin to bayn ha-miṣrim, “among the Egyptians,” so long as the vowels are omitted (which, of course, they always are in ancient Hebrew texts). The outpouring of grief continues through the poetry of Lamentations 1: “Gone from fair Zion are all that were her glory;” “All her inhabitants sigh as they search for bread;” “My eyes flow with tears; far from me is any comforter who might revive my spirit;” “My heart is in anguish.”24 We do not know when Lamentations took its current edited form, but it is easy at least to imagine that these words reflect the immediate responses of the people, seeing the Temple under direct assault, in the process of collapsing and

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 41 burning, and of the exiled leaders, marching east in captivity and subjugation from Israel to Babylon, just as their ancestors once marched east to freedom and sovereignty from Egypt to Israel. Before the poets who were the authors of the five poems of Lamentations set quill to parchment, they and the people of Judah were clearly asking anguished questions and searching for answers. The questions generated by the Temple’s destruction lie at the heart of this present study: the theological problem inherent in the dissonance generated by the reality of such suffering combined with the notion of a good God who is also all-powerful, known as the “trilemma of theodicy.” Theodicy is the effort to show that traditional claims about God’s power and goodness are compatible with the fact of suffering.25 In the face of this problem, the Lamenters adopt an explanation of self-blame as the only logical way to reconcile these conflicting ideas. But unlike the self-blame we will see in writings that are created half a century later, the sins of the community that generated God’s anger and the resulting catastrophe are not even guessed at, let alone named. It is almost as if we can hear the authors of Lamentations crying out, in anguish, “We must have done something!” Below are all the expressions of self-blame in Lamentations 1: Lamentations 1

Because YHWH has afflicted her for her many transgressions, her infants have gone into captivity before the enemy. (1:5) Jerusalem has greatly sinned; therefore, she is become a mockery.

(1:8)

May it never befall you, all who pass along the road. Look about and see: is there any agony like mine, which was dealt out to me when YHWH afflicted me on his day of wrath? (1:12) The yoke of my offenses is bound fast. YHWH is in the right, for I have disobeyed him. My heart is in anguish; I know how wrong I was to disobey.

(1:14) (1:18) (1:20)

Let all their [i.e., my enemies] wrongdoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me for all my transgressions. (1:22)

42  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile The author speaks of transgressions, sins, offenses, disobedience, and wrongdoing, but never is there any particular indication of what these might mean. We surmise from later writings that the sin was abandonment of Yahweh in favor of other gods (Baal, in particular), but none of this is evident from the earliest reactions, as contained in Lamentations 1. Lamentations 2 is a fiery recounting of the wrath of God, which emphasizes that not only did he turn his back on the Jews, but in fact it was God himself (and not the Babylonians, who are never named) who was attacking: My Lord26 has laid waste without pity all the habitations of Jacob; he has razed in his anger Fair Judah’s strongholds. He has brought low in dishonor the kingdom and its leaders. In blazing anger he has cut down all the might of Israel; he has withdrawn his right hand in the presence of the foe; he has ravaged Jacob like a flaming fire, consuming on all sides. He bent his bow like an enemy, poised his right hand like a foe; he slew all who delighted the eye. He poured out his wrath like fire in the tent of fair Zion. My Lord has acted like a foe; he has laid waste Israel, laid waste all her citadels, destroyed her strongholds. He has increased within fair Judah mourning and moaning. He has stripped his booth like a garden; he has destroyed his tabernacle; YHWH has ended in Zion festival and Sabbath; in his raging anger, he has spurned King and priest; My Lord has rejected his altar, disdained his sanctuary. He has handed over to the foe27 the walls of its citadels; they raised a shout in the house of YHWH as on a festival day. YHWH resolved to destroy the wall of fair Zion; he measured with a line, refrained not from bringing destruction. He has made wall and rampart to mourn. Together they languish.28 And on it goes. If nothing else, if Lamentations 1 put the destruction into a kind of communal historical context with its implicit references to Egyptian slavery, Lamentations 2 emphasizes the severity of the moment (and, perhaps, the level of cognitive dissonance it engendered) by asserting that God himself had “laid waste Israel,” “rejected his altar, disdained his sanctuary,” and “handed over to the foe the walls of its citadel.” This is not the same as admitting that the Babylonians had conquered the Jews of their own military superiority, which is what had actually occurred. Lamentations 2 hints at the generic transgression mentioned in Lamentations 1, although, again, it is far from explicit: Your seers prophesied to you delusion and folly. They did not expose your iniquity so as to restore your fortunes, but prophesied to you oracles of delusion and deception.29

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 43 Rashi’s commentary on this verse points out that l’hashiv shvutekh, “to restore your fortunes,” also means “to bring you back from your waywardness.” Rashi ties the “waywardness” to the Jews’ backsliding toward idolatry.30 Of course, Rashi is a much later figure, and he ties the concept implied in the language to similar language in Jeremiah. That conclusion is not implicit in the text. Lamentations 3 is written in a much more staccato style than 1 and 2; the verses are shorter, and the sentences are simpler. So, too, are the concepts. It is written from the perspective of an individual man who has witnessed the destruction and perhaps the exile; the author may be an exile himself. Inasmuch as Lamentations 2 dramatically casts God as the attacker, Lamentations 3 simply lists, in the first 20 verses, the many miseries God has inflicted on this man, its author (who is meant to be understood as metonymic for the entire community): God has “[brought] his hand down again and again, without cease. He has worn away my flesh and skin; he has shattered my bones. All around me he has built misery and hardship. He has made me dwell in darkness, like those long dead.”31 But then, in verse 21, the poem takes a turn, the like of which was not seen in Lamentations 1 and 2: “But this do I call to mind, therefore I have hope: The kindness of YHWH has not ended; his mercies are not spent. They are renewed every morning—ample is your grace!32 It would be wrong to say that the Book of Lamentations changes direction entirely; by 3:46 the author is, once again, bemoaning God’s punishment: All our enemies loudly rail against us. Panic and pitfall are our lot, death and destruction. My eyes shed streams of water over the ruin of my poor people. My eyes shall flow without cease, without respite, Until YHWH looks down and beholds from heaven.33 The author of the text is conflicted between God’s ultimate mercy and the current affliction faced by the author and his community. Despite the struggle, the author arrives at a perspective that takes a long-term view, using uses God’s favor toward the Jews—despite all signs to the contrary, unexpired— to repair the damage Yahweh’s reputation has taken. YHWH is good to those who trust in him, to the one who seeks him: It is good to wait patiently till rescue comes from YHWH. It is good for a man, when young, to bear a yoke; Let him sit alone and be patient, when [God] has laid it upon him. Let him put his mouth to the dust—there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to the smiter; let him be surfeited with mockery. For the Lord does not reject forever, But first afflicts, then pardons in his abundant kindness.34

44  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile Having thus established that God’s mercy not only continues but rather may be discerned even through suffering, despite everything that had occurred, the author explains his reasoning: For he does not willfully bring grief or affliction to me, Crushing under his feet all the prisoners of the earth. To deny a man his rights in the presence of the Most High, To wrong a man in his cause—this My Lord does not choose. Whose decree was ever fulfilled, unless My Lord willed it? Is it not at the word of the Most High, that weal and woe befall? Of what shall a living man complain? Each one of his own sins! Let us search and examine our ways, and turn back to YHWH.35 In Lamentations 3, the author emphasizes that Yahweh is just, in addition to merciful (3:22) and powerful (3:37). But even as acknowledges the community’s fault in provoking God’s wrath and the rightness of God’s just punishment, the author remains vague about the specific sins that had been committed: “Let us search and examine our ways,” he pleads, “and turn back to YHWH.” The plea for self-examination implies that the communal crime was not commonly known or understood. “Let us search and examine our ways” is the imploration of a crestfallen witness, seeking to ensure that the just punishment of a merciful God should not ever be repeated, but the man who wrote these words was obviously baffled as to the nature of the sin. Lamentations 3 was likely recorded very recently after the event and the reasons for Jerusalem’s destruction and the Temple’s fall were not yet clearly understood. In the Book of Jeremiah, idolatry and corruption were identified as the causes. The notion of Jewish sin causing God’s wrath was an easy explanation for this kind of catastrophe, which does not theologically threaten God’s omnipotence, benevolence, or existence. Lamentations 3 concludes with an appeal to God to deal harshly with Judah’s foes and to treat them in a likewise manner. Lamentations 4 is similar in structure to the previous chapters: it begins with a description of the misery caused by the siege of Jerusalem to its inhabitants,36 followed by a six-verse assertion that the misery is God’s punishment37 for “the sins of [Jerusalem’s] prophets, the iniquities of her priests who had shed blood in her midst, the blood of the just,”38 which singles out religious leaders for censure, but remains unspecific. The poem likewise concludes with yet another beseeching of God’s wrath on an enemy; interestingly, it names the Edomites, rather than the Babylonians, as the imminent direction of God’s anger.39 And Lamentations 5, the concluding poem of the Book, has none of Lamentations 3’s hopefulness; its author, rather, was disconsolate. With one small acknowledgment that the fault probably lies with the people themselves—“The crown has fallen from our head; Woe to us that we have sinned!”40—the nature of the sin is still unclear. More, the author seems to question whether the punishment is even just, and continues to

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 45 struggle with the feeling of God’s abandonment. The Book of Lamentations concludes: But you, YHWH, are enthroned forever; your throne endures through the ages. Why have you forgotten us utterly, forsaken us through all time? Take us back, YHWH, to yourself, and let us come back. Renew our days as of old! For truly, you have rejected us, bitterly raged against us. Take us back, YHWH, and let us come back; renew our days as of old!41 The last phrase—“take us back, YHWH, and let us come back; renew our days as of old!”—is often thought of as a positive ending note. The line is a standard refrain in Jewish prayer services and is recited at any public reading of Lamentations. The same phrase is repeated in the final chapters of other books of the Bible, including Isaiah, Malachi, and Ecclesiastes.42 But in truth, there is little in the line that is inherently optimistic, nor anything that seems to have any real hope that the community’s separation from Yahweh is headed anywhere other than outright divorce. Lamentations 5 is, in fact, the most pessimistic of all the poems. While it does assert God’s enduring power, and acknowledges, however briefly, the guilt for the catastrophe as belonging to the people, it makes no attempt to grapple with the nature of the communal sin. Lamentations 1 and 2 at least make half-hearted attempts to discern the community’s sin, and Lamentations 3 asserts the imperative of finding out what sin may have been committed, but offers no suggestions. Lamentations 5 holds out no hope, as Lamentations 3 does, for God’s eventual mercy; it does not even call hopefully for vengeance against the foe, like Lamentations 4. Lamentations 5 ends with an unanswered plea to God for succor and reconciliation. Such is the state of the Jewish community on the tenth of Av, 586 BCE (the day after the destruction), on the eve of the exile. The people of Judah are physically and personally traumatized and theologically stunned, but devoted enough to the monotheistic ideal by this point that Jewish sin is the only possible explanation that is logically consistent with their notions of God’s justice and his power. His enduring mercy, as is clear from the difference in perspectives between Lamentations 3 and 5, is still very much an open question. The differences in perspectives and concerns implicit in each of these poems strongly supports the notion that they were written by different men, likely eyewitnesses to the event given their ignorance of the later consensus surrounding the nature of the sin that drew God’s anger and provoked his punishment in the form of the Babylonian conquest. Later works of prophecy were far more straightforward about the sin. So, too, were the works of prophets who claimed to have seen the devastation coming, like Jeremiah.

46  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile Jeremiah: “For Your Gods Have Become as Many as Your Towns”

Jeremiah is a fascinating figure to mine for information on the theological implications of the Temple’s destruction: he claims to have witnessed it. If take the text at face value, Jeremiah had been warning about the coming reckoning, and naming the sin that would invite it, for quite some time. His perspective is not the only eyewitness perspective—the author of Kings, likely the Deuteronomist(s), likewise provides an account of the Temple’s destruction. That account largely corroborates Jeremiah’s, but is heavily focused on both kingdoms, Israel and Judah, backsliding toward idolatry and Baal-worship. The section on the destruction of the Temple is the beginning of the exile is cursory.43 The destruction is also mentioned in the Book of Daniel, mostly as a means for setting the context of Daniel’s prophetic career in Babylon (specifically in foretelling the Persian conquest).44 The perspective contained in the Book of Jeremiah has some similarities with Lamentations. Both Jeremiah and Lamentations name God as the destroyer of the Temple, and not the Babylonians. But unlike Lamentations, when the author of Jeremiah (whatever his actual name may have been, for simplicity’s sake, we will just call him Jeremiah) asks why this catastrophe occurred, he provides an answer. Jeremiah’s conclusion is also more hopeful than Lamentations’, as he completed the writing of the book that bears his name from the relatively safe, if notably ironic, refuge of Egypt. Engaging with Jeremiah presents methodological challenges that Lamentations does not. Lamentations is relatively straightforward, if somewhat dense, due to its poetic language. Jeremiah contains poetic language, too, but that is not the fundamental challenge of engaging with the book. In contrast to Lamentations’ five chapters, Jeremiah contains 52; and also unlike Lamentations, we possess at least two antique versions of it. One is in the Masoretic text, and another found its way into the Greek Septuagint. These different versions of Jeremiah have the chapters in different orders from one another, and in some chapters, the texts found in the two versions are markedly different. Furthermore, the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran contain versions of Jeremiah that are different from both the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, which indicates that there was at least one other version floating around the ancient world, as well.45 It is the Masoretic version that we will examine here, but to some extent which version we choose to mine for information does not matter. The major themes and narrative strategies of Jeremiah do not vary significantly from the Masoretic to the Septuagint or the Qumran versions. Jeremiah is divided, in a general sense, into three major sections, with a few subsections carved out on specific themes. Chapters 1–25 contain oracles to Judah, which for our purposes provides a theological context for the destruction that Jeremiah warns is coming. Chapters 26–45 contain the scribal anthology, which lays out the events leading up to, during, and just after the sack of Jerusalem and the Temple, but this section does contain some oracles (Chapters 30–33 are called “the Book of Consolation”) which promises restoration and comfort. Finally, Chapters 46–52 are known as the Oracles

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 47 against the Nations, some of which are almost certainly not authentic.46 The following is a noteworthy selection from Jeremiah 11, a part of the author’s warning: The word which came to Jeremiah from YHWH: Hear the terms of this covenant, and recite them to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem! And say to them, Thus said YHWH, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who will not obey the terms of this covenant, which I enjoined upon your fathers when I freed them from the land of Egypt, the iron crucible, saying, ‘Obey me and observe them, just as I command you, that you may be my people and I may be your God— in order to fulfill the oath which I swore to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as is now the case.’ And I responded, ‘Amen, YHWH.’ And YHWH said to me, ‘Proclaim all these things through the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem: Hear the terms of this covenant, and perform them. For I have repeatedly and persistently warned your fathers from the time I brought them out of Egypt to this day, saying: Obey my commands. But they would not listen or give ear; they all followed the willfulness of their evil hearts. So I have brought upon them all the terms of this covenant, because they did not do what I commanded them to do.’ YHWH said to me, ‘A conspiracy exists among the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They have returned to the iniquities of their fathers of old, who refused to heed my words. They, too, have followed other gods and served them. The House of Israel and the House of Judah have broken the covenant that I made with their fathers.’ Assuredly, thus said YHWH: ‘I am going to bring upon them disaster from which they will not be able to escape. They will cry out to me, but I will not listen.’ And the townsmen of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry out to the gods to which they sacrifice; but they will not be able to rescue them in the time of their disaster. For your gods have become as many as your towns, O Judah, and you have set up as many altars to shame as there are streets in Jerusalem— altars for sacrifice to Baal.47 This section contains text that purports to be predictive. Is it possible that Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem before the fact, and also rationalized

48  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile the coming destruction as coming from God, rather than from any human enemies, in the same manner as Lamentations? It is impossible to know, after all, when these books took their current forms. As is the case with Zephaniah and Habakkuk, two minor Prophets whose narrative is placed in the preBabylonian period but whose composition was almost certainly post-exilic, we cannot be certain whether the prognostications of Jeremiah constitute ex post facto “prophecies.” While there are a few elements of the text that suggest that it was written before the destruction, they are not conclusive; indeed, such a conclusion is highly doubtful, for a number of reasons. First, Jeremiah records several prophecies that went unfulfilled. These include the prediction that Zedekiah, Judah’s King at the time of the Babylonian conquest, would “die a peaceful death.”48 In fact, according to 2 Kings 25:4–7 (a work that was long attributed to Jeremiah), Zedekiah received one of the more memorably violent deaths of the Bible. Such erroneous predictions survive in the work, but had this chapter of Jeremiah been composed after the event, such clearly ahistorical errors would quite likely have been excised. The appearance of those errors in the text suggests that it was composed before they were proven conclusively wrong. Additionally, there was no need for divine inspiration for Jeremiah to soberly assess Judah’s geostrategic situation and make a cold and dispassionate prediction, rather than a prophecy, of the Babylonian conquest. These elements of the Book of Jeremiah indicate that it could have been written before the fact, but without the need for prophecy. However, regardless of when they were written, those sections of Jeremiah that are devoted to warning Judah that it must change course on the idolatry issue and those that are devoted to reacting and explaining the catastrophe that befell Judah when Jeremiah’s warnings went unheeded are now indistinguishable. The text, after all, was placed into the canon by humans, and “everything that human hands have touched is subject to review.”49 Jeremiah’s specific message was written in prophetic tones designed to augment its apparent authenticity. He calls his people away from idolatry, toward observance of his understanding of God’s commandments. Jeremiah ultimately affirmed the righteousness of God and promised the restoration of Jerusalem and the Temple. Regardless of the setting, we may at least approach Jeremiah as the whole work of a single author, unless there is clear evidence to suggest disparate authorship (as was the case in Lamentations). In the passage quoted above from Jeremiah 11, and from many other sections throughout Jeremiah, we are meant to understand that Jeremiah had been warning the people of Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem in particular, away from idolatry (worship of Baal, an old Canaanite god, in particular). But beyond the idolatry issue, Jeremiah noted specific commands of God that were not being followed. Most notably, those relating to the covenant between God and Israel were being ignored. Jeremiah 34 gives

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 49 some indication of what that might mean: King Zedekiah and the people had violated the laws concerning the manumission of Hebrew slaves. The word which came to Jeremiah from YHWH after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to proclaim a release among them— that everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, both male and female, and that no one should keep his fellow Judean enslaved. Everyone, officials and people, who had entered into the covenant agreed to set their male and female slaves free and not keep them enslaved any longer; they complied and let them go. But afterward they turned about and brought back the men and women they had set free, and forced them into slavery again. Then it was that the word of YHWH came to Jeremiah from YHWH: Thus said YHWH, the God of Israel: ‘I made a covenant with your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage, saying: In the seventh year each of you must let go any fellow Hebrew who may be sold to you; when he has served you six years, you must set him free.’ But your fathers would not obey me or give ear. Lately you turned about and did what is proper in my sight, and each of you proclaimed a release to his countrymen; and you made a covenant accordingly before me in the house which bears my name. But now you have turned back and have profaned my name; each of you has brought back the men and women whom you had given their freedom, and forced them to be your slaves again. Assuredly, thus said YHWH: ‘You would not obey me and proclaim a release, each to his kinsmen and countrymen. Lo! I proclaim your release’—declares YHWH—‘to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine; and I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.’50 True to his word, God offers the following judgment at the conclusion of the chapter: ‘I will hand over King Zedekiah of Judah and his officers to their enemies, who seek to kill them—to the army of the king of Babylon which has withdrawn from you. I hereby give the command’—declares YHWH—‘by which I will bring them back against this city. They shall attack it and capture it, and burn it down. I will make the towns of Judah a desolation, without inhabitants.’51

50  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile This, too, is unlike Lamentations in that the Babylonians are referenced by name as God’s agents of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. This is an even more specific explanation of the sins committed by the Israelites: in Jeremiah’s view, the violation of God’s law concerning enslaved Hebrews, which is laid out in Deuteronomy 15: If a fellow Hebrew, man or woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall set him free. When you set him free, do not let him go empty-handed: Furnish him out of the flock, threshing floor, and vat, with which YHWH your God has blessed you. Bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and YHWH your God redeemed you; therefore I enjoin this commandment upon you today.52 There seems to be a discernible sequence of events. When combined with what we understand about the general chronology of the JudeanBabylonian conflict and Jeremiah’s specific political and/or theological biases, this chapter places the blame for the most immediate cause of the Temple’s destruction upon Zedekiah himself. The most likely course of events that this text preserves is that the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, at which point Zedekiah ordered the country’s Hebrew slaves released, perhaps to participate in the city’s defense against the Babylonian siege. However, he then reneged and forced the slaves to return to bondage, after which (according to Jeremiah, because of which) God himself recalled the Babylonian army, which executed the divine will by sacking the city and destroying the Temple. Jeremiah 37 sheds light upon Zedekiah’s role in the events that led to the Temple’s destruction. Let us begin with the relationship between the King of Judah and Jeremiah, the most prominent prophet of his age: Zedekiah son of Josiah became king instead of Coniah son of Jehoiakim, for King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon set him up as king over the land of Judah. Neither he nor his courtiers nor the people of the land gave heed to the words which YHWH spoke through the prophet Jeremiah.53 Ignoring the words of a prophet is a poor strategy if one hopes to be treated sympathetically in the text that prophet produces. It is thus unsurprising that Zedekiah emerges from the book of Jeremiah looking like the king who lost the country. But Jeremiah has a larger theme in his work, one that goes beyond his personal grievances against Zedekiah, who, it must be noted, was not the only king of Judah to earn Jeremiah’s disapproval: Jehoiakim

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 51 was similarly disparaged, and for the similar reason of poking at the Babylonian giant with the stick of an ill-advised rebellion. Poor leadership is only part of Jeremiah’s critique of Zedekiah, though. Jeremiah is deeply concerned with transgression and punishment, as well as the potential for repentance and redemption.54 The worship of other gods had been asserted as the reason for God’s destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel at the hands of the Assyrians; the crime of Israel is likened to that of an adulterous wife.55 But Jeremiah’s message was not for Israel (by his time, erased from the map) but for Judah, for whom the prophet uses the fate of Israel as an object lesson and a warning: And after all that [i.e., the Assyrian conquest of Israel], her sister, faithless Judah, did not return to me wholeheartedly, but insincerely—declares YHWH. And YHWH said to me, ‘Rebel Israel has shown herself more in the right than faithless Judah. Go, make this proclamation toward the north, and say, “Turn back,56 O Rebel Israel”—declares YHWH. ‘I will not look on you in anger, for I am compassionate’—declares YHWH; ‘I do not bear a grudge for all time. Only recognize your sin; you have transgressed against YHWH your God, and scattered your favors among strangers under every leafy tree, and you have not heeded me.’57 At the beginning of his career, Jeremiah noticed that the people of Judah were committing the same sins as the doomed kingdom of Israel: “scattering favors among strangers under every leafy tree” evokes the image of the same promiscuous, faithless wife. Jeremiah warned his countrymen that they faced the same fate that had befallen Israel, but he also reminded them that God would answer Judah’s repentance from these sins with compassion and mercy. That same formula of Jewish sin, followed by God’s extraordinary punishment, followed by Jewish repentance, followed by God’s mercy and the restoration of the country, is applied in the material concerning the destruction of the Temple. In Jeremiah 34, Judah’s sin was not idolatry, but violating God’s commands regarding slavery. According to the text, God decreed that every seven years, Hebrew slaves should be set free, in commemoration of their liberation from Egypt. There is a reciprocity implied by the monotheistic covenant: the Hebrews would worship—acknowledge, even—no God but Yahweh, and follow his laws and commands, and in return, God would protect them and make them masters over other nations. That reciprocity is echoed in the command regarding the manumission of Hebrew slaves: as God freed the Hebrews from Egyptian masters, so should Hebrew masters free their own

52  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile Hebrew slaves. In the same chapter, Deuteronomy 15, God promises to bless the Hebrews if they obey his command: If only you heed YHWH your God and take care to keep all this instruction that I enjoin upon you this day…. You will dominate many nations, but they will not dominate you.58 Of course, according to Jeremiah 34, the opposite happened. Not only had Zedekiah neglected to free the Hebrew slaves at the appointed time, but when he did finally order them freed, apparently by proclamation in the Temple itself (an act for which Jeremiah expresses God’s approval),59 Zedekiah ultimately canceled their manumission, possibly when the Babylonians lifted the siege to go fight an invading Egyptian army.60 The specific word for the legal act of freeing the slaves Jeremiah uses is brit, or covenant, which is the same word used for the agreement between God and the Hebrews on the occasion of their flight from Egyptian slavery to freedom. So Zedekiah is guilty of a double violation: as king, he broke his covenant with the people, and as a member of God’s nation, he broke God’s covenant with Israel by violating the rights of the Hebrew slaves. One might add the betrayal of a third covenant, although the term is never used in this context: Zedekiah had been Nebuchadnezzar’s appointed sycophant king, and had violated Nebuchadnezzar’s trust, as well. Jeremiah even offered Zedekiah counsel (the king ordered him to keep it secret, as their enmity was common knowledge) to surrender to the Babylonians, whom the Prophet evidently already perceived not as independent actors pursuing their own interests, but rather as the mechanism of delivery for God’s coming punishment. There is a positive conditional expressed in the previously discussed passage in Deuteronomy 15:6, that by following God’s commands, “you will dominate many nations, but they will not dominate you,” but ultimately the exact inverse occurred: by not following God’s commands, the Hebrews had not dominated anyone, but many nations—Egypt, Assyria, and now Babylon— had ultimately come to dominate them. This turnabout is echoed at the conclusion of Jeremiah 34: “You would not obey me and proclaim a release, each to his kinsmen and country men. Lo! I proclaim a release ‘—declares YHWH—‘to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine; and I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.’”61 Zedekiah ignored Jeremiah’s advice to submit to Babylon, and on the ninth of Av, the Babylonian army took the city. Zedekiah’s children were slaughtered before him at the hands of the Babylonian army, and then he was blinded. This severe punishment was God’s retribution for ignoring his commands, despite repeated warnings through Jeremiah, who is also the narrator of the story. Although the texts claim to have been composed at the same time as these events, Jeremiah’s perspective on them is clearly a later one than is

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 53 Lamentations. The two texts have their similarities to each other: both Jeremiah and Lamentations identify Yahweh, and not the Babylonians, as the sacker of Jerusalem and the destroyer of the Temple, and both attribute the catastrophe to God’s anger at the misdeeds of the Jews themselves. However, the tone of this message is quite different. The authors of Lamentations are in anguish. They cry out at the agony of the misfortune that had befallen them, certain that they had sinned but without specific reference as to the nature of the sin, and struggling, mostly despondently, to maintain the hope that God would restore what he had destroyed and punish the human perpetrators of the act. Jeremiah’s tone is different and probably indicative of a later date of composition. There are strong reasons to date Jeremiah to the later exilic period, perhaps half a century after Lamentations.62 By the time the Book of Jeremiah was written, Lamentations’ anguished tone had been replaced by Jeremiah’s finger-wagging certainty about what exactly had precipitated the destruction. Despite the attention the problem of polytheistic idolatry receives from the prophet, according to Jeremiah the quintessential sin that triggered God’s deployment of the Babylonians as agents of his will was not the kingdom’s apparent dalliance with other gods. Rather, it was the re-enslavement of the Hebrew slaves by King Zedekiah that was the final straw. Although he had indeed ordered their manumission, his order had come too late to comply with God’s law, anyway. The canceling of their manumission was the act that triggered God’s deployment of the Babylonians to destroy the Temple. It should be noted that Jeremiah is, in the Bible, a minority opinion on this being the most proximal cause of the Temple’s destruction. Kings, Daniel, Zechariah (and books that should be associated with Zechariah, like Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah),63 and others all point to polytheistic backsliding as the cause of the destruction. However, there is reason to believe that Jeremiah, despite its setting at the time of the Temple’s destruction, reached its final form later than those others. This is evidenced by the inclusion in Jeremiah 29 of the very specific prediction of the length of Babylon’s period of dominance: “For thus said YHWH: ‘When Babylon’s seventy years are over, I will take note of you, and I will fulfill to you my promise of a favor—to bring you back to this place.’”64 The most likely historical explanation for the destruction of the Temple is implied by Jeremiah 37: the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem was interrupted by an Egyptian threat, and when the threat was dispatched, the Babylonians returned to Jerusalem intent on ending the kingdom’s independent existence, which they achieved through strength of arms. The catastrophe likely had nothing to do with Zedekiah’s treatment of manumitted slaves, which is easier to understand as Jeremiah’s ex post facto morality tale about the Temple’s destruction than it is as a reasonable explanation for the Temple’s destruction. The conviction with which Jeremiah asserts this explanation suggests that we are not reading the words of a Lamenter. Jeremiah is no cry to the heavens: he places the blame not only upon the Jews in general

54  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile but upon one particularly poor ruler. This evolution from Lamentations’ we must have sinned somehow to Jeremiah’s Zedekiah sinned by violating his covenant regarding slavery, and anyway we were backsliding into polytheism as an answer to the question of why an all-powerful, all-knowing, and allbenevolent God could visit such suffering on his chosen people demonstrates some emotional distance from the destruction. Jeremiah has already clearly grappled with the question of sin asked in Lamentations, and by the time the author sat down to compose his book, he already had a prefabricated answer that perfectly suits both his biases and his ultimately hopeful message: Babylon was a golden cup in YHWH’s hand, It made the whole earth drunk; The nations drank of her wine— That is why the nations are mad. Suddenly Babylon has fallen and is shattered; Howl over her! Get balm for her wounds. Perhaps she can be healed. We tried to cure Babylon, But she was incurable. Let us leave her and go, Each to his own land; For her punishment reaches to heaven. It is as high as the sky. YHWH has proclaimed our vindication; Come, let us recount in Zion The deeds of YHWH our God.65 To the author of Jeremiah, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple was a devastating event. However, he found hope in the eventual redemption of Israel at the end of the Babylonian exile. This redemption included the restoration of the Temple and the reemergence of Jewish autonomy under the Persian Empire after Cyrus conquered Babylon. While this autonomy under the Persians was not the same as the monarchic sovereignty the Jews had enjoyed, first with Saul and then with David and the Davidic kings, it was enough to sustain Jewish life. Yahweh’s community survived, and its monotheistic conviction was more unshakeable than ever before. Conclusion Surprisingly, the destruction of 586 BCE and the exile of the Jewish elites was revitalizing for the Jews as a monotheistic community. Forced to adapt to profoundly changed circumstances, the Jews of Babylonia explored novel ideas about their special relationship with God, inquiring as to what may come in the future to restore it. One of the notions they entertained was

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 55 that an anointed Davidic restorer called mashiach—“Messiah”—was lying in wait, ready to resume rulership over the restored monarchy, whenever God saw fit. Despite the challenges they faced, the exiles prospered in Babylon, to the extent that when Cyrus and the Persians conquered the Babylonians, many chose to decline Cyrus’ offer to relocate from the cosmopolitan city of Babylon to their provincial former homeland. The Jewish community of Babylon would remain the intellectual center of Jewish life throughout the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. Perhaps Jeremiah’s answer to Lamentations’ question was the solace that gave the Jews of Babylon the strength to persist in their monotheism even while they were forced to grapple with the implications of the disaster. After all, if the fault lay with Zedekiah himself, alone, and not with all the Jews, there was reason for Jeremiah’s hope for Jewish vindication in 51:10. Another explanation is that Jeremiah’s hypothesis regarding the cause of the disaster may have been influenced by his prior intellectual and theological reflections on that matter. Either way, though, Jeremiah’s confident answer and attribution of blame to Zedekiah reflect a common pattern in monotheistic explanations for catastrophes, as we shall see in subsequent chapters. The ability to contextualize disaster is essential for the longevity of monotheistic communities. No run of good fortune lasts forever, and a mechanism by which adherents of monotheistic traditions explain catastrophes, without abandoning the monotheistic ideal of a single, omnipotent God (which would indicate the utter failure of such communities’ central idea), but also without having sinned beyond God’s forgiveness, would seem to be the only antidote to inevitable potentially cataclysmic adversity. This is not the last time we will see the sins of monotheistic victims blamed for the catastrophes that befell them by contemporary observers; nor the last time we will see an individual, or a small group of individuals, blamed for those sins by writers of the subsequent few generations; nor, indeed, the last time we will see those sins to happen to be exactly the sins later historians, theologians, and moralists consider to be the worst sins committed by their own contemporaries, in their own communities. Ultimately, the disaster of 586 BCE was not a total loss, as it gave rise to new ideas and a new sense of purpose for the Jewish people. After all, in the hands of a writer with a message, a good disaster is a terrible thing to waste. Notes 1 Babylonian Chronicle for the Years 605–594, British Museum tablet BM21946. 2 Kings 24–25. 3 Lamentations 1: 1 and 5. 4 For a deeper description of this whole period, see Oded Lipschits, The Rise and Fall of Jerusalem: Judah under Babylonian Rule (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005), 1–35.

56  The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 5 Nazek Khalid Matty, Sennacherib’s Campaign against Judah and Jerusalem in 701 B.C.: A Historical Reconstruction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 16. 6 Ibid., 191–94. 7 Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem, 11–12. For different perspectives, see p.12, n. 35 8 Nineveh is the capital city of Assyria. 9 Nahum 1:12–14. 10 BM 55467. 11 This dig refers to Sargon’s alleged usurpation of the Assyrian throne and the accusation that he was born of a house slave, Ra’ima. See Mordechai Cogan, “Restoring the Empire: Sargon’s Campaign to the West in 720/19 BCE,” Israel Exploration Journal 67/2 (2017), 151–67. 12 Both translations of the tablet are quoted from Pamela Gerardi, “Declaring War in Mesopotamia,”Archiv für Orientforschung 33 (1986), 31. 13 For a summary of this conflict, as well as references, see Lipschits, The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem, 35. 14 See Ibid., 46, n. 36. 15 Kings 24:17. Zedekiah changed his name from Mattaniah. 16 Martin Noth, Überlieferrungsgeschichtliche Studien: Die sammelnden un bearbetended Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (Schriften der Königberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft Geistiswissenschaftliche Klasse 18. Jh. H. 2 Bd. 1: Tübungen: Max Niemayer, 1943), translated as The Deuteronomistic History, 2nd edition (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 15) (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1991). 17 See Gary N. Knoppers and J. Gordon McConville, eds., Reconsidering Israel and Judah: Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000) and Kari Latvus, God, Anger, and Ideology: the Anger of God in Joshua and Judges in Relation to Deuteronomy and the Priestly Writings (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). 18 See esp. Adele Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994). 19 Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021), 63. 20 Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Destruction: From Scripture to Midrash,” in Prooftexts 2/1: Catastrophe in Jewish Literature (January 1982), 20. 21 Ibid., 20. 22 Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1589. 23 Lamentations 1:1–3. 24 Lamentations, 1:6; 1:11; 1:16; 1:20. 25 Ronald M. Green, “Theodicy,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by M. Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 431. See also Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins, 1–7. 26 Lamentations 2 frequently uses the term Adonai, “My Lord,” rather than the tetragrammaton YHWH. 27 In this case, the Babylonians. 28 Lamentations 2:2–8. 29 Lamentations 2:14. 30 Rashi on Lamentations 2. 31 Lamentations 3:3–6. 32 Lamentations 3:21–23. 33 Lamentations 3:46–50. 34 Lamentations 3: 25–29.

The Babylonians, Solomon’s Temple, and the Babylonian Exile 57 5 Lamentations 3:33–40. 3 36 Lamentations 4:1–10. 37 Lamentations 4:11–16. 38 Lamentations 4:13. 39 The Edomites were a neighboring people, mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible, who were allies or clients of the Babylonians. See Yigal Levin, “The Religion of Idumea and its Relationship to Early Judaism,” in Religions 11/10 (2020), 2–4. 40 Lamentations 5:16. 41 Lamentations 5:19–22. 42 Jewish Study Bible, 1602. 43 2 Kings: Chapters 24 and 25. 44 Daniel 1:1–5. 45 Mark Leuchter, “Jeremiah: Structure, Themes, and Contested Issues,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets, edited by Carolyn J. Sharp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171–72. 46 Ibid., 3–5. 47 Jeremiah 11:1–17. 48 Jeremiah 34:5. 49 Jack Good, The Dishonest Church (Scotts Valley, CA: Rising Star Press, 2006), 68. 50 Jeremiah 34:8–17. 51 Jeremiah 34:21–22. 52 Deuteronomy 15:12–15. 53 Jeremiah 37:1–2. 54 Leuchter, “Jeremiah: Structure, Themes, and Contested Issues,” 175–76. 55 Jeremiah, Chapters 2–4. 56 Also: “Repent.” 57 Jeremiah 34: 10–13. 58 Deuteronomy 15:5–6. 59 Jeremiah 34:35. 60 Jeremiah 37:11. 61 Jeremiah 34:17. 62 Leuchter, “Jeremiah: Structure, Themes, and Contested Issues,” 180–82. One glaring example of the justification for proclaiming Jeremiah to have reached its final form in the late 500s BCE is the reference to Media—that is, Persia—in 51:11: “YHWH has roused the spirit of the kings of Media, for his plan against Babylon is to destroy her.” It is unlikely that Jeremiah would ever have even heard of either the Medes or the Persians half a century earlier, when he is said to have lived. There was significant confusion about whether the Medes and the Persians were the same people, related and allied peoples, or neighboring peoples who fought each other. 63 Julia M. O’Brien, “Nahum-Habakkuk-Zephaniah: Reading the ‘Former Prophets’ in the Persian Period,” Interpretations 169 (April 2007), 168–83. 64 Jeremiah 29:10. 65 Jeremiah 51:7–10.

3

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE)

History Repeats Itself: Another Temple Is Destroyed The rebellion that broke out in 66 CE is known to posterity as the Great Revolt; Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian writing for a Roman audience, calls it the Jewish War. This conflict is a historical moment where a great number of factors that contribute both to modern versions of Judaism and to Israeli nationalism (not to mention Christian eschatology) received their spark. First and foremost, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple (the one rebuilt with funds from Cyrus the Great, the founding figure of the Achaemenid Persian Empire). This destruction was the exclamation point upon their victory over the rebels. This second great shock to the Jewish community echoed the consonant shock of the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple and was more impactful to the community’s future. To some extent, the devastation of the First Temple’s loss was eventually ameliorated, or perhaps even redeemed, by the construction of its replacement. The Second Temple was never replaced, restored, or reconstructed, and now a Muslim shrine—the Dome of the Rock—occupies the same sensitive piece of Old City Jerusalem real estate. The Jews, to continue to survive as Jews, were forced fundamentally to reinvent their relationship to God to account for the loss, for a second time, of their spiritual and physical center. As an aside, the Jewish “last stand” in this war took place on the Dead Sea-adjacent mesatop fortress of Masada, the to-the-death resistance of whose zealous inhabitants against the Roman army has become a symbol of Jewish freedom and Israeli nationalism in more recent times. But for us, while those aspects of the Jewish rebellion and the destruction of the Temple are certainly interesting, they are beside the point. The Jews had yet again been subjected to the loss of their Temple, which was, to say the least, ritualistically indispensable to the local religion as it was then practiced. To complicate matters for the Second Temple-era Jews, around the Jewish festival Passover of the year 33, commemorating the delivery of the Jews from Egyptian bondage a millennium earlier, the Roman governors of the recently-conquered province of Judaea had executed a 33-year-old identified by the Romans as a rabble rouser. The charge of sedition is implied by the DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-4

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 59 means of his death: he was crucified, which was a cruel, but not uncommon, Roman punishment doled out to rebels against the Empire. This was no mere street-corner apocalypticist, of course; this was Jesus of Nazareth, a man with a small but dedicated following who believed he was the promised Davidic Messiah. The destruction of the Temple three-and-a-half decades later also seemed to lend credence to the Christian case that God had already redefined his relationship to the Jewish community with the birth of Jesus. After all, what use was a Temple when one had a resurrected Messiah to follow? The notion that Jesus might be the hoped-for Messiah of the Jews did not emerge in a vacuum. It is worth recounting the long history that led the Jews from where we last left them, with their sovereignty restored, in a limited way, under the Persians, to where they ended up: again in shock at their destruction of their Temple, and again ultimately expelled from their land. Like the rest of the less-powerful peoples of the ancient Middle East, and ultimately Europe, as well, the Jews from the time of the Persians onward found themselves in a position analogous to the so-called “third world” during the twentieth century CE’s Cold War, and like their position before the unification of the region under the Persians: caught in the middle of conflicts between or among empires more powerful than they. Judah’s location at the strategic crossroads between Europe, Asia, and Africa, wherein dwelt the Greeks and Romans, the Persians and Egyptians, respectively, made their repeated subjugation to these outside powers likely and frequent. The conquests of Cyrus and his Persians in the middle of the sixth-century BCE, which included the destruction of the Babylonian Empire and the swallowing of whatever remnants of Assyria that might still have been extant, brought Judah under Persian control. Under the Persians, Judah experienced something of a Jewish renaissance in a territory assigned the name Yehud Medinta, a Persian satrapy that was smaller than the old Kingdom of Judah. That the population of Judah likely did not grow very much (based on archaeological data, Lipschits estimates that the population of Jerusalem at the time was perhaps around 1,000 people1) hardly matters, as it was the Jewish tradition and priestly culture that were allowed to set local laws and cultic norms. Under the Persians, Jerusalem was back in Jewish hands, and despite the brief, almost certainly ahistorical anti-Semitic blip described in the Book of Esther (perhaps tellingly, not included in the Hebrew Bible) and commemorated at Purim, centering around the genocidal plot of the minister Haman, the two hundred years of Persian rule were relatively prosperous for the Jews. The lack of historical evidence of ancient Persian-Jewish conflict and the stellar reputation of Persian kings in the Bible are compelling pieces of evidence for the good relationship between the Jews and the Persians. This does not mean that other subjugated groups were as tolerant of Persian hegemony as the Jews were. The Greeks in particular, both in Asia Minor and in Greece proper, chafed under Persian domination. Perhaps the difference in response to Persian domination had to do with the fact that some groups, like the Jews, had experienced hundreds of years of domination

60  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) by the considerably more intrusive, violent, and punitive Assyrians and Babylonians before the Persians conquered them. The Persians ruled all the former Assyrian and Babylonian provinces, including Judah, with relative leniency. The Greeks, by contrast, had never been conquered by Assyria or Babylon, and as such lacked the bloody and oppressive point of comparison. To the Greeks, Persian dominion was tantamount to slavery, while the formerly subjugated peoples of the Middle East, like the Jews, saw the Persian arrival as something preferable, tantamount to deliverance from the Babylonian and Assyrian yoke. Examples of the negative Jewish attitude toward the Babylonians and Assyrians, as well as their positive opinion of the Persians, abound in the texts of the Prophets. But the Greek responses to the Persian empire, which were characterized by a combination of begrudging cooperation, resistance, and war, did much to shape the world from the fourth through the second centuries BCE and beyond and did not leave Judah untouched. The Greco-Persian wars have received a tremendous amount of scholarly attention, but the primary sources (notably Herodotus and, later, Thucydides) we have for the early interactions between the Greeks and Persians in the fifth century BCE are, to say the least, historiographically problematic. Fortunately, we are not interested in the actual events of Thermopylae or Marathon or even (eventually) Issus, but rather in the attitude toward the Persians from the Greeks (as an aside, we would be equally interested in the reverse—that is, the attitude of the Persians toward the Greeks—but, alas, we do not possess it). The only statement we can comfortably make is a general one: whatever the specifics of the interactions, and regardless of the extent to which historians like Herodotus have lionized the Greeks at the expense of the Persians, we can at least say that some of the Greeks were unwilling to submit to Persian dominion. Not all, of course; the Greek city-states of Ionia (Asia Minor) and Thrace were largely integrated into the Persian Empire, and many island cities of the Aegean and cities of the culturally Greek regions of Macedonia were made into Persian vassals (it would be wise not to make the Persian mistake and ignore those Macedonians, though; they have an important role to play a century later). Further, most of the city-states of northern Greece, including Pharsalus and Thebes, were neutral. Many of the “Persians” fighting against the Peloponnesian city-states of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and their allies during the first Greco-Persian wars were actually Greek-speaking residents of Greece itself, pressed into Persian service after their submission. With the victory of the ragtag alliance of these usually acrimonious Peloponnesian neighbors—or, more likely, the Persian withdrawal from Greece to pursue other strategies, which ultimately were successful, at least for a while—the culture, philosophy, and society of the Greeks on the Greek mainland were able to develop independent of direct Persian domination, although Persian culture and influence were ubiquitous in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean worlds. The near-miss of Persian

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 61 dominion may have contributed to the so-called Golden Age of Athens, a period of impressive cultural output generally dated between the end of the Persian Wars (449 BCE) and the start of the Peloponnesian wars between Athens and Sparta (431 BCE), but really extending both earlier and later by some forty years. This output included the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, as well as the political career of Pericles, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the sculptures of Phidias, the medicine of Hippocrates, and the philosophies of Plato and Socrates. Greek culture thrived. It may be that the Persian failure to subdue the Greeks was due to superior Greek valor, as Herodotus would have us believe, but it is more likely that a combination of Persia’s distracted and overstretched military, the specific interaction of Persian and Greek battle tactics, and the vagaries of historical fortune is the better explanation. After failing to conquer all of Greece under Darius and Xerxes, the Persians tried another tactic: supporting the different Greek city-states as proxies in their wars against each other. As it turned out, Persian gold was far more effective at disrupting Greek unity than any Persian army had ever been. The Persians were most intrusive in the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, who turned on each other after surviving the fifth-century BCE Persian invasion. It may be that the Persians were simply biding their time, waiting until the Athenians and the Spartans had sufficiently weakened one other before launching another invasion. Unfortunately for them, Alexander II—the more famous grandson of Alexander I of Pella, in Macedonia, who had submitted to Persian domination during the invasion of Darius—beat them to it. Alexander the Great, as he came to be known, conquered not only most of the Greek mainland, but also the entirety of the Persian Empire, ending the 200-year reign of the Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. Alexander’s army even made an incursion into India against the Mauryan Empire before what may have been a mutiny forced him to turn his forces around after a decadelong campaign. Alexander died of alcohol poisoning, or perhaps assassination poisoning, in Babylon. Like the Greco-Persian wars, Alexander’s life and career are much discussed. His megalomaniacal psychology seems to have been centered upon cementing his legacy as the world’s greatest conqueror. Perhaps that explains his (apocryphal?) enigmatic, death-bed bequeathal of his empire “to the strongest” of his generals. This statement was like an accelerant: a last will and testament that essentially ensured that none of the Diadochi—his generals Seleucus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Lysimachus, Antipater, and others—would be able to continue and expand his conquest and either usurp or build upon Alexander’s legacy as the greatest conqueror of all time. In 332 BCE, Judah and the Jews, too, fell under Alexander’s dominion. For all his personal grievances against the Persians—perhaps he thought them responsible for the assassination of his father Philip, a military visionary whose army Alexander inherited—Alexander continued the

62  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) Persian policy of religious tolerance for subjugated populations, allowing the peoples he conquered to continue worshipping the gods or God they wished. Alexander’s interactions with the people of Judah were limited. He may have interacted with the Judeans more than the surviving historical sources tell us, but given the ubiquity of fantastical information about Alexander, and his prominence even during his own lifetime, had there been more intimate contact between him and the Jews, we would expect to know about it. The one record of an interaction between Alexander and the Jews concerns the conqueror’s respect and reverence for the Priests of Yahweh and the Temple. Apparently Alexander was a God-fearing man, and as such was perfectly willing to allow and respectfully take part in local religious observances.2 Perhaps, like the Persians, Alexander simply wanted taxes paid, populations docile, and no troublesome religious rebellions in his rear, as he doggedly pressed his army towards the Achaemenid Persian capital of Ctesiphon. The territorial scope of Alexander’s conquest may have been too extensive for any successor to rule. It is also likely that his last act of leaving his empire to “the strongest” of his generals provoked a series of complex wars of succession among them, as it may have been designed to do. When all was said and done, Greece and the newly defunct Persian Empire were split into a variety of culturally Hellenistic kingdoms dominated by Alexander’s various Macedonian generals. Ptolemy, Alexander’s bodyguard, historian, and doubtfully but possibly half-brother, took over Egypt. Seleucus captured and assumed the rule over much of what had been the Persian Empire. Judah was ruled first by the Ptomelids of Egypt, and then finally captured by the descendants of Seleucus. The most important incident in the evolution of Jewish monotheism that occurred under Seleucid rule began with a dispute between two potential high priests of the Jews, Jason and Menelaus (here and in the following centuries, note the Jews with the Hellenized names; they are indicative of the pervasiveness of the spread of Hellenistic culture). This dispute was the catalyst for a profound change in the cultural and religious identity of Judah leading up to the time of the Romans, and as such it deserves its own discussion of context and outcomes. Judah, as a “third-world” power once again, found itself in a similar position to the one it had occupied in antiquity. After all, its geography had not changed. With one power to its south and west, in Egypt, and another power centered in the east, in Syria and Babylon, it again felt itself pulled in two directions. In this case, the pull was between two empires dominated by Greek language and culture. In that era, Egypt was ruled by Hellenistic pharaohs rather than native Egyptian ones, and Persia and the Middle East were ruled by Hellenistic kings rather than Babylonian, Assyrian, or Persian ones. However, ubiquitous Greek cultural hegemony does not change the geopolitics of Judah’s spot on the map. Nor does the Greek factor impact the interest of any dynasty ruling Egypt or Babylon in maintaining control over Israel, as a buffer state or bridgehead if nothing else. Bluntly,

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 63 Judah’s location made it as vulnerable during the Hellenistic age as it had been in the times of Babylonian and Assyrian and Persian dominance. To this political pressure experienced by Judah under the two Greek empires of the Ptolemids and the Seleucids, we may add the domestic cultural pressure created by the almost gravitational, widespread appeal of Greek culture, to which Judah was not immune. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, the territory of Judah quickly became governed by the Ptolemids. It took five wars over the course of more than a century for the Seleucids to gain control of the territory, but they did so in 200 BCE, fully conquering the province by 198 BCE. For the most part, the Seleucids, like the Persians and the Ptolemids, dealt with the officials of the Jewish ethno-religion with a light touch, excusing them from some obligatory taxes and generally allowing them to govern themselves, preferring the Persian model of easy revenue and political quiet to the higher revenue coupled with the higher expenditures that would accompany frequent religious or economic turmoil. The Seleucids ruled over a larger, much more diverse territory than the Ptolemids (the Seleucid empire was fundamentally a duplicate of the Persian Empire at its height, minus Egypt and the Balkans), and the practice of attacking the shrines and symbols of people’s gods had more or less fallen out of practice, starting with Cyrus. The tax exemptions, the religious permissiveness, and the ability to live kata tous patrious nomous—“in accordance with the laws of their fathers”—made Seleucid hegemony tolerable to most Jews, much as Persian hegemony had been.3 Even with this religious permissiveness, the Seleucids were not completely disinterested in the affairs of their subjects, religious or otherwise, in particular as a tool for effective rule. As such, they were certainly aware of the benefits they accrued by having a High Priest of the Temple (a position of both ritualistic and political influence) who was sympathetic to the needs of the Seleucid state. The High Priest when the Seleucids conquered Judah was named Onias III, a scion of the powerful Oniad family that had held the High Priesthood for about a century, since around the time of Alexander. The powerful naturally attract opposition, and the pro-Seleucid stance of other members of the Oniad family, particularly Onias III’s brother Jason, a committed Hellenizer willing to collaborate with Seleucid authorities, made the family plenty of anti-Hellenistic Jewish enemies. Because the Temple functioned as both a cultic center and a kind of national bank and treasury, a financial scandal led to the downfall not only of Onias III, but also indirectly of the Emperor Seleucus IV. The emperor was assassinated by his chancellor Heliodorus, whom he had sent to handle the scandal at the Temple. When news of the emperor’s death reached his brother, that brother returned to the east to assume control as the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Onias III’s brother Jason offered the still-insecure Antiochus a bribe to secure the new king’s agreement that he should replace his brother Onias as High Priest. Jason wasted little time in trying to make Jerusalem a more Greek-oriented city, a polis, requesting and receiving permission from the

64  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) king to, among other things, found a gymnasium and an ephebeum, places of Greek exercise and learning. As Josephus puts the matter, “when [Antiochus] had granted this, they also concealed the circumcision of their private parts in order to be Greeks even when unclothed, and giving up whatever other national customs they had, they imitated the practices of foreign nations.”4 As pro-Greek as Jason may have been; however, he erred when he sent his even more ardently pro-Seleucid rival, one Menelaus, to deliver tribute to the Seleucid representative in Antioch three years into Jason’s term of office. In exchange for increasing the yearly tribute, Menelaus got himself confirmed as High Priest in Jason’s stead. This Menelaus was a catspaw of the Tobiad family, longtime rivals of the Oniads and representatives of the pro-Greek Jerusalemite landed gentry. Jason was forced to flee to pro-Ptolemaic groups in modern-day Jordan. The rivalry between Menelaus and Jason led to armed conflict, which was poorly tolerated by the anti-Hellenizers of the population. These were Jews, notably the urban poor, who despised the foreign influence of Greek culture represented by both Jason and Menelaus. In the conflict between the two men, however, Jason was more moderate on the question of Hellenization, and so the Chasidim,5 as they were called, supported Jason. Seeking to quell the uprising, and quite possibly to secure Jerusalem as a beachhead for a Seleucid invasion of a politically unstable Ptolemaic Egypt, Antiochus IV plundered the Temple of its wealth, apparently with Menelaus’ assistance. The historian Josephus Flavius says that in the hundred and forty-third year of the Seleucid reign [167 BCE], [Antiochus] took the city without a battle, for the gates were opened to him by those who were of his party. And having become master of Jerusalem in this way, he killed many of those who were in opposition, and taking large sums of money as spoil, he returned to Antioch…. Two years later…the king went up to Jerusalem, and by pretending to offer peace, overcame the city by treachery. But on this occasion he did not spare even those who admitted him, because of the wealth of the temple, but through greed—for he saw much gold in the temple and an array of very costly dedicatory offerings of other kinds—and for the sake of taking this spoil, he went so far as to violate the treaty he had made with them. And so he stripped the Temple, carrying off the vessels of God, the golden lampstands and the golden altar and table and the other altars, and not even forbearing to take the curtains, which were made of fine linen and scarlet, and he also emptied the Temple of its hidden treasures, and left nothing at all behind, thereby throwing the Jews into deep mourning. Moreover he forbade them to offer the daily sacrifices which they used to offer to God in accordance with their law, and after plundering the entire city, he killed some of the people, and some he took captive together with their wives and children, so that the number of those taken alive came to some ten thousand.6

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 65 Apparently not satisfied with plundering the Temple, and in accordance with his wider policy of culturally homogenizing his empire, Antiochus IV Epiphanes also built a pagan altar upon the Temple-altar, and slaughtered swine thereon, thereby practicing a form of sacrifice neither lawful nor native to the religion of the Jews. And he compelled them to give up the worship of their own God, and to do reverence to the gods in whom he believed; he then commanded them to build sacred places in every city and village, and to set up altars on which to sacrifice swine daily. He also ordered them not to circumcise their children…[and] appointed overseers who should assist in compelling them to carry out his instructions.7 What happened next is famous: an uprising led by the Hasmonean family of Modiʿin, a group of anti-Hellenizers determined to restore non-Hellenistic Jewish sovereignty over the Temple. The Hasmonean victory over the Seleucids, which is still commemorated with the Jewish winter festival of Hanukkah, marks a local beginning of the end for the Seleucid state, which at that time was less than a century from its final collapse. Following the successful Hasmonean rebellion, the family restored Jewish sovereignty, and the Seleucids never regained sovereignty over Judah. The Hasmonean state effectively governed itself until a Hasmonean civil war broke out, which led to Roman intervention. Ultimately, Judah was incorporated into the growing Roman Republic as one of its Asian provinces. The character of Antiochus IV Epiphanes could be a locus classicus in college history classes focusing on the question of bias in primary sources. According to Schäfer, “already in antiquity, the opinion of pagan authors, to whom the king appeared as an upholder of civilization and fighter against the superstitious barbarism of the Jews, conflicted with the view of Jewish historians, to whom Antiochus was the pure embodiment of evil and religious hubris. The main area of dispute in modern research is…whether the religious edicts were largely an internal Jewish affair, the logical consequence, as it were, of the Hellenization aimed at and initiated by certain Jewish circles, or whether they were a political measure stemming from the Seleucids.”8 If the policies of the paganization of the Temple were indeed Antiochus’ initiatives; however, it would be a break from four centuries of religiously permissive rule on the part of the Persians, the momentarily unified Alexandrian Empire, the Ptolemids, and the earlier Seleucids. Ironically, the trend in Judah already seemed to be moving towards Hellenization before these religious edicts were issued. The affluent and powerful Jews favored assimilation into the wider Greek culture because they were wealthy enough to enjoy it. Generally, the poor and dispossessed emphasized the importance of maintaining Jewish distinctiveness. The sudden shock of Antiochus’ religious edicts, whether they were the product of a proHellenistic program of the wealthier Jews or an official policy of the Seleucid

66  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) imperium, may have shocked the anti-Hellenizers into action, while their severity may have alienated the affluent but less enthusiastic Jewish Hellenizers. The blowback led to the Hasmonean rebellion and then rule. Suddenly, a sovereign Jewish dynasty, emphasizing ritual purity, the law, and Jewish national identity, was in charge. The Hasmonean dynasty, other than the temporary restoration of Jewish sovereignty, is important here only for the factionalism that developed under its rule. This factionalism directly set the stage for the Roman conquest of Judah and Jewish society at the time of both Jesus and the destruction of the Second Temple, which is the topic of this chapter. The Hasmoneans were expansionist in their outlook, forcibly converting neighboring populations like the Idumeans and persecuting Jewish heresies like the Samaritans. To some extent, the partisanship of the Pharisees (Prūshīm) and the Sadducees (Tzdūkīm), which reached a full expression under the Hasmoneans, was simply a continuation of the same cultural pressures that led to the initial Hasmonean rebellion. The Pharisees generally aligned with the anti-Hellenizers, and the Sadducees with the Hellenizers.9 The Oniads and the Tobiads, the rival families under the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, would both have aligned with the Sadducees, as the societally elite, Greek-oriented, priestly managers of the Temple. It is important to recall that the Temple served a dual purpose as a cultic center of Yahweh-worship and a financial and cultural national center. The Pharisees and Sadducees differed on a question of sacred text. The former considered the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) to be critical components of holy scripture, while the latter rejected all but the written Torah, that is, the five books of Moses. Over time, with the ascension of the Hasmonean family to the High Priesthood, the Pharisee position became more mainstream in Jewish society. However, the Sadducees did not disappear, despite the general consensus that they did after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Put simply, the Pharisees were “a distinctive group of ostentatious religious pietists devoted to particular doctrines of their own….[who endorsed] ancestral tradition, [and as such enjoyed] great popularity among members of the wider population who valued the approval of such conspicuously pious and accurate interpreters of the Torah.”10 The Sadducees, by contrast, relied exclusively on written law, and refused “to follow traditions handed down through the generations.”11 They strongly preferred Judaism and Jewish practice be confined to the written word, while they felt that all other facets of life should follow the culturally dominant Greek ethos. The Pharisees, Josephus suggests, were both the popular theological movement of the people and the friends of Pompey and Rome, who are (at this point in the historical narrative) shortly to invade. Josephus’ position as an apparent Pharisee partisan and his sitz im leben as a Jew in Rome writing for a Roman audience make this claim generally suspect. Still, we have no specific, noncircumstantial reason to doubt it.

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 67 Despite their agreement on the question of Hellenization, the relationship between the Pharisees and the Hasmonean rulers was not always copasetic, and the ebb-and-flow between those groups apparently caused the Pharisees to seek outside intervention from Rome. Josephus recorded that Pompey, taking advantage of a rift between the Pharisees and the Hasmonean rulers, arrived in Judah, laid siege to Jerusalem, and captured the Temple. Pompey was, according to Josephus, “amazed at the unshakeable endurance of the Jews, and more particularly at their uninterrupted maintenance of religious practices in the midst of a hail of missiles.”12 With Jerusalem subdued, the Roman general then methodically took control of the surrounding countryside. He installed his client Hyrcanus as the High Priest in Jerusalem, and then conquered cities both along the coast and in Judaea’s (as Judah was now to be known, in its life as a province of Roman republican and imperial rule) mountainous interior. Almost immediately, though, the messy Roman politics of the first century BCE threw the whole Mediterranean, Judaea included, into turmoil. Hyrcanus appears to have been mostly opportunistic relative to the vicissitudes of great family fighting in Rome, first supporting Pompey, then Julius Caesar when the latter emerged victorious from his civil war against Pompey, and then Julius Caesar’s assassins, and then Marc Antony and Octavian when they defeated those assassins. Hyrcanus’ ultimate successor, Herod, would wisely side with the victor, as well, when Octavian and Marc Antony fell out with each other. As it turned out for Hyrcanus, he should have been looking east. The Parthians (a reconstituted Persia; the Achaemenids may have been conquered by Alexander and ruled by his Macedonian successors, but Persia never really disappeared) took advantage of the turmoil and, invited by Hyrcanus’ ungrateful nephew Antigonus, captured Hyrcanus, took him back to Persia, mutilated his ears, and installed Antigonus in his place.13 Antigonus seems to have hoped that the eviction of the Romans might lead to a Hasmonean restoration. The obverse of his coins, struck from 40 to 37 BCE, refer to him as “King Antigonus” in Greek, while the reverse pays tribute, in Hebrew, to “Mattathias the High Priest.” Mattathias had been the head of the Hasmonean clan, the initial leader of the Maccabean rebellion. Since there was no convenient surviving member of the Hasmonean dynasty to answer the call, the coin implies, with its homage to Mattathias, that Antigonus’ reign was legitimate.14 One can easily imagine Antigonus’ chagrin when the Parthian invasion turned out to be little more than an excursive military adventure, and when Octavian (now Augustus) Caesar stabilized Rome’s tottering political state, the senate installed Herod, an ally of the now-earless Hyrcanus, as the ruler of Judaea. Antigonus, meanwhile, was captured by the Roman forces that expelled the Parthians, and he was beheaded on the order of Marc Antony. Herod was an Idumean (from the territory south of Judaea) whose ancestors had been forcibly converted to Judaism under the Hasmoneans. His

68  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) mother was Nabataean. He had no connection to the Hasmonean dynasty, nor any claim to the priesthood, nor, as a half-Nabataean Idumean from a forcibly converted people, were his Jewish credentials particularly robust. At a time when foreign rule was a key political and religious fault line that split the Jewish population, Herod’s rule was thus deeply unpopular, and it was only through the good graces of Rome that he could maintain his power. Even a lavish restoration and expansion of the Temple he financed and his marriage to the granddaughter of the former Hasmonean High Priest Hyrcanus II did not balance, in terms of his local reputation, the negative impact of his uninspiring lineage. His selection of Priests to preside over the expanded Temple compound from obscure Babylonian and Egyptian families, and his introduction of Greek games and Roman wild-beast shows to a Jewish public with no taste for such things, only worsened his reputation. But his position was relatively secure, nonetheless: Herod was Rome’s favorite Jew.15 Upon Herod’s death in 4 CE, his son Archelaus succeeded him in a more limited office, but failed sufficiently to impress Roman observers. Archelaus was sent into exile, and Judaea was placed under the direct rule of a Roman governor. The “chief executive” of the Jews reverted to the person of the High Priest. The identity of the High Priest was then selected by the Romans, as the Persians and Seleucids had done before the Hasmonean dynasty seized control of Judah. The claim that the Jews and the Romans were necessarily a toxic mix because of the Roman demand that their subjects worship the emperor and the Jewish refusal to worship anyone but God is overly simplistic. Conflict was not necessarily inevitable; the Romans and Jews coexisted peacefully, if uneasily, until 40 CE, when Emperor Gaius Caligula ordered a statue of himself placed in the Temple, a provocation other pagan emperors and rulers, in the half millennium from Cyrus until Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and the Roman rulers from Pompey until Caligula, had avoided. That Caligula was assassinated in 41 CE, having alienated the senate with his plan to move to Egypt and be worshiped as a living god, forestalled the provocative installation. Even so, it is not clear that Roman-Jewish relations ever recovered from the planned insult; by 66 CE, the Jews were in open rebellion, fighting the war that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. It was in the uneasy mix of the Romans and Jews following the death of Herod that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, and founded a movement that we may call “Christian Jews.” As the Apostle Paul was traversing the eastern Mediterranean region and spreading the news of Jesus, the relationship between the Jews and the Romans continued to deteriorate, as did the relationships among different Jewish sects like the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The fractiousness of the relationship between Rome and the people of Judaea is evident in the Christian gospels; the daily ups and downs of the Roman–Jewish interaction are largely lost to us, but it is quite clear that the gospel version of the Romans was working very hard to try to maintain something like calm within a tumultuous captive province. Their efforts

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 69 would ultimately be for naught, but it would not be the Romans themselves who suffered the consequences. In 66 CE, the Great Revolt broke out, as the Jews sought to free themselves from foreign domination once again. The Temple was destroyed four years later. The precedent set in Lamentations and Jeremiah at the time of Solomon’s Temple’s destruction provided the blueprint for the Jewish religious leaders to explain, contextualize, and usurp the meaning of the Second Temple’s destruction. The question remained, however, whether the Jews could survive as a monotheistic community after such a cataclysm. On the Sources for the Temple’s Destruction In contrast to the previous chapter, where we drew information from the anthological sacred collections of the Tanakh, many sources that discuss the climactic destruction of the Second Temple are not sacred to any religious community. This necessarily changes our approach: instead of relying on the same texts for the very different questions of what was the nature of the catastrophe that occurred? and what was the reaction of the community to the catastrophe?, we may now separate our sources into two distinct types. The first type of source, which will be utilized in the first part of this chapter discussing the rebellion and the destruction themselves, is documentary: written evidence like historical accounts, as well as physical evidence, which includes archaeological findings, physical artifacts, and numismatics. Like much of ancient history, the evidence we have does not present anything like a clear and incontrovertible picture about the details, but it is sufficient for our purposes. The first and most important of these sources is the work of the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Josephus left for posterity “seven substantial books on the war and its contexts,” which is an alluringly large record of events for any time and place and was published within five years of the war’s conclusion.16 Unfortunately, because we lack any other perspectives of a similar vintage, let alone an earlier vintage, his accounts are impossible to corroborate. So, however much ink Josephus dedicated to the Jewish Rebellion, his accounts constitute only one data point, if our standard for inclusion is a significant discussion of the events. It is far more responsible, methodologically speaking, to treat Josephus’ account as a secondary source for the time and place of the book’s composition, Flavian Rome, perhaps half a decade later, rather than as a primary source for the Jewish Rebellion. Josephus’ explanation for the destruction of the Second Temple is fascinating one in that it followed the narrative blueprint laid out by Lamentations and Jeremiah for the destruction of the First Temple, without the intervening half century. Just five years after the fact, Josephus already blames God and the Jews themselves for the Temple’s destruction, and not the Romans, who physically destroyed it. Of course, his Roman patrons and readers probably would not have appreciated a harangue.

70  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) The dramatic representations of the destruction narrative are interspersed with the author’s own memories and material synthesized from official Roman documents. Parente characterizes Josephus’ account as interdisciplinary: both “pragmatic” and “dramatic” (or “pathetic”) history.17 Josephus was also very forgiving of Titus, the Roman commander, for his role in either ordering or failing to prevent the Temple’s destruction. Another interpretation of his treatment of Titus is that Josephus was subtly emasculating him for the ineffectiveness of his command. The accounts of the Roman historians Tacitus and Dio Cassius both mentioned the destruction of the Temple, but they only offer summaries that agree with Josephus’ version of events. Anyway, Dio Cassius was not even born until a century later, and as such, his account cannot shed any new light. One problem with Josephus’ account is that he was not, himself, an eyewitness to the Temple’s destruction, either. However familiar he clearly was with Jerusalem, by his own admission he was not present, and so the bloody carnage he describes was necessarily invented or adapted.18 Yet another problem is Josephus’ bias, which he is kind enough to expressly state. Referencing other authors, most particularly Marcus Antonius Julianus, who probably wrote the war’s official Roman history, and their penchant for extolling the power of Rome as the driving force in the way events unfolded, Josephus intended to “expound more accurately the actions of the two sides,” with the goal of showing that “it was the Jewish tyrants who drew down upon the holy temple the unwilling hands of the Romans.”19 His emphasis on internecine, perhaps “sectarian,” Jewish struggles as the cause of the Temple’s destruction has generated something of a scholarly industry dedicated to exploring the disputes among the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and others. There were other interested parties among the observers of the Temple’s destruction, but these came later. Christian observers from Justin Martyr and Tertullian to even later ones like Eusebius and Sulpicius Severus drew their own conclusions about the Temple’s destruction, and obviously their interpretations of the event’s meaning were quite different from Josephus’. They concluded that God was punishing the Jews for their rejection of Jesus while, at the same time, allowing the demolition of a spiritual compound made obsolete, along with the rest of Jewish spiritual practice, by the redemptive appearance of Jesus. While it may seem off-base to include Christian voices like Sulpicius and Eusebius commenting on a patently Jewish calamity, their inclusion in this study is a recognition that the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism were porous for centuries after Jesus’ death and the Temple’s destruction: what happened to one community continued to matter profoundly to the other. The second type of source we shall consult is the later religious reactions to the destruction of the Temple, most especially in Jewish Rabbinic literature like the Talmud. Such literature is not sacred, exactly, although it is deeply revered; and most scholars of Rabbinic Judaism agree that the intent of the Talmud was not to create a viable historical account, but rather to approach

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 71 a kind of deeper theological truth and apply the lessons of history (when history was even discussed) to contemporaneous moral quandaries. That intent was itself generated by the destruction of the Temple, as was the development of the formative role of the Rabbi in Jewish society, philosophy, and religion in general. The structure of the Talmud requires a brief discussion, since the Talmud, by its very nature, is a record of rabbinic debates that spans generations and by design comes to very few conclusions on the topics. Far from a mere “book of Jewish law” or “book of Jewish history,” the text of the Talmud is often strongly disinclined to offer conclusive opinions on the questions it takes up. Its structure records the divergent opinions it ascribes to a variety of tradent notables (some named, some not), but only rarely offers anything conclusive for the misguided Jew who wandered into its pages seeking simple answers. The compilers of the Talmud, rather, seem determined to provide a textual anchor for post-Second Temple Jewish religious life—or, at the very least, the Talmud ended up providing such an intellectual anchor. With the Temple destroyed, the Talmud’s fluidity provided generations of Temple-less Jews an intellectual religious superstructure around which to grow, to question, to evolve, and to adapt, all while maintaining a record of the concerns of prior generations (which were often regarded as authoritative). The flexibility of the text, the openness of the text to divergent interpretations, and its propensity to create vigorous debate, ultimately became its most salient feature. For the historian, a multi-layered text like the Talmud, whose diachronic additions are too well-preserved to be called a palimpsest, is almost eel-like in its slipperiness. “Historical reliability was never a paramount concern,” as Goldenberg wryly sums up the problem of a text whose structure placed a premium upon providing later generations with material to study and debate, over and above providing historians with a verisimilitude of real events or even, perhaps, the real content of early rabbinic debates.20 Historians who seek to utilize the Talmud as a source are left with a multi-generational glimpse into a variety of rabbinic perspectives, usually on matters of law and ritual correctness, from which historical nuggets may perhaps be extracted only with extreme care and caution. Whatever its shortcomings as a source of reliable historical data, the Talmud is a gold mine for later perspectives on the meaning and significance of events. We could also categorize these narratives, to take another perspective, not by virtue of genre, but rather the author’s community of origin. From that angle, we have Jewish sources, like Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum and the Talmud, that blame the loss of the Temple on various kinds of Jewish disunity; Christian sources, like Eusebius and Severus, that attribute the destruction of the Temple to Jewish rejection of Jesus; and Roman sources, like Titus, Dio Cassius, and probably Marcus Antonius Julianus, who point to Roman power and Jewish disloyalty and zealotry. The sources all agree that the Jews had it coming.

72  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) Before exploring these narratives in detail, we will discuss the facts in which we are confident. The vast majority of what follows comes from Josephus’ account, and so we proceed, aware of the shortcomings of Josephus as an uncorroborated source. Because the goal is to present Josephus’ narrative, the “history” of the war presented in the coming section is uncritical in its selection of events, and errs on the side of non-spiritually inspired explanations for those events. How observers, both contemporary and later, viewed these events through the lens of their monotheism will be taken up afterwards. A Brief History of the Jewish Rebellion and the Destruction of the Temple In the century before the Temple’s burning, Judaea was experiencing a period of religious upheaval. Disputes among Jewish sects like the Pharisees and the Sadducees were just part of the picture. The life and career of Jesus and the proselytizing mission of his disciples, especially after Jesus’ execution and apparent defeat, were still too embryonic to have garnered much more than disdain from the Jewish communities within Judaea; the gentile focus of the Apostles seems to be evidence that proto-Christian fortunes were at a low ebb within Judaea itself in the years between Jesus’ death and the outbreak of the Jewish-Roman War. On the reverse of that same coin; however, the mere fact that Jesus’ heterodox message could catch on at all is testimony to the religious and sectarian diversity of first-century Judaea. Goodman suggests that modern scholarship tends to underestimate Jewish variety at the time due to what he calls “necessary limitations” of the sources: Josephus’ surviving work of the war, Bellum Judaicum, and his other works, including Against Apion, may not mention the sects that did not impact the war. It is from Josephus that we learn the most about Pharisees and Sadducees. He also mentions Essenes and a “Fourth Philosophy.” Philo, another first-century Jewish historian, refers to “Essenes, Therapeutae, and unnamed extreme allegorists, but not to Pharisees, Sadducees, the Fourth Philosophy, Zealots, Christians, or hakhamim.”21 To this already-complex picture, we must add Pompey’s conquest of Judaea as part of his personal struggle against Gaius Julius Caesar and the incorporation of Judaea into Roman politics. Finally, we must remain cognizant of the Roman preference for indirect rule through meddling over direct rule whenever possible, and the probably reasonable Roman conclusion that the Jewish Temple, as the financial and spiritual center of Jewish life, was the institution best situated through which to impose their will. The potential volatility of the combination of a religiously agitated monotheistic Jewish population forced to endure pagan Roman manipulation of local politics by means of interference in the operations of the maximally sensitive Temple of God is clear. The wrong spark would ignite the situation. Four years after Jesus’ death in 37 CE, Gaius Caligula succeeded the longreigning Tiberius as Rome’s emperor. Caligula quickly demonstrated that he

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 73 had much more in common with the triumphalist emperors of Babylonia and Assyria than he did with the conciliatory Cyrus of Persia. Caligula abandoned the religious toleration that had, with a few interruptions, worked well for centuries of Near Eastern rulers, and came to believe himself divine by virtue of his high office. Caligula’s focus on Jerusalem and the Temple seems to have begun in Alexandria, Egypt, where there was a mixed Jewish and Greek population. The polytheistic Greeks had no trouble erecting a shrine to Caligula when induced to do so. Alexandria’s Jews took no part. This provided an excuse for Aulus Avillius Flaccus, Alexandria’s Greek governor, who had been appointed by Emperor Tiberius, and who was eager to prove himself to the capricious new emperor, to lash out against the Jews’ “disloyalty.” When Caligula, following these events, pointedly ordered a shrine to himself erected in Judaea, and then, when the Jews toppled it, demanded a larger-than-life statue of him be placed in the Temple itself, the volatile situation reached a boiling point.22 As it happened, the oversized Caligula likeness was never installed in the Temple, largely due to the shrewdness of two of Caligula’s underlings, one Jewish, the other not. Publius Petronius, the Roman governor of Syria tasked with overseeing the installation, easily foresaw the Jewish reaction. Under the guise of fulfilling his duty, he very deliberately marched towards Judaea with a pair of legions, slowly enough that he did not arrive before the winter. The delay provided time for Herod Agrippa (also: Agrippa I), the Roman client-king of Judaea, the time to travel to Rome. When there Agrippa sneakily finessed Caligula into countermanding his order, unless installation had already begun. A possibly apocryphal story suggests that, upon learning that it had not yet begun, Caligula was furious with Petronius, and wrote a letter ordering Petronius to kill himself. It was Petronius’ good fortune that the letter was delayed by a storm, and the order reached Petronius only after he had received news of Caligula’s assassination at the hands of Caligula’s own Praetorian Guardsmen. Whether that story is true or not, Caligula’s death defused the immediate tension in Judaea even as it generated significant political unrest in Rome. The assassination almost certainly saved the lives of both Petronius and Agrippa I, the latter of whom worked to see Caligula’s uncle Claudius raised to the emperorship.23 In gratitude for Agrippa’s efforts on Claudius’ behalf, the new emperor granted Agrippa control over all the territory of Judaea. Agrippa was, in many ways, an ideal choice for the role in that he was able to straddle both the Jewish and the culturally Hellenistic Roman world. Not only was he himself Jewish but also a descendant of the Hasmoneans, who had last been the kings of an independent Judea. Agrippa’s appointment was consistent with Claudius’ policy for client states throughout the territory. He appointed rulers with understanding and respect for the religious and cultural sensibilities (he did the same in Armenia and Commagene).24 Agrippa’s ancestry and public religious practice made him a popular ruler in Jerusalem, and he “took pains to play down his Herodian ancestry and to act as a pious Jew whenever

74  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) he was in Jerusalem, even though he was thoroughly Hellenistic elsewhere in his realm.”25 However, to some extent, notwithstanding the brief rule of Agrippa (he was probably poisoned by a rival, Vibius Marsus, the legate of Syria, in the context of rising Roman-Parthian tensions in 44 CE), the whole affair with Caligula’s idol demonstrated the precarity of Jewish monotheistic practice within an empire disposed to, or at least not balking overmuch at, the deification of its emperors. Vibius Marsus, for his part, probably poisoned Agrippa on the suspicion that he was disloyal, which may well ultimately have been true; he may have been secretly conspiring with the kings of the neighboring vassalages of Commagene, Emesa, Armenia, and Pontus to break away from Rome, which would be distracted by yet another Parthian war. Claudius’ counselors, sensitive to this suspicion, prevailed upon the king to commute the appointment of Agrippa’s son, Agrippa II, and he did so, appointing nonJewish functionaries such as Cuspius Fadus to govern the realm as procurator (roughly: civil administrator). In retrospect, this sequence of events was a worst-case scenario for Rome in its attempt to subjugate Judaea. The combination of Caligula’s intention to desecrate the Temple followed immediately by a period that seemed to emulate the restoration of Jewish autonomy under Agrippa I served to awaken the Jews to the dangers of continued Roman rule, while at the same time to whet Jewish appetites for a restored Jewish monarchy. In the absence of a man like Agrippa I, who could keep one foot in each the Roman and Jewish worlds, the Romans repeatedly appointed politicians who could not successfully walk the tightrope between Jewish religious sensibilities and Roman imperial imperatives. The result was renewed unrest. Rome vacillated between military intervention and conciliation, the former only provoking more zealotry and the latter ultimately insufficient. Claudius awarded the power of appointing the Temple’s High Priest to Agrippa II’s uncle, Herod of Chalcis, which put the important task of governing the troublesome province back in the hands of a Jew, but fell short of the Jewish demand that the power be restored to the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious authority. Claudius also removed Fadus as procurator and returned political governance to a Jew by birth, but Tiberius Julius Alexander was an apostate, and the disdain with which he was viewed by the populace led him to declare a no-tolerance policy for any perceived slight against Rome.26 The procuratorship of Judaea had high turnover in the fifth decade of the first century, as Tiberius was shortly replaced with Ventidius Cumanus, who probably could not have prevented the outbreak of widespread violence, but who nonetheless bungled his task so badly that he probably hastened it. Roman mishandling of disputes between the Jews and their neighbors, including the Samaritans, increased over the next decade, all of which gave recruiting fodder to the Jewish Zealots, who were increasingly arguing against the pacifist messianic patience of the Pharisees as self-defeating. As the Jewish-Roman relationship deteriorated, the Zealots were able to stir up more popularity for

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 75 the idea of taking direct action against Roman misrule. Resistance to Roman rule was also undertaken by a secretive movement of assassins, known as the Sicarii for their short, hidden daggers. Calls for calm or quiescence decreased in frequency, and the fringe activists controlled the narrative and silenced their critics with intimidation and, occasionally, assassination.27 The unrest in Judaea was mirrored, halfway across the Mediterranean, by the chaos in the city of Rome itself. Claudius was assassinated in 54 CE, and replaced by his infamous son Nero. Any reader familiar with Nero’s reputation will find it unsurprising that his efforts to manage the Jewish insurrectionary mood were unsuccessful. The ineffective Porcius Festus spent two years (60–62 CE) as procurator; following his death, the High Priest of the Temple, Ananus, assumed the office temporarily. Evidently, Ananus was even more ironfisted than the Romans, and his removal, and replacement with the corrupt Lucceius Albinus (62–64 CE) did nothing to stem the mutinous atmosphere. The last of the procurators before war broke out was Gessius Florus, who “plundered whole districts of the country, driving many of those Judaeans who wanted peace and stability above all to seek refuge elsewhere, as conditions of life in Judaea became intolerable. It seemed as though the procurator was deliberately trying to force an explosion in the volatile province. He presumably believed that it would be easier to crush an open revolt than suppress sedition. If this were his true intent, it was not long before he succeeded in his objective.”28 The spark that set off the war was, interestingly enough, not the strained relationship between the Jews of Jerusalem and the Roman imperium, but rather a Jewish-gentile property dispute in the coastal city of Caesarea that grew violent. Florus, who had already accepted Jewish bribes for protection, arrested the Jews who had reminded him of his debt, and, perhaps in a fit of vindictiveness, demanded more payment from the Temple treasury. When word of this reached Jerusalem, some activists took up a tongue-in-cheek begging campaign “on behalf of the impoverished procurator.”29 Failing to appreciate the humor, Florus marched on Jerusalem in force and sacked part of it. Jewish ealots took control of the Temple. Agrippa II’s attempts at mediation failed. Events started to snowball. A recent Roman defeat at the hands of the Parthians seemed to signal Rome’s vulnerability. A band of Jewish zealots managed to take the fortress at Masada, and slaughter the Roman garrison; and, the official casus belli, the daily sacrifices at the Temple for the health of the emperor ceased on June 19, 65 CE.30 A last-ditch attempt by Agrippa to regain control of the Temple Mount from the Zealots failed, and full-scale war between Rome and the rebellious province of Judaea was then in progress. Although the Jews managed to drive the Romans completely from Jerusalem by September, the infighting of Jewish insurrectionists and the existence of a still-large pro-peace faction in Jerusalem meant that, regardless of some shifts in momentum, the defeat of the Jewish rebels was probably inevitable. The Jews were disunited and seem to have expended considerable energy in a

76  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) civil war before the Romans even returned in force. Ultimately, the campaign to pacify the tumultuous province was led by Flavius Vespasian and his son Titus, both men fated to rule as Emperor in later years. It was Titus who prepared the assault on Jerusalem, and it was under his command that the Temple was destroyed on the Hebrew date of the 9th of Av. The destruction of the Second Temple was the exclamation point for the defeat of the rebels, but it was not yet quite the end of the war. The zealots atop the fortress of Masada, adjacent to the Dead Sea, held out for another three years. When the Romans constructed a large earthen ramp to besiege and bombard the stronghold, the nearly 1,000 Jewish zealots facing capture chose mass suicide to defeat. In the Roman sense, Judaea was pacified. A little more than half a century later, in 132–135 CE, a further rebellion (called the Bar Kochba rebellion) was also put down by the Romans. Thereafter, organized Jewish nationalism lay dormant until the late 19th century. The Romans did not crack down on Jewish religious practice specifically, even following the rebellion of 66–70 CE. Having consciously and prudently chosen to treat the uprising as an act of political sedition motivated by overzealous Jewish nationalism rather than as evidence of the fundamental incompatibility of Jewish religious practice with Roman rule, the Romans did not punish Jews elsewhere in the empire. Nor did they even pressure Jewish practitioners within Judaea itself, beyond the institution of a tax, the Fiscus Judaicus, by Vespasian (who had become emperor following a revolving door of short-lived rulers after Nero’s suicide in 69 CE; his absence explains why Titus, rather than he, commanded the forces besieging the Temple). The Fiscus Judaicus effectively intercepted a tax that had previously been paid by Jews outside of Judaea to the Temple authorities, increased it, and redirected it to the construction of a Temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in Rome. Vespasian was motivated to institute this tax for financial exigency, but he was a ruler much more in the vein of Claudius than Caligula. He probably understood that, even following the emphatic Roman victory, more Jews would resume insurrectionary activities for the sake of God than for the sake of the rate and destination of their taxes. Despite the financial motivations behind the tax, the Romans’ approach to the Jewish community after the war reflected a certain pragmatism and recognition of the limits of their power and the stakes of the conflict. For Rome, the Jewish war was a challenge, but never an existential threat. Even without Roman religious persecution, the outcome of the rebellion and the destruction of the Second Temple had profound consequences for the Jewish religion. The physical and spiritual center of the community, and the towering reminder of Yahweh’s power in the center of the holy city of Jerusalem, lay in ruins, never to be rebuilt, as it had been after Nebuchadnezzar’s sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple. The ability to offer sacrifices to God ended with the Temple, as did the spiritual and political leadership of the Jewish priests. So, although the Romans did not persecute the Jews per se, the destructive results of the war meant that the

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 77 Jewish community was now compelled to find non-priestly leaders to reconstruct the religion in a world without an operating Temple. In this case, it was the Rabbis—both those locally and those in Babylon (the descendants of the community whom the Babylonians had expelled at the time of the First Temple’s destruction)—who assumed the role of leaders of the post-Temple Jewish world. The destruction of the Temple marked the beginning of Rabbinic Judaism. For the Rabbis, their newfound prominence came with the duty to explain the Temple’s destruction as a corequisite to their spiritual leadership. Unsurprisingly, the Rabbis had little difficulty accounting for the Temple’s destruction. After all, Rabbinic Judaism had never had a Temple. The Rabbis only had the memory of one, and with it, not just the responsibility but the opportunity to explain its absence. The Rabbis also had the chance to account for their replacement of the Temple’s priests as Judaism’s leaders. Josephus’ Dramatic History: “He Who Rushes to Obvious Destruction with Eyes Open Earns Contempt”

As discussed previously, Josephus’ history of the rebellion, the Bellum Judaicum, contains a chronology that is plausible, but which is also interrupted by periodic ahistorical elements interspersed. These elements include a few dramatic speeches to which it is unlikely, or in some cases impossible, that Josephus could have been witness. Whether some version of these speeches, which include Agrippa’s pre-war plea to his, which we will discuss momentarily, were actually given is unknown. Even if some version of them was given, the historical speeches likely bore little resemblance to the speeches as Josephus recorded them. For instance, Josephus’ version of Agrippa’s speech is suspiciously on the nose about the outcome of the war. Other ahistorical elements in Josephus’ account include the final speech of Eleazar ben Yair, leader of the zealots at Masada, shortly before their mass suicide (Josephus was not present), and Josephus’ third-person account of his own exploits, head-to-head with Vespasian, as a Jewish battle commander in the Galilee region. Based solely on his autobiographical account of his own wartime conduct, one could be forgiven for thinking that Josephus’ courage, the soundness of his military stratagems, and his ability to write self-serving historical accounts of his own genius went unmatched until Winston Churchill. That Josephus included ahistorical elements in his writing is not a new insight. The question of Josephus’ motivation for including these elements has generated a field of Josephus studies. When considering the message and motive of any work of history, Josephus’ included, there are two “directions” one must look: backward to the author’s sources (that is, comparing what one has written to what information we may reasonably conclude the author possessed) and forward to the author’s audience (that is, what information the author hoped to communicate, to whom, and by what means). Extracting historical “fact” from a written history is therefore already fraught with

78  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) difficulty. When Josephus wrote Bellum Judaicum, he was, in effect, translating actual events, including those he experienced, those he witnessed, and those he heard about secondhand via word of mouth or Roman records, into his own written account. As part of this translation from lived events to words on a page, by necessity, a great deal is omitted, or simplified, or emphasized, in service to narrative priorities that belong to Josephus alone. All of this is the “back to the sources” perspective. Next, we must consider the fact that Josephus was attempting to communicate this narrative to a particular target audience. That the audience was not Jewish or Judaean, but rather a Greek-speaking, elite, educated readership in Rome itself seems most likely. This is demonstrated by the text’s assumption of ignorance on such historically foundational figures like Judah Maccabee and Herod the Great, as well as several ritualistic concepts that would need no introduction if the audience were Jewish, such as the basics of Shabbat and Passover, and rules for Jewish burial. Furthermore, the reader’s unfamiliarity with the non-coastal cities and geographical features of the Levant is implicit in the text’s treatment of those places. On the other hand, examples of the text’s assumption of the reader’s knowledge of about the prior century of Roman history are ubiquitous.31 Then there is Josephus’ own experience to consider. His autobiographical account of his leading the defense of Galilee against Vespasian, and of his capture by Vespasian, and of his prediction that Vespasian was soon to become Emperor, seems designed to clarify for the reader his privileged position as a Jew in Vespasian’s household, while simultaneously retroactively shaping his military legacy. Incidentally, as Mason points out, the traditional view that Josephus was merely writing Flavian propaganda ignores the treatment of the rebellious Jews as valorous and ingenious, the presentation of Titus as gullible rather than heroic, and the overly panegyric presentation of Domitian, Titus’ younger brother who succeeded him and during whose reign the Bellum was completed, which should be understood as ironic “safe criticism.”32 As Mason adds, just because Bellum Judaicum is not merely Flavian propaganda, it would be folly to dismiss its Flavian context. Josephus was writing about Jews, in Rome, for a Roman audience. This applies to his other major works, Antiquitates Judaicae and Contra Apionem, as well.33 Upon his capture, Josephus expediently switched sides in the war, and fought alongside Vespasian, his former adversary and newfound benefactor. Whether this makes him a traitor to his people and a cynical opportunist or a devoted Jew who wanted to end a hopeless rebellion with as little bloodshed and destruction to his country as possible is outside of the purview of this study, or, likely, any study to determine. The tone of the writing makes it clear that he did not abandon his national or religious pride when he abandoned his post and his freedom. The stated goal of his writing was to rehabilitate the Jewish reputation in the eyes of Rome from that of a nation of weak barbarian atheists (as the Romans considered the Jews for their belief in an invisible God) to what he felt was a more accurate representation of

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 79 them as heirs to an ancient civilization, wise and courageous. Prior historians treating the Roman-Jewish war, he writes, “claim to be writing history, [but] they do not, in my opinion, impart sound information and miss their target completely. They are bent on representing the Romans as a great nation, while they constantly disparage and decry the behavior of the Jews. But I fail to see why the conquerors of a feeble nation should be regarded as great. Furthermore, these writers do not take into account the duration of the war, nor the vast numbers of Roman troops that were involved; or they deprecate the ability of the commanders whose strenuous endeavors during the siege of Jerusalem will bring them little glory in the writers’ eyes if their achievements are belittled. However, it is not my intention to emulate those who praise Roman might by magnifying the heroism of my countrymen: I will accurately report the actions of both combatants; but in tracing the course of events I cannot hide my personal feelings nor refrain from bewailing my country’s tragic fate.”34 This is the point where Josephus’ account dovetails with the overall focus in this study. Upon what did Josephus lay the blame for the Judaea’s “tragic fate?” Writing in Rome to a Roman audience, as he was, Josephus was naturally reticent to blame Rome. He blames the Jews themselves for the catastrophe that befell them: “The fact that it was being ruined by civil strife, that the tyrannical Jewish leaders were those who drew the might of the unwilling Roman army to the holy sanctuary, and the flames that subsequently consumed it, is attested to by Titus Caesar himself, who ravaged the city. Throughout the hostilities he pitied the people who were left to the mercy of the rebellious parties and delayed the capture of the city time and again; for by prolonging the siege he gave the guilty a chance to repent.”35 To drive home the point that he is aggrieved by Rome’s triumphant destruction of Jerusalem, he adds: Should anyone criticize me for condemning the [Jewish] tyrants and the crimes committed by their gangs of bandits, or for lamenting my country’s disaster, I beg indulgence for my natural compassion, which is not customary for a historian. For of all the cities in the Roman domain, ours had attained the highest level of expansion and prosperity, and has now been reduced to the lowest level of misery. Indeed, I can hardly compare the misfortunes of all other nations since the beginning of time, with the calamities that have befallen the Jews; and though we cannot blame a foreign nation for all these misfortunes, it is more than I can do to restrain my grief. Should any critic be too stern for pity, let him credit history with the facts and this historian with the lamentations.36 In Book II of the Bellum Judaicum, which covers the rebellion from the oppressive rule of Gessius Florus through the destruction, the character of Agrippa II may be seen as a kind of self-insertion for Josephus. Agrippa II

80  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) serves as a mouthpiece for Josephus’ own thoughts, particularly at the juncture of the story following the spiteful, contrarian, and insulting “charitable collection” taken up for Gessius Florus by an agitated and confrontational Jerusalemite population. Agrippa, like Josephus, an inhabitant straddling Judaean society and the Roman world, is torn between his love of his people and what he sees (presciently, as it turns out) as the hopeless prospect of insurrectionary war against Rome. In effect, Agrippa’s speech, which is allencompassing, rhetorically logical, and emotionally stirring, serves as Josephus’ summary of the war, its relevant causes, and its lessons. Josephus’ Agrippa cautions his countrymen of the folly of rebelling against Rome, and adds that their motives for war are incoherent. Agrippa argues that the time to fight for their freedom has passed. He then provides, as evidence for the imprudence of rebellion, a list of nations and cities that had already submitted to Rome, a reminder that Rome’s resources are far vaster than Judaea’s, and the cautionary tales of Rome’s prior victories. He reminds the Jews that they can expect no help from potential allies, like the Jewish-led Parthian territory of Adiabene, which would certainly not violate the recently achieved Roman-Parthian détente. In fact, Agrippa admits, the only assistance for which the Jews may hold out any hope is divine, but such a hope is reckless given Rome’s evident and immediate strength. Finally, he pleads with his countrymen and suggests that commencing armed insurrection against Rome will be tantamount to killing their own wives and children, devastating their own country, immolating their own race, and destroying God’s Temple. Josephus concedes that Agrippa’s stirring speech was initially effective in temporarily muting the drums of war, but in fact it only delayed them. Because Agrippa’s speech so clearly explicates Josephus’ eventual synopsis of the war despite its ante-bellum placement, it is worth a close look. Ultimately, Agrippa’s exhortation to stand down, advanced by Josephus in Book II of the Bellum Judaicum, presages Josephus’ own (probably apocryphal) last-ditch attempt to save the Temple from destruction in Book V. Agrippa begins with high-minded rhetoric about the motives for war in the community, which he declares to be contradictory. After asking for a calm hearing in front of the Temple even from those who are dead set on war—“If my remarks are not to someone’s liking, pray let him not create a disturbance. For those who have irrevocably made up their mind to rebel will be free to feel the same after my exhortations”37—Agrippa points out that the two pretexts for fighting are confused. Some Judaeans are evidently calling for revenge against Roman injustice, while others call for liberty. But, Agrippa states, “if you intend to avenge your wrongs, what good is it to extol liberty? On the other hand, if servitude seems unbearable, it is unnecessary to complain about your rulers; if they were the most considerate of men, servitude would still be disgraceful.”38 Addressing the subject of Gessius Florus, though not by name, and admitting that “the ministers of Rome are unbearably harsh,” Agrippa argues that “it would be absurd because of one man to make war on so many and because of small charges to take arms

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 81 against so mighty a power—a power that does not even know the nature of our complaints!”39 Directing his speech to the lovers of freedom in the crowd, acknowledging again that servitude is painful, Agrippa declares that “the man who having once submitted then revolts is an insubordinate slave, not a lover of liberty,” and that “there was, to be sure, a time when you should have done everything possible to keep the Romans out; that was when our country was invaded by Pompey. But our ancestors and their kings, with material resources and physical and mental strength far superior to yours, nevertheless failed to mount a resistance to a small fraction of the Roman army; and will you, who have learned submission from your fathers, and you, who are so ill-provided in resources compared with those who first submitted, defy the whole Roman Empire?”40 After reminding his audience of some local history, Agrippa goes on to mention the Athenians, Spartans, and Macedonians—each of them, once upon a time, powerful lovers of liberty who had by then yielded to Rome. Having thus dispensed his argument that whatever its motive, any rebellion is immoral, and that other freedom-seekers had accepted Roman dominion, Agrippa’s rhetoric moves into the realm of realpolitik. Judaea is a small territory; he points out, whereas the Romans have conquered the known world from Danube to Libya, from the Euphrates to Cadiz, and then “sought a new world beyond the ocean and carried their arms as far as Britain, unknown previously to history.”41 Under the heading “An impressive list of nations that bowed to Rome,” Josephus’ Agrippa drives home the point with a list of such nations surrounding the Black Sea, and then mentions Bithynia, Cappadocia, Pamphylia, Lycia, Cilicia, Thrace, Illyria, Dalmatia, and Dacia, all of them in Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. As object lessons, Agrippa invokes the names of defeated nations that attempted to defy Roman might: Gaul, Iberia, Germany, Britain, Parthia, and Egypt (which includes, in his telling, the lands of Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula), and—not last, but certainly the name with the greatest resonance, at least for Josephus’ Roman audience—Carthage, Rome’s ancient enemy now reduced entirely to the realm of ruin and cautionary tale. As his final point before his conclusive plea to desist from their suicidal course, Agrippa reminds the Jews that (in the context of the recently completed list of nearly every known nation and territory, each of which has submitted to Rome) they can expect no allies of any sort: “What allies then will you expect for this war? Will you recruit them from the uninhabited wilds? For in the inhabited world all are Romans—unless, maybe, you extend your hopes beyond the Euphrates and depend on obtaining aid from your kinsmen in Adiabene.”42 Adiabene, a kingdom in northern Mesopotamia along the Tigris that, once upon a time, was part of the Assyrian heartland, was a semi-autonomous Parthian client state at the time of the war, and a frequent buffer state between the Parthians and the Romans. In the early part of the first century, the rulers of Adiabene had converted to Judaism; legend has it that the Izates, the youngest son and designated heir of King Monobazus,

82  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) was sent away to Characene (in present day Kuwait, along the Persian Gulf) to be kept safe from his resentful older brothers. While there, he converted to Judaism through the teachings of a Jewish merchant named Ananias. His mother, the Queen Helena, converted to Judaism, as well, and managed to convince her older sons to defer to Izates when Monobazus died (and the brothers, too, converted to Judaism when they saw how deftly their oncedespised younger brother managed the affairs of state). Later, in the second century, the Romans would invade Adiabene under Trajan; ultimately, both as a result of Roman slaughter and the natural spread of the religion, Adiabene’s rulers and population became Christian.43 At the time of Agrippa’s reported speech, Adiabene was under the rule of Monobazus II (once, Izates’ spiteful older brother, who had succeeded to the throne upon Izates’ death, for which he was not responsible), who had only recently sent his mother’s and brother’s bodies to Jerusalem for sacred burial. Agrippa cautions, however, that despite their religious kindship with the Judaeans, the forces of Adiabene “will not, without good reason, get involved in such a war, and if they should contemplate such folly, the Parthian king would not permit it; for he is anxious to maintain the truce with the Romans, and would consider it a breach of the treaty if any of his tributaries takes the field against them.”44 As for help from God, Josephus’ Agrippa reminds his people that God has already allowed the Romans to become peerlessly powerful and vast, and as such, must have aided Rome in its expansive conquests. Furthermore, Agrippa points out, the divine proscription against fighting on the Sabbath would place them at a profound disadvantage: Consider, too, how difficult it would be to preserve your religious rules from contamination, even if you were fighting opponents easy to overcome; and how if you will be forced to transgress the very principles on which you chiefly build your hopes of God’s assistance, you will alienate Him from you. If you observe your Sabbath customs and refuse on that day to take any action, you will be easily defeated, as were your ancestors by Pompey, who pressed the siege especially on the days when the besieged remained passive. But if in the war you transgress your ancestral law, I don’t see what you have left to fight for, since your one desire is to preserve inviolate all your ancestral customs. How could you invoke the Deity to your aid if you deliberately omit to pay Him the service that is due?45 To emphasize the point that there is no path to victory for the Jews in the war, Agrippa adds, “All who embark on war rely on the support either of God or man; but when, as is probable, no assistance is forthcoming from either quarter, then those who go to war choose obvious defeat. What prevents you then from killing with your own hands your wives and children, and from consigning this most beautiful fatherland to the flames? By such an act of madness you will at least spare yourselves the shame of defeat….Those on

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 83 whom unforeseen disaster falls are at least entitled to pity, but he who rushes to obvious destruction with eyes open earns contempt.”46 Finally, Agrippa makes crystal clear the consequences that await, should his audience ignore his (one is tempted to say “prophetic”) warning and plunge headlong into conflict with the mighty Romans: When the Romans have won they will [not] treat you with consideration; on the contrary, to make you an example to other nations, they will burn the holy city to the ground and exterminate your race. Even the survivors will find no place of refuge, since all the peoples of the earth either have or are afraid to have the Romans as their masters…. Take pity if not on your children and your wives, then at least on your mother city and its sacred precincts. Spare the sanctuary and preserve for yourselves the Temple with its sacred treasures. For the Romans will no longer keep their hands off when they have captured them, since they have only met with ingratitude for sparing them hitherto.47 In this way, Josephus’ Agrippa clearly establishes the foundation for Josephus’ explanation of the Temple’s destruction. Given all the excellent reasons the Jews had for refraining from rebellion, and the very poor ones they had for engaging in rebellion, the demolition of the sanctuary would not be indicative of God abandoning the Jews. Like the Israelites castigated by the Old Testament Prophets, it would serve as punishment for the Jews abandoning God. The Romans, like the Babylonians before them, would merely be instruments of divine justice. Evidently, Agrippa’s pleas were all ignored. In addition to deploying Agrippa to deliver some of his own moralistic perspective, Josephus himself happens to be a character in his own history. After his capture by Vespasian, who intended to send him to Nero (still alive at the time), Josephus recounts that he attempted to ingratiate himself to his captor by proclaiming Vespasian emperor. When Vespasian emerged as emperor in 69 CE, following Nero’s suicide and a resulting unstable fouremperor year, Josephus reports that Vespasian “was grieved to think that the man [that is, Josephus himself] was still a prisoner in his hands” and, at his son Titus’ suggestion, ordered Josephus’ fetters cut, rather than merely removed, to demonstrate the fullness of his pardon. “Josephus,” writes Josephus, “having thus gained his enfranchisement [i.e., Roman citizenship] as a reward for his prophecies, was now believed to be really capable of foretelling the future.”48 With his reliability thus established for now-emperor Vespasian and Titus (and the Roman reader), Josephus presented himself as occupying a unique position to be able to communicate to the Jews whom Titus had besieged in the Temple, shortly before its destruction. It is the same position in reverse, incidentally, that Josephus occupies at the time of the composition of the Bellum: interlocutor from the Jews to the Romans. Josephus presents Titus

84  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) as reticent to destroy the sacred Temple, and recounts that Titus turned to Josephus as a final option: “Titus, realizing that the survival or destruction of the city vitally affected himself, did not omit to urge the Jews to reconsider their policy, while prosecuting the siege. Combining operations with good advice and knowing that too often force is less effective than speech, he called on them repeatedly to save themselves by surrendering the city, which was already virtually almost taken; but he also delegated Josephus to parley with them in their native tongue, thinking they would perhaps yield to the exhortations of a fellow countrymen.”49 Where Josephus’ Agrippa had offered a pre-war speech that covered, in terms of modern academic disciplines, a view of the war through the lenses of economics, military science, political science, and international relations, Josephus’ presentation of himself offers a plea for his fellow Jews to surrender their lost cause based upon history and theology. After repeating many of the arguments he initially attributed to Agrippa about the inevitability of Roman victory, the irresistibility of Roman strength of arms and tactics—ultimately, with the same lack of reception on the part of the hearers—Josephus’ true self-insertion, the character Josephus, promised that the Romans would be magnanimous in victory unless the Jews held out to the bitter end. The bitter end, by the way, was coming in one form or another, given the terrible famine Titus’ siege had generated. Understanding that the Jews within the besieged city were awaiting divine deliverance, Josephus proceeded pointedly to remind them of God’s apparent blessing of Roman endeavors: It might be legitimate to scorn meaner masters, but not the lords of the whole world. For what spot on earth had escaped the Romans, unless heat or cold made it useless for them? Fortune, indeed, had passed over to them from every side, and God, who moved from nation to nation handing them empire, now rested over Italy….That is why their ancestors, far superior to themselves in soul and body and in resources to boot, had yielded to the Romans—a thing they would not have tolerated if they had not known that God was on the Roman side.50 To prove the assertion that dominion is a sign of God’s favor, and destruction a clear sign of his displeasure, Josephus invokes history to prove his point. After his “exhortations were received by many of the defenders on the ramparts with derision or execration, and by some he was attacked with showers of missiles,” Josephus “turned to reminiscences of national history,” in the vain hope that the common people were interested. “You wretched people,” Josephus cried out, “forgetful of your own true allies, are you waging war on Rome with arms and your own might of hand? What other foe have we defeated in that way? And when did God, the creator, fail to avenge the Jews, if they were wronged? Will you not turn around and look at the place whence you are setting forth to fight and think how powerful an

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 85 ally you have outraged? Will you not recall the miraculous exploits of your forefathers and what mighty wars this holy place has won for us in the days of old? For myself, I shudder to recall the works of God to unworthy ears; but listen all the same so that you may realize that you are fighting not only the Romans but God as well!”51 Josephus’ frustration at delivering a rousing lecture to a disinterested audience is a feeling common to many teachers of history. The incredulous Josephus character does, indeed, embark on a desperate harangue about the relative ignominy of Jewish military history, invoking the Jews’ earliest historical memories of conflict, resolved through trust in God and not through violent action. He mentions a Pharaoh named Nechaos (a name not attested elsewhere) whom Josephus blames for carrying off Sara, “a princess, and mother of our race,” for a night, and Abraham’s enlistment of “the invisible ally,” rather than force of arms to bring her back. He also mentions the nation enslaved in Egypt, reminding the zealots in the Temple of their ancestors “tyrannized and subjected to foreign rule for four hundred years, yet, though they might have resisted with weapons and violence, did they not commit themselves to God? Who has not heard of Egypt, overrun with every wild beast and wasted by every disease, of the barren land, the failing Nile, the ten plagues in succession, and the consequent departure of our fathers under escort, without bloodshed, without danger, conducted by God as the future guardians of his shrine?” Then there were the times when the Jews did resort to violence: against Sennacherib of the Assyrians, against the Philistines, and against the Babylonians; in each case, it was a return to trust in God, and not a military triumph, that restored the nation. “In short,” Josephus concludes, “on no occasion did our fathers succeed by force, or fail without it, when they committed their cause to God.” When Josephus then invokes the Prophet Jeremiah, and (accepting Jeremiah’s blame of King Zedekiah, though not necessarily Jeremiah’s explanation Zedekiah’s key sin), declares that the King, “disregarding Jeremiah’s prophetic warnings, gave [the king of Babylon] battle, he was himself taken prisoner, and saw the town and the Temple razed to the ground,” he evidently provoked a violent response from the Temple’s defenders. Josephus suddenly exclaims “Yet how much more moderate than your leaders was that king, and his subjects than you! For although Jeremiah loudly proclaimed that they were hateful to God for their transgressions against him, and would be taken into captivity unless they surrendered the city, neither the king nor the people put him to death. But you,” he continues, “I deplore, assail me with abuse and missiles when I exhort you to save yourselves, enraged at being reminded of your sins and unable to endure any mention of the crimes you have actually perpetrated day after day.”52 Pressing the point further, Josephus blames the rivalry of Aristobulus and Hyrcanus for inviting the initial Roman invasion under Pompey. There is, briefly, no aspect of the current situation Josephus lays at the feet of the Romans; the Jewish zealots, alone, are responsible for provoking

86  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) the superpower and fighting for themselves, and not for God. With the speech of his avatar completed, Josephus the author give a full accounting of the suffering and degradation suffered under the Roman siege by the Jews, the final Roman assault, and the Temple’s ultimate destruction: “The sanctuary…had long before [Titus’ intended assault] been condemned by God to the flames; and now, after the passing of the years, the fated day was at hand, the tenth of the month of Lous [Av]—the very date when centuries before it had been burned by the king of Babylon. But now it was their own people who had caused and started the conflagration.”53 When Titus’ attempt to rally his troops to control the fire failed, Josephus reports, the catastrophe’s conclusion was foregone. Then “the Romans, deeming it useless to spare the surrounding buildings now that the Temple was in flames, set fire to them all both of what remained of the porticoes and all the gates, except two, one of the east gates and the southern gate, both of which were later demolished. They burned also the treasury-chambers, which contained huge sums of money, vast quantities of raiment, and other precious belongings.”54 Josephus does not offer a narrative theological explanation for the Temple’s destruction, but of course he does not need to do so: the attentive reader will intuit it from the word-for-word reprinting of his earlier diatribe. Agrippa’s speech provided a scene-setting context. The speech of Josephus (the character) to the zealots stands as an emphatic confirmation of the position that the Jews brought this calamity on themselves. Finally, Titus’ victorious speech to the vanquished closes the matter: the Romans did everything they could to avoid this catastrophe, and the Jews rejected them at every turn. When Josephus’ Titus enters Jerusalem, and sees the city’s defenses from within for the first time, he confirms: “God indeed has been our ally in this war; it was God who brought down the Jews from their strongholds; for what could human hands or engines accomplish against such towers?”55 It might be possible to reconstruct something like Josephus’ theology from Bellum Judaicum were the account not riddled with the historiographical problems of uncertain sources, blatant self-aggrandizement, bias, audience, and the patronage of the Flavian rulers. But whatever the historical Josephus’ actual opinion of the role of God in the destruction of the Second Temple, in the Bellum Judaicum the God understood by Josephus’ authorial persona functions in the same way as Jeremiah’s God. That God is faithful to his people when they are faithful to him, and he punishes them when they turn from him (as the early Israelites seem to have done frequently, per the prophets), or when they ignore his covenant (as Zedekiah did, per Jeremiah), or, in this case, when they rely on their own strength of arms, imprudently relying on his deliverance from the militarily superior Roman forces. One is reminded of Moses tapping a rock to draw forth water at Horeb, rather than speaking to it.56 Faced with the same problem of theodicy, Josephus expresses his experience of an anguish akin to that experienced by the author of Lamentations. Then, ultimately, he comes to the same conclusion as did the author of

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 87 Jeremiah: that God was again punishing the entire Jewish nation through the destruction of the Temple for the misdeeds of a select few of them. The challenge with Josephus is determining what specifically motivated this conclusion. It could be that Josephus has no guile at all, and that Bellum Judaicum represents the heart-on-sleeve account of its author. However, the Mary Sue-esque exploits of Josephus’ self-insertion, and the obviously ahistorical interjections in the narrative like Agrippa’s speech, strongly discourage the skeptical reader from taking the account at face value. It could be that Josephus was writing with his Roman audience in mind, as Mason suggests, and seeking to function as an interlocutor and defender of his ancestors’ and countrymen’s barbarian reputation. This is certainly his goal in his other major works, the Antiquities and his polemical defense of Jewish practice and history, Against Apion. But the Bellum Judaicum, when read in relation to God, reads like the case a defense attorney would present. Even as Josephus defends the valor, ingenuity, and integrity of his countrymen, through the words of his characters Agrippa, Josephus, and ultimately Titus, he castigates the zealous nationalists in a way that seems calculated to exonerate God of any culpability for the catastrophe. The zealots were warned of the worldly reasons to refrain from rebellion by Agrippa, who pointed to the incoherence of their motives and the folly of their overestimation of their military prowess. The people were reminded of the proper means to retain God’s favor by the pious presentation of the character Josephus, who reminded them of their historical victories (which came from trusting God) and defeats (which came from trusting themselves and their arms). Finally, the author Josephus places the blame for starting the fire that destroyed the Temple on the Jews themselves, and not upon the Romans (who, per Josephus, were more aggrieved at the sight of the burning Temple than the Jews were). If the Bellum Judaicum is Josephus’ defense of Jewish reputation to a Roman reading public, it serves double duty as the defense of God to a Jewish readership. If Josephus turned his coat to the Roman army, he was careful to affirm that he never abandoned the Jewish God, and still felt compelled to absolve God by blaming his countrymen for the disaster. The Echoes of Destruction: Later Jewish and Christian Reactions to the Temple

It is Josephus, and unfortunately for us Josephus alone, upon whom we must depend for anything akin to eyewitness testimony for the events surrounding the Great Revolt of 66–70 CE, and then the destruction of the Temple. We lack any other Judaean source. Josephus’ contemporary Roman colleagues, like Tacitus and Martial, were but little interested in the Temple itself. Martial’s satirical epigrams depicted daily Roman life, and Tacitus was dismissive of Jewish “superstitions.” Tacitus noted that the destruction of the Temple “did not change [Jewish] attitudes to the truth even in the face of adverse circumstances,”57 but for the most part, he ignored the specifics of the Jewish

88  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) rebellion due to the wider scope of his work, relative to Josephus’ myopic focus on the fate of his native country. There were undoubtedly other histories of the war that were contemporary or close to it, but we do not have them. That Josephus’ account survives is likely because of the interest it generated in the early Christian church. Even as Judaism experienced and then began slowly to recover from the shock of the Second Temple’s loss, Christianity was in the process of forming into itself in the wake of Jesus’ death. It seems likely that the Gospel According to Mark, one of the key sacred texts treating the Jesus story, was composed some few years before the Temple’s destruction, but that the authors of Matthew and Luke-Acts both were aware of the Temple’s fate. The early Christians, who were, in fact, still Jews in the process of creating Christianity, as they slowly exchanged a Jewish ethnic identity for a global, spiritual one,58 were thus still naturally keenly attuned to events in Jerusalem, especially as it directly impacted their own burgeoning identity. The “parting of the ways” between those Jews who remained Jews and those Jews and Gentiles who would come to comprise Christianity was a fluid, highly malleable dynamic at the time of the Temple’s destruction. As Goodman puts it, “one impetus of the parting was the need of Christians to define the relationship of their new faith to what they viewed as the old covenant of God with the Jews. And one puzzling aspect of that covenant was the willingness of the Almighty to allow his Temple to be destroyed in 70 CE. Josephus’ detailed narrative, which explained the disaster so clearly in theological terms as a punishment of the Jews for their sins, provided a perfect explanation.”59 Josephus’ account of the war was detailed, and its conclusions about the Temple were theologically convenient to a burgeoning Christology. We must also not forget the popularity of Josephus’ other two major works. The Antiquitates was popular as a functional exegesis of the Old Testament, used by Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Origen. Contra Apionem was a literary model for the emerging genres of the apologetic and the polemic. The “for our sins against God” message of the Bellum Judaicum’s alignment with a theological movement increasingly determined to extricate itself (or at least to distinguish itself) from its Jewish roots made Josephus an early Christian historiographical celebrity. Goodman’s assertion that the Christian “reinterpretation of his narrative as a divine judgement on his people for rejection of Christ” would have “horrified and astonished” Josephus is half true. Horrified, he may well have been, but he would not have been astonished. Josephus was no novice when it came to the propensity of historians to draw whatever conclusion seems most convenient from any historical narrative with an extractable moral. Had he been aware of the triumphal force Christianity would become over the next several centuries (in fairness, that part might well have astonished him), Josephus would surely have been most unsurprised that the third- and fourth-century CE Christian fathers would have had no difficulty finding the evidence for their worldview in Josephus’ account of the Temple’s destruction.

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 89 Functioning as a kind of counterpoint to those Christian historians are the sequence of generations of Rabbis who wrote the Talmud. The Talmud is unlike the Christian histories in that it is essentially impossible to pinpoint the perspective of any specific human with certainty. Authorities are sometimes cited by name and some opinions are attributed, it is true; but we have almost no clear idea when exactly certain elements of the two Talmuds (Palestinian and Babylonian; it is the Babylonian, the larger and generally more esteemed of the two, that is discussed here) reached their final form, beyond a vague periodization that distinguishes among the Mishnaic and then the Tannaitic, Amoraic, and Stammaic contributions. While we can periodize Talmudic material with greater or lesser confidence, depending on the specific section, only the Mishnaic material is easily identifiable for its Hebrew and for the editorial markers added by the stammaim, the Talmuds anonymous final editors, that the Mishna is ending, and the Gemara, the Rabbinic commentary on the Mishna, is beginning. Such signifiers include the appearance of a standalone letter gimel, for Gemara. For the Aramaic sections of the text, we are at the mercy of the stammaim, who may or may not feel inclined to offer any indication of when certain pieces were added, or by whom. In other words, the Talmud is written, but no body wrote it, and so it is appropriate to speak of its multiple perspectives and biases. It is a relief not to try to find a single perspective; the text often brazenly disagrees with itself. This situation is most unlike the situation with the Church Fathers, whom we can name, and to whom we can attach explicitly-stated individual perspectives and biases. In form and in purpose, the early Christian histories and the Talmud bear little in common with one another, with one key exception. Both are seeking to make sense of a post-70 CE theological landscape that includes profound spiritual shocks that are relatively recent: the death and resurrection of Jesus for the Christians, and the destruction of the Temple for both. When the Temple was destroyed, the Christian writers discussed below saw it as evidence of the correctness of their central religious assertion about God shifting his covenant from the Jewish nation to the community of Christian believers. As for the Rabbis, as traumatized and aggrieved as they may have been by the Temple’s destruction, they also saw in the historical fact of its destruction the opportunity to solidify and legitimize their role as the proper replacement for the Priests, as the leaders of Jewish life both in Judaea and in the diaspora. By the time these men were writing their histories, the grief of the Temple’s destruction, expressed so profoundly by Josephus, had largely healed. By then, the absence of the Temple was an integral, indelible piece of Jewish history. Josephus’ final words of the Bellum Judaicum are: “Here we conclude our history, which we promised to report with utmost accuracy for the benefit of those who wish to learn how the Romans aged this war against the Jews. How it is to be rendered must be left to the judgment of the readers; but as regards the truth, I would not hesitate to assert confidently that, throughout the entire narrative, I have aimed at nothing else.”60 While Josephus may

90  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) have had a moral, he asserted himself a historian first and foremost. Conversely, the Church Fathers and the Rabbis may have claimed to be imparting historical truth, as well, but is clear that their relationship to the historical events of the Roman-Jewish war were less purely factual and more nakedly moralistic than Josephus’. The Adversus Judaeos Genre

The Church historians were not trying to impart some new historical perspective beyond what Josephus had written. In fact, they had no need to. They were all content to rely on him exclusively for their knowledge of “what happened.” They took Josephus’ account at face value, borrowed his moral about divine punishment for sin, and then, like the Jeremiahs they were, defined the sin according to their own assumptions about God. Most of the earliest surviving non-canonical Christian writings were profoundly concerned with Judaism. The early Church Fathers who suggested the complete extirpation of Judaism from the canon, such as the late-first/ early-second century CE theologian Marcion of Sinope, were instead themselves expunged and declared heretical. As Tertullian argued, “this was a point of order, that the Father should announce the Son before the Son should the Father, and that the Father should testify of the Son before the Son should testify of the Father….Now (Christ) will neither be acknowledged as a Son if the Father never named Him, nor be believed in as the Sent One if no Sender gave Him a commission.”61 More simply, Christian claims about Jesus, absent of the context of Judaism and the Jewish Prophetic record, make no sense, and thus Jewish scripture, especially the writings Isaiah and the Prophets remain central to Christian claims about Jesus. In fact, Tertullian established that Jewish scripture is more than central to the Christian perspective; it is foundational to placing Jesus within the divine plan. For the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers, the problem with relying on what the Christians came to call the Old Testament of the Jews as the foundation for Christian claims is that, surrounding them in every corner of the Roman empire, were Jews who knew their own scriptures. These Jews rejected their conclusion that the Old Testament prophesied the coming of Jesus as God’s son and the Messiah. The Ante-Nicene Fathers therefore naturally attacked Jewish practice and dogma as in error, and the body of literature they produced in this intellectual endeavor came to be known as Adversus Judaeos, or “Against the Jews.” The range of texts that are properly included in the genre varies according to one’s definition, with some counting only those texts entitled Adversus Judaeos (or Iudaeos), such as those written by Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and Theodoret of Cyrus, with others considering that the Adversus Judaeos type includes “any text (including martyrologies, letters, literary dialogues, apologetic works, and biblical commentaries) that aggressively differentiated Christianity from Judaism to establish the former’s

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 91 superiority.”62 Themes in Adversus Judaeos literature included the supersession of Christianity, as the “new Israel,” over the Jews, Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus, Jewish persecution of Christians, and Jewish obduracy about the “spiritual truth of their own scriptures.”63 These texts may be in the form of polemical essays, biographical dictionaries, invented64 dialogues between Christian and Jewish interlocutors, or biblical commentaries. Jacobs writes that “the fierce rhetoric of adversus Iudaeos literature was highly effective,” and notes that “scholars continue to debate whether adversus Iudaeos literature reflects a social reality of religious competition and vibrancy through the ancient period or vigorous internal anxiety and debate.”65 Whether or not the earliest manifestations of Christian theology were necessarily anti-Jewish is a thorny debate even to this day,66 but the distinguishing of Christianity from Judaism was the fundamental goal of Adversus Judaeos works.67 Garroway sums it up: Christian texts intended especially to disparage Jews and Judaism marshaled a standard assortment of arguments, among them the following: (1) Jews, from time immemorial, have been a nation of reprobates guilty of idolatry, depravity, murdering prophets, and, of course, rejecting God’s messiah; (2) God, accordingly, rejected the Jewish people in favor of a new elect drawn from among the Gentiles, and allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed; (3) this replacement was foreseen in the Jews own scripture, the Old Testament; (4) Jews are nonetheless blinded from a proper understanding of the Old Testament; and (5) Jews therefore fail to see that the Mosaic Law, as well as the Temple cult it prescribes, have been fulfilled spiritually in Christ, and therefore have been abrogated. These claims permeate the Adversus Judaeos literature, even as each author forges his own unique case.68 Adversus Judaeos and the Temple: A Convenient Catastrophe

The Ante-Nicene Fathers were a group of early Christian writers who lived before the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Making significant contributions to the development of Christian theology and doctrine, thinkers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and John Chrysostom provide important insights into the early church’s understanding of Christianity, as well as into the early church’s response to the destruction of the Temple and the challenges it faced during its early development. Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165 CE) was evidently far more prolific than our current collection of his works would suggest. We are in possession of three full works: First Apology, Second Apology, and Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew. It is the last work which most interests us here. In addition to those three

92  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) works, Eusebius mentions works of Justin’s entitled Discourse to the Greeks, On the Sovereignty of God, The Psalmist, and On the Soul, none of which we possess. A native of Flavia Neapolis (today, Nablus), the autobiographical material of his Dialogue paints a picture of a spiritually curious and dissatisfied youth who converted to the Christian movement and founded a school in Rome. Justin was profoundly moved by the early martyrs and saw the intensity of their beliefs as evidence for their correctness. Eventually he became one of them, somehow running afoul of the Roman authorities and ultimately getting beheaded, probably as the result of a public dispute with a pagan opponent. It is in his Dialogue with Trypho that the question of the Temple arises for Justin, although he refers to its destruction only obliquely. His main point about the Temple accords with Tertullian’s, to be discussed next, and may have been the basis for it: that the purpose of its destruction was a disqualification for other potential Messiahs, as he links the sacrifice of Jesus with the Passover sacrifice: “The mystery of the lamb, then, which God ordered you to sacrifice as the Passover was truly a type of Christ, with whose blood the believers, in proportion to the strength of their faith, anoint their homes, that is, themselves….That God’s precept about the paschal lamb was only temporary I can show as follows. God does not allow the paschal lamb in any place other than where his name is invoked69 (that is, in the temple at Jerusalem), for he knew there would come a time, after Christ’s passion, when the place in Jerusalem (where you sacrificed the paschal lamb) would be taken from you by your enemies, and then simply all sacrifices would cease….You also know very well that the offering of the two goats,70 which had to take place during the fast, could not take place anywhere else except in Jerusalem.”71 The Temple, the prescribed site of the sacrifice, was reduced to ruin within two decades of Jesus’ death, rendering the Passover sacrifice, in Justin’s argument, impossible thenceforth. Justin’s dialogue maintains a respectful tone between the protagonist and Trypho, his Jewish opponent, and when the two eventually part company, they do so with mutual respect and good wishes. Trypho expresses his regret that the conversation cannot continue (as Justin is shortly to depart the city), and Justin expresses his earnest hope that Trypho and his coreligionists will find their way to faith in Jesus. However, the polite language should not distract from the fact that Justin’s Dialogue, in addition to its point about the destruction of the Temple being a de facto disqualification of any potential Messiah other than Jesus, still makes the point that Jerusalem’s destruction, and that of the rest of Judea in the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132–135 CE, as well, was a deserved punishment from God. Justin ties the Jewish ritual of circumcision to a kind of mark of damnation, a further sign of the growing distance between God and his once-chosen

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 93 people. “The custom of circumcising the flesh,” Justin writes, “was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians. The purpose of this was that you and only you might suffer the afflictions that are now justly yours; that only your land be desolate, and your cities ruined by fire; that the fruits of your land be eaten by strangers before your very eyes; that not one of you be permitted to enter Jerusalem.”72 Since Christians believed that Jesus’ life had abrogated the need for ritual circumcision, Justin’s perspective is that the continued Jewish practice serves God’s purposes of denoting Jews as clearly as lamb’s blood on a doorpost. With this point made, Justin challenges Trypho that he does not “believe that any of you [Jews] will attempt to deny that God either had or has foreknowledge of future events, and that he does not prepare beforehand what everyone deserves. Therefore, the above-mentioned tribulations [that is, the violence visited upon the Jews by the Romans] were justly imposed upon you.” To explain this punishment, Justin continues, “For you have murdered the Just One, and his prophets before him; now you spurn those who hope in him, and in him who sent him, namely, almighty God, the Creator of all things; to the utmost of your power you dishonor and curse in your synagogues all those who believe in Christ.”73 Knust summarizes Justin’s argument to Trypho, writing that “God, through the prophets, predicted that the old covenant would be abrogated (Dial. 11), that the new covenant would be scored by Jews (Dial. 12, that they would murder and despise the Just One (Dial. 13), and that they would habitually fail to understand the rituals God had imposed upon them (Dial. 14–15)….He concludes by re-emphasizing the main point: circumcision, the Sabbath, and all Jewish festivals ‘were imposed upon you because of your sins and your hardness of heart.’”74 Blaming the Jews for their own suffering served as a tidy explanation for it, and it was an explanation that fits with prevailing notions of Jesus’ nature and mission. It also fits the historical facts as they understood them, courtesy of Josephus. Other early Christian thinkers would see no reason to depart from the convenient notion that the destruction the Jews experienced was the direct divinely ordained response to their reported treatment of Jesus Christ, their continued rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, their mistreatment of Christians, or any combination of the above. The tone, as we shall see momentarily, would harshen over time. Tertullian

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (ca. 155–220 CE) hailed from Carthage, and was an important early polemicist and apologist, as well as a cataloguer of early Christian doctrine. A student of rhetoric and literature one generation removed from Justin Martyr, Tertullian was a forceful and influential voice for the proto-supersessionist argument that Jews had been replaced by Christians as the holders of God’s covenant, but that their scriptures had an important role in validating Christian claims.

94  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) Tertullian’s Adversus Judaeos tract takes the form of “a dispute [that] was held between a Christian and a Jewish proselyte” who both go unnamed.75 Tertullian argues first for the conceptual equality of the two nations of the world, those of Israel and the Gentiles, and then for the spiritual superiority of the Christians, who had not repeatedly angered God with idolatry. Tertullian mentions the specific destruction of the Temple in this treatise only sparsely, the first time in his eighth chapter, entitled “Of the times of Christ’s Birth and Passion, and of Jerusalem’s Destruction.” In this chapter, he is mostly concerned with demonstrating that Jesus fit the prophecy of Daniel’s timing for his arrival, explaining the discrepancy in years by God’s recapitulation of the timing following the Jews’ nonacceptance of Jesus as Messiah.76 “And thus,” he concludes, speaking of the destruction of the Temple, “in the day of their storming, the Jews fulfilled the [70] hebdomads77 predicted in Daniel. Therefore, when these times also were completed, and the Jews subdued, there afterwards ceased in that places ‘libations and sacrifices,’ which thenceforward have not been able to be in that place celebrated; for ‘the unction,’ too, was ‘exterminated’ in that place after the passion of Christ. For it had been predicted that the unction should be exterminated in that place; as in the Psalms it is prophesied, ‘They exterminated my hands and feet.’”78 After making a similar claim about the sacrifice of Jesus coinciding with the Passover sacrifice, he invokes the claim of collective Jewish guilt reported in 27 Matthew and 19 John: “Accordingly, all the synagogue of Israel did slay Him, saying to Pilate, when he was desirous to dismiss him, ‘His blood be upon us, and upon our children;’ and, ‘If thou dismiss him, thou art not a friend of Caesar;’ in order that all things might be fulfilled which had been written of him.”79 His more direct treatment of the Temple’s destruction arrives in Chapter XIII, “Argument from the Destruction of Jerusalem and Desolation of Judea.” Tertullian’s writing is often convoluted, but in this chapter, he is crystal clear. A Jewish leader was to be born in Bethlehem, he argues, and now that the Jews have been exiled (this following not the destruction of the Temple, but the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132–135 CE) and Bethlehem thus emptied of its Jews, the identification of Jesus with the promised Messiah should be obvious. “Now if (according to the Jews) He is hitherto not come,” Tertullian argues, “when He begins to come whence will He be anointed? For the Law enjoined that, in captivity, it was not lawful for the unction of the royal chrism80 to be compounded. But if there is no longer ‘unction’ there as Daniel prophesied (for he says, ‘Unction shall be exterminated’) it follows that they no longer have it, because neither have they a temple where was the ‘horn’ from which kings were wont to be anointed.”81 Indeed: the anointing of the king was to take place in the Temple, which was by then destroyed. Thus, Tertullian argues, the Jews do not have an answer to Jesus as the promised Messiah, and, moreover, have lost forever the ability to anoint a Messiah now that the Temple lay in ruins.

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 95 Tertullian’s explanation for this is naturally the sins of Israel. “Because they had committed these crimes,” Tertullian writes, “and had failed to understand that Christ ‘was to be found’ in ‘the time of their visitation,’ their land has been made ‘desert, and their cities utterly burnt with fire, while strangers devour their region in their sight; the daughter of Sion is derelict, as a watch-tower in vineyard, or as a shed in a cucumber garden’—ever since the time, to wit, when ‘Israel knew not’ the Lord, and ‘the People understood him not,’ but rather “quite forsook, and provoked unto indignation, the Holy One of Israel.’” He continues, speaking of Jesus, “‘On my account,’ He says, ‘have these things happened to you; in anxiety shall ye sleep.’ Since, therefore, the Jews were predicted as destined to suffer these calamities on Christ’s account, and we find that they have suffered them, and see them sent into dispersion abiding in it, manifest it is that it is on Christ’s account that these things have befallen the Jews, the sense of the Scriptures harmonizing with the issue of events and the order of the times.”82 In other words, Tertullian has no new insights on the Temple’s destruction, except for a greater specificity surrounding the nature of Israel’s sin, which he asserts was the Jewish rejection of Jesus. The rejection of Jesus is not remotely a sin that Josephus would have counted as such, but he would have agreed that Jewish sin had caused the destruction. Tertullian’s message is not purely vindictive: that the Jews had mistreated Jesus and had lost the Temple as God’s punitive action. Rather, while that sense of divine punishment is indeed present in Tertullian’s message, the loss of the Temple portends the loss of opportunity for any Messianic candidate who might appear to challenge Christian claims about Jesus. The destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews to Europe and North Africa following the Bar Kochba rebellion meant, for Tertullian, that Jesus was and would remain not only the Messiah, but the only possible Messiah. The Temple’s destruction removed all potential doubt. Beyond his argument about the Temple, it should be noted that Tertullian’s anti-Jewish perspective extended far beyond his Adversus Judaeos. He also wrote a treatise entitled Adversus Marcionem, or “Against Marcion,” a thorough and emphatic rebuttal of the allegedly heretical ideas of Marcion of Sinope. In fact, Dunn83 convincingly argues that, in Adversus Marcionem, Tertullian effectively self-plunders many of the arguments put forward in his Adversus Judaeos, which is “poorly written and repetitive,” or perhaps “published posthumously by a clumsy editor.”84 Marcion had argued that the Old Testament deity and the New Testament deity should not be identified with each other, an assertion that is a logical way to deal with the apparent incongruity between Mosaic Law and the Gospel, fundamentally incompatible with each other, emerging from the same all-knowing deity. In Adversus Marcionem, Tertullian “insisted that the God of the Jews was indeed the one, true, and fair, God, and that the Jewish scriptures were necessary for a complete understanding of what God accomplished through Christ. All one needed, of

96  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) course, was a correct Christian approach to the Old Testament that read it spiritually, allegorically, or typologically rather than literally.”85 In the invective-filled debate that followed, both Marcionites and Tertullian accused each other of being “too Jewish:” Tertullian because he revered the Jewish God, and the Marcionites because they read the Jewish scriptures literally. “Jews and Judaism,” writes Garroway, “thus emerged as a theological category negotiated by polemicists when laying out the contours of one sort of Christianity over and against another. ‘Jewish’ became the mud slung back and forth.”86 As a result of this dynamic, the appearance of “Jews” in early Christian works are best understood as Christian strawmen, as the early Christians sought to define themselves against the Jews and against one another. Other Early Christian Writers

Justin and Tertullian were among the earliest of the Christian apologists and polemicists to define themselves against the Jews, and to use the specter of an imagined Judaism to self-define their versions of Christianity against other, emergent, “heretical” forms of Christianity. They were not the last. It is a testament to Justin’s and Tertullian’s moralizing interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem that no fundamentally different Christian arguments explaining the Roman destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem were ever really put forth before relatively modern times. It should be remembered that these works were all composed in the context of a long and messy divorce between Jews and Christians, in which the two sides essentially defined themselves into existence by differentiating themselves from each other; “Judaizing” Christians, or believers in Jesus who still sought to follow Jewish law, were a real source of concern for Christians who sought to extricate themselves from Jewish legalism entirely.87 Hippolytus of Alexandria, writing a generation after Justin and Tertullian, asks rhetorically, “For what reason was the temple made desolate? Was it on account of that fabrication of the calf? Was it on account of the idolatry of the people? Was it for the blood of the prophets? Was it for the adultery and fornication of Israel?” He answers his own question: “By no means….For in all these transgressions they always found pardon open to them, and benignity; but it was because they killed the Son of their Benefactor, for He is coeternal with the Father.”88 Early theologians like Cyprian, Origen, Melito of Sardis, and writers as late as the fifth-century CE, such as John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, all put forth arguments with the same basic premise: Jewish culpability for Jesus’ death, Jewish stubbornness in the face of Jesus’ divinity, and accusations of violent Jewish persecution of Christians all served as a priori explanations and justifications for the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent devastation of Judaea, and its emptying of some majority of Jews, by 135 CE. Obviously, the early Christian notion that the destruction of the Temple was God’s fundamental and final judgment of the Jews as accursed was

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 97 leading nowhere good for the scattered Jewish communities of Europe, particularly as Christianity’s influence increased from the second through the sixth centuries CE. It may be that Saint Augustine (354–430 CE), who also advanced no novel explanations for the Temple’s destruction but generally agreed with the idea that God was punishing the Jews for their rejection of Jesus, saved the Jews by postulating the “witness doctrine” of the preservation of the Jews. This doctrine states that the preserving of the Jewish people and their traditions was “part of a divine plan to facilitate the ultimate triumph of Christianity. By clinging to the books and practices of the Old Testament, Jews would safeguard the scriptural witness to the truth of the New Testament.”89 Mendelssohn posited that Augustine made Jewish survival possible with this doctrine when he wrote “Blessed be the ashes of that humane theologian who was the first to declare that God was preserving us as a visible proof of the truth of the Nazarene religion. But for this lovely brainwave, we would have been exterminated long ago.”90 It may indeed be that the only reason Jews were allowed to survive by early Christians was this “lovely brainwave” of Augustine’s which was indeed novel and not, as Garroway points out, any kind of “consummation of a trend in early Christian thought.” Christian attitudes toward the Jews, particularly as they developed in the context of Adversus Judaeos literature, where narratives and explanations of the Temple’s destruction found a natural home, seemed to be veering toward a full rejection of Jewish theology, life, and, in some extreme cases like Marcion, scripture itself.91 While not generally aimed at real Jews or Jewish theologians, the Adversus Judaeos genre was instead a body of writing that depicted “Jews” and “Judaism” as rhetorical strawmen to be deployed against champions of divergent Christian doctrines. As such rhetorical strawmen, and with as powerful a sign of God’s disfavor as the Roman destruction of the Temple, it was perhaps only natural that the depiction of Jews would skew towards evil as time went on. In such a context, Augustine’s “witness doctrine” was indeed remarkable. Rome, the Jews, and Judaea after 70 CE

The latter third of the first-century CE was a fascinating moment for monotheistic history. It was not the first time that the Jews had to contend with the notion that God might not be able to prevent every catastrophe from befalling them. They had already experienced many catastrophes, and before 70 CE, the most traumatic was the Babylonian destruction of Solomon’s Temple. The authors of the works of the Prophets had already grappled with the theological implications of the First Temple’s destruction and happened upon a template that later Monotheists could echo. The notion that the omnipotent and benevolent God must be punishing the Jews for their sins, and that the punishment was the destruction of their national capital, eventually morphed into the specific condemnations of Zedekiah in the Book of Jeremiah.

98  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) The use of human sin as an explanation for apparent catastrophe would be picked up by the early Christians in their explanation of Jesus’ death. In that narrative, preserved in the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus’ death at the hands of the Romans is not a punishment bestowed upon the sinful by God, but rather God’s redemptive offering to himself on behalf of the faithful, specifically to absolve them of, rather than punish them for, their sins. But, from the Jewish perspective, the challenges imposed by the destruction of the First Temple turned out to be nowhere near so exigent as the crisis that the Jewish community faced following the destruction of the Second, which itself happened in the midst of the Jesus movement’s abandonment of its Jewish national identity in favor of a universal mission of global salvation (from the Christian perspective) or domination (from the Jewish). When the Temple was destroyed, Christianity was still in its earliest stirrings; at least three of the four Gospels had likely not yet even been written. As Judaism staggered from the blow of the Temple’s destruction for some centuries, and an increasingly powerful, largely hostile, and self-assured Christianity challenged the morality, and in some cases, the desirability, of continued Jewish existence through the writings of some of the Church Fathers, it became clear that “adapt or perish” was Judaism’s only option. The Temple had been the center not only of Jewish religious life, but also of Jewish politics and culture. Religiously, the power of the Jewish priests was fundamentally broken, in that they now lacked a Temple at which to perform ritual sacrifices. Culturally and politically, the final rift with Rome and the exile of most Jews from Judaea would come after the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132–135 CE. Ultimately, it was the Rabbis who would re-create Judaism in their own image, in religious competition with Christianity and in cultural negotiation with the Greco-Roman world. The reconstruction, or perhaps reimagining, of Judaism in a post-Temple world, contending with Roman power, Greek cultural hegemony, and Christian monotheistic rivalry, was an ongoing, centuries-long intellectual endeavor. There is some record of the discussions the Jewish Rabbis had with each other in the form of the Talmud, although the process of editing and compilation that preserves those discussions is certainly not without its own unique brand of interpretive, linguistic, and historiographical challenges. The picture of the Rabbinic relationship to the Temple—while they lamented its destruction, and often longed for its reconstruction—is complicated by the fact that their religious and cultural leadership would not be possible in a world with a functional Temple. Presumably, should the Temple be reconstructed, the religious and cultural power the Rabbis assumed after 70 CE would devolve back to the priests. Rabbinic narratives of the Temple’s destruction, and their explanations for it, are consequently gentle, and occasionally even fanciful. The tone of whimsy that appears in some of them is offset by the by-now expected self-blame, which, in the Talmud, is even more specific about the nature of the sins committed, and the identity of the sinners, than is Jeremiah. It should be borne in mind that Josephus’ rather

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 99 general accounting of the Jewish sins that culminated in God’s destruction (even in Josephus, not the Romans’ destruction) of the Temple, which was specified by the Church Fathers as having to do with Jesus, will similarly be elaborated by the Rabbis. How the Rabbis came to be in this position of prominence following the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Temple is worth discussing, even in cursory form. It was several centuries later that the Rabbis came to be the leaders of the Jewish world, but because our picture of the Jewish memory of the era is filtered through a Rabbinic lens, the question of when the Rabbis rose to prominence is a complicated one. Even as Jerusalem smoldered, and small numbers of proto-Christian Apostles were taking the news of Jesus to the Greco-Roman world, there were still come pockets of Jewish resistance, most notably the zealots atop the fortress plateau of Masada, near the Dead Sea. The Romans were understandably concerned that Titus’ failure to prevent the Temple’s destruction, or his ordering of it, would enrage Jews not just in Judaea, but throughout the Empire, and so made some almost immediate efforts and conciliation. Choosing to receive the Jewish insurrection as an act of nationalism rather than religion, the Romans attempted to treat the religious concerns of the Jewish community more gently. This did not stop Vespasian—now Emperor—from imposing the Fiscus Judaicus, and expanding the number of Jews who were obligated to pay it, as part of his attempts to solve his administration’s financial difficulties. In effect, after 70 CE the Jews “purchased the privilege of worshipping to their own deity” through the payment of “a recurrent reminder of Judaea’s national humiliation.” Predictably, the tax “served as an irritant that prevented the sores of defeat from healing.”92 The Jews in Judaea reconstituted themselves in cities that had been spared, including Yavneh and Tiberius. Largely due to the efforts of Agrippa II in Rome, Roman occupation of Judaea was much more tolerable than before; after the capture of the hilltop at Masada in 73 CE, there was no real threat of another Jewish rebellion, and so both Emperors Vespasian and Titus ruled the territory with a lighter hand. Titus’ successor, Domitian (81–96 CE) was far more hostile to both Judaism and Christianity, and openly persecuted them. The Church historian Eusebius recorded that Domitian gave orders that the entire Davidic line should be put to death, an act of state brutality that was likely only prevented by his assassination and replacement with the power-sharing pair of Nerva and Trajan, the former of whom died in 98 CE; thereafter Trajan ruled alone until his death in 117 CE. Trajan was generally disinterested in Jews and Judaea specifically; his eyes were on a larger prize, and for much of his career pursued the conquest of Parthia, the reconstituted Empire of the Persians. The crisis of Trajan’s reign began when the Parthian Emperor Pacorus II installed his son on the Armenian throne in 100 CE, which violated the Parthian–Roman agreement that, while Armenia (a buffer territory) would remain under Parthian dominion, the Romans would maintain a veto over the identity of its king. In 100 CE,

100  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) Trajan was preoccupied with a war in Dacia (present-day Romania and Moldavia), but in 113 CE, with Dacia pacified, Trajan moved his legions into Mesopotamia. Despite early successes, Trajan could not maintain the military initiative, and when his supply lines stretched, the Parthian king (now Osroes) mounted a counterattack. Needing the legions that were then tasked with keeping Judaea pacified, and aware of both the large Jewish community in Babylon and the potential for the Jews in Judaea to take advantage of the weak moment and mount another rebellion, Trajan ordered the Temple rebuilt. Whether he was sincere or simply using the imperial pulpit to soothe a potentially insurrectionist population in Judaea is impossible to determine. Obviously, Trajan’s ordered Temple was never constructed. While some Rabbis, including the famous Akiva, were overjoyed at the pronouncement, a great number of people opposed the reconstruction project as proposed by Trajan. First there were the Judaean nationalists, concerned that the project would eliminate the popularity of their message, who argued that the Third Temple would be nothing more than a replica. The Samaritans, a religious community in the vicinity, suggested to Trajan that the Jews would stop paying the Fiscus Judaicus. Eventually, Trajan canceled the project, evidently convinced by his underlings that Jewish religious sentiments were unwise to stoke. The cancellation gave fodder to the nationalist voices who were calling for another rebellion, a hopeless endeavor the Rabbis (by their own account) sought to quell. Memories of Roman persecution, from Caligula to Nero to Domitian, and of Roman duplicity, such as Trajan’s vacillation on a Temple reconstruction, continued to fester until 132 CE. By that time, Publius Aelius Hadrian, the former commander of the Roman military east, had been ruling as emperor for 15 years. Hadrian had inherited Trajan’s geopolitical bequest, but not necessarily his ambition. Trajan had extended the borders of the Roman Empire to their greatest extent, conquering, though not securing. Formerly Parthian territories east of the Euphrates, including Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Adiabene, even as unrest simmered in Judaea. There, the sentiment was strong that the Parthians would be better overlords than the Romans; after all, had it not been the Persians who had rebuilt the Temple after its destruction by the Babylonians? Did not Jews in their own times live better, less oppressed lives in Parthian Babylon than in Roman Judaea? Hadrian offered some conciliatory executive actions, such as the removal of the highly unpopular Luius Quietus as governor. However, Hadrian was apparently insincere in his promises for increased Jewish autonomy, and aggressively pushed an assimilationist GrecoRoman cultural and legal agenda in Judaea from about 125 CE. The Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah, an influential voice of calm and discourager of open and certainly doomed rebellion, died in 130 CE. So, when Hadrian began the process of rebuilding Jerusalem not as the center of Jewish life it had once been (after 70 CE, the Jewish religious and intellectual center had moved from Jerusalem to a set of smaller cities like Yavneh and Lydda, about which more in a moment) but as a Greco-Roman cultural center

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 101 called Aelia Capitolina, there were precious few voices remaining urging restraint. Most egregiously from the Jewish perspective, this meant the construction of a pagan temple on the site of the ruined Temple. Even the famous sage Rabbi Akiva, in his 90s, publicly supported the notion of rebellion. Whatever leadership the Rabbis may have held in the beginning of this catastrophic affair did not last, as the leading Rabbis were arrested and executed even before the fighting started. The mantle of the rebellion was taken up by a secular Jew known as Simon Bar Kosiba, also known as Bar Kochba (“son of a star”). Bar Kochba’s soldiers were well prepared for their insurrection, with arms caches, secret tunnel networks, and underground hideouts in the hills surrounding Jerusalem. They used relatively sophisticated guerilla strategies. None of it mattered. Hadrian had pulled back from Trajan’s overextensions in Parthian territory, and so Rome was undistracted by other geopolitical challenges. The emperor was able to deploy the entire military might of the Roman East to the problematic province, and the war ended with Bar Kochba’s death during a final Roman massacre at the fortress of Beitar, near Jerusalem. Sicker suggests that if the rebels in the 66–70 CE, which ended with the destruction of the Temple, had had the leadership and planning of Bar Kochba, they may well have succeeded in throwing off the Romans.93 By the same token, had the Romans been more distracted, it is possible that Bar Kochba’s rebellion might have had a different end. The end of the rebellion seemed to also to augur the end of Jewish nationhood, which disappeared as a viable political program until the late 19thcentury CE. Jews (and Jewish Christians, whom the Romans were disinclined to distinguish) were barred from the area surrounding Jerusalem, although they continued to maintain a presence in neighboring districts like Galilee, Arabia Petraea, Decapolis, and Phoenicia. The city of Jerusalem was officially renamed Aelia Capitolina by its Roman overlords, and the province was renamed as well—from “Judaea” to “Syria Palaestina,” a rebranding that combined the country’s geographical location (Syria, a word referring to the wider Eastern Mediterranean) with an implicit appellative transfer of indigeneity from the Jews to the Philistines, ancient foes of the Jews who inhabited the coastal regions. The imperial reassignment of the land’s identity was meant to erase Jewish connections to the land. The Romans had evidently had enough of the unassimilable territory, and hoped to transform it into a quiescent, productive, compliant province, culturally aligned to the homogenized imperial cultura. But the Rabbis who, following the Beitar massacre, reclaimed the cultural leadership of the Jewish people in exile, as geopolitically cautious as they were, never abandoned that connection. The Birth of Rabbinic Judaism: The Academy at Yavneh

The 70 CE destruction of the Temple was a crisis for Jewish religious life. The priests lost their ritual function, and in some way or another, the Rabbis took over the cultural and religious leadership of the Jewish people. 135 CE, the

102  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) final defeat of Bar Kochba’s forces at Beitar, marks a similarly emphatic break in Jewish national history. Where the first major Jewish rebellion ended with a blow to Jewish religious life, the second ended with what seemed at the time to be the coup de grace to Jewish national and cultural life. The Jews of Jerusalem and its surroundings were scattered into the Roman diaspora, there to continue existing as a collection of occasionally accepted, but mostly excluded, frequently mistrusted, regularly persecuted, and intermittently slaughtered minority communities. The change of the world around them from a pagan world to a Christian one did them no favors; as already discussed, the utility of the Jews as a rhetorical strawman in Church treatises of the Adversus Judaeos genres had real-world consequences for Jews, who were subjected to blood libels, lynching, crusades, pogroms, and attempted genocides over the subsequent two millennia. The Jews had become a landless, scattered nation, run afoul of the regional superpower. They had also become a religion that was treated as competitor/ predecessor faith against which to polemicize. Ultimately, the Jews became an “other” minority community, suspected and accused of ill-will toward God and his people, in the wake of their disastrous Roman defeats. This environment seems an unlikely one in which a religious-intellectual tradition may flourish, and yet flourish it did, thanks to the creativity and adaptability of Judaism’s leaders. The Rabbis responsible for the reinvention (there is no other word that is appropriate) of Judaism had to be willing to alter almost everything about the ethno-religious national community for it to survive: its rituals, its cultural mores, its spirituality and its mysticism, its place in the world, and its very relationship to the past. Judaism’s sine qua non, if we may be forgiven for deploying a piece of Latin academese at this ironic moment, wasone God, all-powerful, who has chosen the Jews to fulfill his commandments. Everything else about the religious tradition was evidently on the table. It is doubtful that the body of Rabbinic literature that emerged out of this attempt to maintain the survival of the Jewish people took the shape it did as the result of some initial post-70 CE Rabbinic intent. Still, the literature that ultimately emerged did the trick: the Jews survived but with a textual, rather than a physical, center. Rabbinic literature in general, and the Talmud in particular, is an amalgamated, compiled, and much-edited and re-edited body of work. It is the record of a multi-generational set of conversations about God, ritual, history, law, community, family, and individual, the compilation and interpretation of which kept Jews in conversation with each other for thousands of years. The Temple had been destroyed, the Jews had been scattered, and the enemies of the Jews seemed to be ascendant. For the Rabbis, that was no reason to give up the command to live by God’s law. The Talmud records their attempt to muddle through. The major change to Jewish cultural and political life in the post-Bar Kochba period was the fundamental change of Jerusalem’s nature. Jerusalem was the ancient political capital of the Kingdom of Israel and the short-lived Hasmonean kingdom, and the provincial capital of several Jewish-dominated

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 103 provinces under the Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Ptolemids, Seleucids, and Romans. After Bar Kochba, Aelia Capitolina was the almost, but not completely, judenrein provincial capital of the rebranded Roman province of Syria Palaestina. By the fourth century, the population of Aelia was essentially Christian, Greek-speaking, and culturally acclimated to Roman overlordship. Other parts of the surrounding territory, including Galilee and parts of the coastal plain remained exclusively or predominantly Jewish, and it was in these environments that the important works of Jewish literature in the period were composed (including the misnamed “Jerusalem Talmud,” which is more properly referred to as the Palestinian Talmud: its writers were in the province of Syrian Palaestina, but emphatically not in Jerusalem). Other cities, like Caesarea, Gaza, and Scythopolis became largely Christian; there was also a significant pagan population in the territory, as well as a good number of Samaritans. When Jerusalem was destroyed, Jewish religious life within the land of Israel survived in the form of Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakkai’s Rome-approved academy at Yavneh (also known as Jamnia). Whatever future there was going to be for Judaism after 70 CE was bound to be tied to Roman concerns, and Ben Zakkai’s position had always been quiescent in the face of overwhelming Roman power. There are several fantastic tales of the founding of the academy at Yavneh under the auspices of the Pharisee Ben Zakkai, most of which involve his personal ingratiation to Vespasian by prophesying the general’s ascension to the emperorship (recalling the fact that Josephus did the same and thereby earned his favor, it would seem that predicting his reign was the way to Vespasian’s heart). Some of the stories about Ben Zakkai involve tales of his escape from Jerusalem while it was besieged. These are almost certainly untrue. “One may regard,” writes Neusner, “the story of a smooth transition from Jerusalem to Yavneh with some suspicion. Nonetheless, if in details the several traditions present difficulties, we may legitimately conclude that their point was roughly congruent to the course of events. Yoḥanan did escape from Jerusalem before its destruction. He did go willingly and with Roman approval to Yavneh. He did begin in an elementary way to reconstitute legitimate Jewish authority there.”94 That the Romans would seek to empower a cooperative branch of what was a diverse pre-70 CE Jewish sectarian picture, including Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and perhaps some others, is in keeping with their practical approach to governance. The destruction of the Temple aside, there is every indication that their goal in 66–70 CE was to reestablish political quiet, and not to persecute a subject people for religious reasons. Brutal as they could be, the Romans were not Babylonians or Assyrians. There were Jews, like Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, who had not participated in the rebellion within Judaea; similarly, there were existing Jewish communities throughout the various cities of the Roman Empire. Finally, there were Jews on the outskirts of the Roman borderlands with the Parthians, such as in Adiabene, and beyond the Roman domains in Parthia itself. Allowing Yoḥanan ben Zakkai to establish his school in Yavneh for the continuance of Jewish

104  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) learning allowed the Romans convincingly to argue to the Jews both within and without their territory that the destruction of the Temple had not been an attempt to impose even a Carthaginian fate on Jewish religious practice or on Jewish culture. Yoḥanan ben Zakkai was not alone in his need to explain the disaster that had befallen the Jews. It was a theological problem that would captivate the next several centuries of monotheistic thought, both Jewish and Christian. We have already discussed two of these perspectives. The first, expressed by Josephus, was that the Jews had sinned by foolishly taking up arms against the Roman juggernaut, and that God had punished them for their militancy and lack of faith in God. Not monotheists themselves, the Romans certainly agreed on the subject of Jewish folly. The Christian fathers, from Eusebius through Augustine, had their own explanation: the Temple’s destruction was the validation of their Christian theology. Jewish apocalypticists who witnessed the destruction saw it as a harbinger of the coming messianic age, declaring in documents like the Apocalypse of Ezra that the Roman age was nearing its end.95 Yoḥanan ben Zakkai and the Rabbis who followed him in his academy at Yavneh had a narrower path to walk in explaining the catastrophe. Unable to depart from the unquestionable truth that whatever happened must be in accordance with the will of the Almighty, averse to the easy explanation of Roman triumphalism, and skeptical of both Christian and Jewish eschatological promises and expectations, the Rabbinic response, as recorded in the Talmud, was a very practical one. The Rabbis themselves were probably a continuation of the Pharisaic sect, although they made no real effort to assert their Pharisaic heritage after the Temple was destroyed; instead, they rebranded themselves as “the sages of Israel,” the appellation an unsubtle affirmation that the other sects had fallen into irrelevancy. To the best of our understanding, the others, including the Zealots, the Sicarii, and the “Fourth Philosophy” mentioned by Josephus, were all weakened in the 66–70 CE rebellion. The Sadducees, the Pharisees’ major competitor, were essentially composed of the priesthood, and after the destruction of the Temple their numbers dwindled. The Rabbis’ abandonment of the “Pharisee” appellation was motivated as much by their desire to include all Jews in their flock as it was a rejection of the notion that they constituted a sect; as Cohen points out, “sectarian groups rarely see themselves as sects.”96 While some have seen the birth of the Rabbinic movement as the act of “triumphalist Pharisees who eagerly excluded their rivals,” in fact the intent was “to proclaim the end of sectarianism.”97 The destruction of the Temple had destroyed the power of the priesthood along with it. Even as they earnestly wept for the disaster (so they tell us), the Rabbis, beginning with Yoḥanan ben Zakkai in Yavneh, were the beneficiaries of the end of the sacrificial cult. The Yavneh Rabbis’ passivity in the face of Roman power, not just in 70 CE but also in 132 CE, allowed them the political space in which to reconstruct their theology and to

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 105 establish their political dominance over Jewish affairs. There they devised a program of redemption and renewal, where the disasters of the past and their consequences offered guidance to God’s will, and lessons for a future Jewish reconstruction. Neusner sums up Yoḥanan’s perspective: “He never said ‘take comfort because in a little while, suffering will cease.’ Yoḥanan called on people to achieve a better fortune through their own efforts. Like Josephus, he taught that Israel can be happy if she submits to God and the Romans and follows the laws laid down by both. Both conceived of the fulfillment of Jewish law as interpreted by the Pharisees to be the good life in this world and assurance of a portion in the next. Yoḥanan, unlike Josephus, did not go to Rome but remained at home among the suffering folk.”98 The Academy at Yavneh was responsible for producing a succession of Rabbis who engaged, first and foremost, with the theological questions raised by Jewish suffering. These included Rabbi Akiva, who died as a supporter of the Bar Kochba rebellion; and Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the man most directly responsible for the compilation of the Mishnah, the first work of Rabbinic literature. The Mishnah is a collection of 63 tractates divided into six orders, covering a wide range of topics. It is preserved as the inauguration of every Talmudic chapter, and operates as the opening of Rabbinic discussion in both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Jewish tradition holds that the Mishnah is part of the Torah she-b’al peh: the “oral Torah,” which was given to Moses on Mount Sinai but not recorded in the written Torah (the five books of Moses). It is equally binding in its legal and practical authority to the written Torah. The Hebrew-language Mishnah is a pioneering work of religious literature in the sense that it self-consciously included perspectives with which the various generations of rabbis who were the Talmud’s authors and editors disagreed. No discernible attempt appears to have been made to excise wrong ideas from the Talmud’s pages; rather, Mishnaic ideas that were considered to be wrong are included and discussed in the Gemara, the mostly-Aramaic-language rabbinic responses to the Mishnah, often in excruciating detail. The Rabbis were prepared, even eager, to accept legal and practical disputes, with the string attached that sectarianism would vanish.99 Only a unified, if contentious, Judaism could survive in a Roman, and then increasingly Christian, world. Critically, though they argued and disagreed about every matter brought before them, the unifying perspective of Rabbinic literature is Rabbi Yoḥanan’s notion that redemption may be found through proper action, proper observance of God’s divine, and study undertaken to determine just what God’s will is in any case that may potentially arise. In the literature produced by the Rabbis, no Messiah, no priestly blood sacrifice, and certainly no combination of the two (essentially, Jesus) was necessary; all the Jews had to do was to defer to the pronouncements of their Rabbis and follow their edicts to the best of their abilities, and God would be faithful. As sure as punishment followed sin, redemption would follow repentance and abandonment of improper ritual action.

106  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) The Rabbis of Babylon: The Exiled (by Choice) Elites

When Solomon’s Temple was sacked and destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth- century BCE, it was the lower-class Jews who remained in Jerusalem and its environs. The elites of Jewish society were uprooted and forcibly removed to Babylon. While it is unclear just how many Jews the Babylonians forced upon this migration, there were certainly enough to form a viable, lasting community that did not simply assimilate into the metropolitan Babylonian culture. As a matter of historical chance, the Jewish community of Jerusalem was in greater danger for communal extinction via cultural assimilation than the Jews who chose to remain in Babylon after being allowed to return. Two centuries later, Jerusalem would be brought into the cultural hegemony of Hellenism from Alexander the Great until the advent of Islam, and the pull of Hellenism in the Eastern Mediterranean was sufficient to generate a Hasmonean backlash. By contrast, the Jews of Babylonia swiftly, and as it happens fortuitously, fell under Persian rule relatively shortly after their exile. The Persians under Cyrus and at least most of his successors seem to have been far more open-minded about cultural diversity—perhaps deliberately so, as a policy aimed at domestic tranquility in a polyglot, multicultural, religiously diverse polity—than the Temple-destroying, idol-kidnapping Babylonians had been. Of course, to be fair to them, the Babylonians did not invent the practices of forced migrations, deadly and destructive religious taunting, and deity abduction; such punishments for resisting had a long and stately history well before the Babylonians appeared on the world scene. When the Persians captured Babylon in the generation following the destruction of the First Temple, and began construction of the Second, they allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Some did; once again, we do not know the number of Jews who chose to remain in Babylon under the Achaemenids, but life under Cyrus’ empire seems to have been sufficiently attractive to a viable number of Jews to decline the opportunity to return to Judea. While these Babylonian Jews, like their co-nationals in Jerusalem, had their brush with Hellenism under Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids, there is nothing to suggest that there was a trend toward assimilation with the dominant culture, be it Persian or Greek, among them. International affairs continued around these Babylonian Jews, who remained in the diaspora by choice. The Achaemenids were replaced by the Seleucids; the Seleucids fell to the Romans in the West after a period of decline two centuries BCE. Because of that same decline, the Persians reasserted themselves in Iran, and are remembered as the Parthians for this era (ca. 240 BCE to 226 CE). The major dynasties were the Arsacids and the Sasanids or Sasanians.100 Neusner ably sums up what we know about the Jews of this period: The community, perhaps half a million people, consisted of the descendants of the Judeans exiled in the early sixth century B.C. Of its

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 107 culture before the first century A.D. we know practically nothing. We may take it for granted that the Jews revered Yahweh, the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Mosaic Law. The community must have possessed its own authoritative traditions on what God expected of them, and those traditions would have consisted of the Law and ad hoc interpretations, presumably by local priests and other sages, of its laws and theology. For the rest, we have no evidence other than the Talmud’s anachronistic attribution of a fully articulated rabbinic tradition to Babylonian Jewry from earliest days.101 After the first century, the quantity and quality of our information are a little bit better, although we must still contend with the historiographical challenge posed by the fact that our main source of information on the Babylonian Jewish community, the Babylonian Talmud itself, was not edited until the sixth century CE at the earliest, some four centuries later. Like their counterparts in Yavneh, who created and recorded the Mishnah, the Babylonian rabbis created a Mishnah-based Talmud that was heavily influenced by (and thus reflective of) their own theological and political ideals. In other words, as a source for the real-world history of the Babylonian Jews, the Babylonian Talmud has all the problems of the Torah and the Gospels, save the claim of divine authorship (and even that claim is not totally absent from the historiographical picture, given the “oral Torah” notion). Except for the outbreak of a moment of Magian zealotry under the early Sasanids, the Jews under the Parthians were largely permitted to govern themselves, regardless of whether it was the Arsacids or the Sasanids in charge. The head of the Jewish community was the holder of the office of the reysh galūta or “exilarch,” a position about whose origins we are largely ignorant; the Davidic figure seems to have functioned as a kind of intermediary between the Jews of Babylonia (and wider Iraq and Persia) and the imperial power, whether they be Persian, Greek, or, eventually, Muslim. The man occupying the analogous position to Yoḥanan ben Zakkai in Babylon was Abba Arikha (175–247 CE), commonly known simply as Rav. Rav was responsible for the foundation of the Talmudic academies of Babylonia, eventually known as the Geonic academies, most importantly the academy at Sura. Little is definitively known about him, but the methods he established for studying the Mishnaic texts produced by the Yavnean rabbis ultimately culminated in the structure of the Talmud. Before proceeding to the Talmud itself, it is important to remember that, though the Jewish communities of Babylon and Palestine were indeed separate communities, with different leaders, traditions, and ideas, the veil between them was quite porous. Babylonian rabbis traveled to Yavneh and back; Yavnean rabbis made the same trip in reverse. Members of the two communities spoke with each other, challenged each other, adopted each others’ ideas, and generally agreed with the insights of Yoḥanan ben Zakkai: defying God’s commandments and morays was a sin; sin generated divine

108  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) punishment; repentance would bring redemption; the key to proper repentance was proper action in accordance with the desires of God; and, finally, that God’s desires could be logically deduced through a close reading of traditional texts and debate with other learned men. The rabbis decided that they themselves, as the most learned men of society, were thus the best guides for the community to follow to act in accordance with God’s desires. The Temple had been destroyed, which was clearly God’s divine punishment. Therefore, the people must have been living outside of God’s desires—sinning. Some of the sinners had been wicked, but most were merely ignorant of proper behavior, and the rabbis could guide them to redemption. The destruction of the Temple, in other words, necessitated the elevation of the rabbis to positions of moral and theological leadership. Rabbinic Narratives of the Temple’s Destruction in the Talmud

Jerusalem was destroyed, according to the penultimate tractate of the Babylonian Talmud’s order of Nashim, because of poor hospitality on the part of a leading citizen and the tacit sufferance of this misbehavior on the part of the Rabbis. Alternatively, it was destroyed because one Rabbi, Zechariah ben Avqulas, was politically foolish enough (the text uses the word “meekness,” anvetanut, to describe him) to refuse a borderline-blemished Temple offering the Romans sent as a test of Jewish loyalty. Perhaps it was the Jerusalemite warmongers who burned the food reserves to force the issue with the besieging Romans, or it might have been the indecision of Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakkai in the face of Vespasian’s three-year siege of the city. Once again, the Romans are not blamed. In fact, the Romans are barely mentioned at all. Beyond a brief mention of Nero as the first enemy general to be sent against Jerusalem and a bizarre, otherwise unsubstantiated story of his conversion to Judaism, and a quick mention of his replacement in the field by Vespasian, the Talmudic accounts of Jerusalem’s destruction are a litany of Jewish self-reflection, moralizing, and self-blame. It is no surprise, therefore, that Gittin, the massekhet that treats the destruction of the Temple, the very event that necessitated the creation of a Talmud, should offer a variety of explanations for the watershed catastrophe of Jewish history. Needless to say, the Rabbis offering their perspectives on the causes of the Temple’s destruction were not eyewitnesses to the event, and were basing their notions of what happened to the Temple on the account of Josephus Flavius, responding either to the account itself or oral traditions that derived from it (or, perhaps, ignoring the historical witnesses altogether, in deference to the potential moral value of the story).102 Neusner even refers to the Gittin account as a prima facie block of Talmud that demonstrates the impossibility of using obviously literary creations for the purposes of historical reconstruction,103 and Yassif counted the destruction of the Temple among 25 “stories of destruction” in Gittin, to include

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 109 accounts of the destruction of Tur Malka and Bethar (reported in the tractate’s Mishnah as destroyed on account of a cock and hen, and a shaft of leather, respectively).104 What Rabbis actually wished to discuss was not the catastrophe of Temple itself, but rather under what circumstances catastrophe may strike. Gittin 55b opens with “the point,” and then, as so many sections of the Talmud do, meanders its way from the beginning of the topic back to it again (eventually). Rabbi Yoḥanan, whose indecisiveness in the face of Vespasian’s siege will be submitted as a yet another potential cause of Jerusalem’s destruction, begins the Mishnah of the passage by asking about a proper example to prove the phrase “Happy is the man who always fears, but he who hardens his heart will fall into ill luck.”105 The fact that this story falls within a tractate whose primary concern is halakhic divorce perhaps provides some context: catastrophes may strike at all levels, from the personal to the communal, but all may be traced back to one form of inflexibility or another. The initial tale of destruction in Gittin 55b tells of a man who threw a party, and instructed his servant to go bring his friend Kamza. Instead, the servant erroneously brought a man named Bar Kamza (an understandable mistake), who just so happened to be the host’s primary social rival. The reasons behind the rivalry are never revealed. When the mistake was discovered, Bar Kamza, the recipient of the mis-addressed invitation, offered three successive solutions to avoid the public shame of being asked to leave a party: first, to pay for his own share; next, to pay for half the party; and, finally, to foot the bill for the entire soiree. The host was not mollified, and “took him by the hand and put him out.”106 The Rabbis of the community, the text immediately then informs us, “were sitting there and did not stop him, [which] shows that they agreed with [the host in expelling Bar Kamza from the party].” At this point, the aggrieved Bar Kamza went to the Romans (the text says that he went to the “Emperor,” kisar, but it is not meant to be understood that he went to Rome; more likely, the text wishes to report that Bar Kamza went to Vespasian, the future Emperor, who was nearby) and reported that his countrymen were rebellious. To prove this charge, he devised a scheme whereby he encouraged Vespasian to send the Jews an offering for the Temple. The Jews’ willingness to sacrifice this Roman gift, Bar Kamza implied, would be a test of their loyalty. With the Roman calf in his possession, Bar Kamza surreptitiously placed a blemish on the calf either on its lip or its eye (“in a place where we [Jews] count it a blemish but they [the Romans] do not”). The blemish had its intended effect: the Rabbis were split on whether to offer the blemished calf. The rabbinic controversy spurred by the blemished calf is entirely plausible, seeing as how it is reported in a book whose organizing principle is rabbinic disagreement. While some wished to make the offering to avoid trouble with the Romans, others, including Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas, were steadfast in their rejection of the calf, lest the people, who were unaware of the context of this particular animal, come to the mistaken conclusion that blemished

110  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) animals may be offered for sacrifice at the Temple. When Reb Zechariah’s opponents proposed putting Bar Kamza to death to prevent his reporting back to the Romans, Zechariah refused on the grounds that making a blemish on a consecrated animal is not a capital crime. Had Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas been just a little more flexible, Rabbi Yoḥanan concludes, as the story returns to its original question, none of what followed would have happened: “Through the meekness (anvetanut) of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas,107 our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt, and we have been exiled from our land.” In this story, and in all the “destruction cycle” that follows in Gittin, there is not a bad word recorded about the Romans. After all, in this particular story their only willful act was the provision of the rabbis with the gift of a worthy sacrifice. Significantly, the bad behavior that set off the sequence of events—the inhospitality of the host and the rabbis’ apparent tacit approval—was precisely the opposite of the virtue that induced God to select Abraham as the father of the people with whom he would create his covenant (namely, hospitality for the stranger). But the nature of the sin that set off the catastrophe is for the Rabbis to debate. Our purpose here is to draw conclusions about the way the Rabbis understood God to be working in the world, and whether the sin was inhospitality, meekness, scrupulousness, inflexibility, or indecision, all the Rabbis agree that the destruction of the Temple was the Jews’ own fault. The specificity of the sin claims reflects a Jeremiah-phase approach to the destruction. Even with the knowledge of the reasons the Jews gave for the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, this exclusive reliance on self-blame as an explanation remains counterintuitive. The Romans, in their destruction of the Temple, surely must have angered God. After all, according to some non-Jeremiah accounts of the Old Testament, the destruction of the First Temple at the hands of the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar had certainly earned them the wrath of God. The book of Daniel gleefully recounts how Nebuchadnezzar’s son Belshazzar misused the sacred, sacked Temple equipment for a party, and God had responded by destroying the Babylonians and allowing their empire to fall into the hands of the Persians.108 This, of course, was after God had become angry at Belshazzar’s father, Nebuchadnezzar himself, and “when [Nebuchadnezzar] grew haughty and willfully presumptuous, he was deposed from his royal throne and his glory was removed from him….until he came to know that the Most High God is sovereign over the realm of man, and sets over it whom he wishes.”109 So there is a clear and obvious Biblical precedent for the transgression of destroying the Jewish Temple. Now the Romans had repeated the Babylonian crime. The author of the Book of Daniel, in other words, had accounted for the Persian success over the Babylonians as stemming from the Babylonian mistreatment of God’s chosen people; how could the Talmudic Rabbis ignore this direct cognate narrative, and opt for one apparently of their own devising?

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 111 The fact is that the Rabbis, whose disagreements comprise the Talmud, had other things on their minds. The slaughtering of Jews and communal catastrophe seems to be taken for granted by the time Gittin reached its final state, and the goal of the Rabbis was not to provide any sort of purely historical account of that catastrophe. Doing so would have taken the moral out of the history, and given that the goal of the Talmud was to encourage debate and discussion, with the ultimate purpose of keeping Judaism anchored to its own traditions while its people were scattered in exile, blaming the powerful Romans would have defeated the purpose. The opportunity to teach their descendants to be flexible, decisive, and hospitable eclipsed any rabbinic desire to cast aspersions on the Romans, either too powerful to provoke with such seditious barbs, or (later) collapsing or gone, and thus not worth the opprobrium. Blaming the Romans would have also opened familiar questions about the omnipotence of the Jewish God. The Rabbis were not worried about opening cans of worms. They were simply careful about which cans they opened. The omnipotence of God is the elemental, fundamental piece of Rabbinic Judaism, and when the favorite people of an all-powerful God are dealt such a crippling blow, that can only be explained with one of two narratives. Either the God in question was not as powerful as everyone thought—this, indeed, was the story the Ancient Near Eastern worshippers of Marduk, Ashur, Enlil, Osiris, and Ahura Mazda told one other as they sacked each other’s cities—or the people in question had fallen out of favor or had transgressed themselves, and were experiencing God’s discipline. Within that latter narrative structure, the Romans are not the enemies of God, but rather his instrument of discipline. Therefore, they could not be blamed, and God himself, as the universal source of justice, was above liability (one might consider him responsible, but not liable). That left only the Jews themselves,110 and the Rabbis of the Talmud devised a narrative that maintained the omnipotence of God, gave their descendants an explanation of the great catastrophe of the Temple’s destruction, offered a range of disagreements and other possibilities to spur debate, and did not waste the opportunity to provide them with an object lesson on how to avoid destruction at the hands of the more powerful empires among which they were to dwell for millennia: be hospitable to each other, flexible in dealings with the stranger and the ruler, and decisive in the face of coming calamity. Upheaval, devastation, misfortune, and slaughter may be unavoidable, and may even spring from the smallest of misunderstandings (like whether a servant is meant to deliver an invitation to a Kamza or to a Bar Kamza). But, as the Talmud teaches, through flexibility, decisiveness, social cohesion, and hospitality, the impacts and frequency of calamity may be mitigated. Notes 1 Oded Lipschits, “Persian Period Finds from Jerusalem: Facts and Interpretations,” in Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9, Article 120 (2009), 1–30.

112  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 2 See Aleksandra Klęczar, “Alexander in the Jewish Tradition: From Second Temple Writings to Hebrew Alexander Romances,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Alexander the Great, edited by Kenneth Royce Moore (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 379–402. 3 Peter Schäfer, The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27–32. 4 Josephus Flavius, Jewish Antiquities XII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 123. 5 These should not be confused with the modern Orthodox Jewish movement of the same name. 6 Josephus, Antiquities XII, 125–29. 7 Ibid., 129–31. 8 Schäfer, The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World, 42–43. For Schäfer’s discussion of the research, see 43–45. 9 In fact, the distinction between these two sects, and the Essenes, a third sect sometimes mentioned, is anything but simple. In fact, were it not for Josephus, we would have no certainty about even the existence of some of these (as he called them) haireseis. The descriptions presented in this study are safe, but as such they are, by necessity, purposefully general and vague. Having only Josephus as a source is problematic, indeed; we have no notion of what other types of Judaism may have existed—Josephus himself makes reference to a fourth, which he blames for the outbreak of war against Rome in 66 CE, but which he never describes. We are not even sure which sect produced the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran, although they are most commonly associated with the Essenes. See Martin Goodman, “Josephus and Variety in First-century Judaism,” in Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays, edited by M. Goodman (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 33–46; and Martin Goodman, “A Note on the Qumran Sectarians, the Essenes, and Josephus,” in Journal of Jewish Studies, 46 (1995), 161–66. 10 Martin Goodman, “Josephus, The Pharisees and Ancestral Tradition,” in Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays, edited by M. Goodman, 120–21. 11 Martin Goodman, “The Sadducees in First-Century Judaism,” in Ibid., 131. 12 Josephus Flavius, The Jewish War (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), 38. 13 Goodman, Jews in a Graeco-Roman World, 101. 14 Ibid., 101. 15 Ibid., 102. 16 Steve Mason, “What is History? Using Josephus for the Judaean-Roman War,” in The Jewish Revolt Against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mladen Popović (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 157. 17 Fausto Parente, “The Impotence of Titus, or Flavius Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum as an Example of ‘Pathetic’ Historiography,” in Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, edited by Joseph Sievers and Gaia Lembi (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 45. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Ibid., 47–48. See Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, 1.10. 20 Goldenberg, 157. 21 Goodman, “Josephus and Variety in First-Century Judaism,” 35. For an in-depth collection that treats the topic, see Shaye J.D. Cohen and Joshua J. Schwartz., eds., Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 22 Martin Sicker, Between Rome and Jerusalem: 300 Years of Roman-Judaean Relations (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001), 128. Sicker provides a readable summary of the buildup to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath, as originally recorded in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum. See 128–78.

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 113 23 Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, edited by Gaalya Cornfeld (Grand Rapids, MI: Zonderman Publishing House, 1982), 160. Original Bellum Judaicum 2, XI.1–4. 24 Sicker, Between Rome and Jerusalem, 131. 25 Ibid., 131. 26 Ibid., 137. 27 Josephus, The Jewish War, 166; Bellum Judaicum 2.XIII.3–6. 28 Sicker, Between Rome and Jerusalem, 143. 29 Ibid., 144. 30 Ibid., 148. 31 Steve Mason, “Of Audience and Meaning: Reading Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum in the Context of a Flavian Audience,” in Sievers and Lembi, eds., Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, 91–93. 32 Ibid., 98–100. See also Frederick Ahl, “The Art of Safe Criticism in Greek and Rome,” in The American Journal of Philology 105/ 2 (Summer 1984), 174–208. 33 Steve Mason, “Flavius Josephus in Flavian Rome: Reading on and Between the Lines,” in Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, edited by A.J. Boyle and W.J. Dominik (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 559–90. 34 Josephus, The Jewish War, 9; Bellum Judaicum 1.I.3–4. 35 Ibid., 9; Bellum 1.I.4. 36 Ibid., 9–10; Bellum 1.I.4. 37 Ibid., 178; Bellum 2.XVI.4. 38 Ibid., 178; Bellum 2.XVI.4. 39 Ibid., 178–9; Bellum 2.XVI.4. 40 Ibid., 179; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 41 Ibid., 180; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 42 Ibid., 184; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 43 Mehrdad Kia, The Persian Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia, v.1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016), 54–60. 44 Josephus, The Jewish War, 184; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 45 Ibid., 184; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 46 Ibid., 184; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 47 Ibid., 184-185; Bellum 2.XVI.5. 48 Ibid., 312; Bellum 4.X.7. 49 Ibid., 381; Bellum 5.IX.2. 50 Ibid., 382; Bellum 5.IX.3. 51 Ibid., 382; Bellum 5.IX.4 52 All the quotes from Josephus’ speech to the Temple’s defenders come from Ibid., 284–385; Bellum 5.IX.4. 53 Ibid., 421; Bellum 6.IV.5. 54 Ibid., 424; Bellum 6.V.1. 55 Ibid., 444; Bellum 6.IX.1. 56 Exodus 17:6. 57 Tacitus, Histories, 5.13.1–2, translated in Kelly Shannon-Henderson, “Tacitus on the Destruction of the Temple” (Paper presented at Society for Classical Studies Virtual Annual Meeting, January 9, 2021). I am indebted to Dr. ShannonAnderson for sending me a copy of her presentation notes. 58 Joshua D. Garroway, Paul’s Gentile-Jews: Neither Jew or Gentile but Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 59 Martin Goodman, Josephus’ The Jewish War: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 18–19. 60 Josephus, The Jewish War, 509; Bellum 7.XI.5.

114  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 61 Tertullian, Against Marcion 3.2, translated by Peter Holmes in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, edited Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1887), 321–22. 62 Andrew S. Jacobs, “Adversus Iudaeos,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, first edition, edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craig B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013), 111–13. 63 Ibid., 111. 64 Cf. Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, AD 135–425 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1986), who suggests that in some cases, there may have been actual debates recorded by this literature. 65 Jacobs, “Adversus Iudaeos,” 113. 66 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974) was the landmark work that touched off the modern debate. 67 Joshua Garroway, “Church Fathers and Antisemitism from the 2nd Century through Augustine (end of 450 CE),” in The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, edited by Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022), 71. 68 Ibid., 68. 69 See Deuteronomy 16:5–6. 70 Here Justin is referring to two goats to be offered during the fast, the scapegoat and the sacrificial goat, which he alludes to as representing the first and second comings of Jesus. 71 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho: Selections from the Fathers of the Church, volume 3, edited by Michael Slusser (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 61–62. 72 Ibid., 27. 73 Ibid., 27–28. 74 Jennifer Wright Knust, “Roasting the Lamb: Sacrifice and Sacred Text in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho,” in Religion and Violence: The Biblical Heritage, edited by David A. Bernat and Jonathan Klawans (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), 105–6. 75 Tertullian, “An Answer to the Jews,” translated by the Rev. S. Thelwall in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, volume 3 of The Anti-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, edited by the Reverend Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1887), 151. 76 Ibid, 159. 77 Group of seven. In this case, one hebdomad refers to seven years. 78 Tertullian, “Answer to the Jews,” 160. 79 Ibid., 160. 80 Unction of the royal chrism: the anointing (unction) of the appropriate myrrhbased oil concoction (chrism) to be dripped on the heads of kings. 81 Tertullian, “Answer to the Jews,” 169. 82 Ibid., 171–72. 83 Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian’s Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 84 Jennifer Wright Knust, “Tertullian’s Aduersus Iudaeos: A Rhetorical Analysis (review),” in Journal of Christian Studies, 17/4 (Winter, 2009), 687–88. 85 Garroway, “Church Fathers and Antisemitism,” 70.

The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 115 86 Ibid., 70. 87 See Boyarin, Border Lines, passim. It should be noted that, although the discussion here focuses on Christian engagement with the Jewish catastrophe of the destruction of the Temple, and as such much anti-Jewish polemic enters into the discussion, the Rabbis of the Talmud were not silent on Jesus, and had no difficulty, on the rare occasion they mentioned him, of creating some polemic of their own. On this, see Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 88 Hippolytus, Expository Treatise Against the Jews, translated by J. H. MacMahon, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1886), 7. 89 Garroway, “Church Fathers and Antisemitism,” 66. 90 Max Saperstein, Moments of Crisis in Jewish-Christian Relations (London: UNKNO, 1989), 11, cited in Ibid., 66. 91 Ibid., 81. 92 Sicker, Between Rome and Jerusalem, 170. 93 Ibid., 187. 94 Jacob Neusner, A Life of Yohanan Ben Zakkai, ca. 1-80 C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 168–69. 95 Ibid., 181–82. 96 Shaye J.D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), 227. 97 Ibid., 227. 98 Neusner, A Life of Yohanan Ben Zakkai, 187. 99 Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 228. 100 For a political history of the Jews under the Persians, see Jacob Neusner, Israel and Iran in Talmudic Times: A Political History (New York: University Press of America, 1986). 101 Jacob Neusner, “Politics and Theology in Talmudic Babylonia” (B.G. Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies, Syracuse University, May 15, 1969). 102 Rubenstein, 139, n. 2. 103 Idem., 140, n. 3. 104 Ibid., n. 6. 105 Ashrei adam mefached tamid u’mekasheh levo yipol b’raʿa. Proverbs 28:14. 106 Gittin 56a. 107 Rubenstein points out that the name “Avkulas,” involves wordplay, which could be Av-qolas—“Chief Blockhead.” See Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 149, n. 28. It is also worth noting that the names “Kamza” and “Bar Kamza” mean “Locust” and “Son of Locust,” so the swarms of Romans that are shortly to besiege the city may be hiding behind the name of this key character. 108 Daniel 5:1–30. The Daniel story in the Tanakh contains a number of ahistorical elements, including the identity of the man leading the Persian conquests. According to this narrative, that man’s name is Darius the Mede; according to every other source out there, including other parts of the Tanakh, the conqueror in question is Cyrus the Great. None of this questions the fact that the Rabbis would have understood God to be quite angry indeed with the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzer and Belshazzar in particular, and that his anger is reflected in the text. 109 Ibid., 20–21.

116  The Destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) 110 Elsewhere in the Talmud (Yoma 9b) the destruction of the two Temples is linked by the concept of baseless hatred (sin’at khinam), a phrase which originally appears in Psalms 69:4. The Rabbis do, indeed, self-reflect in the case of the first Temple, as well—blaming idol worship, illicit sex, and bloodshed among the Jews of the era, which similarly casts the Babylonians in a utilitarian light (contradicting their antagonistic presentation in the Book of Daniel). Yoma equates the concept of baseless hatred to these three specific categories of sin. It might be surmised that the unnamed host of the party’s hatred for Bar Kamza was baseless—after all, we never hear the cause of their enmity. In any event, that the Rabbis engage in self-blame in the case of the First Temple (and even get into a debate over which generation, the one that saw the destruction of the First Temple and the one that saw the destruction of the Second, was worse) only confirms the fundamental assumption of this study: that they believed that God’s enemies could do nothing without his will.

4

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant

A New Monotheism In all recorded history, it is hard to think of a shock on par with the relatively sudden expansion of the Arab armies under the banner of Islam in the middle of the seventh century.1 Arabia was a territory largely forgotten by the empires of classical antiquity, and its people scorned. One imagines that a few ill-fated military expeditions into the desert peninsula contributed to the disinterest of the nearby states. Desolate, on the road to nowhere of interest, inhabited by tough nomads throughout and a few oasis-based cities along and close to its western and southern coasts, Arabia’s importance to the antagonistic Empires of Byzantine Rome and Sasanian Persia lay largely in its simple proximity to them and its potential as a highway for an invasion from the enemy. The two empires were frequently at war with each other, and both subcontracted their southern defense to Arabian tribes, the Ghassanids, and the Lakhmids, rather than station their own troops in the desert. But other than that purely defensive consideration, they seem to have spared the territory barely a second thought. It had no resources useful to them, and nomads were notoriously difficult to tax. Even if a tax collector could find them in the unfamiliar, vast desert, let alone catch them, he would find it impossible to compel them to pay money they did not possess to an emperor in a faraway palace. Of all the empires of classical antiquity, the Romans came the closest to conquering the territory, but they never came close to controlling it the way that they controlled greener lands. They managed, for a time, to hold parts of Nabataea (modern-day Jordan) and several outposts along the coast of Arabia Felix (modern-day Yemen), but their attempts to subdue any of the peninsula’s interior were spectacular failures. Heat and dryness, long and dangerous supply lines, impassable and labyrinthine terrain, and the inhabitants of the peninsula were too much for them, so they wisely contented themselves with economic interaction. The Byzantines, the Greek-speaking, eastern successor state to, or perhaps the Christian continuation of, the Roman Empire, and the Sasanians, the contemporaneous incarnation of the Persian state, were grand, self-confident DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-5

118  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant empires, with rich religious and cultural traditions. Their fortunes ebbed and flowed with the course of their frequent wars and occasional outbreaks of peace. Neither of those empires suspected that a new monotheistic religion— Islam—would, over the course of the seventh century and into the eighth, emerge from the barren and resource-poor desert to their south, or that its adherents would conquer a swath of territory from the borders of India in the east to Spain in the west over the course of a mere century or so. Islam’s rapid expansion changed the political realities and religious contours of West Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Even as the Muslims themselves fashioned the core of their new tradition as they grappled, both martially and intellectually, with the questions of their own proper behavior and the political and religious legitimacy of their leaders, the territory over which they held dominion grew steadily. Shortly after Western Arabia became unified under the banner of the Prophet Muḥammad following his conquest of his hometown of Mecca, the death of the Prophet threatened to abort the nascent faith. According to Islamic tradition, a great number of tribes who had converted to Islam seem to have understood the Prophet’s death as the end of their obligations to the emergent community. The Prophet’s successor (Caliph) Abū Bakr oversaw a successful series of campaigns designed to return the wayward Arabs of Yemen, Najd, and the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula to the fold. The so-called ridda (“Apostasy”) wars were completed during Abū Bakr’s short two-year reign as Caliph. The new religion was not to remain confined to Arabia, and once the Peninsula was united, the Caliphs, beginning with Abū Bakr’s successor ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, sent both missionaries and armies into the lands of Roman and Persian classical antiquity. Much has been written discussing the motives for the early Muslims and their conquest. Whether motivated by the need for the economic bounty of conquest to maintain internal unity or by the uncompromising universal message of Islam’s rigorous monotheism, the early Muslim Arabs inspired a few converts among the Byzantines and the Persians, but also earned many military victories. We will briefly discuss the course of the conquest, in which the Muslims stripped the Byzantine Empire of its choicest provinces and, rather quickly, swallowed Persia whole. Once we have explored the historical narrative of the Muslim conquest, we will proceed to consider the implications of these events for those on its short end: the Byzantines, who—as Christians—found themselves facing a grave (but, to readers of this study, familiar) theological challenge, not just from the birth of Islam, but from the Muslims’ rapid successes. Islam’s rise seemed to indicate to the Byzantine Christians that the Muslims had successfully arrogated God’s favor from them. We should not forget about the Sasanian Persians, who surely must have grappled with similar concerns. That we do not possess much in the way of primary Sasanian sources is due to the complete success of the Muslims in conquering Iran, and, to some extent, to the Persian-Arab hybridization of

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  119 culture that was born in the interaction, which was by no means purely martial. The twin processes of Iran’s Islamization and Islam’s semi-Persianization, which over the course of a few centuries was total, were not conducive to the survival of non-Islamic or anti-Islamic sources. The Byzantines, by contrast, had other lands in which to record their horror and shame at the Islamic conquests. Moreover, even if their sources had survived, the Sasanians were not monotheists, but dualist Zoroastrians; for dualists, as for polytheists, the success of an enemy is not necessarily a catalyst for theological introspection. Historical Context: The Early Islamic Conquests The question of the nature of the Islamic conquests is one that has generated plenty of debate in the last couple of centuries. Donner2 sums up various Western interpretations and explanations of the events of the middle of the sixth century CE, which include a mass Arab migration (explained by either the mundane desire for booty or changing climate conditions in Arabia increasing the desert’s material impoverishment); a conquest undertaken only after the surprising success of Arab raids on Iraq and Syria, and, as a complementary explanation, the temporary weakness of the Byzantines and Sasanians; or economic pressure generated by the ridda wars. In these models, Donner explains, Islam played a role, but opinions on the nature of Islam’s role ran the gamut from purely coincidental to solely responsible. To many historians, economic and climatic conditions were evidently more comfortable explanations for world-shaking changes than devotion and piety. The problem with the marginalization of Islam as an explanation for the conquests that came with it is that these other explanations are “deterministic [and as such] imply that the Islamic conquests, or something very much like them, would have occurred whether or not Islam appeared on the scene, whereas the theories based on “accident” suggest that an empire was dropped, half-conquered, into the unsuspecting hands of the early Islamic leaders, who merely finished a conquest they had never dreamed of starting. In short, Western scholarship has proceeded on the basis of the unspoken assumption that the Islamic conquests could not really have been caused by Islam.”3 Donner’s approach is not to dismiss the economic and climatic conditions, nor completely to ignore the demonstrable unsteadiness of both the Byzantines and the Sasanians, each empire suffering from war exhaustion and teetering from the results of some poor years in terms of agriculture and disease. That said, Donner does muse that perhaps the perception of Byzantine and Sasanian “weakness” may be a retroactive scholarly projection based upon the success of the early Muslims, rather than an ex ante explanation for that success. It was, then, for this complex web of reasons that, once the Prophet Muḥammad had unified most of Arabia under Islam and Abū Bakr had fortified that unity, the Muslims looked northward toward expansion. The two most proximal territories were Syria and Iraq. Syria was part of the

120  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant Byzantine Empire, and Iraq was a province of Sasanian Persia. The conquests of Syria and Iraq, despite being lumped together under the general heading of “Islamic conquests,” were quite different; they were undertaken for different reasons, by different tribes with different socioeconomic motives. Those differences were significant catalysts for what came to be known as the SunniShīʿī divide. We will discuss the state of the Byzantines and the Sasanians first; then we will look at the conquests from the Arab point of view. The World of Classical Antiquity: Byzantium and Persia on the Eve of the Islamic Conquests

Average Roman (Byzantine) citizens, in the year 630, had no real reason to fear for the longevity of their state, which presented the very image of timeless sovereignty. Those in power probably should have known better: with the benefit of hindsight, the proverbial cracks were clearly visible. The real surprise was the source of the punch that shattered the Empire’s hold on the Levant. A defense strategist in Constantinople would have been justified keeping both eyes fixed firmly on Persia; a conquest from Arabia would have seemed the longest of longshots. The Sasanian Persians, who had occupied Jerusalem for 16 years, had just been successfully driven out by a Byzantine offensive. The initial 614 CE capture of Jerusalem was a profound shock to the Byzantines. Not only had the Persians captured the holy city, but the Christians had watched the relic known as the True Cross taken as booty back to Persia. That there was already an apocalyptic mood in the air when the Muslims first arrived was partially the result of this recent calamity. Works such as the Life of Theodore of Sykeon, the Life of George of Choziba, and the Life of Mihr-Mah-Gushnasp are all works that, responding to the Byzantine loss of Jerusalem to Persia, predict the end of the world.4 The Christian recapture of Jerusalem calmed the frantic atmosphere momentarily and was the exclamation point on a Byzantine-Persian war that had begun a quarter century earlier, with Persian interference into a brutal round of Byzantine assassinations and coups. Before the Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641 CE) ascended, a series of rebellions and attempted overthrows had followed the murders of the Emperors Maurice (602 CE) and Phocas (610 CE). The instability in the Byzantine capital had been the pretext for the Persian invasion. But now, under Heraclius, the invasion was reversed, and Byzantine forces advanced on the outskirts of Ctesiphon, the Persian capital. The Persians capitulated. From the Byzantine Christian perspective, God’s order had been restored. Perhaps the initial Persian victory had just been a kind of divine warning. Their victory probably convinced the Byzantines that they were back in God’s good graces. Military victory over Persia did not solve all the ills that afflicted the Byzantine Empire, however; indeed, the war had little impact on Byzantium’s internal brittleness. First and foremost of these ills were the theological divisions that split Christianity, the Empire’s official religion and to some extent

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  121 the reason for its existence. The state we know as the Byzantine Empire, but which was known to its inhabitants simply as Rome, was the product of an administrative evolution of the Roman Empire’s earlier incarnation. The Roman Emperor Constantine famously moved to the capital of the Empire from Rome to the small Anatolian city of Byzantium, which he immodestly but predictably renamed Constantinople, in 330 CE. He also legalized Christianity. The administrative division of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Western Roman Empire was certainly complete by the middle of the fifth century CE, when the Western half collapsed. The Eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, would continue to exist for another millennium, even despite the seventh century CE Islamic conquest of the Near East and the Levant. The Empire became officially Christian under Theodosius I (r. 379–395 CE), who duly banned paganism. This was the culmination of a frankly stunning transition for Christianity, which began its existence as a small disfavored sectarian movement that branched off from a similarly disfavored local ethno-national religious tradition that was famously incompatible with the ruling Romans. The Romans had persecuted both types of Judaism to greater or lesser degrees. Now Rome itself was Christian. But to apply, in an unnuanced manner, the term “Christian” to the Byzantine world is to ignore the fierce debates raging among the early Christians, whose purpose was to properly define the God and the Savior who offered humanity salvation. We have already seen the products of some of these debates in the form of the Adversus Judaeos literature, even though many of the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers significantly predated the Byzantine debates. In fact, debates is a soft name for the series of violent excommunications and persecution of Christian thinkers and sects named heterodox by posterity, for losing. The debates of the Latin Fathers gave way to the Christological debates among a variety of thinkers. Nestorius (d. 451 CE) argued that Mary should not be called Theotokos, the carrier of God, since she was not herself divine. The theological underpinnings of this notion lay in the notion that God himself suffering on the cross was heretical. In 431 CE, Nestorius was excommunicated and exiled by his rival, Cyril of Alexandria. Twenty years later, the Council of Chalcedon concluded that the division of Christ into two natures (“Diophysite”), one fully divine and one fully human, was correct, and this position became the official dogma of the Byzantine church. This decision was deeply divisive to the practice of Christianity within Byzantine lands. Opponents who held the opposite views, either that Christ had one, divine nature (“Monophysite”) or that he had a single, composite nature, both divine and human in equal measure (“Miaphysite”), formed their own churches, such as the Armenian, Ethiopic, and Coptic sects. The Orthodox, Diophysite view went largely unchallenged in the Latin West and in the Byzantine heartlands of Anatolia and Greece, but in Syria and Egypt, there was a significant population that held the Monophysite view. In general, the Monophysite and Miaphysite populations of Syria spoke Syriac, a local Aramaic dialect, while the Diophysite Christians were Greek speaking, a linguistic

122  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant divide that only solidified Byzantium’s internal disunion. Heraclius’ introduction of the notion of Monothelitism—an attempt to circumvent the troublesome debate about Christ’s nature in favor of an assertion that, whatever his nature, Christ was possessed of a single will—and Monenergism—that he was possessed of a single energy—did nothing to end the fractiousness, and instead only added more sects to the mix. Thus, though no religious movement is immune to disagreement, the Diophysite Orthodox Church remained relatively whole, while the Syriac-speaking communities of Christians in Syria ultimately “comprised four competing [Mono- or Miaphysite] confessional communities: East Syrians, Miaphysites, Chalcedonians, and Maronites.”5 To the consternation of the Byzantine rulers, all attempts at sectarian reconciliation failed, and with the carrot of ecumenical concord off the table, the Empire turned to the stick of persecution, with the primary goal, apparently, of imposing the theological homogeneity they had failed to negotiate in council. Thus, the Byzantines were divided by matters of what seem today to be matters of theological pettifoggery, but which were to them central questions of Christian doctrine (and thus, salvation), and, ultimately, political alignment. Even so, as Kennedy points out, “the differences of theological opinion would probably have remained a talking point among theologians if they had not reflected the broader cultural distinctions.”6 The Monophysite religious communities were distinct from the Diophysite by virtue not only of language (Syriac and Coptic instead of Greek), but also environment: generally speaking, the Diophysite patriarchs were urban, and the Monophysite rural. So, when the Muslims did invade Syria, the already-diverse enemy they encountered was also severely weakened by internal enmity. There is no reason to assume that the Syriac-speaking Christians of the Byzantine Levant welcomed the conquest as such. However, it is evident from the resistance to imperial edicts on the part of, for example, Sophronius, the Bishop of Jerusalem at the time of the Muslim conquest, that dedication to the Byzantine state was at best lukewarm in the Byzantine territories that are most proximal to Arabia, particularly Syria. Over time, the Christian population finding itself within the expanding Islamic world empire either adapted to Islamic rule, with no great nostalgia for Byzantine overlordship, or, more frequently, the descendants of the conquered Christians themselves adopted Islam, finding more cultural sympathy and economic benefit to doing so. The great rival to Byzantium was Persia, which was then under the control of the Sasanian family, who had ruled the several-times successor to the Achaemenid Persian Empire of Cyrus for about 300 years. In many ways, the interaction between the Greek world and the Persian world had shaped the world of classical antiquity. The Sasanian Empire was the clear successor to the Persian cultural tradition, although with the postAlexandrian Hellenistic overlay still present. Unfortunately, we know far less about Sasanian Persia than we do about Byzantium, largely because when Persia was conquered by the Muslims, the conquest was total; there

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  123 was no analog to Constantinople, a capital city controlling a continued Byzantine Empire in Anatolia, the Balkans, and parts of Eastern Europe, that could serve as a continuation of the Sasanian-era iteration of Persian culture and a Persian polity. Before their state collapsed, the Sasanian house ruled based on dynastic divine right. Non-dynasts, like Bahrām Chōbīn (590–591) or Shahrbarāz (628) who temporarily overthrew the house and seized control could not maintain it, finding themselves wanting for popular sovereignty.7 Our knowledge of the Sasanians, and in particular the events of their decline and eventual fall, is complicated by the Islamic conquests as an intervening event. It is possible that we have some authentic Persian source material that survives into the Arabic chronicles, most notably those of al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhūrī, both of the ninth century CE, but also those of Aḥmad ibn Wādi al-Yaʿqūbī (d. ca. 910 CE), ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn al-Masʿūdī (d. ca. 960 CE), and Hamza al-Isfahānī (d. ca. 960s CE). However, approaching pre-Islamic Persian history through Islamic sources is an approach that generates obvious historiographical complications. The general approach of scholars of the era, until recently, has been to assume a unifying underlying source to all the Persia-focused material in the Arabic chronicles; more recently, Hoyland has argued that Arabic knowledge of Persia derives from a complex web of sources to which they had access, rather than that single narrative source, perhaps the Khudāy-nāmah, the Book of Lords.8 Whether Hoyland is correct about this historiographical picture or not, we have no Persian sources, or Persian stories about themselves. At best we have is recensions of Persian stories as they appear in sources like these, or (earlier) sources like Herodotus or the text of the Hebrew Bible. With the lament for the lack of Persian sources thus dispensed with—it is a situation that is unlikely to change, barring some unlikely archival or archeological miracle—it is our good fortune that we are not completely in the dark about Sasanian history, as their coins shed some light on Sasanian decline. Since “later Muslim historians often provide a normalized and highly edited version of event presenting [the Islamic conquest] as purposeful march of progress,”9 focusing instead on the material evidence provided by coins offers an opportunity for a more nuanced view of late Sasanian and early Islamic history in Persia. While such an exploration is outside the purview of this project, it is heartening for the historian to know that better days may lie ahead in the reconstruction of the late Sasanian past. For the moment, though, forced as we are to rely on the Arab narrative of the decline of an empire they conquered, the picture of late Sasanian Persia seems not dissimilar to the picture of Byzantium on the eve of the Islamic conquests: a great amount of turnover at the top, combined with the exhaustion of extended military conflict with Byzantium and—unlike Byzantium— total defeat. None of this is to say that the Islamic conquests were inevitable. But, from the perspective of the Sasanians, the Islamic conquests just so happened to kick off at a particularly bad time.

124  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant The Conquests of Syria and Iraq: Islamic Perspectives

Byzantine Syria was the crown jewel of the Islamic conquest, and its subjugation was the earliest foreign policy goal of the Prophet Muḥammad that lay outside the Arabian Peninsula. The draws of Syria were obvious: it was familiar to the early Muslims, as the destination and source of the Ḥijāz region’s most proximal trade. It was also full of pastureland; by contrast, Iraq (whose conquest will be discussed momentarily) was heavily constructed agricultural territory, and the grasses and deserts of Syria may have been more appealing to the nomadic Arabs. The invasion of Syria was not undertaken under the Prophet Muḥammad, nor under his immediate successor, the first Caliph, Abū Bakr, who had to solidify the hold of the Islamic enterprise on the rest of Arabia. While the elderly Abū Bakr succeeded in bringing those “apostatizing” wayward tribes back into the fold through a skillful combination of diplomatic incentives, threats, and force, his death a mere two years after the Prophet’s meant that he did not have the time to follow the Prophet’s plans and spread the new community beyond the Arabian Peninsula. By the time of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, Abū Bakr’s successor and the second Caliph, a kind of hierarchy was well on its way to forming in the Islamic polity. Theoretically, according to the values attributed to the Prophet, every believer was to consider himself equal to each of the others. In practice, of course, such ideals are rarely tenable in the long or even the short term, and in the half-century following the Prophet’s death, the members of those families that had constituted the pre-Islamic elite slowly but surely elbowed their way back into positions of political and economic prominence. The Islamic focus on Syria meant that “large numbers of Qurashīs [the clan of the Prophet’s tribe of the Banū Hāshim, but which was dominated by the rival Banū Umayya], volunteers from the Yamāma tribes [who had been incentivized back into the Islamic fold by Abū Bakr]…and some members of tribes from the northern Ḥijāz” were well-represented in the conquest of Syria, but “conspicuous by their absences were the Anṣār of Medina [that is, the early Medinan converts to Islam, who had offered the Prophet shelter and allegiance when his position in Mecca was perilous] and members of the Najdī and eastern Arabian tribes.”10 The conquest of Syria was a conquest by and for the Islamic elite, which was slowly but surely coming to mean the same families that had been the pre-Islamic elite. By contrast, Iraq was a land to which the Prophet paid little to no attention. The Islamic sources even portray the conquest of Iraq as succeeding due to something between good fortune and an accident of history.11 The Quraysh, Kennedy writes, “were hardly represented at all [in the conquest of Iraq] whereas there was a considerable number of Anṣār from Medina and Thaqafīs from Ṭāʿif…[in other words] those who were already secondclass citizens in the new regime while the élite turned their attention to Syria.”12 The makeup of the Islamic armies that conquered Syria and Iraq,

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  125 respectively, was to have profound consequences for the Islamic empire. The notables of the Banū Umayya, who had held an economically dominant position in Mecca before the Prophet Muḥammad, and who opposed him until their conversion under duress, were shortly to assume a similarly dominant position in Syria, whose conquest they spearheaded. Umayyad domination of Syria meant that when a movement advocating for the rulership of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the Prophet’s first cousin and son-in-law, arose, Umayyad-led Syria naturally became a territory opposed to this movement, which eventually came to be known as Shīʿism (for Shīʿat ʿAlī, or “partisans of ʿAlī”). This should not lead anyone to the conclusion that Shīʿism emerged, fully formed, in the generation after the Prophet’s death, or that there was some “definitive moment when the Muslim community split into two irreconcilable factions; such a perspective was anachronistically posited by later Sunnī [as the dominant Islamic sect came to be known] and Shīʿī scholars.”13 While it was no accident that Iraq became a site of much Shīʿī activity over the course of the several centuries of development that overlapped with Islam’s beginnings, and Syria generally remained a staunchly Sunnī territory, there were certainly Muslims in Iraq who espoused Sunnī ideas and Muslims in Syria who were sympathetic to Shīʿism. There were a great number of complexifying elements in the early Islamic state, including not only sectarian identity and geography but also fitna (communal strife), ridda (apostasy), conquest, administration, and genealogy.14 For the historian, this multifaceted historiographical picture is complexifying, as well: most of the Muslim sources we have for both territories are Arabic sources from the third/eighth century and later, by which time Sunnī and Shīʿī scholars had intellectually and literarily (though only rarely violently, at that time) distinguished themselves from their rivals. This had a significant effect on the way Muslims remembered the conquests and the set of inter-Muslim conflicts that broke out concurrently. Without specific regard to either Sunnī or Shīʾī perspectives, the early Muslims obviously had no trouble explaining their shockingly successful conquests in a broader theological context, or reconciling their relatively sudden overlordship of a vast territory stretching from Spain to India with their conception of God. Clearly, his favor was with the victors. This is not to suggest that the theology generated by the success of the conquests was unsophisticated. Whatever perspective the Byzantines and the Sasanians may have held about the violence of the Muslim conquests, the Muslims themselves understood their conquests in far more meritorious terms, whether it be the notion that God permitted Arab military success to buttress the faith of the believers (as suggested by the Spanish historian al-Kalāʿī), or to encourage the spread of Islamic ethics in a manner not dissimilar to the post-Alexander spread of Hellenistic culture, or as a sign to the Jews and Christians that he had replaced their faiths with an updated version, as suggested, though not so flippantly, by Ibn Taymiyya.15 Success may be accompanied by theological disagreement, but it has no reason to breed theological crisis.

126  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant For the Byzantines, however, the loss of Syria and particularly Jerusalem to the Muslims turned out to be the event that generated a great deal of monotheistic soul-searching. As the Jews had lamented Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonian and the Roman pagans, now the Roman Christians had to contend with questions of God’s favor or power as Muslim armies took control of the holy city. Contextualizing the Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Near East: Calamity or Continuity? The first matter we must note, as we examine the Christian reaction to the Muslim-Arab conquests, is that there are fundamental differences between the calamities we have examined thus far and the events discussed in this chapter. Whether they are calamitous or glorious, of course, depends on one’s perspective; and the fact is that, unlike the destructions of the two Temples, we have rich historical and literary sources from the perspectives of both the “victims/vanquished” and the “perpetrators/victors” (again, contextdependent categories)—Christian and Muslim, in this case. Babylonian sources, or any non-Jewish sources, treating the destruction of the First Temple are rare, both because of the event’s mundanity to non-Jewish observers and because of the event’s remote antiquity. Even with the destruction of the Second Temple, we are limited in terms of the perspectives of our sources. Not so with the Arab Muslim conquests, the coverage of which appears to be fully three-dimensional. While there is still a tremendous historiographical challenge associated with discerning the historicity of the events described in the form of the “problem with the sources” that is well-known to any scholar of early Islamic history, modern historians of the Arab Muslim conquests have no shortage of perspectives from which to draw. However, this embarrassment of riches in source variety is mitigated—unfortunately, as it turns out—by the fact that, however, blessed we may be in terms of historical perspectives, we are nonetheless cursed by the lack of sources that are demonstrably contemporaneous with the Arab Muslim conquests, from any side of it. The “historiographical desert,” also known as a “long silence” or a “long gap” in Byzantine historiography, running from essentially the time of the conquests through about 750 CE, stands in stark contrast to the sixth-century CE picture, in which the genres of secular classicizing history, church history, and world chronicle all were well-represented and survive to the present day.16 A similar gap exists in the Arabic chronicles, the earliest surviving of which was not written before the end of the eighth century at the very earliest. This places us in a similar historiographical situation to the ones we encountered in the previous catastrophes: for the most part, at best we are looking at later presentations of the earliest sources. A second difference between the Arab Muslim conquests and the other matters discussed in this study is that, in this case, both the perpetrators of the conquest and the conquered populations claimed the banner of the same

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  127 Monotheistic God. Explaining the success of the conflict was easy for the Arab Muslims. Over the ensuing centuries, many Christians and Jews of the erstwhile-Byzantine east took the conquests as a not-terribly subtle message about God’s preferences, and the population gradually converted to Islam in large numbers. There were many reasons beyond the theological, economic ones particularly, for people to convert to Islam. The Byzantines were confronted by the same questions about God as the Jews and early Christians had been: how could he have let this happen? Finally, there is the matter that there is a significant amount of disagreement about whether the Arab Muslim conquest of the Levant marks a definitive turning point in the religious history of the region, or was a much muddier “significant event” that perhaps served to expedite trends already underway. In Hoyland’s words, “in the three or four centuries preceding [Islam’s] appearance, a period now usually referred to as Late Antiquity, the world it was to inherit had already been subject to major upheaval and transformation.”17 These upheavals and transformations included the division of the Roman Empire into an Eastern (Byzantine) and Western part, the latter of which collapsed in relatively short order; the aforementioned scramble for influence and sovereignty in the Near East between the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Persian Empire; and the increasing importance of nomadic Northern Arabian tribes to those agriculture-based civilizations. There was also an increasing religiosity in both Byzantium and Persia, and as already mentioned, increasing theological and Christological schism among Christians throughout both realms. “Seen against this background,” says Hoyland, “it becomes evident that Islam did not, initially at least, ‘seal the end of late antiquity,’ but rather continued many of its salient features. The expansionist aims of Justinian, Khusrau II and other Late Antique emperors were pursued with alacrity by the youthful Muslim state. And it was in the latter that Late Antiquity’s twins, religion and politics, achieved full union.”18 He continues, “Islam, though distinctive in many ways, fitted well into the Late Antique mold, being all-pervasive, zealously assertive of its God’s omnipotence, concerned with the hereafter and confident that the gap between heaven and earth could be bridged by people with special gifts and at special places of significance.”19 All these distinctions between the Arab Muslim conquests and the other cataclysms mentioned in this book are only perceivable in hindsight. In particular, the notion that the Arab Muslim conquest might be simply a change to the color of existing trends would not have been an intuitive Byzantine response to it at the time. To the Greek-speaking Byzantine Christians of the Near East, informed by their longstanding prejudice, the Arabs were a culturally inferior rabble of nomadic barbarians, descended from slaves and generally untrustworthy.20 Their sudden overlordship was more than merely a difficult pill to swallow: in the context of the theological triumphalism of post-Nicene Christianity, it seemed to augur the end of the world.

128  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant Apocalyptic Visions of the Arab Muslim Conquests

In stark contrast to the Arabic historiographical picture, which is rich if problematic to mine, simply finding even a single Byzantine source that treats the Arab-Muslim conquests in a straightforward manner seems to be an exercise in futility. Between the Chronicon Paschale (The “Easter Chronicle”) of the 620s, a history that concludes 17 years into the reign of Heraclius and some years before the Arab-Islamic conquest, and the Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor of the early ninth century CE, nearly two centuries after the conquest, there is a near-complete Byzantine historiographical black hole. A direct Byzantine retelling of their loss of Jerusalem and their most important Asian provinces outside of Anatolia either never existed or has not survived. The absence of sources may itself reflect Byzantine bewilderment. One is tempted to think of the sudden disappearance of Assyrian chronicles following the fall of Nineveh in July of 612 BCE (a useful reminder that there is no iron law that says that civilizations will survive their calamities). As Kaegi put it, the Byzantines struggled “to find a suitable theological and historical framework in which to explain the fortunes” of both empire and church in the wake of the conquests.21 The sudden absence of historiographical writing may testify to the difficulty of that task, and in and of itself feels like something of a Lament. Following the Persian successes of the period, there was already a Byzantine predisposition toward apocalyptic thinking in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, and it is that genre, rather than straight historical response, that we must mine for Byzantine perspectives (the Book of Main Points of John Bar Penkāyē, to be discussed later in this chapter, is a notable exception, although it, too, has its apocalyptic elements). The Arab Muslim conquests obviously did nothing to discourage such apocalyptic thinking. It is tempting to assume that among the conquered, if we were going to extrapolate a response by observing the Jews of the Temple periods, the simple, triedand-true answer of “for our sins” was obviously the low-hanging “theological crisis” fruit for which they would naturally reach. But the picture is complicated somewhat by the apocalyptic trend already underway. In the eschatologically focused milieu of Late Antique Byzantium, the Arab Muslim conquests were readily perceived as evidence of the end of the world by both Jewish and Christian observers alike, although not all of these observers were unhappy at the turn of events. As it turns out, the Muslims themselves were not immune from apocalyptic thinking: any reverses were ultimately perceived as temporary setbacks that had been prophesied in their own emerging eschatological traditions.22 In a sense, the “end of the world” explanations might be understood as upping of the ante for monotheists responding to events that seemed to run counter to their understanding of God’s will. After all, the destruction of the two Temples each carried with it the possibility that it was a coup de grace for the Jews of both of the Temple eras. In each case, the communities on the

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  129 receiving end of the disaster adapted themselves to it and arguably became stronger for it. After the First Temple was destroyed, the exiled Jews of Babylon took what they perceived to be a hint from God and dedicated themselves steadfastly to monotheism and maintained (or renewed) their covenant with God. They looked forward to the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of God’s order. Christians observing the destruction of the Second Temple naturally concluded that it was God’s clear sign of the truth of their claim about Jesus. As for the Jews who witnessed the Second Temple’s destruction, the Rabbis filled the Priestly vacuum with their own leadership, scholarship, and literary and legal output, all of which generated a vast written corpus that carried with it as much authority as the Priests had ever had, if not more. Rabbinic literature ultimately rendered the Temple obsolete; the Priests, unnecessary. So, monotheists had seen this story before, and in each previous case, the community had not been snuffed out. The utility of self-blame in the face of these disasters was essentially to send a message to the members of the victimized community that God’s anger, which caused the catastrophe, required an adaptation to their behavior if the anger were to be mitigated. The genuine apocalyptic expectation that was already ubiquitous in the sixth and seventh century Byzantine milieu would naturally be reinforced by any indication of God’s anger—such as, for example, the conquest of the Empire’s fairest provinces at the hands of scorned outsiders. The seventh-century Christians did react to such things, and record their immediate, Lamentations-phase reactions and their later, Jeremiah-phase divine explanations. But while the Jews of antiquity recorded their reactions to their calamities in Biblical poetry the two Talmuds, many of the seventhcentury Christian Jeremiah-phase reactions took the literary form of the prevailing mood of eschatological crisis: post-dated apocalyptic prophecies. Sophronius’ Lamentation, and the Blame Game after the Arab-Muslim Conquest

In the year 590 CE, when the Prophet Muḥammad was an unknown 20-yearold, and still a few decades before the Arab-Muslim conquests, Domitianus, the bishop of Melitene, boasted that “We [Christians] have not been condemned to Jewish lamentation nor been reproached by the shame of captivity at the hands of brigands.”23 That Domitianus’ hometown of Melitene, modern-day Malatya, was conquered during the caliphate of ʿUmar, and used thereafter as a base for further Muslim incursions into Anatolia, is a singular irony. The city passed back and forth between the ascending series of Islamic states and the shrinking Byzantine Empire several times. Domitianus could not have known what was coming a half-century into his future, of course. A clear-eyed historical understanding that, while worldly success appears to be God’s favor bestowed upon the faithful, such success is in fact ephemeral and based on very human, and very fickle, trends and fortune eluded him, as it does for most everyone. As we have seen on a pair of occasions with

130  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant the Jews, who had to grapple theologically with the loss of Jerusalem to the Babylonians and then the Romans, now it was the Christians’ turn to wonder, in the high-stakes, eschatology-minded milieu of late antiquity, why their benevolent God had delivered their fairest lands into the hands of (their term) “atheioi,” the Godless. There is no nuance in the late seventh century Greek apologetic work “known as the Trophies of Damascus, in which [a] Jewish disputant counters the mockery of his Christian antagonist with the following retort: ‘If things are as you say, how is it that enslavements are befalling you? Whose are these devastated lands? Against whom are so many wars stirred up? What other nation is [so much] fought as the Christians?’”24 The schadenfreude evident in the Jewish disputant’s tone is palpable. That the instrument of Christianity’s seventh-century humiliation should be the Arabs, a people hitherto scorned by Greek-speaking Christian thinkers, was an added spice. John Moschus (d. 619 or 634), a Cilicia-born monk serving in the monastery of St. Theodosius, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, compiled a great work known in Greek as the Leimōn (“Spiritual Meadow”) and in Latin as the Pratum spirituale. The Pratum spirituale was “a distillation of what he and Sophronius had seen, heard and learned on their travels” through Egypt, Syria, and the Aegean.25 Most of the work focuses on the holy achievements of early Christians, but there are some anecdotal appearances made by the Arabs, called the Saracens. Hoyland has usefully cataloged these appearances: a Saracen decapitating an ascetic (but then the Saracen is carried away by a bird); another Saracen is presented as attempting to kill a monk named Ianthus (but instead he gets swallowed by the earth); a third is depicted as stealing a holy man’s donkey (but the donkey is recovered and returned, miraculously enough reportedly intact, by the holy man’s lion); still another is described as attempting to rob a monk (but falling to paralysis for some days); and, finally, a group of Saracens is presented as being compelled to return a young captive by the prayers of a monk.26 The Saracens of the Pratum are savage and rapacious, and easily foiled in their dastardly designs by simple Christian piety. As the Pratum demonstrates, the Arabs were disdained to the point of total disregard. Much of the Pratum spirituale is certainly not the work of John Moschus himself, as it treats events that occurred after or very close to his death. Some of these events are to be found in an appendix that was added to a Georgian translation, perhaps by the year 670 CE. The Arab-Muslim conquest of Jerusalem is one of these events, appearing in a section focusing on Sophronius, Moschus’ traveling companion and the Bishop of Jerusalem at the time of its fall to the Arabs. By this point in the study, it surely comes as little surprise that these Christian writers blame the conquered Christian population, and not the Arab Muslim conquerors, writing that “the godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our Lord, Jerusalem, with the permission of God and in punishment for our negligence, which is considerable.”27 Compellingly, the Muslims then began the work of transforming the site of the twicedestroyed Temple into a Muslim prayer space (although not, as yet, the Dome

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  131 of the Rock, which still stands on the site). That sacred square mile, the Temple Mount, changing hands seems to generate no small amount of theological introspection, regardless of who lost it to whom. The tale in the Georgian appendix to the Pratum spirituale, in which Sophronius plays a central role, is likely not an eyewitness account, but rather a text produced during the Jeremiah phase of the Christian reaction to the Arab-Muslim conquest. That the story of the conquest of Jerusalem’s first appearance on the stage of history is, indeed, in this Georgian addition to the Pratum dated more than three decades later, and that the author places the blame specifically on disobedience to priests, suggests that it was a later response. According to the story in the Georgian appendix, whose narrative coverage continues to events well after the conquest, a skilled marble worker named John, who took money from Sophronius not to help the Arabs “defile,” the site of the “Capitol”—either the Temple Mount itself, or perhaps the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—with their own prayer space construction, reportedly did so anyway. Shortly thereafter, he fell from a ladder and died from his wounds, conveniently gasping out with his last breath that his fate was due to his disobedience of the Patriarch. For an earlier, Lamentations-phase Christian response, we may look to Sophronius himself. He had become the Patriarch of Jerusalem after the death of Modestus, who had presided over a troubled and controversial time. Jerusalem was occupied by the Persians from 614 to 628, and Modestus served under the Persians as a collaborator, caretaker Patriarch while Zacharias, the actual Patriarch, was held captive in Iran. Modestus was then officially appointed to the position by Heraclius when the Byzantines fully reconquered the city in 630. Sophronius had spent the captivity with his friend Moschus in North Africa and only came to Jerusalem to bury Moschus’ bones there. It is not entirely clear how exactly Sophronius came to succeed Modestus, but when he did, the “Hagarenes,” yet another Greek name for the Muslims, were already making territorial gains in the south. After surrendering the city to the ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb-led Muslims, and famously personally receiving the caliph and giving him a tour of the city, Sophronius continued in his role as the city’s Christian Patriarch. Christians in the city continued to enjoy some measure of religious freedom under Muslim political dominion.28 Sophronius’ Homily on the Nativity, delivered in Jerusalem on Christmas of 634, and his Homily on the Epiphany, whose exact date is uncertain, but which seems to have been delivered by 637, are his works that mention the Arab Muslim conquests that come before the conquest of Jerusalem.29 In his Christmas address, Sophronius alternates between well-wishes for his sovereigns and appeals for succor from Arab-Muslim attacks. He enjoins his superiors to “make persistent and ceaseless supplication and plead to God on behalf of our Christ-loving and most serene rulers…so that God himself, the merciful lover of humankind, who has power equal to intention, will be appeased by your prayers which are acceptable to God, and he will favor them with very many years and grant them the greatest victories…and crown them

132  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant with their children’s children and fortify them with divine peace, and grant them strong and mighty authority over all the barbarians, shattering their pride.”30 Sophronius continues: “On account of our sins they have now unexpectedly risen up against us and are seizing everything as booty with cruel and savage intent and godless and impious boldness.”31 Sophronius’ homily continues with a beseeching of “you blessed men” to pray fervently to end the God-imposed scourge. Further in the speech, Sophronius bemoans the inability of pilgrims to journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem due to fear of the Saracens. Comparing the Christian plight to the plight of Adam, expelled but in sight of Eden, and King David, parched for water, Sophronius offers his best attempt at a solution: Therefore exhort and pray for and entreat your intense longing for Christ our God, so that, insofar as we are able, we will make ourselves straight and make ourselves shine through repentance and purify ourselves through penitence and refrain from committing deeds that are hateful to God. For thus if we should live as is loved by and pleasing to God, we would laugh at the fall of our Saracen enemies and would observe their near ruin and witness their final destruction. For their blood-thirsty sword will enter their hearts and their bow will be shattered and their arrows will be fixed in themselves.32 By the time of his Homily on the Epiphany, a few years later, Sophronius seems to have given up all hope of a quick victory over the invaders. In fact, Jerusalem would fall mere months after its delivery. This Homily echoes Lamentations in its tone. In it, Sophronius is secure in the knowledge that God’s blessed community was itself to blame but it offered no specifics on what precisely they might have done to bring about God’s wrath: The contrary circumstances compel me to think about our way of life, for why are they waging war among us? Why do barbarian raids abound? Why do the Saracen armies rise up against us? Why have destruction and plunder proliferated so much? Why is there endless shedding of human blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human flesh? Why have the churches been torn down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ, the giver of every good thing and the provider of this our great joy, blasphemed by mouths of heathens, and he cries out to us most rightly: ‘Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations’ [Isaiah 52:5], which is the most onerous of all the dreadful things that have befallen us. For on account of this the God-hating and wretched Saracens—clearly the abomination of the desolation that was prophetically foretold to us—run about through places where they are not allowed, and they plunder cities, mow down fields, burn villages with fire, set flame to the holy churches, overturn the sacred

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  133 monasteries, stand in battle against the Roman armies, and they raise up trophies in combat and add victory to victory. And increasingly they mock us and increase their blasphemies against Christ and the church and speak iniquitous blasphemies against God. And these adversaries of God boast of conquering the entire world, recklessly imitating their leader the Devil with great zeal, and emulating his delusion on account of which he was cast down from heaven and assigned to the gloomy darkness. These things the vile ones would not have accomplished, nor would they have gained so much power as to do and utter these things lawlessly, unless we first insulted the gift and first defiled the purification, and in this way aggrieved the giver Christ and incited him to wrath against us, even though he is good and takes no pleasure in evil, being the font of mercy and not wanting to see the ruin and destruction of humankind. But truly we bear responsibility for all these things ourselves, and no ground will be found for our defense.33 Sophronius’ homilies are a perfect example of a Lamentations-phase text: bemoaning the situation, certain that the victims themselves were responsible, but uncertain or, at least, nonspecific about what sins had so angered Christ that he had allowed the Saracens to run rampant, “even though he is good and takes no pleasure in evil, being the font of mercy.” Sophronius’ list of Saracen atrocities “adds additional urgency to his entreaty to his listeners to rue and eschew their evil deeds,” is “a handy and vivid example of why one should repent and reform,” according to Hoyland, and an “indication of Jesus’ dissatisfaction with his people,”34 but nowhere in Sophronius’ homilies are the specific Christian misdeeds that invited God’s wrath enumerated or even hinted or guessed at. Other Christian writers of the same era responded with similar horror and similar castigation of non-specific Christian-committed sin. It was not just speakers of Greek; speakers of West Syrian, Coptic, and Armenian responded with similar horror.35 Thomas the Presbyter, in his Chronicle most likely dated 640 CE, recounted the horrors of the invasion without explicitly hypothesizing as to its cause, although the “sharply anti-Chalcedonian” tone of the chronicle invites speculation that Thomas may have considered the conquests to be the result of “the ecclesiastical policies of the emperor Heraclius (610–641 CE),”36 which included the introduction of Monothelitism. This source, incidentally, may have been the very first non-Arabic source to mention Muḥammad (ṭayyāyē d-mḥmṭ, “Muḥammad’s nomads”) by name.37 A Homily on the End Times attributed to Ephrem the Syrian, the greatest of Syriac Christian writers of the fourth century, was probably written in the 640s, like most Byzantine-milieu responses to the conquests in the form of an eschatological prophecy. Pseudo-Ephrem’s vaticinium ex eventu “predicts” that “a people will come forth from the desert, the offspring of Hagar, the servant of Sarah, who hold fast to the covenant of Abraham….A marauding nation will triumph. The marauders will spread

134  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant across the land, over plains and mountaintops….They will plunder the ends of the earth and take control [of] the cities, and the lands will be devastated, and the slain will multiply on the earth, and all nations will be subjugated before the marauding people.”38 Pseudo-Ephrem explains this calamity (and offers hope for succor) by reminding his readers that “the Lord in his wrath, because of the iniquity throughout the land, will stir up kings and mighty armies, for when he wants to purge the land, he sends men against men to destroy one another.”39 Anger, grief, and bewilderment dominate the tones of these works, which seek to express the anguish of subjugation with the by-now expected reaction of self-blame. Although Pseudo-Ephrem’s writing is clearly a response to the arrival of the conquerors, and the author’s depiction of the Sons of Hagar is “consistently negative,” their “eschatological role…remains underdeveloped here in comparison with other (and most likely slightly later) Syriac apocalypses,” including the very influential Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, of which the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephrem seems to be unaware.40 This lachrymose Byzantine perspective stands in stark contrast to the nonByzantine Christian reaction of Isho’yahb of Adiabene, a Nestorian Christian catholicos (the highest-ranking position of the Church of the East), who lived in the Sasanian Empire where the Muslims did not have such early success. Isho’yahb gloated that “this seducer…and destroyer of [Byzantine] churches, also appeared among us in the land of Radan, a land in which there is more paganism than Christianity. Yet because of the praiseworthy conduct of the Christians [here], not even the pagans were led astray by him.”41 In Adiabene, it would seem, God did not grant the Muslims the same victories he gave them in the Byzantine lands; surely, Isho’yahb argues, this was due to proper Nestorian ecclesiasticism. One detects in Isho’yahb’s smugness traces of Domitianus’ self-assured boast that Christianity remained free of subjugators in 590 CE. In neither case was the haughtiness to last. The Nestorian Christian author of the Khuzistan Chronicle, an anonymously composed text from no later than 652, by which point the Sasanian Empire was essentially conquered in its entirety, sang to a different tune. The Chronicle has some false information, to be sure; it names Muḥammad as leading the Arab armies, when according to Arab-Muslim tradition, he had died about a decade before the conquest of Persia truly got underway. This could be the result of the author’s simple mistaking of the central spiritual figure of the new Muslims for their political and military leader. Speaking of the conquest of both Persia and the parts of Byzantium that had fallen under Arab-Muslim sway, the author writes that “the triumph of the sons of Ishmael, who subdued and subjugated these two mighty kingdoms, was from God. Yet God has not yet granted them rule over Constantinople, because victory belongs to him.”42 That the author of the Khuzistan Chronicle feels compelled to qualify his account with the specification that God had not “yet” caused Constantinople to fall to the Muslims is clear: he may have assumed the fall of the Byzantine capital to be imminent.

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  135 The Jewish Response to the Muslim Conquests The Christians were not the only monotheistic community to have to contend with the newcomer to the monotheistic family tree. Trying to pin down the Jewish response to the success of the Arab-Muslim conquests is more challenging than the Christian response. Still, we can say with certainty that it was initially quite negative, although some later Jewish texts, which we will discuss shortly, were more sanguine about the Muslim conquest. The challenge inherent in asserting a “Jewish” response is that it is difficult to determine just who these Jews were, or what their perspective really was. The first Jews and Christians to encounter the new monotheism that began with Muḥammad’s prophetic career were not in the well-documented communities of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. Rather, they were the Prophet’s neighbors in Arabia itself. Mecca, the Prophet’s home city, was a center for pagan pilgrimage, and the Kaʿba its central shrine. Most of the people in Mecca were themselves pagans when Muḥammad was born. The paganism of the general population, and the pagan pilgrimage industry, made Mecca initially unfertile ground for the Prophet Muḥammad’s messages. There were, however, many Jews and Christians among the Arabs in the wider Arabian Peninsula, including some Jewish tribes in Yathrib (Medina) which Islamic history remembers for their fraught interactions with the Prophet Muḥammad. These initial interactions were quite contentious. According to Islamic tradition, there were three Jewish tribes in Medina when the Prophet Muḥammad made the hijra, the emigration from Mecca to Medina, at which time he took up the mantle of political leadership of the community in addition to prophethood. These tribes were the Banū Naḍīr, the Banū Qaynuqāʿ, and the Banū Qurayẓa. Accused in the Muslim sources of theft and treachery, the Prophet moved against them, expelling the Banū Naḍīr and the Banū Qaynuqāʿ from Medina and slaughtering the Banū Qurayẓa, between the years 624 and 627 CE. The Prophet concluded contracts with other Jewish communities, including those at the oases of Khaybar, Fadak, Wādī al-Qura, and Muʾta, establishing the Jews who dwelt there as dhimmīs: legally protected participants the new Islamic umma, or community, granted dispensation to maintain their religious practices and beliefs, but burdened with higher tax rates and second-class legal status.43 There is a genuine mystery to unpack here, and the mystery comes in two parts. On the one hand, we have what appears to be a genuine misunderstanding of Jewish theology in the Qurʾān, specifically in the oft-cited passage of Surāt al-Tawbah (9:30): wa-qālat al-yahūd ʿUzayr ibn Allāh wa-qālat al-naṣarā al-masīḥ ibn Allah dhālika qawluhum bi-l-fawhihim yuḍahiʾūna qawl alladhīna kafarū min qablu qatalahum Allāh annā yuʾfakūna. This means “The Jews say that ʿUzayr is the son of God, and the Christians say that Al-Masīḥ is the son of God. These statements of theirs are baseless, and they only are repeating the words of disbelievers from before [their times].

136  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant May God condemn them that they are so deluded!”44 The part of this verse that refers to the Christians is not difficult: “al-Masīḥ” is simply the Arabic form of the word “Messiah,” and while Jesus is not mentioned by name here (he is ʿIsā in Arabic), he is well-understood to be the figure in question.45 “ʿUzayr” is another matter entirely. Even if one were to accept the standard identification of ʿUzayr with Ezra, who is credited by Muslim tradition with reconstituting, and perhaps falsifying, the Torah, any reader with even the most basic acquaintance with Judaism will know that Jews fundamentally reject the idea of divine parenthood, except in the most poetic sense—that humans are all “children of God.” Furthermore, while Jews may respect Ezra, they certainly do not worship him. The exegetical yoga performed by Muslim scholars attempting to square this particular circle included the explanation that only some Jews, and not all, worshipped ʿUzayr, or that the Jews in the region were actually Karaites.46 Another possibility is that the Jews in the vicinity of Medina used the Hebrew word ozer—“helper,” another name for God but certainly not for any descendant of his, which derives from the same ʿayn-zayn-resh root as Ezra—which is a far better linguistic explanation for this appearance of ʿUzayr than first assuming that the reference in al-Tawbah is to Ezra, and then assuming that the name was given in a diminutive form.47 There is, after all, a perfectly good Arabic version of the name Ezra (ʿAzrā); “ʿUzayr,” if it refers to Ezra, would better be translated as “Izzy,” a familiar nickname. Along this line, if there were people worshipping Ozer as the son of God in the vicinity of the Prophet, it is also a possibility that this was a sect of Christianized Jews using language to refer to Jesus that has fallen out of use. There is no way to know for sure what the explanation of ʿUzayr is. It is fair to say, at least, that the Jews encountered by the Prophet Muḥammad in Medina, and referenced in the Qurʾān, were not in the mainstream of Judaism as it was practiced by the Jews of Byzantium and Persia. If the Jews in question were actually believers in Jesus, and using the term Ozer to stand in for Jesus, that would help explain the second part of the mystery, which is the neutral-to-positive presentation of the Muslims in Byzantine and Persian Jewish sources. If the Prophet and his followers did indeed wipe out the Banū Qurayẓa, and expel the Banū Nadīr and the Banū Qaynuqāʾ, and go to war against and subjugate the Jewish tribes of the surrounding oases, one would expect a litany of unmitigated anger against this new Prophet, based upon the accounts of survivors of this violence as reported to other Jews. Jews do not typically ignore the pogroms of which they have been victim; they commemorate them. But some of the Jewish sources from the first century of Arab-Muslim rule are anything but pejorative when speaking about the Muslims. On the contrary, some are glowing. In some of these, the Muslims come across like the new Persians, and Muḥammad, the new Cyrus. One explanation of this Jewish lionization of the man who had reportedly wiped out many Jews early in his career is that the “Jews” of Medina were not considered part of the Jewish people, whether they were

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  137 Karaites, Christianized Jews, or simply Jews who had gone beyond the accepted bounds of “Judaism” in their worship of Ezra. We lack any Lamentations-phase Jewish literature for the Arab-Muslim conquests. Certainly, the Jews (or whatever they were) of Arabia did not leave any documentation of their own expulsion and destruction. But the Jews who lived in erstwhile Byzantine and Sasanian lands, similarly, left us nothing sufficiently close to the Arab-Muslim conquest to be considered their immediate reaction. Sometime around the middle of the eighth century CE, a Jewish apocalyptic work, ostensibly by Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, a second-century Tannaitic sage, appeared. Rabbi Shimon, the great Kabbalist who composed the work known as the Zohar, was also known by the acronym R-Sh-B-Y (“Rashbi”). He was presented as “a colossal figure, at once human and divine, who touches and influences the upper and lower worlds. He is the great radiance, the great light of the world and the Torah, the complete man, the perfect mystic, a powerful shaman, master of Torah, and the great teachers. Rashbi teaches his students the essence of the hidden, mystical world as well as the appropriate boundaries between the disclosure of the mysteries of ultimate reality and their concealment.”48 In other words, Rashbi was a conveniently trustworthy figure for an author to credit with a post-facto prophecy. The text was part of an apocalyptic cycle that understood Muḥammad as “a messianic deliverer divinely chosen to liberate the Jews and their Promised Land from Rome’s oppressive yoke.”49 The apocalyptic text’s surviving form was almost certainly based on an earlier text; the author, for example, “predicts” (that is, already knows about) the ʿAbbāsid revolution of 750 CE, but seems to be unaware of the violent, rather than peaceful, death of the Caliph ʿUmar in 644 CE, a discrepancy that is best explained by the existence of an ʿUmarera text that was somewhat carelessly edited and appended sometime after the ʿAbbāsid overthrow of the Umayyads, whose first ruler, Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān, came into his caliphal title around the year 661 CE. The author of The Secrets of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai writes: “When he [Rabbi Shimon] understood that the kingdom of Ishmael [i.e., the Arabs] would come upon [Israel], he began to say ‘Is it not enough, what the wicked kingdom of Edom [Rome, in this case; the Edomites are a useful, unspecific other here] has done to us that [we must also endure] the kingdom of Ishmael?’ And immediately Metatron50 the prince of the Presence answered him and said, ‘Do not be afraid, mortal, for the Holy One, blessed be he, is bringing about the kingdom of Ishmael only for the purpose of delivering you from that wicked one [i.e., Edom/Rome]. He shall raise up over them a prophet in accordance with his will, and he will subdue the land for them; and they shall come and restore it with grandeur. Great enmity will exist between them and the children of Esau [i.e., the Christians].”51 The Prophecy continues, “The second king who will arise from Ishmael will be a friend to Israel. And he will repair their breaches and the breaches of the Temple. And he will shape Mount Moriah [i.e., the Temple Mount] and make it

138  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant completely level. And he will build for himself there a place for worship over the Foundation Stone [Even Shtiyya], as it is said, ‘and your nest is set in the rock’ [Num. 24.21]. And he will make war with the sons of Esau, and he will slaughter their troops and take a great many of them captive. And he will die in peace and with great honor.”52 Indeed, Moschus’ tale of the double-dealing marble worker named John, who helped the Muslims establish some sort of prayer space upon the Temple Mount, takes place after the Muslim took Jerusalem under the second caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, who received the personal surrender of Sophronius. The apocalypse continues “with a forecast of the Abbasid revolution, which augurs the beginnings of a final conflict between Israel and Rome. This ultimate war will usher in a two-thousand-year messianic reign, followed by the final judgment.”53 Obviously, the Temple Mount was then, and remains today, a site of extreme theological sensitivity and apocalyptic potential. Not all Jews were as positive about the arrival of the Arab-Muslim ruling elite as the author of The Apocalypse of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. The Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer was an Aramaic-language collection of traditions of the Hebrew Bible ranging from creation to Esther and attributed to the secondcentury Talmudic superstar Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, a rough contemporary of Rashbi’s.54 Most of the text concerns the description of a visit between Abraham and his son Ishmael, living in the desert of Parran, but section 30 does not feature Abraham or his son. Rather, it is an apocalyptic text discussing the “fifteen things” that will be done by the sons of Ishmael. There are a number of useful chronological anchors that place the text, at the latest, in the eighth or ninth century CE.55 It clearly draws from the same Biblical sections as The Secrets of Shimon bar Yohai (such as the references to measuring the Land with ropes, a reference to Daniel 11), but the Pirqe’s perspective on the Arab Muslims is decidedly more negative than that of the Secrets. It is still not as negative about Arab Muslims as the Christian writers are. The sons of Ishmael will do fifteen things in the future at the End of Days in the Land [of Israel], and these are: They will measure the Land with ropes; And they will make cemeteries places for pasturage of flocks and for garbage; They will measure from them and by them on the mountains; And deceit will increase; And truth will be hidden; And law will be removed from Israel; And afflictions will abound in Israel; And they will mix the scarlet dye of the worm with wool; And paper and pen will decay; And the ruling kingdom with withdraw coinage; And they will repair the destroyed cities and clear the roads; And they will plant gardens and orchards;

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  139 And they will repair the breaches of the walls of the Temple [Beit HaMikdash]; And they will build a building on the [site of the] Temple [Hekhal]; And two brothers will rule over them.56 Truly, this is a mixed record of (future) accomplishment. The author of the Pirqe is surely unhappy about the measuring of the land, the pasturing of livestock in cemeteries (which would render them unkosher to eat or to milk, according to Jewish dietary law), the increase of deceit, the hiding of truth, the removal of the law, the abundance of affliction, the decay of the paper and pen, and the withdrawal of coinage. On the other hand, the repair of broken cities and roads and the planting of gardens and orchards do not exactly raise the reader’s ire. It is difficult to ascertain just how the author feels about the Arab-Muslim appropriation of the Temple Mount. It is possible to date this apocalypse to the time of ʿAbd al-Mālik, the Umayyad ruler who oversaw the construction of the Dome of the Rock, who ruled from 685 to 705 CE. In that case, the construction of the Dome of the Rock would be the building atop the site of the Temple, and the two brothers would be ʿAbd al-Mālik and his brother, the governor of Egypt ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. A more likely explanation would be that it was composed during the reign of Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān (661–680 CE),57 as it was under his auspices that any construction atop the Temple Mount began, and he instituted several of the policies that this prophecy seems to highlight, primarily infrastructure. He was also responsible for the removal of coins with crosses from circulation; he fought the first major campaign against the Byzantines (the Romans); and he ruled in close cooperation with his brother Ziyd ibn Abī Sufyān. That Ziyād was governor of Basra gives the messianic prediction at the conclusion of the chapter some context: “And from Rome, the son of David will sprout forth, and he will come to the Land of Israel and will look upon the destruction of [three great battles, just discussed] as it says, ‘Who is this that comes from Edom from Bozrah in garments stained crimson?’”58 Of course, these are not the only possibilities. Graetz identifies al-Amīn and al-Maʿmūn, the ninthcentury CE warring sons of Hrūn al-Rashīd as the two brothers; Lewis suggests the first two ʿAbbāsid rulers, al-Saffāḥ and al-Manṣūr.59 What are we to make of this mixed response from mid-seventh-century or early eighth-century Jews to the Arab-Muslim conquest? The paucity of sources means we must proceed cautiously, based upon some well-informed assumptions. The first assumption is that the killing of the Banū Qurayẓa cannot be what it seems: either the Muslim accounts were wholly fabricated (unlikely), or the Jews writing at the time of The Secrets of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer had not heard about them (equally unlikely; they would probably have heard about them from the Muslims themselves); or they did not consider the Banū Qurayẓa, and the other “Jews” of Western Arabia, to be “Jews” in their sense (possible, given the misapprehension about Jews and divine parenthood indicated by the reference to ʿUzayr).

140  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant Another possibility is that the Jews under the Byzantines were aware of the incident, but now, perhaps half a century to a century later, were willing to let those bygones be bygones in the name of messianic, apocalyptic hope, and a sincere desire to be extricated from the clutches of their politically Roman, culturally Greek, religiously Christian Byzantine occupiers. Even though these are the first texts we are examining that are Jewish reactions to the Arab-Muslim conquest (and even though they claim to predict, rather than respond to, it), they are not in character Lamentations-phase responses. Both in terms of their distance from the initial event and in terms of the meaning the authors can ascribe to the events of the conquest, these are quite obviously Jeremiah-phase perspectives, in which the cataclysmic event has been put into its proper perspective as an indelible, and possibly desirable, element of God’s divine plan for Israel and the Jews. It is also a fact that, although the first wave of the Arab-Muslim conquest encompassed the Jewish communities of Egypt, the Levant, the Near East, Persia, and Arabia entirely, and their lives were profoundly affected by it, it was not really their catastrophe. While Jerusalem was the Jewish religious and cultural center, even during times of exile, it had been held by the Romans since 135 CE, and it had been (worse and worse, from the Jewish perspective at the time) a Christian Roman city since roughly two centuries after that. The Jews did not hold Jerusalem, or the environs of the Temple, when ʿUmar received the city’s surrender from Sophronius. Jerusalem had not been a part of any kind of Jewish polity since the Roman meddling in the Hasmonean Civil War culminated in the Jewish kingdom’s reduction to Roman vassalage. Jerusalem’s Arab-Muslim takeover was therefore a Roman Christian loss, despite the city’s gargantuan importance to Jewish history and spirituality. The Jews may not have loved the Islamic concept that Islam abrogated Judaism, nor the Jews’ second-class state of dhimmitude under the Muslims, nor certainly the contentious and deadly relationship between the Prophet Muḥammad and the Jews of Medina (if such they were). But their anger at the half-millennium-long mistreatment at the hands of the Edomites (the Roman Christians, most recently in their Byzantine form) might have been sufficiently calcified to make the Jews openminded when it came to their new Arab Muslim rulers. The early Muslims of the first Islamic century might not have been friends of the Jews, but they were unquestionably the enemy of the Jews’ enemy. By the time the two apocalyptic texts under present discussion were circulating, the Jews had some experience living under the enemy of their enemy, and they probably found Muslim rule preferable to Christian. The question of what that life was like for them for the first few centuries of Islamic rule—whether the Jews experienced a flowering golden age of tolerance, or whether they were oppressed like never before, under the Muslims—is a politicized question these days due to the 1948 CE founding of the modern State of Israel. The truth lies somewhere in between the lachrymose narrative of Muslim subjugation of the Jews and the saccharine narrative of an idyllic interfaith symbiosis between Muslims and Jews (and

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  141 Christians), the proponents of which argue back and forth about which, the Muslims or the Christians, were more intolerant of the Jews. Bernard Lewis sums up the matter: “If we compare the Muslim attitude to Jews and treatment of Jews in medieval times with the position of Jews among their Christian neighbors in medieval Europe, we see some striking contrasts. In Islamic society hostility to the Jews is nontheological. It is rather the usual attitude of the dominant to the subordinate, of the majority to the minority, without that additional theological and therefore psychological element that gives Christian anti-Semitism its unique and special character.”60 Of course, Lewis writes with the benefit of hindsight and historical distance. The great Spanish Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204), who lived through the very violent persecutions of the Almohads in North Africa and Spain, had a different perspective (although an expected one, to the attentive reader of this study): “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us. This is as the Exalted had warned us: ‘Even our enemies themselves being judges’ (Deuteronomy 32:31). No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us.”61 Life in Spain under the Muslims was not always as harsh for the Jews as it was during Almohad dominance. And, more to the point, the authors of The Secrets of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and the Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer only had—at most—the first century or so of Islamic rule to which to respond, while Maimonides experienced the rule of the Muslims after more than four centuries of their success. But the earlier authors were responding as much to life under the Byzantine Christians as they were to life under the Muslims. In that context, Lewis’ balanced overview of Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations has more relevance than Maimonides immediate reaction to his Almohad-era childhood. From the Byzantines to the Muslims: Contextualizing the Jewish Reaction to the Arab-Muslim Conquests

The loss of Jerusalem and the provinces of the late Antique Near East was a calamity for the Christians. For the Jews, these conquests constituted little more than a change in management at the top. It is hard to imagine a ruling group that would be more antithetical to Jewish life than the Byzantines, who combined (at least from the Jewish perspective) all the negatives of Roman overlordship with the religious tradition of Christianity, whose relationship to Judaism was especially troubled: each of the two traditions, as they existed at the time, had emerged as a primordial rejection of the central religious claims of the other. Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were theologically anathema. The Jews had their problems with the Romans, of course, before Christianity existed as such. Some of these we discussed in chapter three. The Romans

142  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant not only destroyed the Second Temple but also occasionally banned Jewish religious practice (such as the ban on Sabbath observance and circumcision imposed by Hadrian around the time of the Bar Kochba Rebellion of 132–135 CE). However, such bans were typically short-lived, and by 212, when Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to non-Romans, the Jews had, legally speaking, “graduated from tolerance to near parity with other Roman citizens.”62 The Romans were generally indifferent to the religious idiosyncrasies of their subject populations; that they occasionally punished them with proscriptions against such religious practices was more nakedly punitive than it was a policy undertaken out of any sort of Roman religious fervor. The Jewish relationship with the pagan Romans was difficult. It was often careless Roman insensitivity to Jewish religious sensibilities that touched off their infrequent, if destructive and famous, conflicts. The Jews were not the only ethnic group to chafe under Roman overlordship, after all. Rome’s adoption of Christianity as the official state religion fundamentally changed that dynamic. The Roman conversion to Christianity meant that the Romans shared with the Jews a conviction that their own version of the divine story was the exclusive correct one, and now the Christian rulers of the Empire “found the continuing presence of the Jews both problematic and a source of competition.”63 When the Emperor Theodosius II, in the first part of the 15th century CE, ordered a law code compiled, the declining position of the Jews under the Christian Romans became evident. While the final version of the Theodosian Code somewhat reluctantly admits (16.3.8) that “the sect of Jews is forbidden by no law,” and enshrines that synagogues should be left undisturbed (“their synagogues and habitations shall not be burned indiscriminately,” which leaves one to wonder whether discriminate burning was permitted), but closes with the ominous warning that “the Jews also shall be admonished that they perchance shall not become insolent, and elated by their own security, commit any rash act in disrespect of the Christian religion.”64 Jews in the Theodosian Code are often classified along with heretics and pagans, denigrated as adherents of a supertitio rather than the more-neutral religio, and compared to a plague.65 Unsurprisingly, this schizophrenic legal treatment of Jews did not translate into excellent Jewish civic life. When the Muslims conquered the erstwhile-Byzantine territories in which the Jews both enjoyed these protections and suffered these indignities, the Jews were not heartbroken at the exit of the Byzantine overlords from their lives. Indeed, their lot improved. Rather than a specifically denigrated other whose religious perspective implicitly denounced the theology of the ruling Christians, the Jews under Islam were simply one of a variety of non-Muslim communities. More, their position as second-class dhimmīs was better than that of pagans, for example, as both Jews and Christians were classified ahl al-kitāb: “People of the Book,” those people acknowledged by Islamic tradition to be in receipt of true revelation from God, albeit one whose laws and practices were now obsolete or erroneously practiced. Unlike the Byzantine Christians,

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  143 the Muslims had no special legal code for Jews until the 14th-century treatise Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma (the Laws pertaining to the dhimmīs) by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, which dealt with dhimmīs in general, and not Jews in particular. Even with the second-class nature of dhimmī life, the Jews at the times that The Secrets of Shimon bar Yohai and the Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer became finalized had not experienced the legal codification of Jews that occurred in later Islamic centuries. Even a century or so after the conquests, the Muslims were relatively new to rule. To some extent, they were figuring out how to govern their expanding territories as they went along. Of course, the Umayyads who took control after 661, and who oversaw most of the expansion of the Islamic empire and its institutionalization in the conquered lands, were experienced administrators. They had been the leading clan of pre-Islamic Mecca, oversaw the city, and presided over a vast trading network. This provided them with a kind of competent familial institutional memory of rule, but such institutional memory had no context for running a vast intercontinental, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious empire. The manner in which the Muslim rulers came to regard Jews and Christians evolved, and was different in different places and at different times. Maimonides could bemoan the sovereignty of the children of Ishmael, but he also succeeded in rising to a position of prominence in al-Andalūs, Islamic Spain. And, because the Jews and the Muslims together lacked the mutual theological baggage that bedeviled Jewish-Christian relations, the interaction between the two communities was significantly less theologically tense, at least at the beginning of the Islamic empire, and probably (speaking generally, of course; there are always exceptions) throughout the Middle Ages. Genuine Jewish-Muslim enmity is a more modern phenomenon and is based much more on the political consequences of the modern state of Israel’s existence than it is on any sort of theological dispute. The Jews have no surviving Lamentations-phase responses to the ArabMuslim conquest, and the earliest of the responses that they did produce are Jeremiah-phase attempts to place the conquests into an apocalyptic framework. This framework cast the conquests as an act of God, perhaps benevolent and perhaps not, that would ultimately result in Israel’s freedom and the coming of the Jewish Messiah. It is entirely possible, even perhaps likely, that the Jews never even lamented the conquests overmuch in the first place. Some Jeremiah-phase Christian Responses to the Conquests There were several self-reflective Christian responses to the Arab-Muslim conquests that fit the mold we have already seen. However, the initial selfblame of writers like John Moschus and Sophronius did not evolve exclusively in the standard Jeremiah-phase direction of self-blame. Rather than look to their own sins, or use the calamity of the loss of Jerusalem, and the rest of the Near East besides, to Muslims as a justification for penning social or religious criticism, some writers instead lashed out at the Jews. Because

144  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant the form of these reactions was apocalyptic, attacking the Jews (or terming the Arab Muslims “New Jews” and the like) was mostly halfhearted. They may have been an easy, and standard, target, but blaming Jews for what was evidently divine punishment for Christian sin was bound to engender cognitive dissonance. The Christians who looked back at the Muslim conquest of their territories in the Levant and the Middle East had a new theological complication: a multi-century record of the imperial domination of others that had suddenly and spectacularly collapsed in those territories. The earlier Jews of the temple eras had never felt so secure as the Christians had come to feel. The Jews of the First Temple period were aware of the military and political superiority of a great number of kingdoms, Babylon and Egypt being the most proximal to them, even as they asserted the supremacy and the uniqueness of their God. In the Second Temple period, the sentiment remained the same, even as we swap out Babylon and Egypt for Rome. The early Christians clearly saw Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as the harbingers of a heavenly, spiritual kingdom. Nowhere in the Gospels is it suggested that imperial dominion is a sign of God’s favor. But when Rome became Christian, and Christianity became a pervasive element of Roman and Byzantine life, the temptation to view that worldly success as a sign of God’s approval was likely irresistible. After all, if disaster is meted out by God himself in response to human sin, then the notion that success, glory, and power are also meted out by God himself in response to human virtue is simply the logical reverse of the same coin. This was an old idea; our old friend Justin Martyr, in his writings in the Adversus Judaeos genre, asserted as much. Justin explained to his literary Jewish counterpart, Trypho, that “since you have been cast out after defeat in battle, such sufferings are your just deserts, [but] we [Christians], on the contrary, are guilty of no such crime [as you committed to earn your defeat] after we knew the divine truth.”66 Justin Martyr was not alone. As Christians won battle after battle and war after war, “persecution and martyrdom faded from the rhetoric of victory as Christians privileged Christ’s martial might rather than his followers’ patient endurance.”67 Domitianus’ 590 CE boast that Christians did not have to bear the Jewish shame of infidel dominion— the notion a direct descendant of the rise of ante-Nicene imperial triumphalism as “evidence” of Christianity’s rightness—aged poorly. The author of the seventh-century Greek work The Trophies of Damascus went to some lengths to point out that, though the Christians had lost the physical locales of places such as Mount Sinai, Jordan, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem to the Muslims, that “Christ is [still] glorified in those places.”68 The author of The Trophies of Damascus consciously and explicitly decoupled imperial dominion from religious self-assurance. This decoupling would have been, indeed, some comfort for the demoralized flock. While the Muslims were certainly not welcomed as new imperial overlords, the particulars of Islamic perspectives on the ahl al-kitāb were to allow them to continue to worship in their own traditions, however misguided. The ability to continue to be Christian,

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  145 albeit in an Islamic context, offered a narrative escape from the dead end of Christian imperial triumphalism’s collapse. For most defeats through Christian Roman history, whether it be to the Visigoths or the Huns or the Ostrogoths, the imperial triumphal model of God’s partiality to Christianity was inoculated against challenge by the most standard Jeremiah-phase apologetic: the defeat was caused, naturally, by the sins of one ruler or another, and not the sins of the whole community. One may reasonably call this scapegoating of the ruler “the Zedekiah gambit.” “The emperor’s moral virtue,” writes Olster, “was the measure of imperial well-being, so that if he was pious and virtuous, the empire prospered, but if he was not, the empire suffered.”69 In other words, if a defeat occurred, it was prima facie evidence of executive vice; a change at the top would mean a change in imperial fortune.70 It was a tidy recurring narrative motif that could easily account for any imperial setbacks. Of course, though they may have drawn from the same thematic well as Jeremiah-phase narratives, for the most part, such defeats were not genuinely community-threatening. The Zedekiah gambit would not suffice for the Arab-Muslim conquest. A new monotheistic community, challenging not just Christianity’s lands and property but the universal claims of the faith in and of themselves, seemed to have stolen the very mantle of imperial triumphalism from the Christians, as much as they took their lands and property. Even so, the coming of the Muslims and their imperial successes, shocking though they might have been, were insufficient to replace the adversarial position of the Jews in Christian theology and eschatology. The Judaisms and the Christianities at the time took their forms in confrontational conversation with each other over the course of the first few centuries of Christianity. The Jews were still the enemy of “best fit” for the Christians, and while the Arabs seemed to have God’s favor, and were doubtless the more pressing nuisance, in the apocalyptic Christianity of the late seventh century CE, the Saracens were but a harbinger of a greater conflict down the road. Furthermore, these Christians, seeking to explain their defeat, had not just a theological context but a literary genre from which to draw inspiration: the Adversus Judaeos genre. As a result, many of the Christian apocalyptic accounts that emerged after the Arab Muslim conquests continued to cast the Jews, rather than the Arab Muslims, in the role of the central antagonist. This phenomenon is explicit in the writings of Theodore Syncellus, even before the conquest;71 Pseudo-Methodius, Maximus the Confessor, and others continue it after.72 The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius and the Letter of Maximus the Confessor: The Functions of Jews and Muslims in Christian Eschatology

Borrowing the name and reputation of Methodius (d. 311), a fourth-century bishop of Olympus, a West Syrian author wrote an apocalyptic text, probably around 680 CE,73 with the partial title Treatise…on the succession of kings and on the end of time. Colloquially, it is known as the Apocalypse

146  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant of Pseudo-Methodius. Notable “for its inclusion of several eschatological ideas….[including] such elements as the Enclosed Nations [of the North] and the Son of Perdition,”74 and possibly for introducing the legend of the Last Emperor,75 according to Witakowski the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was “the first Christian polemic aimed at Islam,”76 although it was probably predated by the Homily on the End Times, attributed to Ephrem the Syrian (Pseudo-Ephrem), previously discussed. In the absence of straightforward historical chronicles, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius a critically important window into the era: wildly popular in Byzantium in particular, “its profound influence is evident in all of the subsequent Byzantine apocalyptic tradition.”77 The Apocalypse of PseudoMethodius was quickly translated from Syriac into Greek, and then into Latin, and eventually into Armenian, Church Slavonic, and Middle English. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius had a significant impact well beyond the Greek-speaking world, and for a much longer time than one might expect. The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius clearly had come to recognize, in a way that early Christian responses to the Arab-Muslim conquest did not, that the restoration of a Christian, Roman empire in the lost territories was not imminent, and that the Muslims were not simply going to vanish without cause. Pre-conquest eschatological predictions, such as the retaking of Jerusalem from the Persians by Heraclius, had come to pass, but the end times had not arrived. Furthermore, the Arab Muslim conquerors continued to grow stronger and their rule, more institutionalized. A Christian explanation of this unfortunate turn of events was called for. Worse, from the perspective of Pseudo-Methodius, a combination of second-class legal status and some amount of economic pressure caused by the jizya, the Islamic poll tax on dhimmīs, seemed to be inducing some Christians to adopt the faith of their conquerors.78 Witakowski does not mention it, but the glory brought by prolonged Muslim imperial success likely had something to do with increasing rates of conversion to Islam in the period, too; this was the double-edged sword, for Christianity, of imperial triumphalism finally cutting its wielder. Islam, not Christianity, now appeared to have God’s favor. Pseudo-Methodius hated the trend of conversion to Islam and wrote his apocalyptic text largely to warn his co-religionists away from such apostasy, particularly when based upon the notion of triumph implying divine favor. Framed as the account of a vision the historical Methodius had on Mount Sinjar, in modern-day Iraq, Pseudo-Methodius asserted that the worldly inconveniences of Muslim rule were soon to end, along with the very world itself. This reported vision took the form of a history of the world, one which divided that history into seven ages, with the first half of the work treating the first six ages, and the latter half focusing on the last 70 years of the world. The Muslims (the text calls them “the sons of Ishmael”) feature prominently as the antagonistic power. With callbacks to the books of Gideon and Daniel, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius asserts that the Sons of Ishmael will

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  147 “enslave Christians for ten weeks of years. At the end of this period, though, they will be destroyed by the Romans (that is, the Byzantine Empire).”79 The Sons of Ishmael’s big mistake, in the Apocalypse, would be to assert the blasphemous nation that “the Christians have no savior,” which would earn them God’s ire and cause him to anoint the idealized Last Emperor, who would arrive and defeat the Sons of Ishmael. This Emperor’s coronation would be closely followed by a period of peace, shortly to be smashed by the invasion of Northern peoples that had been confined behind gates erected in antiquity by Alexander the Great. After the defeat of these, the Antichrist would appear; his defeat would usher in the Second Coming of Jesus. The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, in other words, placed the Christians at the time it was written in the middle of the first act of a three-act eschatological drama. The author was originally assumed to be a Chalcedonian Christian, given its “exaltation of an eschatological king of the Greeks,” but in fact “this eschatological figure is an amalgamation of Alexander the Great, Constantine, and Jovian. In other words, he is an idealized Christian emperor who would bring salvation and unity to all Christianity.”80 Now, most scholars consider Pseudo-Methodius himself to have been a Miaphysite81 Christian due to his location in Sinjar (a Miaphysite area) and his inclusion, in a surprisingly central role, of the Kingdom of Ethiopia in the text. Not only would the Kingdom of Ethiopia play a decisive (but unlikely, given the military realities of the era)82 role in Christian deliverance from the Sons of Ishmael, but in fact Alexander the Great’s mother had been an Ethiopian princess named Kushat.83 This is significant because Ethiopia was, similarly, a territory where Miaphytism was the most common Christian doctrine. The Muslims, the Sons of Ishmael, are predictably presented as simple agents of barbarism and tribulation. “They are destruction,” Pseudo-Methodius writes, “and will come out for the destruction of everything. They are defiled and love defilement.”84 He describes them as those who “will ride upon boasting and be wrapped in arrogance” until they are defeated, adding that they will “become so arrogant in their rage and boasting that they will demand tribute from the dead lying in the dust.”85 He adds “they will take the poll tax”—an explicit reference to the jizya—“from orphans, widows, and holy men.”86 The Sons of Ishmael, furthermore, “will not have mercy for the poor and will not aid the afflicted. They will strike the elderly and oppress the weary of spirit. They will have neither pity on the sick nor mercy for the weak. Rather, they will laugh at the wise, mock the lawgivers, and deride the knowledgeable….All the earth’s inhabitants will sit in a stupor and a daze.”87 Unsurprisingly, Pseudo-Methodius goes on to accuse the Muslims of all manner of barbarity and viciousness. To the question of why God would send these “rebels, murderers, blood shedders, and annihilators”88 to afflict the Christians, whom God loved, Pseudo-Methodius has a familiar answer: “They are a testing furnace for all Christians.”89 True to the spirit of the original Jeremiah, the author of the

148  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius points to improper devotion to God, and improper practice, as the cause of God’s wrath. The problem is exacerbated, the author writes, by the apparent willingness of Christians to follow the fair weather, so to speak, and convert to Islam. Placing the problem of improper devotion in its historical context, Pseudo-Methodius writes, “For the blessed apostle [Paul] said, ‘Not all among Israel are Israel’ [Rom 9:5]. So too not all who are called Christians are Christians. For in the days of the prophet Elijah, there remained only seven thousand among the Sons of Israel who worshiped the lord God. But all Israel was saved by them. Likewise,” he continues, dejectedly, “at the time of the chastisement by these tyrants, [only] a few of the many Christians will remain [Christians], just as our savior shows us in the holy gospel, saying, ‘When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith upon the earth?’ Behold, in those days, even miracle workers will despair. Many who were Sons of the Church will deny the Christians’ true faith, the holy cross, and the glorious mysteries. Without compulsion, lashing, or blows, they will deny Christ and make themselves the equivalent of unbelievers.”90 Thus far, the sin, at least according to Pseudo-Methodius, and a familiar one, too: faithlessness to divine truth had ever been a cause of divine ire. Were this Apocalypse a prophetic text in the literary style of Jeremiah, or a chronicle, it probably needed to go no further. But the particulars of the apocalyptic genre demand that the author provide a further prediction. This constraint of the genre is of great benefit to historians in terms of dating these texts: it is not difficult to discern the moment when the content shifts from specific, accurate “predictions” about the “future” (they are so specific and accurate, of course, because the events described had already occurred at the time of composition) to genuine predictions that are vague, historically inaccurate, or often both (often, the text remains intermixed with “historical” material to lend it credence). When Pseudo-Methodius speaks about Christians converting to Islam, he is bemoaning a phenomenon that had, indeed, been occurring.91 He also probably perceived the declining importance of Christian holy men: “For men will be under the chastisement of the Sons of Ishmael. They will enter into such afflictions that they will despair of their lives. Honor will be taken away from priests, in the church the divine service and the living sacrifice will cease, and at that time priests will become like the [common] people.”92 Christian worship may or may not have been as disrupted by the conquests as the Apocalypse claims here, but it certainly would have been altered from Pseudo-Methodius’ perspective. This is more plausible to have been a reaction, rather than an apocalyptic prediction, of the author. At that point in the text, the tone changes to one of genuine prediction: “In that tenth week [of years—i.e., after 70 years], during which the extent of their victory will be complete, affliction will grow strong, a double chastisement upon men, livestock, and animals. There will be a great famine, many will die, and their corpses will be thrown into the street like mud, without anyone to bury [them]. On one of those days, plagues of wrath will be sent upon men, two or three a day. In that tenth week, when everything will come

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  149 to an end, they will give their sons and daughters to pagans for money. Why would God avert his gaze from helping the faithful and they endure these afflictions except that they might be tested and the faithful be separated from the unfaithful, the tares from the chosen wheat? For that age is a testing furnace.”93 A litany of tribulations to be faced by the Christians in that “week” follows, until it looks as though all hope is lost. It is at that point that the Sons of Ishmael go too far. After these afflictions and chastisement by the Sons of Ishmael, at the conclusion of that week, while men live in danger of chastisement and have no hope of being saved from that harsh enslavement, while they being persecuted, afflicted, and beaten, while they are hungry, thirsty and suffering this harsh chastisement, these barbarian tyrants will be delighting in food, drink, and rest. And they will boast of their victory. For they devastated and destroyed the inhabitations of Persia, Armenia, Illicia, Isauria, Cappadocia, Africa, Sicily, Hellas, the Roman Empire, and all the ocean’s islands. They will be dressed like bridegrooms and adorned like brides. They will blaspheme, saying, ‘The Christians have no savior.’94 That statement, apparently, will be sufficient to trigger the next phase of Pseudo-Methodius’ hypothesized apocalypse. Led by a “king of the Greeks… awoken like a man recovering from [too much] wine…[they] will go out against them from the Kushites’ sea [i.e. Ethiopia] and cast devastation and destruction upon the desert of Yathrib and among the dwelling places of their ancestors.”95 After the Greek reconquest, “the yoke of [Arab] enslavement will be seven times heavier that their own yoke [that they imposed had been]….They, their wives, and their children will become slaves, and [in servitude] they will serve those who had served them. Their servitude will be a hundred times more bitter than their own [enslaving had been for us].”96 So, as far as the Muslims concerned Pseudo-Methodius, they may have been living large right then, but their bitter doom was preordained, just as the rest of the challenges facing the conquered Christians were preordained. In the grand eschatological drama, Pseudo-Methodius tells his readers, the Sons of Ishmael play only the henchman’s role. Following their downfall will be a “great peace like never before,” during which there will be “no evil person, no thought of evil, and no fear or trembling in their hearts.”97 Into that peace will stampede the armies of the north (those who had been confined behind Alexander’s gates of iron) who will “eat children in front of watching parents” and “drink animals’ blood like water;” they will “slaughter babies and give them to their mothers and force them to eat their children’s bodies.”98 No human foe, Pseudo-Methodius warns, will be able to stand against these, but he consoles his readers that “after one week of affliction, all of them will be devastated in the Valley of Joppa. For they will all be gathered there—they, their wives, and their children. God will send one of the angels’ commanders

150  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant there, and he will devastate them in an hour.”99 A ten-and-a-half-year reign of the Greek emperor in Jerusalem would follow God’s effortless destruction of the northern barbarians, at which time the “Son of Destruction”—the Antichrist, the true villain of the story—would be revealed. The Son of Destruction, Pseudo-Methodius writes, “will be conceived and born in Chorazin, grow up in Bethsaida, and reign in Capernaum.”100 Unsurprisingly, this Son of Destruction will be a Jew, and more specifically a member of the tribe of Dan. This Danite will “enter Jerusalem, dwell in God’s temple, and pretend to be like God. But he is a mortal man, embodied from semen and born of a married woman….But if he could, through the bitterness of his inclination, this Child of Destruction would deceive all. For he will become a dwelling place for all demons, and all their actions will be accomplished by him.”101 But God will save the day again, and consign this evil man to torment in hell. “But as for us,” Pseudo-Methodius concludes, inviting the reader to remain steadfastly faithful and not join the pretender and the hypocrite in their ordained torment, “may our lord Jesus Christ consider us worthy of his heavenly kingdom, along with all who do his will. Let us offer glory, honor, adoration, and exaltation now and always, for ever and ever. Amen.”102 The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius is unique in its hybridization of Ethiopia’s role with that of the Byzantine Roman Empire, largely due to his desire to make his apocalypse dovetail with the relevant eschatological material in the book of Daniel and in Psalm 68:31, which includes the statement that “Ethiopia will stretch out her hands to God” or, perhaps “Ethiopia shall surrender (or: yield her power) to God.”103 But the Apocalypse of PseudoMethodius was certainly not the only apocalyptic text in the late Antique Byzantine world to function as an anti-Jewish polemic. Even as PseudoMethodius acknowledged and blamed Christian sins (specifically, conversion to Islam), and had much abuse to pour upon the Sons of Ishmael, the very genre of the apocalyptic prediction demands a truly omnipotent concept of God: one that knows precisely what will happen and when, and can make that foreknowledge come to pass in reality. In that context, even the Christian sins would not really be the Christians’ fault. Pseudo-Methodius may decry the evil of the Arab Muslims, and he may warn people away from apostasy for the sake of their own immortal souls and for escaping a torturous damnation. But this entreaty to fidelity is not the same as Pseudo-Methodius asserting, like Jeremiah did for the Jews at the time of the Babylonian sack of Solomon’s Temple, that Christian sin was so offensive to God that he sent the Sons of Ishmael as a lesson in humility, to compel the Christians to stop doing the evil things they were doing. Rather, the Arab-Muslim conquest was not just a divinely authorized calamity, but a divinely planned calamity. The plan was at least three centuries in the making. And in this divinely planned calamity, it was the Jews—adherents of the ancient, most direct theological challenge to Christian doctrine—who would ultimately bear the brunt of God’s true wrath, and receive his true punishment (Christians would be rewarded with paradise). In this way, it was Jewish sin, Jewish obstinacy, that

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  151 was to blame for the Arab-Muslim conquest, which was just a predetermined set piece in the grand eschatological drama. In blaming the Jews, PseudoMethodius was not unique at all. Another such observer was Maximus the Confessor, known to us through his own writing, the Epistolae, and a denigrating biography under the Syriac title (spoiler alert) The history of the wicked Maximus of Palestine, who blasphemed against his creator and whose tongue was torn out, but which “is generally known to modern scholars by the less colorful name Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor.”104 The author of this unflattering biography identifies himself as George of Reshʿaina, a figure who is otherwise unknown. The text was probably composed in the late seventh century. Maximus was a Maronite vehemently opposed to Monothelitism, the Christological compromise between Monophysite and Diophysite doctrine that had been championed by the Emperor Heraclius. Monothelitism asserts that Christ had both a divine and human nature but a single will. According to the Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor, the heretical doctrines put forth by Maximus himself were the cause (and, to some extent, the result) of the Arab-Muslim conquests: “On the one hand, the conquests created enough unrest to prevent an effective ecclesiastical response to Maximus’ heresy. On the other hand, Arab military success could also be seen as punishment of those Christians who had accepted Maximus’ theology.”105 “Following the wicked Maximus,” George of Reshʿaina writes, as he catalogs the itinerant theologian and his companion’s travels, “God’s wrath punished everywhere that had accepted his error.”106 We have some of Maximus’ writings, and he is not silent on the topic. In a letter written to Peter, the governor of Numidia, on another topic, he mentions some current events tangentially, urging perseverance in prayer to alleviate Christian suffering at the time of the conquest: “To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another’s lands as though they were their own; to see civilization itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human,” he laments.107 Clearly horrified by the Arab Muslims, however, Maximus turns his pen against the true villains, which to him are the Jews. Maximus accuses the Jews of a great many things, not the least of which is delighting in the Christian plight at the hands of the Arab Muslims. To see the Jewish people, who have long delighted in seeing flow the blood of men, who know no other means of pleasing God than destroying his creation…who deem themselves to be serving God by doing precisely what he detests, who are the most deprived of faith in the world and so the most ready to welcome hostile forces…who announce by their actions the presence of the Antichrist since they ignored that of the true savior…this people who are the master of falsehood, the agent of crime, the enemy of truth, the savage persecutor of the faith….What is more terrifying, I say, for the eyes and ears of Christians than to see a cruel and alien nation authorized to raise its hand against the divine inheritance? But is the multitude of sins committed by us that has allowed this.108

152  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant Those many sins, to Maximus, included the forced baptism of the Jews by his theological opponent and political enemy, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, a practice to which Maximus was stridently opposed. Maximus argued that the infusion of nonbelieving Jews into the community was like a poison, a dilutant that thinned the pure faith of the true believers. Such a dilution, Maximus argued, seems sufficient motive for God not only to punish the Christians, but to solve the problem: to send the invaders to separate the apostate, pretend Christians from the true ones, and to bring about the end times. For both Maximus and Pseudo-Methodius, as well as for other writers of other middle-to-late seventh-century apocalypses, the Arab-Muslim conquests were not themselves the emergence of the Muslims themselves onto the world stage, but the means of God’s chastisement for a sinful world. This casting of a narrative’s villains as mere instruments is not new, of course; the Jews of both the First and Second Temple’s destructions characterized their catastrophes in similar terms. But the apocalypticists were writing within a particular genre, with a particular set of literary requirements, within a particular theology. The Jews at the times of the Temples and the earliest Christians had certain understandings about God’s power and will, such that it was easier to cast the worst of blame on their own communities, or, indeed, on the sinful world, rather than reexamine those understandings in the light of catastrophe. Still, these religious communities are not monolithic, and are even less monolithic when considered diachronically. The Christians of the seventh century had the same essential understanding of God’s power and will, but also had a massive amount of literary and theological baggage that had become indelibly intertwined with that understanding. Notions of sin and the inevitable end of the world had been present in Christian theology since our earliest written records of its adherents’ activity. Imperial triumphalism, combined with the repeated ill-fortune of the Jews who were their gravest theological opponents, had seemingly confirmed God’s preference for Christianity, and had simultaneously firmly set the inevitable eschatological villainy of God’s onetime-chosen people. This dichotomy between the divinely favored Christians and divinely unfavored Jews was emphasized by worldly Christian dominance. The long duration of Christian dominance had calcified the perception that God rewarded faithfulness with worldly dominion. That notion of God’s favor could not, by that time, be discarded, even in the face of what must have seemed compelling evidence to the contrary; it was too integrated, not just into notions of divine favor and dominance, but also into the (by then, centuries-long) theological and Christological debates that had shaped Byzantine-era Christianities into their present forms. There was no going back on either notion: that the Jews were the villains of the grand eschatological drama, and that God expressed his desires with the granting of political dominance. Therefore, the apocalyptic writers had no wiggle room to reframe the end times with the Arab Muslims, not the Jews, taking the form of the great adversarial power in the narrative of the end times (even had they wished to do so; there is no evidence at all that they had any such desire).

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  153 Keeping the Jews as the central villains of the grand divine story of God, Jesus, and the End of the World was an example of a Zedekiah gambit. It allowed for a tidy explanation of divine punishment for Christian sins, but turned a catastrophe from a devastating current event into a regrettable, but indelible, piece of God’s plan to redeem his Christian followers. Apocalyptic Responses in Non-Apocalyptic Works

John bar Penkāyē was a monk of the East Syrian monastery of John Kāmul. Tasked by his Abbott Sabrishoʿ to write a theological response to the dominion of the Ishmaelites over the Christians, the overachieving John instead wrote a voluminous history of the world, teleologically crafting a narrative that presented a world not in the process of receiving God’s final saving grace, but rather a realm too far gone to wickedness and sin, abandoned by God to evil and destruction. This cheerful tome was entitled the Book of Main Points. The question of how God could allow such horror as befell the Christians conquered by the Arab Muslims stands at the center of his narrative. John bar Penkāyē “interpreted the previous six centuries of church history as a cycle of Christians learning from their tribulations, growing closer to God, and—once their situation improved—falling back into error. Applying this heuristic to the contemporary situation, the Book of Main Points claims that once Roman persecution of Christians subsided in the early fourth century, theological error overtook the church. The resulting Chalcedonian theology led to the Byzantines’ defeat by the Arabs.”109 The book was written in the 680s, when the second Arab fitna (time of strife; civil war) was underway. It was thus not exactly a direct response to the initial shock of the conquest, but rather to the shock of its apparent intransience. The Umayyads (he calls them the “Sons of ʿAmmāyē”) were in the process of establishing themselves as Islam’s first dynasty when they faced a pair of rebellions, one by al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī and the other led by ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr. Ultimately, both rebellions failed, but their coincidence weakened the Umayyad’s grip over John’s area. This instability allowed John to write free of central Arab Muslim control, as a group of non-Arab prisoners of war had taken advantage of the political untidiness to temporarily seize control of the city of Nisibis, near John’s monastery. John called these troops the Shurṭē, short for the Arabic shurṭat allāh, “God’s special troops,” who couched their rebellion in the pious Islamic terminology of their enemies and may have fought with wooden clubs called kāfirkūbat, an ArabicPersian hybrid word meaning “infidel smashers.”110 Bar Penkāyē considered these Shurṭē to portend the downfall of the Ishmaelites, despite the rebels’ expressly Islamic piety. Their rebellion, focusing on vengeance for al-Ḥusayn following his death at Karbalāʾ and justice for the mistreated family of the Prophet Muḥammad, did indeed contain justifications that—while coming too early to designate as “Shīʿī” justifications—certainly spoke to many

154  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant eventual central Shīʿī grievances, and reflected the growing disputatiousness of the Muslim empire, of which John bar Penkāyē was aware. John traces the beginnings of the divine cause of the conquests to the Council of Nicaea and the accumulation of political power for the church. “As long as pagans ruled,” John bar Penkāyē laments, all our ranks were properly conducted because, on account of fear of persecutors, the lax and dissolute were not allowed to remain among us. As soon as someone [drifting] from vigilance of the truth fell asleep, the furnace of persecution would separate him [from us] without the bother of a council. But from time to time, when the vehemence of our persecution lessened a little, in accord with tradition, the fathers would assemble, judge a few accusations that had sprung up, dispel perplexities that had arisen, affirm the apostolic cannons, and [do] other appropriate things that the age had taught them to set right and to establish…. Our faith flourished greatly and our conduct was radiant.111 Bar Penkāyē’s understanding of Christian history was that it vacillated between eras of dominance and vulnerability. In Bar Penkāyē’s view, the acquisition of political power was precisely the wrong path for Christians to take: the imperial triumphalism of the Chalcedonian church was a worldly trap that turned Christian minds from righteousness and heaven to politics and profanity. The councils that took place when Christianity was persecuted, John explains, were the necessary actions of the leaders of a pious community, designed to “dispel perplexities” and “affirm the apostolic cannons” and do “other appropriate things.” The establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, though, set Christianity on a one-way street to disorder: Even though there were many councils before that of Nicaea, they were neither universal nor to make a new creed. Rather, [they took place] for the purpose that we spoke of above. But after there was relief and [Christian] believing kings took control of the Roman government, then corruption and perplexity entered the churches. Creeds and councils multiplied because every year they made a new creed. Rest and peace brought them great loss. For lovers of glory did not stop stirring up trouble. Rather, they stole the obedience of kings with gold and played with them like children. These were the things concerning the Romans.112 Matters were different, Bar Penkāyē asserts, for the Churches under Zoroastrian Sasanian rule, under whose overlordship such corruption had no fertile ground in which to take root within the politically powerless Church (although John credits God with suppressing any potential theological offenses before they could flourish).

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  155 In 325 CE, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, with the stated goal of resolving the ecclesiastical and Christological differences of opinion that had entered in the various Christian communities of belief in the pair of centuries after Jesus’ death. Among other outcomes, the Council resulted in the excommunication of Arian Christians, who held to the belief of Arius that Jesus was begotten by God at a certain moment, and was therefore not co-eternal with God the Father. This excommunication was just the first in a series of sectarian fractures that bedeviled Byzantium and rotted its religious unity. Coming, as it did, more than three centuries before the Arab-Muslim conquest began, Jon bar Penkāyē did not consider Nicaea to be the most proximal cause of the conquest. Rather, as it was presented in the Book of Main Points, Nicaea was the beginning of the sin that was most hateful to God: Christian schism, the result of Christian rulers engaging with theological questions under political pressure. This is not to say that Bar Penkāyē had any sympathy for Arians or other such troublemakers; clearly, political supremacy was a poor context for wise ecumenical deliberation, for in such an environment, unity ceased to seem exigent. For from when this evil schism took place until now, three times there appeared [the same portents from] the sun that he had show the crucifiers at the time of the Crucifixion, as well as earthquakes, tremors, and terrifying signs from the sky. These indicated nothing other than the heretics’ wickedness and what was about to come upon the earth. Therefore, when he observed that there was no reform, he summoned a barbaric kingdom against us, a people who knew no persuasion and had neither covenant nor pact, who accepted neither flattery nor supplication. This was their comfort—unnecessary blood[shed]. This was their pleasure—to rule over all. This was their desire—captivity and exile. This was their food—wrath and anger. They were not appeased by anything that was offered them. When they had flourished and did the will of him who had summoned them, they reigned and ruled over all the world’s kingdoms. They enslaved all peoples to harsh slavery and led their sons and daughters into bitter servitude.113 The sins that were corollaries of the schisms that began with the official ecumenical councils were many: “persecution of priests, slandering of holy ones, mingling with unbelievers, marriage with the wicked, consorting with heretics, friendship with the crucifiers [i.e., the Jews]”114 are just the beginning. John goes on to name “scorning of sanctuaries, despising the divine mysteries, contempt for holy Sunday, neglecting assemblies during our Lord’s festivals, trampling the laws and canons of the fathers, abolishment of first fruits and canonical tithes,”115 as well as “unnecessary ablutions, fraudulent findings ascertained from magical water, rushing to soothsayers’ doors, evil possession of ashes and amulets, [seeking] wicked traditions from the

156  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant dwelling places of demons, Satanic influence [in the pursuit] of the illusion of dreams, strife and quarrel, murder and adultery, pillage and plunder. What then, my friends,” John laments, “are these things [so] or not? I know that they are. I, I am weary of relating them.”116 The implication of this list is that proper practice would have resulted from avoiding the temptations of political power and leaving the world in the hands of Christ. Worst of all, John bar Penkāyē notes, is that all of this was the result of unforced error: “the age did not force us to this, [but] our wickedness did.”117 John bar Penkāyē concludes his discussion of the Sons of Hagar (as he calls the Arabs) by recounting the early political history of the Umayyads under Muʿāwiya and his successors, offering invaluable insight into the period for modern historians (and corroborating some facts related in several Arabic chronicles). He cannot, however, fully resist the apocalyptic milieu of his contemporaries like Pseudo-Methodius and Maximus the Confessor. Citing Jeremiah 4:18, he addresses his Abbott Sabrishoʿ and writes, this is ‘our evil that has become bitter and reached our hearts.’ Having been informed by holy scripture and especially by our Lord’s words, I truly know that the end of ages has reached us. For behold, everything that has been written has been fulfilled: ‘Men will become deceitful, lovers [only] of themselves, traitors, brutes, haters of good, enslaved more to lust than to love of God. For they have the semblance of the fear of God, but they are far from its power’ [2 Tim 3:2-5]. The blessed Paul said these things about our time, Behold, they are [now] here….We are missing only one thing: the coming of the Deceiver. I think that these things [i.e., the Arab-Muslim conquest and the discord all around] are his birth pangs.118 He goes on to predict that the Shurṭē would be the cause of the dissolution of the Empire of the Sons of Hagar (that is, the Arabs). John bar Penkāyē’s Book of Main Points was neither a chronicle nor an apocalypse, but rather was a direct theological response, from the Jeremiah phase of the evolution of the Byzantine narrative, to the Arab-Muslim conquest that included both straightforward historical information and apocalyptic prediction. Perhaps “apocalyptic reaction” would be a better term for the genre of the Book of Main Points; although Bar Penkāyē perceives the world to be in essentially the same stage of the apocalypse as PseudoMethodius does at the time of the Arab Muslim conquest, his tone is less one of warning and more one of resignation for a world already beyond the possibility of redemption. Conclusion When the Arab-Muslim armies emerged from Arabia in the decades following the Prophet Muḥammad’s death, they were not yet in possession of a single fully developed theology, let alone the vast varieties of theologies that

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  157 came to comprise the Islamic theological tradition. The growing complexity of Islam would be informed and challenged by their interaction with the Christians and Jews whom they came to rule, as well as by their own internal discussions (both literary and martial) that echoed the very debates that John bar Penkāyē so decried in Byzantine Christianity. They had not—yet—experienced any communal catastrophes on the level of the Temples, or, indeed, their own conquests, as discussed in this chapter. Islam was not a religion born in and shaped by trauma. On the contrary, the Prophet of Islam, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh, died a success: on the eve of his death, he remained the leader of his community, which had succeeded militarily and was growing and thriving culturally and economically. This is not to say that there were not to be challenges along the way; the Prophet’s own death in 632 CE was the first such significant challenge to Islam’s endurance, and surviving the death of a founding figure is never a sure thing. Still, Muḥammad’s death of natural causes, at a reasonably advanced age, required no religious rethinking of the universe, even if it generated a tremendous amount of fathomable grief. Neither the Prophet himself nor anyone else had ever proposed that he was anything other than a virtuous human, let alone co-equal with God himself. His death was part of the normal order of things, even if it was an extraordinary and politically fraught moment. Indeed, it threatened to rip the community apart within a generation or two; but even as the Muslims contested over questions of the legitimacy of the leader and the proper nature of that leader’s office, their armies conquered the southern provinces of the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian Persian Empire, North Africa all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, which they then crossed and brought most of the Iberian Peninsula, which they called al-Andalūs, under their control. Even in times of fitna, Muslim imperial success continued. There was yet no grand reason for the Muslims to wonder about God’s favor. The Jews, on the other hand, were more than well-experienced in coping with such historical catastrophes. They already had literature within their traditions that explained, contextualized, and grappled with the causes and implications of such matters. The Arab-Muslim conquest required no novel, clarifying narrative. On the contrary, it could easily slide into the existing narrative and theological structures dealing with catastrophe that the hard experience of the loss of the Temples had granted them. The Christians, for their part, clearly struggled with the implications of this defeat, which was more theirs than the Jews’, anyway. The Arab Muslims cannot have been aware of the extent to which their invasion would interrupt and stoke the monotheist feud that had functioned in a Jewish-Christian binary. This allusion to a binary is not meant to elide the diversities of Judaism or Christianity (Christianity in particular). But as we saw in the Adversus Judaeos literature, when adherents of different flavors of Christianity wished to hammer each other with the worst insult they could muster, it was “Jewish” or “Jew.” The Jews were the quintessential unbelievers for the Christians; the Christians, the most appalling heretics for the Jews.

158  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant In time, the Muslims would take their place in the monotheistic interreligious dialogue (which became, thereby, a trialogue) and conflict, but that did not happen as early as the seventh century. Historians always wish for a greater quantity of sources, and a greater variety. The few sources we have, in this case, present a picture of Christian and Jewish responses to the Arab-Muslim conquest that are decidedly patchy. Even with that dearth, however, a clearly discernable distinction between how the Jews and Christians perceived the emergence of the Muslims exists. While both saw the events of the conquest as prima facie evidence that God’s apocalyptic plan’s final act was underway, they naturally disagreed on the nature of just what events would soon follow. The Jewish perspective is rather easily dispensed: watching the Christians lose Jerusalem to the Muslims may have signaled to some of them that the Messianic age was imminent. As the Secrets of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and the Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer demonstrate, the Jews did not approve of Muslim religious claims or military occupation, but they clearly were not heartbroken at Christian misfortune. They seemed to be content to suffer Muslim overlordship, at least to some extent, if doing so allowed them to see their theological opponents humbled. The Arab-Muslim conquests were momentous, and not infrequently deadly to the Jews, from the very beginning (although, as discussed, the exact religious character of the Jews of Medina is a matter that requires further exploration). But when viewed as an act of God, to the Jews it was clearly the Christians, and not the Jews, who were now the focus and aim of God’s displeasure. Far from a punishment for the Jews, the Muslim conquest of Christian territories seemed to portend Jewish redemption. Christians, by contrast, had lost lives, treasure, territory, and prestige. Perhaps worst of all, they lost possession of Jerusalem, Jesus’ city. In a milieu where, for centuries, they had considered their overlordship over Jerusalem and the Middle East as evidence of God’s favor and proof of their theological correctness, even if they quibbled over ecumenical details, the loss of these territories was profoundly embarrassing. Some of the Christians ultimately blamed themselves and their own sins. Consistent with what we have termed the Jeremiah phase in this study, a half century after Sophronius lamented the emerging conquest in his writings, calling for nondescript repentance before ultimately being forced to surrender Jerusalem personally to ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, Pseudo-Methodius and Maximus the Confessor postulated specific sins that brought on the conquest. For Pseudo-Methodius, it was Christian denial of Christ and increasing apostasy that induced God to afflict the Christians with the Arab Muslims. Maximus the Confessor blamed the forced conversion of the Jews—not because forced conversion is itself an immoral act, but because the expansion of the term “Christian” to nonbelievers watered down Christian purity of faith. This, Maximus believes, is what induced God to send the Sons of Ishmael. Of course, Maximus’ biographer, known as George of Reshʿaina, thought that it was the

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  159 heresies of Maximus himself that induced God to punish the Christians collectively. As far as Pseudo-Methodius and Maximus the Confessor go, their selfreflective critique came in the form of apocalypses that cast the Muslims in the role of divine punishers, much like the Bible and the Talmud cast the Babylonians and the Romans when they demolished the Temple. There was no abandoning monotheism for any of the afflicted communities. But the Christian writers and thinkers could not simply abandon centuries of theological claims against the Jews and against heretical Christian sects with erroneous theologies. The ability to incorporate traumatic events is obviously key to monotheistic longevity. The Christians leaned on their religious tradition, accepted that God was punishing them with afflictions, and placed those afflictions within their existing theological schema: God would redeem them when his grand eschatological drama had played itself out. Of course, the world did not end, and neither did the Christian-Muslim conflict. Since both claimed a universal religion, such conflict—while certainly not ubiquitous in the world of Christian-Muslim relations—was probably inevitable. It would be another few centuries before the Muslims had some soul-searching of their own to do, when Crusading Western Christians took Sicily and—once again—Jerusalem. Notes 1 Although the far larger and bloodier conquests of the Mongols—similarly out of nowhere, as far as the sedentary world was concerned—were sufficiently shocking to receive discussion later in this study. 2 Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 3–9. 3 Ibid., 8. 4 Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 75. 5 Michael Philip Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), xvi. 6 Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, Second Edition (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2004), 4. 7 Ibid., 7. 8 For this discussion, and for an English translation of al-Yaʿqūbī, al-Masʿūdī, and al-Isfahānī’s work on the Persians as they appear in their Arabic chronicles, see Hoyland, The ‘History of the Kings of the Persians in Three Arabic Chronicles. 9 Khodadad Rezakhani, “History from the edge: teaching early Islamic history from Sub-Sasanian coins,” in Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia, vol. 30 (2021), 131–32. 10 Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 61. 11 Lawrence I. Conrad, “Ibn Aʿtham and his History,” Al-Uṣūr al-Wuṣṭā 23 (2015), 124. Conrad points out that Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī traces the beginnings of the Islamic conquest of Iraq to a dispute between the northern Rabīʿa tribe and Sasanian officials over grazing rights.

160  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant 12 Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 66. 13 Najam Haider, “The Myth of the Shīʿī Perspective,” in Routledge Handbook on Early Islam, edited by Herbert Berg (New York: Routledge, 2018), 210. 14 Albrecht Noth, The Early Arab Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994), passim., but especially 26–108. 15 Ayman S. Ibrahim, The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion (622–641): a Critical Revision of Muslims’ Traditional Portrayal of the Arab Raids and Conquests (New York: Peter Lang, 2018), 1–5. Ibrahim points out that some modern Muslim scholars challenge this traditional view, emphasizing their argument that the conquests were undertaken for much more venal and standard motives. 16 Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 5. 17 Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997), 12–13. 18 Ibid., 15. 19 Ibid., 15–16. 20 Ibid., 24. See also E. M. Jeffreys, “The Image of the Arabs in Byzantine Literature,” The 17th International Byzantine Congress, Major Papers (New Rochelle, NY: 1986), 305–21. 21 W.E. Kaegi, “Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest,” Church History 382 (June, 1969), 149. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 Theophylact Simocatta, History, 4.XVI.16, in Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, trans., The “History” of Theophylact Simocatta (NewYork: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1986), 129. 24 Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 79. 25 Ibid., 61. 26 Ibid., 62, n. 24. 27 John Moschus (Georgian tr.), Pratum spirituale, 100–102 (tr. Garitte, 414–16), cited in Ibid., 63. 28 On the nature and status of non-Muslims, see Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Cf. Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). 29 Stephen J. Shoemaker, A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Jewish and Christian Eyes (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021), 47. 30 Sophronius of Jerusalem, Synodical Letter 2.7.3, in Ibid., 47. 31 Ibid. 47–48. 32 Ibid, 50. 33 Ibid., 50–51. 34 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 72–73. 35 See Ibid., 116–52 for the more immediate reactions to the Arab-Muslim conquest in these languages. 36 Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 60. 37 Ibid., 61. 38 Ibid., 85–87. 39 Ibid., 87. 40 Penn, When Christians first met Muslims, 39. 41 Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 94–95. 42 Ibid., 132.

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  161 43 The interaction of the Prophet Muḥammad with the Jewish tribes of Yathrib is well-attested in the canonical ḥadīth collections of Bukhārī and Muslim, as well as in the Sīra of the Prophet by Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī. For a discussion of the literary and formal elements of the relationship between the Prophet and the Jews of Arabia, see Rizwi S. Faizer, “Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī revisited: a case study of Muhammad and the Jews in biographical literature,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, McGill University, 1995. 44 Qurʾān 9:30. 45 ʿIsā al-Masīh, Jesus the Messiah, is mentioned in the Qurʾān 11 times. 46 Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. 50–74. 47 This explanation for ozer as a possible explanation for the appearance of “ʿUzayr” in al-Tawbah was presented by Moshe Sharon during a class lecture at Hebrew University in the Fall semester 2003, but appears to be otherwise unpublished. The class notes are no longer in my possession, and the exact date of the lecture is unknown. 48 Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 31–32. 49 Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 138. 50 Not a figure of the Bible, but Metatron is an angel of the Talmud and the Kabbala. He is variously associated with the Archangel Michael, Enoch, Melchizedek, and Yahoel. 51 Author unknown, The Apocalypse of Rabbin Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai, in Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 139. 52 Ibid., 140. 53 Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 141. 54 There are many “Eliezers” in the Rabbinic tradition. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus is important enough that when scholars of Judaism refer to “Eliezer” without naming his father, this is the one to whom they refer. In this way, he is like Pelé. 55 Ibid., 145. 56 Author unknown, Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer, in Shoemaker, A Prophet has Appeared, 145–46. 57 Abba Hillel Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel, from the 1st through the 17th Centuries. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927, 40–41. 58 Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer, 146. 59 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 316. 60 Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 85. 61 Moses ben Maimon, The Epistle to Yemen, trans. in The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook (Norman A. Stillman, ed. and trans.) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 241, as cited in Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: the Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), XX. 62 Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 31. 63 Ibid., 32. 64 Ibid., 33. 65 Ibid., 34. 66 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho. 67 David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 32. 68 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 80. 69 Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response, 35.

162  The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant 70 See Ibid., 32–38 for a discussion of specific rulers and the ways in which their perceived sins or virtues were used to explain the shifting fortunes of the empire. 71 Ibid., 72–78. See also Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire, 38–48. 72 For an in-depth discussion of the lives, careers, and theologies of John Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus the Confessor, see Phil Booth, Crisis of Empire: Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 73 Shoemaker, in Ibid., 49, agrees with an earlier dating, perhaps between 644 and 670. For our purposes, the exact date is neither here nor there, so long as we agree—and we all do—that it was some years after the Arab-Muslim conquest. The debate centers around how long Pseudo-Methodius predicted the Muslims would rule: seven or ten “weeks,” meaning years, in the Danielic sense. 74 Witold Witakowski, “Syriac Eschatology in Antiquity,” in Eschatology in Antiquity: Forms and Functions, edited by Hilary Marlow, Karla Pollmann and Helen Van Noorden (London: Routledge, 2021), 508–9. 75 Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire, 50, mentions some of the arguments for this, but is not persuaded that this eschatological figure originated with Pseudo-Methodius. 76 Witakowski, “Syriac Eschatology,” 509. 77 Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire, 50. 78 Witakowski, “Syriac Eschatology,” 509. 79 Penn, When Christians first met Muslims, 109. 80 Ibid., 113. 81 A Byzantine-era Christian conception of Jesus Christ as one being with a single nature both fully divine and fully human, as opposed to the prevailing Diophysite Chalcedonian view, namely that Jesus was one being with two natures, divine and human, or to the Monophysite view, more popular in many of the conquered Byzantine territories, that Jesus was only possessed of a divine nature. Such Christological debates are fascinating, and dare we use the adjective Byzantine, but this study is not really the place for them. It is worth noting that the Byzantine religious schisms were intensely salient to life in Late Antiquity, and may well have contributed to the rapid success of the Arab-Muslim conquests. The Monophysite Christians of Syria may well have preferred Muslim rule to Diophysite Chalcedonian; the Muslims, after all, were content subsume all flavors of Christianity as dhimmi, and not worry about their misguided Christological hair-splitting. 82 A point made by Penn, When Christians first met Muslims, 114. 83 Given her historical reputation for vindictiveness, ruthlessness, and effectiveness, should an unlikely space-time displacement occur and transport the author of this study to ancient Macedonia, he will not be the one to break the news to Olympias. 84 Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, in Michael Philip Penn, trans., When Christians first met Muslims, 121. 85 Ibid., 120. 86 Ibid., 120. 87 Ibid., 120. 88 Ibid., 122. 89 Ibid., 122. 90 Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse, 122. 91 The scholarly debate surrounding conversion to Islam in the early period, exemplified by Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) and, more recently, Ayman S. Ibrahim, Conversion to Islam: Competing Themes in Early Islamic Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021),

The Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Levant  163 the latter of which contains an excellent discussion of the state of the question in the introduction, differ in their use and approach to the sources. While they may disagree on the rate of conversion to Islam in different territories, and the reasons for conversion, all agree—and it is self-evident—that conversion was occurring. For some in-depth discussions of different cases, see Nimrod Hurvitz, Christian C. Sahner, Uriel Simonsohn, and Luke Yarbrough, eds., Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020). 92 Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse, 123. 93 Ibid., 123–24. 94 Ibid., 124. 95 Ibid. 125. 96 Ibid., 125. 97 Ibid., 126. 98 Ibid., 126. 99 Ibid., 126. 100 Ibid., 127. 101 Ibid., 128. 102 Ibid., 129. 103 Witakowski, “Syriac eschatology in antiquity,” 510. 104 Penn, When Christians first Met Muslims, 62. 105 Ibid., 63. 106 George of Reshʿaina (attributed), Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor, in Ibid., 68. 107 Maximus the Confessor, Epistolae 14, cited in Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it, 77–78. 108 Ibid., 78. 109 Penn, When Christians first Met Muslims, 86. 110 Patricia Crone, “The Significance of Wooden Weapons in al-Mukhtār’s Revolt and the ʿAbbāsid Revolution,” in Ian Richard Netton, ed., Studies in Honour of Clifford Esmond Bosworth, Vol. 1: Hunter of the East: Arabic and Semitic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 180. 111 John bar Penkāyē, Book of Main Points, in Penn, When Christians first Met Muslims, 90. 112 Ibid., 90. 113 Ibid., 91. 114 Ibid., 96. 115 Ibid., 96. 116 Ibid., 97. 117 Ibid., 97. 118 Ibid., 105–6.

5

Muslim Responses to the Crusades

The End of Late Antiquity Periodizing history is a challenge. The notion of cleanly demarcated eras certainly makes history easier to discuss in seminars, but history is only that cleanly distinguishable in retrospect. As Hoyland noted, and as discussed above, “Islam did not, initially at least, ‘seal the end of late antiquity,’ but rather continued many of its salient features. The expansionist aims of Justinian, Khusrau II and other Late Antique emperors were pursued with alacrity by the youthful Muslim state. And it was in the latter that Late Antiquity’s twins, religion and politics, achieved full union.”1 Regardless of these continuities, as historians, we often use the arrival of the Muslim armies, and the resulting Muslim overlordship of about half the world’s Christians, to mark a distinctive break (in Western Eurasia, at least) between “late Antiquity” and the “early Middle Ages.” This distinction would have meant nothing to the people alive at the time; they were not aware of the change. Though they may have been ignorant of the fact that future historians would consider them to have existed at such a transitional moment of world history, the Christians who fell under Arab dominion were certainly quite aware of the political and social changes that had befallen them, as discussed in the previous chapter. Although their writings have been largely ignored by scholars of Christianity in the West, whose interests have focused more on the Latin world—a matter decried by Noble and Treiger, albeit with some hope for future scholarship treating the Orthodox tradition2—Christians under Arab dominion did not stop producing theological works, many in Arabic. Nor did Byzantine Christian theology stop grappling with the implications of its current events; nor was Latin Christianity unaware of the challenges faced by the coreligionists in the East. Once it became clear that the Muslims were there to stay and were themselves a permanent fixture of the world and not merely some kind of ephemeral divine punishment sent as part of God’s eschatological drama—and their permanence became clear when the troubles predicted in the apocalyptic writings that followed the Arab-Muslim conquest did not come to pass for a couple of centuries—the dynamics of imperial rule changed significantly enough for us to determine that “Late Antiquity” was over and a new era was underway. DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-6

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 165 Such transitions between periods had occurred before. The conquests of Alexander the Great altered the political landscape of the Ancient Near East, marking an end to the nearly three-millennia-long dominion of local, ethnolinguistic empires such as Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Achaemenid Persia. What followed—multi-ethnic empires such as those of the Seleucids, Romans, and Sasanian Persians—were now, under the Muslims, brought under the sway of an Empire with something new to offer, something very much like a world empire to go along with a universal monotheism. Encompassing a territory that stretched from Arabia to Central Asia and from modern-day Spain to the borders of India, the initial Arab-Muslim military conquest created a polity that was unprecedented in its geographical scope and ethnic diversity. Critically, Islam as a community survived numerous schisms in its first few centuries of existence, and even as it underwent the overthrow of the Prophet’s family in the seventh century, the overthrow of its first dynasty in the eighth, the gradual fracturing of central authority in the ninth, and the emergence of a number of notable-family dominated “commonwealths” in the tenth, its society, cultural output, and military dominance continued not just to survive, but to flourish. Furthermore, just because the armies of the Caliphs were stymied when Islam reached its territorial zenith as a political entity, traveling holy men and mercantile contacts continued to spread the faith to regions as diverse as the deserts of Sub-Saharan West Africa, the East African coast as far south as Sofala in modern-day Mozambique, the jungles of India, the island archipelago of Indonesia, and the vast Turkic range of the Central and even East Asian Steppe. As diverse as it was, the inhabitants of these regions who converted to Islam (and even, to some extent, the non-Muslims in dār al-Islām, the “abode of Islam”) could all agree that they were part of what has come to be called Islamicate civilization, which showed great adaptability to its diverse population’s cultural, political, and spiritual traditions. Not only did Islam’s theologians and thinkers respond to Christian and Jewish claims with equally complex theological and historical models of their own, but they did so while absorbing a great deal of Persian high culture, Turkish military might, and a whole host of social contributions from Islam’s wealth of diverse believers. Even the mighty Roman Empire, at its height before the division, never achieved that level of social and cultural integration. For all its territorial extent and its diverse multi-ethnic subject population, the Romans were cultural imperialists, and it might be fair to say supremacists: diverse beliefs were tolerated, and in the case of some gods, even incorporated into the Roman pantheon, but the Roman population was expected to conduct themselves according to Roman codes of political, social, even sartorial, behavior. A diverse, expansionist, globally minded empire such as the Islamic empire, with adherents to its systems of thought even outside its borders, was something new. Thus, the Arab-Muslim conquest is as good a place as any to mark the end of Late Antiquity and the dawn of the early Middle Ages, even if we stress Hoyland’s point that they continued, and perhaps completed, a series of Late Antique trends. In its maturity, the Muslim Empire was not a Late

166  Muslim Responses to the Crusades Antique empire. To be fair, it was not exactly a “medieval” or “middle age” empire either, as such Eurocentric concepts have little bearing on the cultural fluorescence of the Muslim world. Still, relative to Late Antiquity, the world wrought by adherents of Islam and their subject populations was something much more complex and, as time went on, increasingly modern. Following the emergence of Islam, the third major monotheistic tradition, nothing particularly novel has emerged in monotheistic responses to catastrophe. In medieval and modern times, the responses to catastrophes have followed much the same pattern: Lamentation of the terrible event, the Jeremiahphase blame, and occasional (though increasingly infrequent) prognostications that the catastrophe itself augured the end times. After the coming of Islam, the monotheists of the world, the Muslims included, were armed not only with complex theologies of self-blame that had already been expressed by earlier monotheists but also with an array of prior narrative responses which equipped them with useful explanatory tools and traditions, which included whole literary genres, stock scapegoats, pseudo-epigrapha, and the like. If anything about later responses to catastrophe was novel, it was not the tools and traditions; at most, it was a creative moment of exegesis. The Islamic tradition has not yet been discussed in this study of Late Antiquity because it falls outside of that chronological framework. That hardly seems fair in the context of this study. If the goal is to argue that monotheists respond narratively and theologically to catastrophe in consistent ways, utilizing the same narrative contextualization and theological schema (as it most certainly is) to ignore the catastrophes that befell the Muslims would leave open the possibility that they might have responded differently. As we shall see in our discussion of the Crusades in this chapter and the invasion of the Mongols in the next chapter, they most certainly did not. Historical Context: The Crusades The historical moment known to history as “the Crusades” has generated mountains of scholarship. Entire encyclopedias and countless monographs and scholarly articles and lectures have been devoted to the series of conflicts, generally understood to be between medieval Christians and their Muslim contemporaries, in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries CE. This “clash of civilizations” characterization does a disservice to the complexity of the period, which was not characterized exclusively by Christian-Muslim enmity. Christian and Muslim states were often in conflict, but not always; sometimes they were allied with each other against others of their own faith, and sometimes they were at peace and simply traded with each other. Christian and Muslim individuals, too, experienced a range of relationships with mixed territories like Jerusalem, from bitter enmity to devoted friendship to marriage. The “Christians versus Muslims” model erases much of that. The historiographical picture is further complicated by the simple fact that we are blessed with a great deal of primary source material from across

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 167 the spectrum of observers: Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews; Franks, Germans, Greeks, Byzantines, Arabs, Persians, and Turks; rich and poor; men and women. We may lament—so to speak—the general dearth of sources for the ancient events we have discussed in this study to this point, but the relative lack of perspectives means that the job of a historian trying to tie the sources together into a coherent picture from which we may draw conclusions is much simpler, even if the conclusions drawn from so few sources are unavoidably rickety. This is not the case for the Crusades. In Hillenbrand’s words, “No aspect of Mediterranean history has been studied more thoroughly than the Crusades, and given their Western origins, it is natural that they should have generated so much scholarship in the West. Yet on the Muslim side too, although medieval writers did not view them as being so momentous—coupling them jointly with the Mongol scourge as hated interventions into the Islamic world by infidel outsiders from outside—there is still much to be said.”3 The complexity of the period must be borne in mind: Muslim reactions to the Crusades were not monolithic. In truth, the ancient responses to the community-threatening calamities we have already discussed were probably not as monolithic even as they seem to us now, but again, we are limited in our perspectives by the scope and number of surviving sources. The chronology of the Crusades merits only a brief discussion, seeing as how they are amply treated by any number of excellent monographs.4 The following excerpt is from Carole Hillenbrand’s incomparable compendium, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. It succinctly provides us with the necessary chronology: A century [after the Prophet’s death] the Muslims had crossed the Pyrenees and conquered lands extending from northern India to southern France. For the next two hundred years, the balance of power between Europe and the Islamic world remained decisively in the hands of the Muslims, who enjoyed massive economic growth and whose culture flowered in spectacular fashion. From 750 onwards the ʿAbbasid state was moulded be Perso-Islamic culture and government and increasingly sustained by the military support of Turkish slave armies. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, the political fragmentation of the great ʿAbbasid empire centred on Baghdad was well under way; the situation favoured the reappearance of Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean and the beginnings of the revival of Christian power in Spain. Trading links were followed by maritime successes against the Muslims. The Normans took Sicily from the Muslims and the Christians of northern Spain reconquered Toledo and began an inexorable advance southwards. The close neighbour of the Islamic world, Byzantium, had conducted successful raids into northern Syria in the late tenth centuries and briefly held towns there.

168  Muslim Responses to the Crusades During the first centuries of Muslim rule, Christian pilgrims from Europe had usually been able to visit the sacred places associated with their faith in Jerusalem and the Holy Land; they travelled overland via the Balkans, Anatolia and Syria or took the sea route to Egypt or Palestine. Thus news came back to Europe of the sophisticated way of life and high cultural achievements of the Islamic world; in the eleventh century, the Pope and European monarchs were also told of the weakening and decentralization of Muslim political and military power. However, rumours of the notoriety of one particular Islamic ruler—the sixth Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim—had also reached Europe. His persecution of the Christians within his realm, which extended to Syria and Palestine, culminated in the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009-10. Al-Hakim’s actions are usually considered to have been a contributing factor to the gradual evolution of desire in Christian Europe to launch the First Crusade and to rescue what were perceived as the endangered holy places of Christendom.5 Hillenbrand goes on to describe the political fragmentation experienced by the Islamic world, split as it was by the rise of the Fāṭimid Caliphate of Egypt (an Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī state that espoused a faith that was “anathema to Sunni Muslims”6) and the continuing influx of Turkish nomads, whose mounted archery skills mad them too useful, as slave soldiers, for many potentates to quit, but their increasing numbers and knowledge of their own political importance7 resulted in a centuries-long series of Turkish dynasties, sultanates, and empires. Turkish domination of the Middle East would last from the Seljuq dynasty of the Crusader era through the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. Even as Turkish dynasties like the Seljuqs established themselves, Turkic migration did not stop and became a source of irritation and instability for the Seljuqs. Those Turkic tribesmen who could not be controlled were instead coopted; they were shunted off to the north to fight the seasonal conflict against the Byzantines in Anatolia. However, unlike their predecessors in the Islamic world, for the first time since the initial Arab-Muslim conquests they made serious territorial gains, with different groups, like the Seljuqs of Rūm and the Danishmendids, establishing different small states in formerly Byzantine territory in Anatolia.8 The Islamic world was already politically fractured, and then a sequence of prominent deaths at the end of the 11th century, including those of the Seljuq wazīr Niẓām al-Mulk, the Seljuq Sultan Malik-shāh, the ʿAbbāsid caliph alMuqtadi, and the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustansir in about a three-year period led to further jockeying for power and political upheaval. This vacuum at the top, combined with internal sectarian division and warfare, left the Islamic world unprepared for what they would have perceived as a barbarian invasion from Western Europe. From the outside, however, Turkish successes against Byzantium, most prominently at the battle of Manzikert in 1071 CE, gave Europeans the impression of a monolithic and menacing Islam on the rise.

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 169 The military defeats at the hands of the Seljuqs were sufficient to alarm the Byzantines, to the extent that the Byzantine emperor started asking for Latin Christian help; in 1090 CE, the appeal of Alexius Comnenus was answered in a 1095 CE speech at Clermont, which called on Christians to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim domination. No doubt, the centuryold memory of the Fāṭimid calip al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh’s outrageous desecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre loomed large in the recruitment campaign, but the only primary source we have describing the atmosphere in the city of Jerusalem—a Muslim ḥadīth scholar by the name of Ibn al-ʿArabī visited the city while on the pilgrimage to Mecca and described it as an academically and intellectually charged center of religious scholarship, noting the good relations of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the city to each other and mentioning the fine estates of some of the Christians.9 The First Campaign was a patchwork force led by various European potentates, including Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Sicily, and Godfrey of Bouillon, and it achieved some early victories. The Frankish enterprise saw its first successes in the Levant with the capture of a few seaports, which allowed for supply lines to open the Mediterranean to Western Europe. Indeed, the Crusader-established states that were ultimately declared were narrow strips of land hugging the Mediterranean coast; the Crusaders had little success penetrating beyond the coast. The Crusader-established states—the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the County of Tripoli—were all extant by 1109 CE and were collectively known as Outremer, French for “across the sea.” In no small part, these enterprises succeeded because the initial Muslim response to the invasion was “one of apathy, compromise and preoccupation with internal problems. The early decades of the twelfth century were a period of great Muslim disunity; there was little military reaction to the ever more pressing danger of Frankish expansionism and no substantial Muslim gains in territory were achieved. Instead of fending off the Crusader threat, the disunited petty Muslim rulers of Syria made truces with the Franks and were perennially engaged in small territorial struggles, often within a framework of Muslim-Crusader alliances.”10 Indeed, Syria had already been invaded many times; even the fact that the Crusaders were Christians was not all that alarming, given that many times the invaders had been Byzantine Christians. Many of the contemporary observers, such as al-Abīwardī, mentioned below, assumed these new invaders were Byzantine, using for the Franks the Arabic word rūm: Rome. In many ways, the Crusader conquests mirrored the initial Arab-Muslim conquests, though on a much smaller scale: an invasion of religiously motivated peoples, scorned as barbaric by the invaded population, aided in their success by the disunity and sectarian schism of the invaded society. Ultimately, the Muslim world found some unity to deal with the threat, most prominently under the leadership of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī (the famous Saladin), who recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 CE. It would fall briefly to Crusaders once again, in 1228 CE, when the Ayyūbid (the dynasty descended

170  Muslim Responses to the Crusades from Saladin) Sultan al-Kāmil surrendered the city to Frederick II of Sicily, but it was back in Muslim hands by 1244 CE, when “soldiers from distant [Khwarazm] in Central Asia, displaced by the Mongol invasions, and moving westwards on the rampage, took advantage of the weakness of the city, which they conquered and sacked.”11 The Ayyūbid dynasts who ruled Syria and Egypt were ultimately overthrown by their Turkish slave soldiers, the Mamluks, who established an Egypt-based dynasty that would last three centuries. Initially led by the Sultan Ṣayf al-Dīn Quṭuz and then, after his assassination in 1277 CE, by his rival Rukn al-Dīn Baybārs, the Mamluks succeeded in expelling the Franks from their last strongholds along the Mediterranean coast. The fall of Acre on May 18, 1291 CE was the coup de grace for the Middle Eastern Crusading enterprise, as the Franks thereafter abandoned the ports they still controlled: Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. Jerusalem, Again: Frankish Conquest and Muslim Responses

According to Muslim understanding, the Crusades—al-ḥurūb al-ṣālibiyya, or “Cross wars” in Arabic—did not begin with the Council of Clermont or the proclamation of Pope Urban II, in the context of Western scholarship the two most commonly referenced starting points for the series of conflicts that pitted Christians against Muslims in a battle for control of the Holy Land. Of course, the Crusades did not just target the Holy Land in general or Jerusalem in particular, as Crusades were launched against sites in Egypt, North Africa, and even, eventually, the Baltic states. The historian Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿAẓīmī (d. after 1161 CE), the first historian to present the Crusades in some kind of historical schema, saw a link between the fall of Toledo to the Christians in 1068, the conquests of al-Mahdiyya in North Africa and the Norman conquest of Sicily in 1086, and the arrival of the Crusaders in the Levant as part of the same Crusading phenomenon. Although Western Europeans generally do not conceive of those other conquests as part of the Crusader narrative, al-ʿAẓīmī saw them as part of a wider Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean. In the Levant, Arab historians note the 1097 CE fall of the city of Edessa, but pay it little further mind; it was already a majority Christian city. The subsequent fall (1098 CE) of Antioch to the Crusaders was much more alarming: it was a major Muslim city. The historian Ibn al-Qalānisī (d. 1160 CE) blames only one man, one Firūz, an Armenian armorer in the retinue of Yaghī Siyan, the Turkish governor of the town, for engaging in a treacherous betrayal of the town’s defenses.12 But Ibn al-Qalānisī is not the only Arab chronicler to engage in some speculative, self-reflective history, such as we have seen throughout this study: al-ʿAẓīmī states that the weak Franks defeated the strong Muslims “because of the evil of [the Muslims’] intentions.”13 The fall of Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman in December of 1098 CE was noted by Ibn al-Athīr, who mentioned the city as the site of a Frankish massacre.14 These conquests were all significant victories for the Crusaders, and as far

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 171 as the Muslims were concerned, each one was more alarming than the last. They responded to them in certain, by now predictable, ways. A poet lamenting the fate of his home in Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman writes, “I do not know whether it is a pasturing place for wild beasts or my house, my native residence…I turned towards it and asked my voice choked with tears, my heart torn with affliction and love. ‘O house, why has destiny pronounced such an unjust sentence on us?’”15 Elsewhere, an unknown poet preserved in the history of Ibn Taghribirdī wrote a qaṣīda (panegyric ode) addressing his fellow Muslims who did not do enough to defend their lost territories: “Do you not owe an obligation to God and Islam, defending thereby young men and old? Respond to God! Woe to you! Respond!”16 Still, even though the losses of Edessa, Antioch, and Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman stung the Muslims, the much greater symbolic importance of Jerusalem’s loss to the Franks cannot be denied. Even as the status of Jerusalem ebbed and flowed from the time of Jesus until the Muslim conquest, gradually increasing in importance as a site of Christian triumphalism with many churches and monuments, the importance of the earthly city (as opposed to the heavenly concept of Jerusalem) fell sharply in the Eastern Christian world after the Muslims took possession of it.17 As the Frankish capital of the territories of Outremer, the earthly city of Jerusalem began to regain its economic importance after the Crusader conquest of 1099 CE.18 After the Franks took Jerusalem, Al-ʿAzīmī, Ibn al-Qalānisī, and a century later, Ibn al-Jawzī reported increasingly detailed accounts of the devastation wrought by the Frankish rampage through the city. For the Muslims alive at the time, an Islamic restriction against niyāḥa, or lamenting, which was seen as an act of rebellion against God’s will, complicates the application of the terminology of lamentation, which we have done throughout this book. The new Islamic order rejected ritual mourning as it conflicted with the emphasis on salvation in the afterlife. Private mourning was permissible, but lamenting was not.19 El Cheikh emphasizes that this refers to private mourning of the dead and notes that Islamic tradition draws a distinction between lamenting and expressing grief, the latter of which was permissible. Despite these restrictions, some laments devoted to cities were composed, including one for Jerusalem, which had grown in importance in the Arab-Muslim tradition.20 In the Muslim accounts of the fall of the city, starting with al-ʿAẓīmī and all the way through Ibn Taghribirdī (a 15th-century Mamlūk-era Egyptian historian), the tale of Jerusalem’s fall and the associated carnage grew. But no discussion of Frankish motives, religious or military, ever appears. “The conquest of the city,” writes Hillenbrand, “is a disastrous event recorded with great sadness but without reflection; it is an event to be suffered and from which lessons are to be learned.”21 At this juncture, it is worth taking a brief historiographical interlude to note that many of the distinctions between what we have been calling the “Lamentations phase” and the “Jeremiah phase” of the developing narrative response to catastrophe have largely disappeared. This might be because

172  Muslim Responses to the Crusades the Muslim writers and thinkers with whom we are about to engage were at least somewhat aware of previous monotheistic responses to catastrophe and were thus capable of jumping straight to the Jeremiah-phase specific conclusions about the nature of the applicable sin and the identity (or identities) of the scapegoat. The Muslim view of the catastrophes that God is perceived to have inflicted upon his most-correct devotees has this in common with the Christian and Jewish views: nothing can happen that is contrary to God’s will, and so, if something terrible (like, say, a successful Crusade) occurs, there are lessons to be learned from it. Arab and Persian Muslim chroniclers, like Al-ʿAẓīmī, Ibn al-Qalānisī, Ibn al-Athīr, Ibn al-Jawzī, Ibn Abī Dīnār, Ibn Taghribirdī, Ibn ʿAsākir, Ibn al-ʿAdīm, and their like, were not averse to delivering history with a moral. For reasons ranging from genuine conviction to official patronage, they saw history as replete with lessons, and their task was to present those lessons, even while they related their best attempt at “true” information. This does not mean that we lack the record lamenting responses. But such lamenting responses are typically recorded for us in the context of some Jeremiah-phase histories. These responses became part of the picture: the object lesson in terms of consequence, when the appropriate lessons are not learned. The historical lessons that must be learned from the fall of Jerusalem are often explicitly stated. Commenters from both contemporary and subsequent times have noted the supreme disunity of the Muslim world. For example, Ibn al-Abīwardī, a Baghdad jurist, wrote an elegy for Jerusalem, which is recorded in the Kāmil fī al-Taʾrīkh of the great Arab Muslim historian Ibn alAthīr al-Jazarī, whose work will be prominently featured in the next chapter. The poem reflects on the internal tensions in the Arabo-Islamic world during the Frankish invasions.22 Utilizing “a series of similes that compare a onceglorious situation to the current moments of disaster,” such as “We mixed blood with flowing tears/not a courtyard was left for the women,” the ode “begins with an acknowledgement of the situation of war and desecration in the city of Jerusalem.”23 It goes on to place the blame for the situation on “the disunity of the people, their movement away from faith, and the neglect of their duty to rise up against the enemy.”24 This faith, the ode suggests, has been resting on “weak pillars,” a clear reference to the neglect of the rulers. The neglect of religious duty is contrasted against the praiseworthy fervor of the initial Arab-Muslim conquests; the poem urges all Muslims to reflect on this pride and the “bravery, generosity, and courage” that is their birthright.25 Consistent with previous Lamentations-phase compositions, Ibn al-Abīwardī writes obliquely about nondescript sins: “The evil of grudges [continues] whilst grudges have become inflamed by unbelief.”26 Ibn al-Athīr, for his part, has a wider mission in his compilation al-Kāmil fī al-Taʾrīkh (“The Complete History”). He lived during a tumultuous time. He was born in 1160, and having spent time with Saladin’s army, he saw Jerusalem reconquered and change hands a few times in his lifetime. In addition

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 173 to his relatively sanguine discussion of the Crusader challenge, Ibn al-Athīr provides a terror-stricken account of the Mongol invasions. His entire narrative of Islamic history, from the story of the Prophet Muḥammad through his own time, self-consciously emphasizes the unity of Muslims, despite their theological, linguistic, and cultural variety; in fact, he massaged his entire narrative to eliminate (where he could) and mitigate or minimize (where he could not) historical evidence of Muslim disunity and Shīʿī grievance in particular.27 The twin incursions of the Crusaders from the West and the Mongols from the East clearly had something to do with this unifying mission: a century later, the historian Ibn Kathīr was less reticent to denigrate his “ignorant” (his word) theological opponents among the Shīʿa in his Kitāb al-Bidāya wa-l-Nihāya. Despite its contemporaneousness with many of the events discussed, the Kāmil certainly fits the mold of a Jeremiah-phase text much better than a Lamentations-phase one, although it contains elements of both: it possesses, in some parts, all the anguish of the Lamentations phase, but also a clear-eyed Jeremiah-phase ability to place clear blame on specific people, committing specific sins. Ibn al-Athīr directly ties the Crusader phenomenon in Syria and the Levant to the Christian conquests in the Western Mediterranean: Toledo and Sicily. Unlike some of his colleagues, Ibn al-Athīr does discuss the Frankish motives for the conquest, but he states they have nothing to do with either religion or pilgrimage. “The reason for their invasion,” he explains, “was that their ruler, Baldwin, a relative of Roger the Frank who had conquered Sicily, gathered a great host and sent to Roger, saying, ‘I have gathered a great host and I am coming to you. I shall proceed to Ifrīqiyya [North Africa] to take it, and I shall be a neighbor of yours.’”28 Roger responds with disgust, “rais[ing] his leg and [giving] a loud fart. ‘By the truth of my religion,’ he said, ‘there is more use in that than in what you have to say!’”29 He evidently did not think much of his relative’s plan, decrying what would amount to his betrayal of the Zīrid Emir of Tunisia, with whom he was on good terms and to whom he deported yearly agricultural surplus for a tidy profit. Instead, he suggested to his cousin, “If you are determined to wage holy war on the Muslims, then the best way is to conquer Jerusalem. You will free it from their hands and have glory….They therefore made their preparations and marched forth to Syria.”30 According to Ibn al-Athīr, Jerusalem had been held by various Turkish commanders for some time before it was taken by the Shīʿī Fāṭimid dynasty, led by al-Afḍal Badr al-Jamalī, in 1096, but the Franks later seized the city in 1099. After granting safe passage to a group of defenders in the citadel, he reports, the Franks took the al-Aqsa Mosque and “killed more than 70,000, a large number of them being imams, ulema, righteous men and ascetics, Muslims who had left their native lands and come to live a holy life in this august spot.”31 Ibn al-Athīr goes on to describe the unsuccessful defense of the lands of Islam from the Franks and provides the reason: “The rulers were all at variance, as we shall relate, and so the Franks conquered the lands.”32

174  Muslim Responses to the Crusades As Denaro points out, the Islamic historiographical tradition often relied on the theme of disunity as a means of explaining defeat. This was because there were very few defeats in early Islamic history, so the reversals in Sicily and al-Andalus were of a scale that, at the time, had no precedent. The defeats in the early Islamic narrative included “the death of the general ʿUqba b. Nāfīʿ at the hands of the Berber leader Kusayla in 683, the naval defeat by the Byzantines in 747, or the futile attempts to conquer Constantinople.”33 Relative to the myriad victories the early Islamic tradition records, this is a paltry list indeed. Even the Mecca-delivered setback of the Prophet Muḥammad at the battle of Uḥūd (625) forced only limited self-reflection, given that the earliest surviving histories of it (Denaro mentions the usual sources: the Sīra of Ibn Hishām, the Maghāzī of al-Wāqidī, and the Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī)34 were written well after the fact, when the Prophet’s ultimate success was known and celebrated. This may be contrasted with both Lamentations and Jeremiah, which were both composed at times when the ultimate impact of the Temple’s destruction on the Jews was yet unknown. Even so, “these texts ascribe the defeat less to the greater tactical skill of the enemy than to the division and confusion reigning among Muslims. The desire for spoils…and disobedience toward the Prophet (and thus towards God) underlie a defeat described as ‘a catastrophe which befell the Muslims.’”35 Denaro concludes that there were two main historiographical strategies for confronting Muslim losses in Sicily and al-Andalūs, the first being the representation of defeat “as a tangible manifestation of moral and spiritual crisis,” in a literary style that reverses the “typical motifs from the historiography of futūḥāt [literature describing the successful conquests].”36 The second, which “represents the crisis as the consequence of a specific event, generally an [etiological] anecdote,” often connected to women, has examples that include the tale of Ibn al-Thumna, the ruler of Syracuse, and his mistreatment of his wife Maymūna, which will be discussed below.37 Of course, although it was a primordial, easy (perhaps we might say “canned”) Muslim explanation for their defeats, political disunity was only one of the Muslim responses to the Crusades; another was a call to engage in a particular Muslim practice, much discussed and misunderstood today, known as jihad, or “struggle.” Once again, in this context, the temporal distinction between the Lamentations and Jeremiah phases seems nonexistent; thus, we can see real-time response regarding the nature of the catastrophe and what the various observers perceive to be the proper response to it. Where Ibn al-Athīr saw political disunity as the fundamental misdeed that provoked the Crusades—a remarkably realpolitik piece of analysis, it must be said—a sequence of exegetes, judges, and piety-minded historians saw the absence of jihad as the problem. Beginning withʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir al-Sulamī (d. 1106),38 but including several scholars directly affected by the fighting, including some who provided information to the great Damascene scholar and biographical dictionary composer ʿAlī ibn ʿAsākir,39 one

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 175 response to the Crusades was a disgusted assertion of the growing laxity of tradition Islamic values. Because “jihad,” like “Crusade,” is often translated as “holy war,” it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the differences between the two, for the sake of understanding the Muslim call for it. Cobb sums up the differences: Because of their [i.e, “jihad” and “Crusade”] common roots in a universal monotheism whose God is a jealous God, there is perhaps some family resemblance. But these concepts developed independently of one another and have important differences. It is true that crusades and jihads must both be launched by acknowledged authorities—popes and caliphs or imams, respectively. But…caliphs are not popes, and most caliphs simply acquiesced to jihads preached by others. Both forms of holy war promise martyrdom and eternal salvation to those who fall in them. However, crusades also offered a host of institutional incentive, such as Church protection of family and property, that jihad never did. Crusading was a centralized principle, an act of loyalty to the Church and its leader, the pope. Jihads were, in practice at least, much less centralized and might, in the right hands, become privatized conquests that could become the basis for regimes to rival that of the caliph. Crusading was a penitential act, which, like jihad, attracted the faithful inclined to acts of conspicuous self-abnegation. As such, crusades were votive and thus temporary, based upon a vow that might be fulfilled by death or absolution. Jihad, by contrast, was a perpetual obligation of the faithful. Finally, crusades were directed at the ‘liberation’ of lands considered rightfully Christian, whereas the goal of jihad was the conversion of infidels to Islam. Crudely put, crusading was about rescuing sacred land; jihad was about rescuing souls.40 Cobb continues: In the Qurʾan, the hadith, and the writings of jurists, jihad was a principle with many meanings, all of them linked to a core meaning of ‘struggle,’ often qualified as ‘struggle in the path of God,’ fi sabil Allah. These included, of course, waging war against infidels, but also inner struggle against sin. This latter variety of jihad, sometimes called the ‘Greater Jihad,’ is often overemphasized by contemporary apologists uncomfortable with the prominent place of jihad in medieval Islamic sources, but it does have clear origins in the Qurʾan and hadith and is every bit as authentic as the militant ‘Lesser Jihad.’ Nevertheless it is also perfectly clear that when medieval Muslims discussed jihad, they were almost always discussing it in the sense of armed struggle against infidels….Jihad…was not militarism, to be contrasted with pacifism, but rather war with pious intent, to be contrasted with the vast taxonomies of war that are secular.41

176  Muslim Responses to the Crusades When, in or around the year 1105, the Damascus-based jurist, scholar, grammarian, and preacher ʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir al-Sulamī gave a series of lectures in the mosque of a Damascus suburb, he had in mind the “Lesser Jihad.” The jihad, according to the prevailing school of thought as defined by the eponymous founder of al-Sulamī’s chosen maddhab (school of law), Muḥammad ibn Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, was both a fard kifāya and a fard ʿayn—that is to say, both a communal and an individual obligation.42 Most of the time, the communal obligation was fulfilled by those who volunteered to fight in the yearly war against Byzantium. In times of greater threat, the communal obligation extended to more individuals. Al-Sulamī saw, in his own time, the same fundamental problem that Ibn alAthīr would see, looking back at the Islamic world on the eve of the Crusades a few decades later: the disunity of Islamic politics. The ʿAbbāsid caliphate had fallen on hard times starting with the civil war between al-Amīn and al-Maʿmūn, the two squabbling sons of the famous caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 809) and perhaps the two ruling brothers mentioned in the Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer. In the end, it was their younger brother Yaʿqūb, and his army of imported enslaved Turkish archers, who reaped the most immediate benefit; he helped al-Maʿmūn to defeat their older brother and then quickly succeeded to the caliphate under the regnal title al-Muʿtaṣim Billāh. But al-Muʿtaṣim’s sons and grandsons were easily manipulated by a variety of Turkish factions, leading to the beginning of the collapse of de facto ʿAbbāsid authority throughout the empire (although Sunni territories continued to pray in the caliphs’ names and to offer the occasional tax remittance). The decline of ʿAbbāsid authority in the 10th and 11th centuries “was accompanied by a general decline in enthusiasm for the jihad and modifications in jihad theory,” including scholars placing an increasing emphasis on the “Greater Jihad.”43 Al-Sulamī—keenly aware, unlike Ibn Abīwardī, of the difference between the Byzantines and the Franks (Ifranj)—had no doubt that the dilution of the jihad, either in concept or in execution, was responsible for the current state of dār al-islam. He writes, After the death of the Prophet, God bless him, the four caliphs and the Companions of the Prophet agreed on the jihad’s being obligatory on all. Not one of them left off prosecuting it during his caliphate, and those who were appointed as successors afterward and ruled in their own time, one after another, followed them in that, the ruler carrying out an expedition himself every year or sending one of his deputies out on his behalf. It did not cease to be that way until the time in which one of the caliphs left off prosecuting it because of his weakness and his negligence. Others followed him in this for the reason mentioned or something similar. His stopping this, along with the necessary impositions on the Muslims that they threw off and the forbidden things that they acted badly by doing, made it necessary that God dispersed their unity, split up their togetherness, threw enmity and hatred between them, and

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 177 tempted their enemies to snatch their country from their grasp, thus curing their hearts of their faults. A number of the enemy pounced on the island of Sicily while the Muslims disputed and competed, and they conquered in the same way one city after another in al-Andalus. When the reports confirmed for them that this country suffered from the disagreement of its masters and its rulers’ meddling, with its consequent disorder and disarray, they confirmed their resolution to set out for it, and Jerusalem was their dearest wish.44 It is worth noting that, while he lamented of the lack of jihad from his side, he had no compunction about ascribing the concept of jihad, even the term jihad, to the Christian Crusaders, who “looked out from al-Sham [i.e., greater Syria] on separated kingdoms, disunited hearts and differing views laced with hidden resentment, and with that their desires became stronger and extended to whatever their outstretched arms could desire. They did not stop, tireless in fighting the jihad against the Muslims. The Muslims were sluggish, avoiding fighting them and reluctant to engage in combat until the enemy had conquered more than their greatest hopes had conceived of the country and destroyed and humiliated many times the number of people that they had wished.”45 Al-Sulamī and Ibn al-Athīr agreed that the disunity of the Muslim world had invited the Crusades and accounted for their success. Each writer saw one of the causes of that disunity to be sectarianism, such as the strife that pit Sunnī against Shīʿa. On a larger scale, it was sectarianism (and pure power politics) that made Fāṭimid Egypt, an Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī state,46 and the Seljuqcontrolled Middle Eastern empire under the nominal dominion of the Sunnī ʿAbbāsid caliph actively work to subvert each other. The theme of disunity also applied to the pettier squabbles between rival warlords, such as the alcohol- and abuse-based war between the brothers-in-law, Ibn al-Thumna (qāʾid of Syracuse and Catania, on Sicily) and Ibn al-Ḥawwās of Agrigento. According to Ibn Abī Dīnar, their family feud directly invited the “Frankish” invasion of the island (Ibn al-Thumna, the drunk, had hired Norman mercenaries under the command of Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger—he of the infamous fart) and set off the series of Crusades from al-Andalūs to Jerusalem.47 This is not exactly accurate, as this was not the first Norman insinuation into Sicilian affairs, but Ibn al-Thumna was a nice object lesson: “the chroniclers who reflected on these events needed someone to relieve the Muslim community of the collective onus of failure, and they focused blame on someone whose strategic and moral shortcomings could satisfactorily explain the loss of Sicily and everything else that followed. Ibn al-Thumna fit the bill perfectly [italics added].”48 This scapegoating is a motif with which readers of this study are already familiar. But for al-Sulamī and for Ibn alAthīr, the problem was not the drinking or even Ibn al-Thumna’s spousal abuse; it was the disunity and strife, the fitna, that invited catastrophe. Both men also would have agreed that the lack of unified response, in the form of jihad, is what doomed the island.

178  Muslim Responses to the Crusades Where Ibn al-Athīr and al-Sulamī disagree is on the cause-and-effect relationship between political disunity and the lack of a unified response to the Crusades. Ibn al-Athīr believed the political disunity that had followed the sectarian disunity made the lack of jihad a dismaying, but not necessarily unexpected, corollary. Like the Christians regarding the Jews at the time of the initial Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century CE, Sunnis and Shīʿa were too focused on their differences with each other to mount a proper unified response (as we shall see, the response will be even worse in the case of the Mongols from the east, and Ibn al-Athīr’s castigation of Muslim leaders will be even more strident). By contrast, al-Sulamī blamed the actions of that one particular Caliph who had been indefensibly lax in waging the jihad, thus creating a permission structure for laxity from his successors. For alSulamī, the abandonment of jihad as an obligation by this specific ruler was the beginning of the problem. The political disunity did not cause the lack of a unified response to the Franks, specifically jihad. Rather, the abandonment of jihad as a fard, an obligation, by a specific ruler whom al-Sulamī is too circumspect to name, had induced God to dispel Muslim unity and send the Franks as an object lesson in the importance of jihad not just to themselves, but to God. This perspective about divine justice and punishment is something new. The Jews of the Temple periods saw the destruction of both Temples as the result of their sins (improper or insufficient devotion to God, when the Babylonians were “sent” to destroy the First Temple, and improper or inhospitable treatment of each other, when the Romans demolished the second). But the destruction of God’s two Jerusalem Temples is not an intuitive consequence to those sins. Similarly, the Christians at the time of the Arab-Muslim invasion saw the invasion as God’s angry inauguration of the end times, brought about by a combination of his divine mercy and his righteous anger about theological error or another. In each case of invasion, there is no clear conceptual line between the cause and the maximal consequence; all that the writers we discussed in those cases could point to was that the unprecedented extent of the disaster reflected the extraordinary level of God’s displeasure with the sins committed. He must have really wished the lesson to land to apply such an extreme consequence, but each one is something of an illogical consequence. Al-Sulamī’s and Ibn al-Athīr’s versions of God, however, is a cleverer teacher than the Old Testament, Talmudic, Chalcedonian, or Miaphysite God is, as the Frankish successes are both an extreme consequence for the Muslims who experienced and accounted for them and a natural consequence of Muslim disunity. In this way, al-Sulamī and Ibn al-Athīr can point to disunity and lack of jihad (whichever came first) as both the cause of the Crusades’ inception and as the explanation behind the Crusades’ successes. From a “parental punishment” perspective, no divine consequence of the Old Testament, the Talmud, or the various Church theologians ever made quite so much sense.

Muslim Responses to the Crusades 179 Alas, just as we have arrived at this juncture of our study, wherein calamities begin to make sense in the context of the sins that observers label as their causes, we come upon the greatest calamity of them all, one that afflicted Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—as well as the Chinese, the Central Asians, and the peoples of the steppe (obviously, catastrophe is not solely an affliction for monotheists). By numbers alone, this string of catastrophes makes up the greatest incidence of human-caused mortality before the 20th century and the rise of automated killing devices like machine guns, chemical weapons, and nuclear bombs. No invasion would test the collective Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith in a just, powerful, and benevolent God more than that of the Mongols. The destruction was on such a level that it defied easy explanation. Notes 1 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 15. 2 Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger, “Introduction,” in Noble and Treiger, eds., The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700–1700: An Anthology of Sources (Dekalb, IL; Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 3–39. 3 Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), 2. 4 Such include P.M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London: Routledge, 1986); Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (3 Volumes) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–4); and, more recently, Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Christopher Tyerman, The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). This is just a starting point. 5 Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 15–17. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 For a description of the beginning of this trend of Turkish domination, see Matthew S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra (A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E.) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). 8 This is, indeed, when the Turks first took control of parts of modern-day Turkey. 9 Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 49–50. 10 Ibid., 20–21. 11 Ibid., 26. 12 Ibn al-Qalānisī, Dhayl taʾrīkh Dimashq, translated by H.A.R. Gibb as The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (London: Luzac, 1932), 45. 13 Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 57. 14 Ibid., 63. 15 Ibid., 71. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Joshua Prawer, “Christian Attitudes towards Jerusalem in the Early Middle Ages,” in The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period, ed. Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 32–35. 18 Tamar M. Boyadjian, The City Lament: Jerusalem across the Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 29. 19 Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 39.

180  Muslim Responses to the Crusades 0 Boyadjian, The City Lament, 32. 2 21 Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 66. 22 Boyadjian, The City Lament, 55. 23 Ibid., 60. 24 Ibid., 61. 25 Ibid., 62. 26 Hillenbrand, The Crusades, 70. 27 This is the topic of another book written by the author. See Aaron M. Hagler, The Echoes of Fitna: Accumulated Meaning and Performative Historiography in the Case of Karbalāʾ (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 28 Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-Taʾrīkh (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1998), translated by D.S. Richards as The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr: The Coming of the Franks and the Muslim Response (New York: Routledge, 2016), 13. 29 Ibid., 13. 30 Ibid., 13. 31 Ibid., 21. 32 Ibid., 22. It is at this juncture that the poem of al-Abīwardī, previously discussed, appears in the text of the Kāmil. 33 Roberta Denaro, “‘And God Dispersed their Unity’: Historiographical Patterns in Recounting the End of Muslim Rule in Sicily and al-Andalus,” in Medieval Sicily, al-Andalus, and the Maghrib: Writing in Times of Turmoil, eds. Nicola Carpentieri and Carol Symes (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2020), 107. 34 Ibid., 108. 35 Ibid., 108. 36 Ibid., 118. 37 Ibid., 118. 38 See Niall Christie, The Book of Jihad of ʿAli ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106): Text, Translation and Commentary (London: Routledge, 2015). 39 See esp. Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay, The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Mourad, Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus: Champion of Sunni Islam in the Time of the Crusades (London: OneWorld, 2021). 40 Cobb, The Race for Paradise, 29. 41 Ibid., 30. 42 For a complete overview of the varied nature of the concept of “Jihad,” see Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Mourad and Lindsay, The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology, 16–30; and others. 43 Christie, The Book of the Jihad, 2–3. 44 ʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir al-Sulamī, Kitāb al-Jihād, translated by Christie in Ibid., 206. 45 Ibid., 207. 46 For a relevant and brief history of the rise and fall of the Fāṭimid state, see Cobb, The Race for Paradise, 45–49. 47 Ibid., 35–37. 48 Ibid., 37.

6

Gog and Magog

In 1220, the world conqueror Chinggis Khan1 took the city of Bukhara from the empire of the Khwarazm-Shah. The Central Asian Muslim king had unwisely provoked him by failing to punish the governor of the city of Otrar for stealing from the Mongol leader and executing some of his followers on charges of espionage. After taking the city in a massacre (which was common practice for Chinggis Khan’s Mongols), the victorious Khan had a message for its surviving Muslim inhabitants. According to the Persian chronicler Juvaynī, known to be friendly to the Mongols, he is supposed to have gathered the town’s notables in the mosque. Ascending the pulpit, he gave a blood-chilling homily: “Oh people, know that you have committed great sins, and that the great ones among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”2 Chinggis Khan was no monotheist, of course. It is highly unlikely that he ever said these words in Bukhara or anywhere, and, even if he did, it is unlikely that Juvaynī would have known about them. The odds are good that every last one of those notables met an untimely end shortly thereafter, so there would have been nobody to report the incident to Juvaynī or to any other chronicler. There is reason to doubt any quote attributed to him as authentically from the Great Khan himself. For a man as recent in history as he is, we know surprisingly little about him. We do know what others, both Mongols and the historians of their many conquered populations, said about him. Even if this anecdote is just a story that Juvaynī or his source conjured, it is unsettling to see the Lamentations-phase acknowledgment of unknown sins placed in the mouth of a self-acknowledged instrument of God’s wrath. The reactions of monotheists to the utterly unexpected Mongol invasions of the 12th and 13th centuries CE fit many of the molds we have seen thus far in this study: assertions of divine punishment, self-blame, sins committed by the community or by individual sinners, and apocalypticism. Whether written by Christians or Muslims, historical accounts of the Mongol conquests contain these themes. The wars began on the Eurasian steppe DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-7

182  Gog and Magog north of China but quickly spread across the continent. Mongol troops, including many Turkic tribal vassals, attacked as far south as Vietnam, as far east as China (two amphibious invasions of Japan were felled by storms known to Japanese history as kamikaze, “divine wind”), as far north as the Baltic Sea, and as far west as modern-day Germany. For decades or centuries, the Mongols ruled the largest contiguous land-based empire ever created on earth (the British maritime Empire of the Victorian era was larger in terms of pure terrestrial square mileage). The Mongol conquest utterly defied understanding in its era, and while we are better able to account for the factors that led to its success today, it is no less shocking a historical occurrence even to us. A Brief History of the Mongol Conquests The young boy was named Temüjin; he was born, according to the Secret History of the Mongols, our only source of information on the event, with “a clot of blood as big as a knucklebone”3 clutched in his right fist: a gruesome foreshadowing of his unprecedentedly bloody impact upon the world. His birth, probably in 1161 or 1162, coincided with his father Yisügei’s defeat of a Tatar chieftain named Temüjin-üge; the younger Temüjin was given the name in commemoration of this victory. The Tatars repaid Yisügei with poison when Temüjin was nine, and he grew up raised by his widowed mother Hö’elün. A rough childhood, to put it lightly, tempered Temüjin into an extraordinary (which is not to say “good”) man. He became skilled at judging character and possessed of an indelible vision of his own destiny. Through a combination of diplomacy, persistence, and pure violence, he succeeded in unifying (which is to say, subjugating) a number of surrounding clans of other tribal, pastoral nomads. By 1206 CE, Temüjin was acclaimed with the title Chinggis Khan, which means “Strong ruler,” “Oceanic ruler,” or perhaps “Universal ruler.” So enthroned, Chinggis Khan began the megalomaniacal process of bringing the entire world under his dominion. It was not a process that either he or his descendants and successors would ever totally complete. Still, nobody else has ever come as close to conquering the world as the Mongols did. He had a unique skill, at least according to the Secret History of the Mongols, for spotting gifted people and winning their loyalty. Early in his career, after a fight against a tribe called the Tayichi’ut, Chinggis Khan addressed his captured foes: ‘From on top of that range [of mountains] cane an arrow that broke the nape [a cervical vertibra] of my yellow war-horse with the white mouth. Who shot [that arrow] from the mountain top?’ [One of the Tayichi’ut captives] Jebe replied, ‘I shot the arrow from the mountain top. If I am to be put to death by the [Khan], then I shall be left to rot on a piece of ground [the size of] the palm [of a hand]. But if I am granted [mercy],

Gog and Magog 183 then I shall go ahead on behalf of the [Khan]. I will attack for you: I will slash the deep waters, and erode the shining stone. At your word, I will go forwards and smash the blue stones. If you order me to attack, I will smash the black stones. I will attack for you.’ Chinggis [Khan] said: ‘[Faced with] those he has killed and with his enemies, the enemy hides and tells lies. [Here,] however, the contrary is true. [Faced with] those he has killed and with his enemies, [this man] does not deny [his feelings and actions]. On the contrary, he admits them. [This] is a man to [have] as a companion. His name is Jirqo’adai, but because he shot at the nape of my yellow war-horse with the white mouth, he shall be called Jebe [which means “arrow”] and I shall use him like as an arrow.’ [So] he was called Jebe and ordered to walk at [Chinggis Khan’s] side. This is how Jebe left the Tayichi’uts and became [Chinggis Khan’s] companion.4 Spotting worthwhile virtues and skill even in a recently vanquished enemy who, earlier that day, had been trying to kill him, Chinggis Khan found in Jebe another tremendously skilled leader. That quality served him well as he brought a large piece of the planet to heel: he knew how to assimilate the resources he came to control. No brief history of the Mongol conquests can do them justice; they must be treated expansively, for which we here lack the space. A brief excerpt must regrettably suffice, but the extent and brutality of the events so ephemerally dispensed must not be forgotten: The Mongol armies erupted with the full might of the steppe. China was the first to experience the Mongol onslaught. Moving southwestward, in 1209 the Mongols forced the small Tibetan-Buddhist Hsi Hsia kingdom to acknowledge their suzerainty. Chinggis Khan then turned his attention to the considerably more substantial and potentially disruptive power to the east, the ethnically Manchurian Qin (1125–1234). The Qin themselves had just one century earlier departed the stepped to invade the Khitan territories in northwestern China, conquering some and forcing others to move westward where they became known as the Qara Khitai. In 1215, the invading Mongol army occupied the Qin capital of Zhongdu, modern Beijing, and forced the Qin to retreat and take up a defensive position further to the south. Soon thereafter, the Qin received a temporary reprieve as events in Central Asia drew the Mongol forces from their campaigns in China. As Chinggis Khan’s armies were becoming entrenched in northern China, he sent another force to the west. The Qara Khitai confederation fell under Mongol pressure in 1217, and soon thereafter Chinggis Khan dispatched envoys and a large and ostensibly peaceful trade mission to his new Central Asian neighbor, the [Khwārazm-Shah ʿAlāʾ alDīn Muḥammad] (r. 1200–1220). Ruling a territory that had recently

184  Gog and Magog grown to encompass Transoxania, Khurasan, Afghanistan, and much of Iran, the [Khwārazm-Shah] arguably represented the most powerful force in the eastern Islamic world at the time. Nevertheless, provoked by Mongol raids in the north and suspicious that the Mongol envoys and caravan merchants were spies sent to determine the [KhwārazmShah’s] strength and defensive positions,5 [Alāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad’s] governor at the frontier outpost of Otrar had them massacred and confiscated their merchandise. Chinggis Khan realized that, in addition to the Qin, he faced another potentially serious threat to the west. Leaving behind a relatively small force to hold the Mongol advances in northern China, in 1219–1220 Chinggis Khan personally led the Mongol invasion of Islamic Central Asia.6 The conquest, from the Mongol perspective, was a complete success, but for the Muslims of Khwārazm, and the further Islamic lands they conquered—Persia, Iraq, the Jazīra, and parts of Syria—it was a catastrophe not even on the same scale as the Crusades (or the destruction of the Temples for the Jews, or the Arab Muslim conquests for the Byzantine Christians). The Christians of Central Asia, the Rus lands, and parts of Europe that had the misfortune to encounter the Mongol armies felt the same. The Mongol eruption felt like the end of the world. If the end of the world had been incited by the Arab-Muslim conquests, as Byzantines such as Pseudo-Methodius asserted, then this was a later stage of the apocalypse. The extent of the conquests, the audacity and military inimitability of the conquerors, their unprecedentedly violent treatment of their subjects, their obscure origins, the unimaginable death toll, the apparent absence of God as disaster unfolded all around: any of these alone would have shocked the empires of the Middle Ages into self-reflective blame-casting. In the form of Chinggis Khan’s Mongols, they all arrived at once. The Account of Ibn al-Athīr: In Anticipation of the End, a Plea for Leadership In the disasters examined in this study, it is uncommon to find an eyewitness who predicted the calamity and wrote about it before it happened. Postdated apocalypses from Byzantium, such as that of Pseudo-Methodius, do not count, as these were demonstrably written after the events that are correctly “predicted,” and before the point in the narrative where the “predictions” become ahistorical. Ibn al-Athīr’s anguished section of al-Kāmil fī al-Taʾrīkh, entitled “Account of the irruption of the Tatars (i.e., the Mongols) into the lands of Islam,” makes no claim to be an apocalyptic prophecy, but he implies an apocalyptic connection to the events now occurring in his east to the people of Khwārazm, news of which has reached him. Ibn al-Athīr was experienced at recounting catastrophes. As challenging as the Crusades were to the

Gog and Magog 185 Islamic societies of his day, and as much as they preoccupied him and served as “Exhibit A” in his moralistic take about the need for pan-Muslim unity, in his writing he never seems stunned by the Crusades, nor quite so personally distressed, as he is when writing about the Mongols. The Crusades were just another incursion; the shocking acts of the Mongols leave Ibn al-Athīr scrambling for a new term. It will also shortly be evident that he was aware of much of the history of calamity we have discussed in this book, and very quickly contextualized the disaster then underway, and heading in his direction, in comparison to some of it. The Kāmil is a chronicle organized by year. In his account of the Hijri year 617 (1220–1221 CE), Ibn al-Athīr reluctantly addresses his current events, expressing both horror and bafflement at the speed and extent of the disaster. He writes: For several years I continued to avoid mention of this disaster as it horrified me and I was unwilling to recount it. I was taking one step towards it and then another back. Who is there who would find it easy to write the obituary of Islam and the Muslims? For whom would it be a trifling matter to give an account of this? Oh, would that my mother had not given me birth! Oh, what did I had died before it occurred and been a thing forgotten, quite forgotten! However, a group of friends urged me to record it, although I was hesitant. I saw then that to leave it undone was of no benefit, but we state that to [write on this subject] involves recounting the most terrible disaster and the greatest misfortune, one the like of which the passage of days and nights cannot reproduce. It comprised all mankind but particularly affected the Muslims. If anyone were to say that since God, glory and power be his, created Adam until this present time mankind has not had a comparable affliction, he would be speaking the truth. History books do not contain anything similar or anything that comes close to it. One of the greatest disasters they mentioned is what Nebuchadnezzar did to the Israelites, slaughtering them and destroying Jerusalem. What is Jerusalem in relation to the lands that these cursed ones destroyed, were each city is many times larger than Jerusalem? And what are the Israelites compared with those [these Tatars] killed? Amongst those they killed, the inhabitants of a single city are more numerous than were the Israelites. Perhaps humanity will not see such a calamity, apart from Gog and Magog, until the world comes to an end and this life ceases to be. As for the Antichrist, he will spare at least those who follow him and destroy those who oppose him, but these {Tatars] did not spare anyone. On the contrary, they slew women, men, and children. They split open the bellies of pregnant women and killed the fetuses. To God we belong, and to him we return. There is no power nor strength except in God the High, the Mighty.

186  Gog and Magog This is the calamity whose sparks flew far and wide and whose damage was all embracing. It spread through the lands like a cloud driven on by the wind. An [unknown] people emerged from the confines of China and made for the cities of Transoxiana, such a Samarqand, Bukhara, and the others. They took them and treated their inhabitants as we shall recount. A group of them then crossed into Khurasan and thoroughly dealt with it, conquering, destroying, slaughtering and plundering. Then they passed on to Rayy and Hamadhan, the uplands and cities up to the boundary of Iraq. Subsequently they attacked Azerbayjan and Arran, which they ruined and most of whose people they killed. Only the rare fugitive survived. All this was in less than a year. Nothing like this had ever been heard of.7 Ibn al-Athīr goes on, his tone alternating between numb and aghast, to catalog the horrors experienced by the peoples of Iran, Central Asia, and other places. Putting the Mongol conquest next to the Crusades, his opinion of which is already clear, he seems convinced that the Islamic world seems caught in a vice between two terrible foes. He writes, This enemy, the infidel Tatars, trampled over the lands of Transoxania, seized and ruined them. That is extensive enough territory for you! But this particular group crossed the river into Khurasan, took it and did the same sort of thing. They came next to Rayy [modern-day Tehran], the Uplands and Azerbayjan, and then they came into contact with the Georgians and overwhelmed their country. The other enemy, the Franks, came forth from their lands in the furthest reaches of the lands of the Rūm, in the north-west, and coming to Egypt, conquered a city like Damietta. They remained there and the Muslims were unable to dislodge them or drive them out.8 He also emphasizes the Islamic community’s fractiousness, mentioning that even the survivors of these calamities were “at daggers drawn between themselves,” contributing to the disunity which he saw as Islam’s fundamental challenge. To drive the point home, Ibn al-Athīr writes, “We pray to God to supply Islam and the Muslims with help from himself, for there is nobody to help, aid and defend Islam. ‘When God wills evil to a people, there is no averting it and they have no protector other than Him.’ The cause of these Tatars only prospered because of the lack of a strong defender.”9 Driving home the point, he continues: “The reason why such a one was lacking is that the Khwārazm Shah Muḥammad had taken power over the lands and killed and eliminated their princes. He alone was left, sultan of all the lands. When he was defeated by the Tatars, nobody was left in the lands who could resist them or defend the lands in order that God might complete a thing destined to be done.”10 The litany of horrors then resumes and continues for a significant duration.

Gog and Magog 187 Continuing to combine the anguish of the Lamentations-phase response and the scapegoating of the Jeremiah-phase response, Ibn al-Athīr has many curses for the Mongols, but not really blame. He blames Muslim leaders for the calamity. First up for his opprobrium is the Khwārazm Shah, who had looked the other way when his governor of Otrar made the terrible mistake of seizing Chinggis Khan’s caravan and putting his emissaries to death. But Ibn al-Athīr adds, “there is another report concerning the reason for their irruption into the lands of Islam, such as is not to be mentioned within the covers of books.”11 Of course, he cannot resist mentioning this unspeakable reason later; Richards points out that this refers to the accusation that the ʿAbbāsid caliph had sent secret messages to the Mongols, inviting them to commence hostilities with the Khwārazm Shah, his rival. This report is repeated by several other historians, including Ibn Wāṣil and Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī, and they assert that the fall of the ʿAbbāsid dynasty in 1258 was God’s punishment for this betrayal of fellow Muslims. Once again, Ibn al-Athīr picks up the horror, recounting the devastating, one-sided war against the Khwārazm Shah and his people. News has also reached Ibn al-Athīr of Mongol activities against people as far away as the lands of the Rūs (about whom, more shortly). A representative summary of Ibn al-Athīr’s perspective on the events is found in his discussion of their entry into Azerbaijan. He continues to emphasize the unprecedentedness of the Mongol assault, making the case that this is the greatest calamity of all time that is afflicting the Muslims, blaming lack of Muslim leadership and Muslim disunity, denigrating the quality of those leaders who were there, and even addressing future historians who—he well knows—may have a tendency to doubt extraordinary claims. After describing the slaughter of the Georgians in “a most dreadful rout,” he writes: Indeed, these Tatars had done something unheard of in ancient or modern times. A people emerges from the borders of China and before a year passes some of the reach the lands of Armenia in this direction and go beyond Iraq in the direction of Hamadhan. By God, there is no doubt that anyone who comes after us, when a long time has passed, and sees the record of this event will refuse to accept it and think it most unlikely, although the truth is in his hands. When he deems it unlikely, let him consider that we and all who write history in these times have made our record at the time when everybody living knew of this disaster, both the learned and the ignorant, all equal in their understanding of it because of its notoriety. May God provide for the Muslims and Islam someone to preserve and guard them, for they have been forced to meet a terrible enemy and reduced, as for Muslim princes, to those whose aspirations do not go beyond their bellies and their private parts. Since the coming of the Prophet (God bless him and give him peace) until this present time the Muslims have not suffered such hardship and misery as afflict them now.12

188  Gog and Magog Ibn al-Athīr aimed to create a history that either downplayed or erased issues of communal division, likely driven by his fear of what was to come, based on reports from the East. Whether the Mongols were a punishment sent by God or not (Ibn al-Athīr asserts that they were indeed), it was clear to him that the Mongol invasion resulted from Muslim disunity, either as a cause of God’s wrath or as an explanation for Mongol victory (or perhaps both). Disunity had been a serious problem when it came to the Crusades, but now, by Ibn al-Athīr’s prediction, it could potentially be fatal to Islam itself. Ibn al-Athīr was not the only historian in the Islamic world who wrote about the Mongols as a contemporary to the events. Shihāb al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Kurandizī al-Nasawī (d. 1249–1250) wrote a biography of the last Khwārazm Shah (the son of the Shah who provoked the war with Chinggis Khan), Jalāl al-Dīn. Sīrat al-Sulṭān Jalāl al-Dīn is only of limited value; as Jackson points out, al-Nasawī was less interested in the Mongols per se than he was in Jalāl al-Dīn’s “tireless, and ultimately fruitless, efforts to carve out a new principality at the expense of his brother and of other Muslim dynasts in western Iran. It is noteworthy that for Nasawī, as for other loyal servitors who appear in the work, the prince was the sole bulwark of Islam against the pagan Mongols. Somewhat less emphasis is placed on the Khwarazmian forces’ own depredations against their fellow Muslims in Azerbaijan and northern Iraq, which made them a byword for brutality.”13 Minhāj al-Dīn Uthmān ibn Sirāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī, another historian contemporary with the Mongol incursion and conquest of Khwārazm and other parts of the eastern Islamic world, wrote his Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, a history dedicated to his patron, Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd, the Sultan of Delhi, a full generation after Ibn al-Athīr in 1260. He recorded his history from the safety of the Delhi Sultanate—the Mongols never did make any successful serious incursions into India—and “as a native of Ghūr [in modern-day Afghanistan] who had left for India only in 623/1226, Jūzjānī had the two advantages of direct familiarity with the eastern Islamic lands and personal experience of the invasions.”14 Jūzjānī, too, saw the invasions in eschatological terms, and he will be discussed in greater detail below. Other historians of the Islamic world who treat the Mongols in a minor or derivative way, and Jackson provides a useful catalog of these.15 The Afterlife of The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius: The Mongols in the First Chronicle of Novgorod The Muslims were not the only monotheists afflicted by the Mongol conquests. The Mongols essentially subjugated, always with a high body count, any people who opposed them or even those who did not submit to their dominion quickly enough. The Rus, who were ancestors of modern Russians, were originally centered around the modern-day Ukrainian city of Kyiv and

Gog and Magog 189 converted to Byzantine forms of Christianity in the late tenth century CE. Having imbibed the apocalyptic spirit that was by then fully embedded in that ethos (as discussed in the previous chapter), the Russians responded to the invasion in a predictable way. In fact, as Brzozowska shows, the Muslim conquest-era text The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius experienced no fewer than three translations into the Church Slavic language, and into a variety of Slavic vernaculars, as well.16 Noting that the Novgorod First Chronicle, “probably the oldest existing historiographical work…created in an intellectual milieu of Novgorod the Great” contains a “richly detailed description of the first Mongolian invasion of Rus’ and the Battle of the Kalka River,” Brzozowska asserts that the “narrative clearly resonates with the tone of the vision of Pseudo-Methodius, whose authority the Old Rus [writer] evokes directly.”17 The Novgorod Chronicler reports: That same year (1223 CE), for our sins, unknown tribes came, whom no one exactly knows, who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is: but they call them Tartars,18 and others say Taurmen, and others Pecheneg people,19 and others say that they are those of whom Bishop Mefodi20 of Patmos bore witness, that they came out from the Etrian21 desert which is between East and North. For thus Mefodi says, that, at the end of time, those are to appear whom Gideon scattered, and they shall subdue the whole land from the East to the Efrant,22 and from the Tigris to the Pontus Sea except Ethiopia. God alone knows who they are and whence they came out. Very wise men know them exactly, who understand books; but we do not know who they are, but have written of them here for the sake of the memory of the Russian Knyazes23 and of the misfortune which came to them from them.24 The mysterious peoples to which the author of the Chronicle of Novgorod is alluding, those mentioned by “Mefodi” [Methodius/Pseudo-Methodius], are Gog and Magog, the mythologized ravagers of the ancient world. In reality, they are a usefully vague Biblical allusion, a “Dread Pirate Roberts”-like name that may effortlessly and baselessly be applied to any scary foreigners. The reason for any writer to apply “Gog and Magog” to any group is that the name itself invites the fear of the reader. The initial appearance of Gog and Magog is in the writings of the Biblical prophets, including our old friend Jeremiah. The basic reference is to “an enemy from the north [who] would bring disaster upon Israel. The destructive adversary was identified with Assyria [Isaiah XIV:25] and later with the kingdom of [the Babylonians] [Jeremiah XIX],”25 but “the real basis for all subsequent Jewish, Christian and ultimately also Islamic descriptions of Gog and Magog as eschatological figures is the frightful vision of the prophet

190  Gog and Magog Ezekiel during his Babylonian exile. In chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX Ezekiel describes the great invasion into Israel by the forces of the north and the final destruction.”26 Ezekiel 38 reads: The word of the Lord came to me: O mortal, turn your face toward Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal…. Prophesy, O Mortal, and say to Gog: Thus said the Lord God: ‘Surely on that day, when my people Israel are living secure, you will take note, and you will come from your home in the farthest north, you and many peoples with you—all of them mounted on horses, a vast horde, a mighty army—and you will advance upon My people Israel, like a cloud covering the earth. This shall happen on that distant day: I will bring you to my land, that the nations may know me when, before their eyes, I manifest my holiness through you, O Gog!’ Thus said the Lord God: ‘Why, you are the one I of in ancient days through my servants, the prophets of Israel, who prophesied for years in those days that I would bring you against them! On that day, when Gog sets foot on the soil of Israel—declares the Lord God—my raging anger shall flare up.’27 Ezekiel’s Gog is spurred on by God himself; this is not inconsistent with the growing sense, contemporaneous with Ezekiel, that God himself is indeed responsible for all catastrophes that befall Israel. Gog and Magog (“Magog” could be Gog’s geographic location, their close companion nation, or possibly an interchangeable term for the same nation) are certainly viewed as instruments of God’s apocalyptic judgment. The Jewish tradition did not come to a consensus on the identity of these nations. From the tenth century on, it was “conventionally understood that the border between the lands of Japeth (Europe) and Sem (Asia) was formed by the Tanais/Tina River, the present-day Don, which empties itself into Lake Me’at/Maeotis (Sea of Azov),”28 and that Gog and Magog were savage peoples from that corner of the world. This understanding would certainly have placed them geographically in the steppe, from which the Mongols later emerged. The description of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel as “mounted on horses, a vast horde, a mighty army,” certainly invites comparison with the Mongols when they appeared. As a pair of allied eschatological adversaries, though, Gog and Magog were always a useful specter for writers in a variety of monotheistic religious traditions. For instance, in the Sibylline Oracles, they are mentioned as peoples of Ethiopia,29 while Josephus Flavius equated them with the Scythians30 and linked them with a popular Greek tradition about Alexander the Great. In that tradition, Gog and Magog were barbarous tribesmen from the north whom Alexander had sealed away from invasion of the civilized world with a set of iron gates, but Josephus attached no apocalyptic significance to them.31 As Christianity spread and came to dominate Rome and then Byzantium, a number of

Gog and Magog 191 other peoples earned identification with “Gog and Magog.” These included the Alans, the Huns, the Goths, the Getae, the Massagetae, and eventually others, including the Mongols. The Alexandrian tradition about the iron gates holding back the hordes of barbarism waiting to overrun the civilized world, mentioned by Josephus, spurred a piece of popular fiction known as the Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes. Although the Alexander Romance is filled with fiction, its successive editions hold historical value. In a Syriac version of the Alexander Romance, an appendix, known as the Alexander Legend, describes Gog and Magog as “horse-mounted hordes with blue eyes and red hair. They are dressed in skins, eat raw carrion and drink the blood of men and animals. They are swifter than the wind, running between heaven and earth, their chariots and swords and spears flash like fearful lightning….Alongside every hundred men stand one hundred thousand bands of demons. They possess such force because they are sorcerers versed in magic practice.”32 According to the Legend, Alexander was horrified when he learned of these men and hired blacksmiths and brass workers to labor until they have constructed a gate that would seal Gog and Magog away from civilization forever. This story marked the beginning of the association of Ezekiel’s vague “Gog and Magog” with the real-world threat of various steppe peoples like the Scythians, Huns, Xiongnu, Turks, and Mongols. The Apocalypse of PseudoMethodius solidified this thematic bond. Pseudo-Methodius, as discussed earlier, did not associate Gog and Magog with the Arabs, as might have been expected. Instead, he cast the Arab-Muslim invasion as the prelude to the apocalyptic drama, which Gog and Magog would escalate after the Last Emperor’s vanquishing of the Muslims. This may be because Arabia was not attested as the country of origin for Gog and Magog. Pseudo-Methodius gratuitously lists all the disgusting evidence of Gog and Magog’s barbarity and inhumanity, celebrating their imprisonment behind Alexander’s iron gate and lamenting its inevitable breach. PseudoMethodius’ presentation of Gog and Magog became something of a vulgate, influencing other Syriac apocalypses, as well as apocalypses in the Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian traditions.33 As influential as the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was, though, it clearly did not invent the tradition about Alexander sealing Gog and Magog away. Alexander is known as Dhū al-Qarnayn, “the two-horned one,” in the Qurʾān, and Sūrat al-Kahf (the 18th chapter of the Qurʾān), which of course predates the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, contains a reference to Alexander and his gates: “Then he took yet another path until he reached a pass between two mountains. He found, opposite them, a people who could barely understand his speech. They said, ‘O, two-horned one! Truly, Gog and Magog (jūj wa-mājūj) are damaging the land. Should we pay tribute to you, so that you may build a barrier between us and them?’ He said,

192  Gog and Magog ‘What my Lord has given me is more valuable. But assist me with all your strength, and I will build a barrier between you and them. Bring me blocks of iron.’ Then, when he had completed filling the gap between the two mountains, he said, ‘blow the fire!’ After the iron became red hot, he said, ‘bring me molten copper so that I can pour it over it.’ Now the enemy could neither scale it nor break through it. He said, ‘This is a mercy from my Lord. But when the threat of my Lord comes to pass, he will collapse it. And my Lord’s promise is true.’”34 According to Paret, the Alexander Romance is likely the source for this material from the Qurʾān and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius both.35 Gog and Magog have multiple appearances in Islamic works of history, geography, and eschatology, highlighting the multi-faceted nature.36 Ibn al-Athīr, perhaps in desperate hope, avoids linking the Mongols directly to Gog and Magog, invoking them as a point of comparison, rather than identification. The author of the Chronicle of Novgorod also independently invokes Gog and Magog; if nothing else, these disconnected appearances of the two barbarous nations are evidence both of the myth’s enduring power and of its applicability to the Mongols, who were perceived as bringing an end-of-the-world brutality during to both the Kievan Rus and Islamic lands. Chinese chronicles, by the way, do nothing to dispel the general picture of the Mongols: the brutality of the conquests seems to be unanimously asserted across the afflicted literate world. The “Gog and Magog” schema reflects the “the pursuit of a specific modernization of the message of Pseudo-Methodius,” which allowed “the nomads who threaten the Rus’ state (Polovcians and Tatar-Mongols) [to be] identified with Ishmaelites, whose invasions on the lands of Christians are [presented as] God’s punishment for the latter’s sins, while the mysterious northern tribes (Yugars) are to be associated with the ‘unclean people’ imprisoned by Alexander the Great.”37 The Chronicle of Novgorod connects its Mongols, the “Unknown tribes,” with the eschatological Gog and Magog, and asserts that the invasion is retribution “for our sins.” It is nonetheless conspicuously nonspecific about the exact nature of those sins. Unlike Ibn al-Athīr’s section treating the Mongol catastrophe in the Kāmil, which has both Lamentations- and Jeremiahphase elements, this section of the Chronicle of Novgorod is an exclusively Lamentations-phase response. We lack any Jeremiah-phase account from the historians of the Rus. This is probably because the Mongols did not immediately follow up their devastating and demoralizing defeat of the Rus at the Battle of the Kalka River with further conquests. After defeating the Rus, the Mongols took the Rus princes and, the Chronicle records, “suffocated them having put them under boards, and [the Mongols] themselves took seat on top to have dinner.”38 But following that slaughter and humiliation of the

Gog and Magog 193 Rus survivors, the Mongol forces simply vanished, which must have added to the mystery of the catastrophe. The Chronicle reports: “And thus, for our sins God put misunderstanding [of the warnings delivered by others fleeing the Mongols] into us, and a countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages. This evil happened on May 31, on Saint Eremei’s [Jeremiah] Day. And the Tartars turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again; God knows whence he fetched them against us,” it concludes, adding for the third time, “for our sins.” The next year, according to the Chronicle, the Rus princes resumed petty squabbling amongst themselves, blithely pretending that Gog and Magog would never return. That was an error. The reason the Mongols disappeared is because the force that had so easily dispatched with the Rus’ resistance was a small auxiliary force led by the great Mongol generals Subotai and Jebe. This event is hardly mentioned in the Secret History of the Mongols, with only a single sentence noting that Chinggis Khan sent Subotai “northwards to attack the lands and peoples [of]…eleven tribes,” which it then lists, and notes that “[Chinggis Khan ordered] Subotai to cross the great waters of the Idil [Volga] and the Jayaq [Ural] Rivers and go as far as Kiwa Menkermen [Kyiv].”39 Subotai completed his reconnaissance mission, had dinner atop the dying bodies of the Rus, and returned to Chinggis Khan as directed. The Chronicle of Novgorod’s bewilderment about the event is understandable; most victorious armies do not simply withdraw after victory. When the Mongols returned in 1238 CE with a force five or six times the size of Subotai’s 1223 CE auxiliary force, the Chronicle reports on the overwhelming slaughter, again noting that it was “for our sins” multiple times. As the Mongols took over Russia for what would be a centuries-long domination, the Chronicle concludes the notices for 1238 CE, still lamenting the disaster, yet finally coming to a conclusion that might be something of a Jeremiah-phase recognition of its causes; it is the same conclusion at which Ibn al-Athīr arrived at the same time: disunity and petty squabbling. And who, brothers, fathers, and children, seeing this, God’s infliction on the whole Russian Land, does not lament? God let the pagans on us for our sins. God brings foreigners on to the land in his wrath, and thus crushed by them they will be reminded of God. And internecine war comes from the prompting of the devil: for God does not wish evil amongst men, but good; but the devil rejoices in wicked murder and bloodshed. And any land which has sinned God punishes with death or famine, or with infliction of pagans, or with drought, or with heavy rain, or with other punishment, to see whether we will repent and live as God bids for he tells us by the prophet: ‘Turn to me with your whole heart, with fasting and weeping.’ And if we do we shall be forgiven for all our sins. But we always turn to evil, like swine ever wallowing in the

194  Gog and Magog filth of sin, and thus we remain; and for this we receive every kind of punishment from God; and the invasion of armed men, too, we accept at God’s command: as punishment for our sins.40 The rest of the Chronicle would be written under Mongol supervision. “May God Destroy Them:” Jūzjānī’s Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī’s Presentation of the Mongols The Muslim world, unlike the Rus under the early Mongols, had locales that were not brought under the Mongol boot. The Mongols conquered the entirety of East Asia, Central Asia, the western steppe (including modern-day Ukraine, parts of modern-day Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe), Persia, and much of the Middle East. However, the Delhi Sultanate was spared, the beneficiary of India’s limited points of entry, including the Himalaya Mountain Range which provides a significant defensive barrier along much of the country’s northern approaches, as well as the sensitivity of the Mongols themselves to the biological hazards of the unfamiliar Indian climate. Much of Israel south of the Jezreel Valley, including Jerusalem, as well as Egypt and North Africa, were also spared from Mongol conquest. The Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt (1260), in which the Egypt-based Mamluk Turks stymied the Mongol advance, is often considered the turning point in the Mongol conquests. Despite the single defeat at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, the Mongols were dominant over the territories they came to rule, in some cases for centuries. One consequence of any war, let alone a conquest on the scale of what the Mongols accomplished, is a wave of refugees fleeing the carnage and seeking a safe harbor. The Persian chronicler Jūzjānī (d. 1260), mentioned briefly above, was one such refugee. A learned man and a scholar from a notable Khurāsānī family closely connected to the Ghaznavid and Ghūrid houses, Jūzjānī found himself displaced to the Sultanate of Delhi (to which, to be fair, he seems to have wanted to go anyway) when the Mongols came to his native lands.41 While in the service of the Delhi Sultan, Jūzjānī composed his universal Islamic history, the Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, in Persian. It contains “twenty-three chapters (ṭabaqat) [discussing] mythical and historical information on various Biblical-Islamic prophets and kings, pre-Islamic Iranian kings, [the] early Islamic community and its leaders in Arabia, and [the] Umayyad and Abbasid caliphal dynasties. It also contains regional and local dynastic histories of a variety of medieval Islamic sultanates, including biographical accounts of their ruling houses, military, political, and administrative classes such as the Perso-Turkic Muslim slaves of the Delhi Sultanate.”42 As useful as this account is, the most interesting piece for our purposes is the last chapter, entitled “Events of the Islamic World and Irruption of the Infidels (Mongols), May God Destroy Them.” Among the many grievances Jūzjānī records against the Mongols, one of the first is

Gog and Magog 195 personal: that the Mongols disrupted his young marriage. “In the same year when [I] was in [my] youthfulness [and got married], the cursed Genghis Khan crossed the Jaihun River towards Khurasan with the intention (to invade) Ghazni.”43 In his discussion of the late Ghūrid (a ruling family of Afghanistan) and Khwārazmian rulers, Jūzjānī, like Ibn al-Athīr before him, identifies Muslim infighting and disunity as the most proximal cause of the Mongol invasions. Jūzjānī highlights the role of the Khwārazm Shah in the collapse of the Ghūrids before the Mongol invasion and generally agrees with the consensus that the Khwārazm Shah’s foolish provocation of Chinggis Khan had at the very least hastened the invasion, which may well have been inevitable. Jūzjānī reports that he himself participated in the fight against the Mongols and lost his family (including an uncle) to the Mongols.44 Once safely ensconced in Delhi, Jūzjānī set to work writing his history in honor of his patron. He begins his section on the Mongols (whom he calls “the Infidels”) with the relation of various eschatological prophecies. After that, Jūzjānī resumes his discussion of current events, which he directly connects to the Delhi Sultan, Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shah (whence: Ṭabaqat-i Nāṣirī), and his dynasty: “Notwithstanding that, by the will of the Almighty, and the decrees of Destiny, the turn of sovereignty passed unto the Chingiz Khān, the Accursed, and his descendants, after the Kings of Iran and Turan, that the whole land of Turan and the East fell under the sway of the Mughals [another name for the Mongols], and that the authority of the [Muslim] religion departed from those regions, which became the seat of paganism, the kingdom of Hindūstān (India), by the grace of Almighty God, and the favour of fortune, under the shadow of the guardianship of the Shamsī race, and the shade of the protection of the [Iltumishid] dynasty, became the focus of the people of Islam, and orbit of the possessors of religion; and, as from the extremity of the territories of [China, Turkestan, Transoxania,45 Tukharistan, Zawūl, Ghūr, Kābul, Ghaznin, Iraq, Ṭabaristān, Ārān, Azarbaijān, the Jazīra, Anbār, Sijistn, Mukrān, Kirmān, Fārs, Khūzistān, Diyārbakr, and Mosul, as far as the boundaries of Rūm and Shām], fell into the hands of the infidel Mughals, and not a trace of the Muslim [kings and Sultans] remained in these countries—the Almighty’s mercy be upon them, and may He long preserve the Nāsirī dynasty!”46 This long invocation emphasizes the divine teleological justification behind the Mongol invasion: God’s purpose was, naturally, to make Jūzjānī’s patron, Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shāh, Islam’s primary defender, after all the other unworthy rulers were defeated. But that obsequious introduction to the Ṭabaqāt should not distract from the ultimate purpose of Jūzjānī’s history as it relates to the Mongols, which is quite clearly to catalog the horror. One particularly gruesome story arrives in the relation of the first contact between the Khwārazm Shah and the Mongols. Jūzjānī reports that the Khwārazm Shah was struck by “the ambition to appropriate the countries of” China, and when his ministers could not talk him out of the notion,

196  Gog and Magog he sent a man named Bahāʿ al-Dīn al-Rāzī to scout China. Bahāʿ al-Dīn’s harrowing tale ultimately reached Jūzjānī, who writes: From a considerable distance a high white mound appeared in sight, so distant that between us and that place was a distance of two or three stages, or more than that. We…supposed that the white eminence was perhaps a hill of snow, and we made inquiries of the guides and the people of that part [respecting it], and they replied: ‘The whole of it is the bones of men slain.’ When we had proceeded onwards another stage, the ground had become so greasy and dark from human fat, that it was necessary for us to advance another three stages on that same road until we came to dry ground again. Through the infections [arising] from that ground, some [of the party] became ill, and some perished. On reaching the gate of the city of [Zhongdu, modern-day Beijing], we perceived, in a place under a bastion of the citadel, an immense quantity of human bones collected. Inquiry was made, and people replied that, on the day the city was captured [by the Mongols], 60,000 young girls, virgins, threw themselves from this bastion of the fortress and destroyed themselves, in order that they might not fall captives into the hands of the Mughal forces, and that all these were their bones.47 Obviously, the Khwārazm Shah did not take the warning of Bahaʿ al-Dīn seriously enough. When Inalchuq, the Shah’s governor of Otrar, seized the Mongol trade caravan and emissaries—Jūzjānī reports that “a camel man who was at bath” escaped the slaughter, and fled back to Chinggis Khan to deliver the outrageous report—the Khwārazm Shah refused to turn him over to the Mongols. This refusal provoked the war that would lead directly to Shah’s death, isolated on an island in the Caspian Sea, likely utterly flummoxed at the swift end of his empire. Jūzjānī had some choice criticisms for Chinggis Khan’s son, Chaghatay, as well. Jūzjānī described Chaghatay as “a tyrannical man, cruel, [bloodthirsty], and an evil-doer; and among the Mughal rulers there was not one who was a greater enemy of the Muslims.”48 Incidentally, Chaghatay’s descendants would rule over a large chunk of Central Asia when, two generations after the Great Khan’s death, the Mongol enterprise split itself into divided, and occasionally warring, khanates. Jūzjānī reports that Chaghatay frequently suggested to Ögedei, his younger brother, who became the Great Khan after the death of their father Chinggis, that he should “massacre all Muslims and not let any of them remain.”49 Jūzjānī also accuses Chaghatay of poisoning the relationship between his eldest brother, Jochi, and Chinggis, an estrangement that resulted in Jochi’s death. He also reports that Chinggis Khan, no sentimentalist himself, passed the Khanate to his middle son, the same Ögedei, on account of his awareness that Chaghatay was too malevolent a person to run the newly won empire successfully. It is with some glee that Jūzjānī records Chaghatay’s death while hunting. “Chaghatay was in the act of discharging

Gog and Magog 197 a recoiling arrow in a hunting ground at the prey, when, verily, it entered the back of that accursed one, and he went to hell; and God’s people, particularly the people of Islam, were delivered from his malevolence.”50 Jūzjānī is a critically important source for our understanding of the historicity of the Mongol conquests. Because he did not write under the burden of Mongol censorship, which was not the case for Rashīd al-Dīn and Juvaynī, whose accounts we will discuss momentarily, Jūzjānī was free to record his recollections and his scholarship with relative impunity. Because he was less of a moralizer than Ibn al-Athīr had been, we get a relatively straightforward chronicle in Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī, albeit one with a lot of cursing directed at the Mongols. The Ṭabaqāt served its purpose of glorifying Jūzjānī’s patron, Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shāh, by presenting a flattering history of his state, and then by declaring that all the horrors inflicted by the Mongols were for the sake of exalting Nāṣir al-Dīn’s stature as Islam’s great defender. Victim of the Mongols that Jūzjānī is, he is happy to share in gruesome detail on everything, from the first rumblings of horses on the horizons to the 1258 CE siege and destruction of Baghdad and the death of the last ʿAbbāsid caliph. Even so, the text lacks a moralizing tone. Jūzjānī does, however, imply the standard tropes of a Jeremiah-phase text, including the sin of disunity among the Muslims (particularly the discord caused by the Khwārazm Shah in defeating the Ghūrids and the Ghaznavids), and individual guilt (also centered on the person of the Khwārazm Shah, for his provocation of Chinggis Khan in the matter of the governor of Otrar’s outrageous theft and murder of Chinggis Khan’s emissaries). The Jeremiah-phase moral need not necessarily be the focus of an account to be present—in this case, as an almost unmentioned, assumed element of the narrative.

In Defense of Gog and Magog: Juvayni and Rashīd al-Dīn The Mongols were an unprecedented catastrophe for China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. As an incidence of human-caused mortality, the Mongol invasions were genuinely unprecedented in world history and remained without equal until the 20th century saw the outbreak of a pair of industrialized World Wars. And while they did not threaten to extinguish any religious tradition, as the destruction of the First Temple might have done for the Jews, or provoke creative eschatological accounts, as the Arab-Muslim conquest had done for the Byzantine Christians, the very scale of the Mongol outbreak certainly stretched the coping mechanisms that the monotheistic traditions had generated for managing catastrophe to the breaking point. Attribution of the catastrophe to God’s will, self-blame, specific assignment of the offending sin or sins, and even the narrative framing of catastrophe as a necessary part of God’s eschatological plan seems insufficient to account for the gruesome achievements of Chinggis Khan and the Mongols. As this section has shown, all such approaches were tried. The Mongols came, saw,

198  Gog and Magog conquered vast territories … and remained in control of those territories, ruling as pagan overlords over Muslims, Christians, and Jews, not to mention over the citizens of Confucian China and the other pagans of the Central Asian steppe. If this was God’s punishment for his monotheistic devotees, where was the relief for those who remained under Mongol control? If this was, indeed, the outbreak of Gog and Magog, smashing through Alexander’s iron gates, loosed by God to wreak havoc upon a sinful world, why did the end of the world not follow shortly thereafter? As Mongol rule became a fact of life and the wounds of the conquest scabbed over, generations were born, lived, and died never having known a world free of Mongol dominion. Much like the Rabbis in Sasanian Babylon casting their disaster in terms of its divine teleology, historians working under Mongol auspices crafted narratives that highlighted the benefits of Mongol rule. Such benefits would not be unfamiliar to anyone interested in studying the history of the Mongols today: many modern works treating the history of the Mongols and their impact draw extensively from these sources, which emphasize the wealth, trade, cross-cultural pollination, safety, and religious toleration of the interlinked societies that arose in the wake of the conquests. Two such historians who wrote of the upside of Mongol rule were ʿAtāʾ-Malik Juvaynī (d. 1283 CE) and Rashīd al-Dīn Faẓlullāh Hamadānī (d. 1318 CE). Their histories are of great value, in that each provides an insider’s look at the Ilkhanate. The Ilkhanate was a part of the wider Mongol Empire, covering parts of modern-day Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkey, which at its height also incorporated parts of Iraq, Syria, Armenia, and stretches of Central Asia. The unity of the Mongol enterprise had held together following the death of Chinggis Khan, whose chosen successor, his son Ögedei, succeeded to the top job with the apparent support of his brothers. The speed of the conquests actually increased under his watch. But when Ögedei died young, perhaps of alcohol poisoning, the succession to the role of Khagan became contentious. At the heart of the discord was the personal enmity between two grandsons of Chinggis Khan, Batu, the son of Jochi (who was Chinggis Khan’s eldest son, but whose paternity was in some question), who ruled over the western parts of the steppe, and Güyük, the son of Ögedei. The two never came to warfare against each other—Güyük died en route to a likely confrontation in 1248—but their hostility kept the question of succession contentious, and internal Mongol politics disordered, for several years, while a world still reeling from 30 years of Mongol thrashings caught its collective breath. The respite was not to last, of course; Möngke, the son of Chinggis Khan’s youngest son, Tolui, acceded to the Khaganate and the conquests resumed.51 Tolui’s other three sons, Kublai, Hülegü, and Ariq Böke all had illustrious careers of their own, with Kublai becoming the first official Mongol Emperor of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty and Hülegü conquering the Middle East and founding the Ilkhanate. Hülegü was also responsible for the death of the last ʿAbbāsid Caliph of Baghdad, al-Mustaʿṣim Billāh, in 1258. The manner of the Caliph’s death is disputed. One account states that he was wrapped in

Gog and Magog 199 a carpet and trampled to death by horses, at Hülegü’s bequest. This was a twisted kind of compliment, in fact, as the Mongols did not believe in shedding royal blood outside of the battlefield, and while the bludgeoning certainly caused internal bleeding, not a drop of blood exited the body. Another account suggests that the Caliph was locked in a tower with his treasure, with Hülegü inviting the doomed Caliph to eat and drink whatever portions of his hoarded treasure he wished. The conquests finally reached their furthest extent at the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260 CE, two years after the murder of the Caliph. This was a troubled time in the Middle East, as two other political entities were actively engaged in enmity against each other. The first was the Crusader States, which, though no doubt disappointed to learn that the Mongol invaders smashing their Muslim foes in the east were not, in fact, led by the mythical Christian King Prester John, had prudently, if sheepishly, submitted to the yoke of Mongol vassalage. There was also a group of Ismāʿīlī renegades, known to history as the Assassins, who had terrorized Crusader and Muslim communities alike, with targeted killings of their leaders. These had been smashed by the Mongols when they stormed through Iran, capturing their castle at Alamūt and ending the Assassin threat forever (the story goes that the Assassins had sent a few hundred assassins to kill the Khan; the attempt failed, and the Mongols evidently did not forgive them). With nothing between the Mongols and Egypt, Hülegü may have made a tactical error by withdrawing some of his forces from Syria, perhaps due to insufficient pasture lands for his army’s horses. He left his army in the hands of his lieutenant, Ketbugha.52 It was Ketbugha’s army that was defeated by the Mamluks of Egypt, who had very recently overthrown the Ayyūbid descendants of Saladin, at ʿAyn Jālūt.53 Ketbugha’s defeat and execution at the hands of the Mamluk leader Quṭuz (who was himself killed and replaced by his own rival Baybārs shortly thereafter) did not break the Mongol forces, but it did prevent them from ever reaching Egypt. The Mongols were also stopped a few days shy of Jerusalem. One can only imagine what kind of responses all three monotheistic traditions would have devised had the Mongols done to Jerusalem what they had done to hundreds of other cities throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Instead, the Mongol descendants of Hülegü consolidated their rule in Iran, while the Mamluks, having driven the Mongols from Syria, established their control of that country and focused their attention on completing the work of finally vanquishing the Crusaders.54 A 21-year period of quiet allowed both the Mamluks of Egypt and the Ilkhans of Persia to stabilize their regimes. Eventually, just as the Mongols who came to dominate China as the Yuan Dynasty (r. 1271–1368), beginning with Kublai Khan, followed Chinese imperial tradition and adopted a Confucian ethos, many of the Mongols of the western part of the Empire converted to Islam. These converts included some emperors of the Golden Horde (the descendants of Jochi through Batu, who came to rule over parts of Russia) and all the Īlkhānid emperors after the

200  Gog and Magog conversions of Ghāzān Khan (d. 1304) and his brother and successor Öljeitü (d. 1316). Ironically, our historian Rashīd al-Dīn, who had been appointed to his position by Ghāzān, was executed on the probably spurious charge of assassinating Öljeitü with poison. Juvaynī, working in the court of the Īlkhāns, wrote a history covering the same events as Jūzjānī, but with a decidedly different tone. Juvaynī was born into the Mongol world; for him, too, the Mongol conquests were divine punishment. However, unlike other historians who reached a similar conclusion, for Juvaynī the proper course of action was submission to Mongol authority. After all, the success of the Mongol conquest had been God’s will. More to the point, submission to Mongol rule was the will of his Mongol patrons and rulers at the Īlkhān court. Juvaynī’s account of the Mongol conquests, and subsequent rule over his corner of the world, is detailed and useful, but “one must recognize that political expediency imposed limits on any efforts at objectivity.”55 This pragmatism is most evident in his complete omission of Hülegü’s killing of the Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim in 1258 in his narrative, but he “directs attention to what he perceives to be one of the Mongols’ greatest achievements in the region: the defeat of the heretical Nizari Ismaʿilis, reviled in the west as the Assassins. To [Juvaynī] and his contemporaries, [these] followers of Hasan-i Sabbah (r. 1090–1124) were a greater threat to Sunni Islam than the Mongol infidels.”56 Juvayni’s work, Taʾrīkh Jahān-i Gūsha, was largely written while he was in the service of Hülegü, so perhaps decrying his own patron’s execution of the Caliph would have been ill-advised. As Kamola puts it, “As [Juvaynī] wrote, the fall of Baghdad was still very recent memory, and the shockwaves it sent through the Sunni community still reverberated quite loudly. The tentative steps that Juvayni takes to normalize the Mongol conquest would have been entirely undone if he rehearsed the cultural trauma marked by the end of the caliphate.”57 Juvaynī’s historical model was based on the Shahnameh of Abu al-Qāsim Firdawsī, an Iranian national history, which showed the conquests of Alexander and the Muslims as “setting the stage for new periods of historical greatness,” and so “the rubble of the Mongol conquest might become the foundation for a more unified and stable Iranian and Islamic community.”58 On the events that began the Mongol conquest of the Islamic lands, which Juvaynī was predisposed to excuse for one reason or another, he reports the following version of the initial Khwārazm-Mongol contact: “In those days, the Mongols regarded the Muslims with the eye of respect, and for their dignity and comfort would erect them clean tents of white felt; but today, on account of [Muslim] calumny one of another and other defects in their morals they have rendered themselves thus abject and ragged.”59 Juvaynī narrates that Chinggis Khan sent a message to the Khwārazm Shah: “Merchants from your country have come among us, and we have sent them back in the manner that you shall hear. And we have likewise dispatched to your country in their company a group of merchants in order that they may acquire the

Gog and Magog 201 wondrous wares of those regions; and that henceforth the abscess of evil thoughts may be lanced by the improvement of relations and agreement between us.”60 The outrageous seizure of these merchants, which touched off the onesided, brief, and bloody Mongol-Khwārazm war, is rendered in disapproving detail: “When the party arrived at Utrar, the governor of that town was one Inalchuq, who was a kinsman of the Sultan’s mother, Terken Khatun, and had received the title of Ghayir-Khan. Now amongst the merchants was an Indian [take note: not a Mongol] who had been acquainted with the governor in former times. He now addressed the latter simply as Inalchuq, and being rendered proud by reason of the power and might of his own Khan he did not stand aloof from him nor have regard to his own interests. On this account Ghayir-Khan became annoyed and embarrassed; at the same time he conceived a desire for their property. He therefore placed them under arrest, and sent a messenger to the Sultan in Iraq to inform him about them. Without pausing to think the Sultan sanctioned the shedding of their blood and deemed the seizure of their goods to be lawful, not knowing that his own life would become unlawful, nay a crime, and that the bird of his prosperity would be lopped of feather and wing….Ghayir-Khan in executing his command deprived these men of their lives and possessions, nay rather he desolated and laid waste a whole world and rendered a whole creation without home, property or leaders. For every drop of their blood there flowed a whole Oxus; in retribution for every hair on their heads it seemed that a hundred thousand heads rolled in the dust at every crossroad; and in exchange for every dinar a thousand qintars were exacted.”61 Juvaynī reports that Chinggis Khan, upon hearing the news of the abuse and execution of his envoys, “went up alone to the summit of a hill, bared his head, turned his face towards the earth and for three days and nights offered up prayer, saying, ‘I was not the author of this trouble; grant me strength to exact vengeance.’ Thereupon he descended from the hill, meditating action and making ready for war. And since Küchlüg and Toq-Toghan [two tribal steppe enemies of Chinggis Khan], the fugitives from his army, lay across his path, he first sent an army to deal with their mischief and sedition….He then dispatched envoys to the Sultan [i.e., the Khwārazm Shah] to remind him of the treachery which he had needlessly occasioned and to advise him of his intention to march against him; so that he might prepare for war and equip himself with thrusting and striking weapons….And so the beatified Sultan because of the harshness of his disposition and the violence of his custom and nature was involved in grave danger; and in the end his posterity had to taste the bile of punishment therefore, and his successors to suffer the bitterness of adversity.”62

202  Gog and Magog Juvaynī thus blames the Mongol conquest of Islam on Inalchuq’s prickliness about his title63 and his greed for Mongol merchandise. He also blames the Khwārazm Shah’s post facto authorization of the theft and execution of the envoys, which Juvaynī attributes the Shah’s violent nature. Chinggis Khan, a man whose name is often used to invoke extreme violence, is presented as a regretful but duty-bound avenger of his people, seeking nothing but justice for their wrongful deaths. In Juvaynī’s performance of the episode at Otrar, one does not even need divine authorization for the spilling of rivers of Muslim blood that would follow; it was simply the understandable act of a wronged and honorable (if harsh) man. Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allāh Hamadānī (d. 1318) was a Jewish convert to Islam and did not experience the conquest himself. He did, however, owe his privileged position as a physician and historian to the Mongol conquests. He, like his father and grandfather before him, was a courtier to the rulers of the Īlkhānate, during the reigns of Hülegü’s son Abaqa (r. 1265–1282). Under Ghāzān Khan and Öljeitü (whom he was blamed with assassinating, a crime for which he was subsequently executed), he was elevated to the position of Grand Vizier and wrote two important histories which we will treat here.64 Rashīd al-Dīn’s position was precarious by nature; as a “recently converted Jew whose position hinged entirely on the favour of his imperial masters…. and as a convert…under pressure to display Muslim credentials in the face of rivals who envied, suspected and traduced him,” Rashīd al-Din’s adulation for the Īlkhāns was certainly understandable; everybody needs allies.65 It was at the request of Ghāzān Khan, the first Mongol ruler of the Middle East to convert to Islam, that he wrote the Persian-language classic of history Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (or, in Persian: Tavārīkh; it is a Persian book, but an Arabic title, as was customary for literary works. The title means “Collection of Chronicles”). Rashīd al-Dīn had unrestricted access to Persian libraries in the Īlkhānate, as well as to Mongol and Chinese sources. His patrons also allowed him access to the Altan Debter, a valuable Mongol chronicle that would otherwise have been forbidden to him, as a Persian, to read.66 The Jāmiʿ is divided into two parts, with the first, the Taʾrīkh-i mubārak-i Ghāzān-i, discussing the Turkish and Mongol tribes, the lineage, career, and successors of Chinggis Khan himself, and on Hülegü and his Īlkhānid successors up through Ghāzān Khan.67 The second part, written at the behest of Ghāzān’s successor Öljeitü, includes the histories of Muslim and non-Muslim peoples, such as the Oghūz Turks and the Chinese, as well as histories of Iran, India, the Jews, the Franks, and the Armenians.68 Much of his information was gleaned due to the increasing cosmopolitanism of Tabriz, the Īlkhān capital, which attracted merchants from all points of the world. The second work of history that concerns us here is entitled The Blessed History of Ghāzān, a book that focuses on the “Turkic” peoples, an ethnographic designation that, for Rashīd al-Dīn, includes the Mongols. The book claims to have two audiences: his patron for whom it is named, naturally, but also the Islamic world, misinformed—so he asserts—by the biased

Gog and Magog 203 and disapproving works of prior Muslim historians like Jūzjānī. It is true that, with his special access to the contents of the Altan Debter, Rashīd alDīn was in a unique position to bring primary source material to bear on the Islamic world’s Mongol-related scholarship. Linking the Turco-Mongol peoples to one Dib Baqui, a grandson of Noah through Japheth, Rashīd al-Dīn asserts the relevance of the steppe nomads to the Abrahamic tradition. He also presents the legendary figure of Oghuz Khan, ancestor of the Seljuqs, as a monotheist. Following the ancestry of Chinggis Khan, the anecdotes about whom “preserve [his] words and deeds, revealing his concern for order and propriety, honour, respect, sobriety and the care of family, as well as the marks of a good ruler and commander (and in one instance, a good horse), and the efficacy of supplicating God. Set in the context of steppe life, these stories mark Chinggis Khan as the ideal nomadic ruler.”69 The work, like Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh, is at its core an argument for Mongol legitimacy in the Middle East, within a hybridized Mongol-Iranian-Islamic ideology.70 Rashīd al-Dīn is a difficult historical figure to recreate, even given the wealth of his written works that remain extant. For one thing, there is a rather serious authorship question that arises with some of his work;71 for another, his success invited jealousy, and his Jewish heritage provoked accusations of insincerity.72 Finally, his fall from grace and execution— motivated by the apparently unsubstantiated accusation that he had poisoned the Khan—casts a cloud of uncertainty over his death and, thus, his ultimate legacy. We may, however, leave all that aside and focus on his body of work. Rashīd al-Dīn sought to legitimize Mongol rule over the Middle East, particularly the Īlkhānid dynasty, and as a result, he essentially does not bother with theological questions in his historical writings. He was determined to please his patrons and thus presupposed that the line of Chinggis Khan’s ancestors and descendants that led to Ghāzān was legitimate. With that legitimacy established, the rightness of the conquest is a fundamental element of Rashīd al-Dīn’s narrative. Rashīd al-Dīn’s presupposition of Mongol legitimacy (which was good for his health, until it was not) is essentially begging for confirmation bias logically, but for the present study, the lack of grappling with the catastrophe is indicative of the overall success of not only the pro-Mongol histories like that of Juvaynī before him but of the overall Monotheist project. This project, from the destruction of Solomon’s Temple onward, allowed catastrophes to be recontextualized, refurbished, and recast to make the present the best of all possible worlds, as it is the world that God has allowed to come to pass. Consistent with the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim notion of a God who punishes his devotees by inflicting infidel and barbarian invasions upon them, and in view of the notion, fully ripened by Rashīd al-Dīn’s time, that by definition this punishment of God’s constitutes divine justice, the Mongol invasion that spilled rivers of Muslim blood was, in fact, no catastrophe at all.

204  Gog and Magog Notes 1 The Mongol Khan’s name is variously rendered as Chinggis, Chingiz, Genghis, and otherwise. All refer to the same person. 2 ʿAla-ad-Din ʿAta-Malik Juvaini, Tarīkh-i Jahān-gusha, translated by J.A. Boyle as Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 104. 3 The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan, translated and edited by Urgonge Onon (London: Routledge, 2001), 57. 4 Secret History of the Mongols, 125–26. 5 Which, to be fair, they may well have been. The Mongols were known, in part, for their advance intelligence of the disunity of their enemies, and embedding spies with diplomats and merchants is certainly not an uncommon phenomenon. 6 Scott C. Levi and Ron Sela, “The Mongol Empire—Introduction,” in Levi and Sela, eds., Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 111–12. 7 Ibn al-Athīr, Kāmil, translated by D.S. Richards as The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr for the Crusading Period from al-Kāmil fī’l-Taʾrīkh, part 3 (London: Routledge, 2008), 358. 8 Ibid., 215. 9 Ibid., 204. 10 Ibid., 204. 11 Ibid., 205. 12 Ibid., 215. 13 Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 18–19. 14 Ibid., 19. 15 See Ibid., 22. 16 Zofia A. Brzozowska, “Who Could ‘the Godless Ishamaelites from the Yathrib Desert’ Be to the Author of the Novgorod First Chronicle? The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius in Medieval South and East Slavic Literatures,” Studia Ceranea 9 (2019), 369–89. 17 Ibid, 384. 18 Obviously, these are the Mongols: Tartars are Tatary in the original. 19 These are names of known tribes who ranged closer in proximity to Novgorod than the Mongols had. 20 That is, Methodius; the author refers to Pseudo-Methodius, but takes the claim to Methodian authorship seriously. 21 A reference to Yathrib, or Medina. 22 The Euphrates River. 23 A Rus title of nobility, frequently translated as “Prince” or “Duke.” 24 Robert Mitchell and Nevill Forbes, trans. The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016– 1471 (London: Offices of the Society, 1914), 64. 25 Emeri van Donzel and Andrea Schmidt, Gog and Magog in Early Eastern Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam’s Quest for Alexander’s Wall (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 5. 26 Ibid., 5. 27 Ezekiel 38: 1, 14–18, in Berlin and Brettler, eds., The Jewish Study Bible, 1116. 28 Van Donzel and Schmidt, Gog and Magog, 7. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Josephus Flavius, Antiquities I:6. 31 Van Donzel and Schmidt, Gog and Magog, 10. 32 Ibid., 15–19. 33 See Ibid., 32–49.

Gog and Magog 205 4 Qurʾān, al-Kahf (18):92–98. 3 35 Rudi Paret, Der Koran. Übersetzung, Kommentar und Konkordanz (2 Volumes) (Kohlhammer Verlag: Stuttgart, 1969), cited in Van Donzel and Schmidt, Gog and Magog, 52. 36 See Van Donzel and Schmidt, Gog and Magog, 55–79. 37 Brzozowska, “Who Could ‘the Godless Ishmaelites from the Yathrib Desert’ Be,” 385. 38 Chronicle of Novgorod, 66. 39 Secret History of the Mongols, 253. 40 Chronicle of Novgorod, 84. 41 Jawan Shir Rasikh, “The Many Lives of a Medieval Muslim Scholar: An introduction to the life and times of Minhaj Siraj al-Din Juzjani, 1193–1260 CE,” in Afghanistan 3/2 (2020), 111–17. 42 Ibid, 112. 43 Minhāj Sirāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāsirī, 2 vols., ed. by Abdul Hay Habibi (Kabul: Anjuman-i Tarikh-i Afghanistan, 1963), 1:339, cited in Ibid., 125. 44 Rasikh, “The Many Lives of a Medieval Muslim Scholar,” 125. 45 Transoxania is rendered here as “Māwar-un-Nahr,” a transliteration of the Arabic mā warāʾ al-nahr, which means “that which is on the other side of the river [Oxus];” thus, “Trans-ox[us]-ania” has the same meaning. 46 Minhāj Sirāj al-Dīn Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt-i Nāsirī, translated by H.G. Raverty as Ṭabaqāt-i-Nāṣirī: A general history of the Muhammadan dynasties of Asia, including Hindustan; from A.H. 194 (810 A.D.) to A.H. 658 (1260 A.D.) and the irruption of the infidel Mughals into Islam (England: Gilbert and Rivington, 1881), 869–88. If that seems too large a page range to cite a single, if run-on, sentence, it is because Mr. Raverty has, it must be said, an unequaled ability to fill pages with discursive footnotes that even the author of this study finds pedantically overwhelming. 47 Ibid., 965. 48 Jūzjānī, Ṭabaqāt, in Levi and Sela, eds., Islamic Central Asia, 136. 49 Ibid., 136. 50 Ibid., 136–37. 51 For a useful chronology of the disputed successions and the rise of the independent Khanates, or appenages, see Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 97–106. Much of the information on the Islamic world is derived from the historians discussed in this section, Rashīd al-Dīn and Juvaynī. 52 For a history of Hülegü’s campaigns in the Middle East, see Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 125–48. 53 For a full history of the battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, its causes, course, and impacts, as well as the significant factors that played into its outcome, see Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Īlkhānid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26–48. 54 Ibid., 47–48. 55 Levi and Sela, Islamic Central Asia, 143. 56 Ibid., 143. 57 Stefan Kamola, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 65. 58 Ibid., 66. 59 Juvaynī, Taʾrīkh-i Jahān-i Gūsha (Boyle, trans.), 78. 60 Ibid., 79. 61 Ibid., 79–80. 62 Ibid., 80–81. 63 Let university students everywhere take note. 64 For a brief, but comprehensive, biography of Rashīd al-Dīn, see Kamola, Making Mongol History, 28–54.

206  Gog and Magog 5 Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 27. 6 66 Levi and Sela, Islamic Central Asia, 140. 67 Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 27. 68 Ibid., 28. 69 Kamola, Making Mongol History, 84. 70 Ibid., 91. 71 Ibid., 99–101. 72 Ibid., 106. See also Jonathan Z. Brack, “Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Michigan, 2016).

General Conclusions

Islam did not have to explain much catastrophe for the first few centuries of its existence as an independent monotheistic community and system of faith. At least as it remembers its own past, through its earliest times God’s favor kept the Islamic enterprise succeeding. Even as it slowly rents itself asunder through political, ethnic, and sectarian divisions, for the first several hundred years after the life and death of the Prophet Muḥammad, most of those conflicts remained confined to literary and intellectual theatres. Winning victory after victory, even temporary setbacks did not alter the general optimism that pervades Islam before the time of the Crusades and then, more calamitously, the Mongol invasions. No run of good fortune or God’s fortune lasts forever. When the reckoning did come in the form of those invasions from West and East, the Muslims did not have to reinvent the wheel when it came to contextualizing and finding positive, community-bolstering meaning in the terrible things that had befallen them. To be sure, the historians, writers, and thinkers who experienced the Crusades and the Mongol horror came up with different sins to explain it than had the Jewish observers of the losses of the Temples or the Christian writers who saw the Arab Muslim successes. In the case of Islam’s misfortunes, the lack of ideological or sectarian unity, the lack of political unity, and the failure to live up to the farḍ (religious obligation) of jihad were all presented as models that explained the calamities wrought by the Crusaders and the Mongols. But the model of self-blame, divine punishment, and subsequent self-examination served the Muslim theologians every bit as well as it served the Christian fathers and Jewish sages before them. At the time of the Crusades and the Mongol conquest, the notion that the Muslim God might not be more powerful than the Christian God (yes, they are generally considered to be the same God, but in truth, the Muslim and Christian, and Jewish concepts of what God is and what God wants are clearly not identical) or (even more disturbing, from a monotheist perspective) might not be more powerful than the spiritual force that oversaw the Mongol enterprise was never seriously considered, at least not in a way that survived in the written tradition. Similarly, the hypothesis that God might not be altogether just remained absent from Islam’s textual-historical tradition, even in the face DOI: 10.4324/9781003377191-8

208  General Conclusions of some indiscriminate, and clearly unjust, sackings of cities and massacring of populations. By definition, this destruction had been divinely authorized. The benefit of self-blame is that it requires no reexamination of the nature of reality, and, perhaps more to the point, nudges the monotheistic response in the direction of solving problems that can be addressed, here on this earthly plane—even if those problems are not necessarily the ones that caused the catastrophe in the first place. The Muslim world ultimately survived the incursion of both the Crusaders and the Mongols. In the case of the Crusades, the survival was the result of solving the problems that the Muslim thinkers agreed had invited the invasions in the first place. For Islam to survive the Mongol onslaught, the key was waiting for the historical wheel of fortune to reverse the setback. The Crusades were, indeed, successful in no small part due to Muslim disunity; unlike the Jewish responses to the two Temples’ destructions, the “sin” that God was punishing was both offensive to God and a clear-eyed, realpolitik assessment of Muslim loss of territory to the Franks. The squabbles among the petty Muslim rulers were divisive enough that it took a few generations for a response sufficiently organized and forceful to drive the Crusaders from the Middle East. Lack of unity was also a serious problem for the Islamic world when the Mongol wave reached them in Central Asia and crashed through Iran and Syria before reaching its breaking point in the Jezreel Valley, at ʿAyn Jālūt in 1260, but it probably was not decisive. Given the Mongols’ apparently global military supremacy, it is doubtful that even ironclad, universal Muslim unity would have achieved any success against the invaders at their full force. Much of the world happened to be disunified at the time; the Chinese world was split between the Jin and the Song dynasties, as well as the smaller states of Qara Khitai and Xi Xia (the “Great Liao” and “Western Liao” dynasties, respectively). The Islamic world was divided among Khwārazm, the Seljūqs (both the Great and the Seljūqs of Rūm), and the Ayyūbids, not to mention the myriad of smaller principalities and the sectarian divisions throughout. The Rus were divided by the rivalries among their princes; Eastern Europe, by the rivalries among their kings. None of them withstood the onslaught. The Mongols smashed forces large and small, representing states and kingdoms united and disunited, with what seems to be equivalent, casually brutal ease. This fact is corroborated by the historical chronicles of the vanquished as well as the Mongols’ own perspective as presented in The Secret History. The Mongols were defeated, ultimately, by climate (they had trouble with exotic diseases too far south) and their own internal divisions, in this case among the grandsons of Chinggis Khan. The rivalry between Batu and Güyük, and other personal conflicts along the Chinggisid line, led to the division of the Mongol Empire into states like the Khanate of the Great Khan (also known as the Yuan Dynasty of China), the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, the Khanate of the Golden Horde in modern-day Russia, and, as we have discussed, the Īlkhānate of Persia. The Toluid Mongol rulers

General Conclusions 209 of the Īlkhānate relied on an existing bureaucracy, ethnically Persian and largely though not exclusively Muslim, to govern. This was very similar to the manner in which the Yuan Dynasty Mongols ruled China through their Confucian bureaucracy and became culturally Sinicized. Five rulers in, under the influence of historians and advisors like Juvaynī and Rashīd al-Dīn, the Īlkhāns themselves converted to Islam, making it much easier for Muslim historians and thinkers, then writing under restored Muslim sovereignty, to cast the Mongols’ slaughter-filled incursion into Dār al-Islām as something other than a catastrophe. Perhaps the bloodshed was, as Juvaynī and Rashīd al-Dīn asserted, ultimately for the best, restoring for the Muslims the good and just, if stern, leadership they had been lacking. When the Īlkhāns became Muslims, the wisdom of God’s just punishment of specific Muslim misgovernment was retroactively understood, or perhaps celebrated. The Muslims were conquered, slaughtered, and apparently divinely chastised, but patience and the ability to filter anguishing events through the standard monotheist filter of self-blame was once again a successful theological antidote. Thus vaccinated against notions of lasting defeat with a time-tested monotheistic theological model, even defeat could not defeat Islam. The situation is not different for Christians and Jews. The very longevity of these three monotheistic faiths is not just supported by such a model of explaining catastrophe, which is inevitable given enough time. Such longevity is, in fact, dependent upon the development of such a model. A cynic or a skeptic might say that each monotheistic tradition adopted an unfalsifiable schema for explaining away the logical contradictions inherent in an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God that allows disaster to befall those who are scripturally identified as his favorite humans. This cynic would not be incorrect, either; this approach includes a clear confirmation bias and a conservatism bias (with notions of God’s omnipotence being the immutable element). But from a utilitarian standpoint, if the goal of the proponents of the self-blame model is the long-term survival and continuity of their tradition or community, explaining catastrophe with self-blame is clearly a good strategy. That the narratives this approach produces are unfalsifiable also means that they are widely, perhaps universally, applicable. This model is a one-size-fits-all response to catastrophe that only needs to differ in the situational specifics, like the nature of the offending sin, the identity of the evil miscreants unleashed as a punishment against God’s chosen, and—eventually—the identity of the specific sinners, which ultimately exculpates most of the victimized monotheistic community. That we can see, in the historical record, a nearly ubiquitous evolution from Lamentations-phase writing (writing that bemoans the catastrophe, expresses generic notions of self-blame, and pleads with God for justice) to Jeremiah-phase writing (writing that emerges after the community has reflected on its misdeeds, specifies the sins, and shifts the blame for the catastrophe from the community at large to specific individuals), regardless of

210  General Conclusions the catastrophe in question, suggests that self-blame may be an axiomatic component of monotheistic thought, or, at least, the monotheistic thought of traditions that can survive their catastrophes. In truth, completely wiping out an idea like monotheism is almost impossible. Even if the Mongols had slaughtered every Muslim, Christian, and Jew in the world, thus snuffing out the fires of monotheism, all it would take is one person, at any time, finding one religious text and becoming convinced of its truth for the embers of one of those traditions to reignite. The survival of those traditions was thus never really in danger of being utterly extinguished by external invasion. The Babylonians, Romans, Arab Muslims, Crusaders, and Mongols, for all the damage they did to those they conquered, were never close to extinguishing the Judaism, Christianity, or Islam that their invasions challenged. On the other hand, if the Jews, Christians, and Muslims themselves looked at the devastation wrought by those invaders, and concluded that God had abandoned them, or was not all-powerful, or perhaps did not exist, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam might well have disappeared. People can be slaughtered, Temples can be destroyed, and cities and countries can be lost, but ideas can only die if those who believe in the ideas stop believing in them. The ability to blame one’s own community for catastrophes, to reflect on misdeeds, to reform the behavior that seemed to provoke the problem in the first place, offered a practical solution to the cognitive theological dissonance such a calamity would naturally provoke. Owning disaster by incorporating it into pious narratives and traditionaffirming models of history was not merely useful for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For these monotheistic traditions, asserting a single, omnipotent God, to survive in a universe that inevitably brings such disasters, owning catastrophe is a basic requisite for longevity. Owning disaster prevents the idea from failing. It prevents the tradition from disappearing, even when the people are massacred, the cities fall, the Temples are razed, and the countries are taken. And owning disaster prevents the world from ending, even if the only way to do that is to officially float the notion that the end of the world may be nigh.

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220 Bibliography Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Walters, Patricia. “The Synoptic Problem.” In The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament, edited by David E. Aune, 236–53. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2008. Watson, Francis. “Is There a Story in These Texts?” In Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, edited by Bruce W. Longnecker. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002. Watts, James. “Was the Pentateuch the Constitution of the Jewish Ethnos in the Persian Period?” In Essays on Judaism in the pre-Hellenistic Period, edited by Joseph Blenkinsopp. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017, Wellhausen, Julius. Reste Arabischen Heidentums. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1887. Whitby, Michael, and Mary Whitby. trans. The History of Theophylact Simocatta. New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1986. Williamson, H. G. M. “The Setting of Deutero-Isaiah: Some Linguistic Considerations.” In Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context, edited by Jonathan Stökl and Caroline Waerzeggers. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Willis, Lawrence M. “The Gospel According to Mark.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy Jill-Levine and Marc Z. Brettler, 55–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Witakowski, Witold. “Syriac Eschatology in Antiquity.” In Eschatology in Antiquity: Forms and Functions, edited by Hilary Marlow, Karla Pollmann and Helen Van Noorden, 499–514. London: Routledge, 2001. Ye’or, Bat. Islam and Dhimmitude: When Civilizations Collide. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson, University Press, 2002.

Index

Abaqa 202 Abba Arikha, Rabbi see Rav Abbasids 4, 22, 24, 137, 138–140, 187, 189, 197; collapse of authority 167–168, 176–177; destruction of 198–199; dispute with Fāṭimids 177 ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr 153 ʿAbd al-Mālik, Umayyad Caliph 22, 23, 139 al-Abīwardī 169, 172, 176 Abraham, Monotheist Patriarch 1, 13, 21, 110, 133, 138 Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddiq 118, 119, 124 Achaemenid Persia 17, 18, 58, 62, 67, 106, 122, 165; Jewish community of 106; lack of surviving sources for 7, 17, 29n24 Acre 170 Adiabene 80–82, 100, 103, 134 Adversus Judaeos literature 6, 90–97, 102, 121, 144, 145, 157 Aelia Capitolina see Kingdom of Jerusalem Aeschylus 61 Agrippa I see Herod Agrippa Agrippa II 74, 75; as stand-in for Josephus 79–84, 87, 99 Ahl al-Kitāb see People of the Book Ahura Mazda 111 Akiva, Rabbi 100, 101, 105 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad, KhwārazmShah 183–184 Alamūt 199 Alans 191 Albinus, Lucceius 75 Alexander Legend 190–192, 198

Alexander the Great 18, 25, 26, 61, 67; and the Jews 18, 61, 63, 106; conquests and rule 61–63, 165, 200 Alexius Comnenus 169 ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib 24, 125 Almohads 141 Ambrosiaster 90 al-Amīn ibn Harūn al-Rashīd 139, 176 Ananus see Hananiah Anat 14 al-Andalūs 143, 157, 174, 177 Anṣār 124 Antichrist 147, 150, 151, 185 Antigonus, Alexander’s general 61 Antigonus, nephew of Hyrcanus 67 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Seleucid Emperor 63–65, 68 Antipater, Alexander’s general 61 al-Aqṣā Mosque 23, 173 Archelaus, son of Herod 68 Arian Christians 155 Ariq Böke 198 Arius 155 Armenia 73, 74, 99, 100, 149, 187, 198 Armenian Christians 121, 191 Arsacids 106, 107 Asherah, goddess 14 Ashur, god 14, 111 Assassins, Ismāʿīli 199, 200 Assyria 14, 17, 51, 52, 73, 81, 85, 103, 128, 165, 189; collapse of empire 34–38; domination of Near East 59–63 Astarte 14 Athens 60–61 Augustine 90, 97, 104 Augustus Caesar see Octavian

222 Index ʿAyn Jālūt, Battle of (1260 CE) 194, 199, 208 Ayyūbids 169, 170, 199, 208 Azerbaijan 186–188, 198 al-ʿAẓimī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh 170–172 Baal, god 14, 42, 46–48 Bab (Bahai) 19 Babylonian Exile of the Jews 15, 26, 32–55, 106–111, 129, 190 Bahāʾuʾllāh 19 Bahrām Chōbīn, Parthian ruler 123 Banū Naḍīr 135 Banū Qaynuqāʾ 136 Banū Qurayẓa 136, 139 Bar Kamza xiv, 109–111 Bar Kochba 76, 92, 95, 98, 101–105, 142 Bar Kosiba see Bar Kochba Batu 198, 199, 208 Baybārs, Rukn al-Dīn 170, 199 Beijing see Zhongdu Beirut 170 Beitar 101–102 Belshazzar 110, 115n108 Berbers 174 Bethel, god 14 Bohemond of Sicily 169 Caligula 68, 72–76, 100 Cambyses, son of Cyrus 17 Canaanites 13, 14, 48 Caracalla, Emperor of Rome 142 Carchemish, Battle of (605 CE) 37 Carthage 81, 90, 93, 104 Chaghatay 196 Chalcedon 121; Council of 121; Chalcedonians 122, 133, 147, 153, 154, 162n81, 178 Chemosh, god 14 Chinggis Khan 181–203, 208 Chrysostom, John 90, 91, 96 Church of the Holy Sepulchre 24, 131, 168, 169 Churchill, Winston 77 Claudius, Emperor of Rome 73–75 Coptic Christians 121, 122, 133, 191 Council of Clermont 170 Council of Nicaea 91, 154, 155 Ctesiphon 62, 120 Cumanus, Ventidius 74 Cyprien of Carthage 90

Cyril of Alexandria 96, 121 Cyrus the Great 16–18, 54, 55, 58–61, 63, 68, 73, 106, 122, 136 Damietta 186 Danishmendids 168 Darius, Achaemenid Persian emperor 17, 61 David, King 14, 15, 33, 38, 54, 132; descendants of 16, 26, 27, 34, 38, 54–55, 59, 99, 107, 139 Dead Sea Scrolls 46, 112n9 Deutero-Isaiah 15–17, 26, 27, 28n13 Deuteronomist, the 38–39, 46 Dhimmī 135, 140, 142, 143, 146, 162n81 Diadochi 61 Dio Cassius 70–71 Diophytism 121–122, 151 Dome of the Rock 22–24, 58, 131, 139 Domitian, Roman Emperor 78, 99, 100 Domitianus, bishop of Melitene 129, 144 Edessa, County of 169, 170 El, god 14 Eliezer ben Hyrcanus see Eliezer, Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi 138, 161n54 Enlil, god 111 Ephrem the Syrian 133, 134, 146 Essenes 68, 72, 112n9 Ethiopia 81, 147, 149, 150, 189, 190; Ethiopic Christians 121, 191 Euripides 61 Eusebius 70, 71, 92, 99, 104 Exodus from Egypt 2, 14 Ezra the Scribe 39, 104; Qurʾānic Conflation with ʿUzayr 136–137 Faḍāʾil Literature 21 Fadus, Cuspius 74 al-Farabī 25 Fāṭimids 168, 169, 173, 177 Festus, Porcius 75 Firūz, alleged betrayer of Antioch 170 Fiscus Judaicus 76, 99, 100 Flaccus, Aulus Avillius 73 Florus, Gessius 75–80 Fourth Philosophy, the 72, 104 Geonim 107, 199 George of Reshʿaina 151, 158 Georgia 130, 131 186, 187, 191

Index  223 Getae 191 Ghassanids 117 Ghayir-Khan 201 Ghāzān Khan 200–203 Ghaznavids 194, 197 Ghūrids 194, 197 Godfrey of Bouillon 169 Golden Horde 199, 208 Goths 191 Greco-Persian Wars 59–61 Gregory of Nyssa 90 Güyük 198 Hadrian, Publius Aelius 100, 101, 142 al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, Fāṭimid Caliph 168–169 al-Hamadānī, Rashīd al-Dīn 197–203, 209 Haman 3, 59 Hananiah 75 Harran, Battle of (609 CE) 37 Hārūn al-Rashīd, Abbasid caliph 139, 176 Hasan-i Sabbah 200 Hasmoneans 28, 67–68, 102, 106, 140; rebellion 65–67 Helena, Queen of Adiabene 82 Heraclius, Byzantine Emperor 120, 122, 128, 131, 133, 146, 151, 152 Herod 67–68 Herod Agrippa 73–74 Herod of Chalcis 74 Herodotus 17, 60, 61, 123 Hezekiah 15, 35 Hindūstān see India Hippocrates 61 Hö’elün 182 Hülegü 198–202 Huns 145, 191 al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī 2, 24, 153 Hyrcanus, Hasmonean-era High Priest 68 Hyrcanus, Roman-era High Priest 67, 85 Ibn Abī Dīnār 172, 177 Ibn al-Abīwardī 169, 172, 176 Ibn al-ʿAdīm 172 Ibn al-ʿArabī 169 Ibn al-Ḥawwās, ruler of Agrigento 177 Ibn al-Jawzī 171, 172, 187 Ibn al-Qalānisī 170–172 Ibn al-Thumna, ruler of Syracuse and Catania 174, 177

Ibn ʿAsākir 172, 174 Ibn Bajja 25 Ibn Rushd 25 Ibn Sina 25 Ibn Taghribirdī 171, 172 Ibn Taymiyya 125 Ibn Tufayl 25 Ibn Wāṣil 187 Idumeans 66, 67, 68 Ilkhanate 198–203, 208, 209 Iltumishids 195 Inalchuq, governor of Otrar 196, 201–202 India 24, 61, 118, 125, 165, 167, 188, 194, 195, 201, 202 Irenaeus 88 Isfahānī, Hamza 123 Ishtar, goddess 14 Ismāʿīlis 168, 177, 199, 200 Issus, Battle of (333 BCE) 60 Izates, Prince of Adiabene 81–82 Jalāl al-Dīn, Khwārazm Shah 188 Jason, Oniad High Priest during the Seleucid Era 62–64 Jebe, Mongol general 182–183, 193 Jehoiachin 32, 37 Jehoiakim 37, 50 Jochi 196, 198, 199 John Bar Penkāyē 128, 154–157 Josephus Flavius 93, 95, 98, 99, 104, 105, 108, 190, 191; as historian 58, 64, 66, 67, 69–72, 77–79, 81–90; as historical figure 66, 78–80, 83, 86, 103 Joshua ben Hananiah, Rabbi 100 Josiah, king 14 Jovian 147 Judah ha-Nasi, Rabbi 105 Julius Caesar 67, 72 Jupiter, god 76 Justinian, Byzantine Emperor 127, 164 Juvaynī, Ata-Mālik 181, 197, 198–203 Juzjānī, Minhāj-i Sirāj 188, 194–197, 200, 203 Kaʿba 23, 135 Kalka River, Battle of the (1223 CE) 189, 192 Kāmil, Ayyūbid Sultan 170, 172 Kamza 109, 111 Karaites 136–137 Karbalāʾ, Battle of (680 CE) 2, 24, 153

224 Index Ketbugha 199 Khusrau II, Persian Emperor 127, 164 Kievan Rus 192 Kingdom of Jerusalem 190 Kingu, god 2 Kublai Khan 198, 199 Küchlüg 201 Kusayla, Berber leader 174 Kyiv 188, 193 Lakhmids 117 Lysimachus 61 Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman 170, 171 Macedonia 26, 60–62, 67, 81 Maimonides 25, 26, 141, 143 Malik-Shāh, Seljuq Sultan 168 Mamluk Dynasty 170, 171, 194, 199 al-Maʿmūn ibn Hārūn al-Rashīd 139, 176 Manzikert, Battle of (1071 CE) 168 Marathon, Battle of (490 BCE) 60 Marc Antony 67 Marcion of Sinope 90, 95, 96, 97 Marduk, god 2, 14, 17, 36, 111 Mark, Apostle 88 Maronites 122 Marsus, Vibius 74 Martial, historian 87 Martyr, Justin 20, 70, 91–93, 96, 144 Masada 58, 75–77, 99 Masoretic text 46 Massagetae 191 al-Masʿūdī, ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn 123 Mattathias 67 Maurice, Byzantine emperor 120 Maximus the Confessor 145, 151–152, 156, 158, 159 Maymūna 174 Mecca 22, 23, 118, 123–125, 135, 143, 169, 174 Medes 35 Mefodi see Pseudo-Methodius Menelaus, High Priest during the Seleucid Era 62, 64 Miaphytism 121, 122, 147, 178 Modestus, Patriarch of Jerusalem 131 Modiʿin 65 Monobazus I, King of Adiabene 81, 82 Monobazus II, King of Adiabene 82 Monophytism 121, 122, 151 Monotheism, concept 13–16 Monotheletism 122, 133, 151

Moschus, John 130, 131, 138, 143 Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān 137, 139, 156 Muḥammad, Khwārazm-Shah 183, 184, 186 Muḥammad, Prophet 1, 2, 4, 18–23, 118, 119, 124, 125, 129, 133–137, 140, 153, 156–157, 173–174, 200 al-Muqtadī, Abbasid Caliph 168 al-Mustansir, Fatimid Caliph 168 al-Muʿtaṣim Billāh, Abbasid Caliph 176 Nabataeans 68, 117 Nahum, Prophet 35, 36, 53 Nasāwī, Shihāb al-Dīn Muḥammad 188 Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd, Sultan of Delhi 188, 195, 197 Nebopolassar, Babylonian emperor 37, 38 Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian emperor 26, 32, 37, 38, 52, 76, 110, 185 Nechaos, Pharaoh 85 Nero 75, 76, 83, 100, 108 Nerva 99 Nestorian Christianity 121, 134 Niẓām al-Mulk 168 Nizaris 200 Novgorod 188, 189 Numidia 151 Octavian 67 Ögedei 196, 198 Oghūz Turks 202, 203 Öljeitü 200, 202 Olodumare, god 2 Oniad Family 63, 64, 66 Onias III 63 Origen 88, 96 Osiris, god 111 Osroes, Parthian Emperor 100 Ostrogoths 145 Otrar 181, 184, 187, 196, 197, 202 Ottoman Empire 5, 168 Outremer 169, 171 Pacorus II, Parthian Emperor 99 Parthian Empire 67, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82, 99, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107 Pella 61 Peloponnesian Wars 60–61 People of the Book 22, 142 Pericles 61 Peter, Governor of Numidia 151

Index  225 Petronius, Publius 73 Pharisees 66–68, 70, 72, 74, 103–105 Phidias 61 Philip of Macedon 61 Philistines 85, 101 Phocus 120 Phoenicia 14, 37, 101 Plato 61 Polovcians 192 Pompey 66, 67, 68, 72, 81, 82, 85 Prester John 199 Principality of Antioch 169, 170, 171 Protestant Reformation 4 Psalms 16, 94 Pseudo-Callisthenes 191 Pseudo-Ephrem see Ephrem the Syrian Pseudo-Methodius 145–158, 188–192 Ptolemy 61, 62 Qara Khitai 183, 208 Qin 183, 184 Quietus, Lucius 100 Qumran see Dead Sea Scrolls Qurashīs see Quraysh Quraysh 124 Quṭuz, Ṣayf al-Dīn 170, 199 Rashbi see Shimon bar Yoḥai, Rabbi Rav 107 Raymond of Toulouse 169 Rayy 86 al-Rāzī, Bahāʾ al-Dīn 196 Ridda wars 118, 119 Roger the Frank 173, 177 Sabrishoʿ, Abbot of the Monastery of John Kāmul 153, 156 Sadducees 66, 68, 70, 72, 103, 104 Saladin 169, 170, 172, 199 Salāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī see Saladin Sara, Jewish matriarch 85 Sargon II, Assyrian emperor 34, 36 Sasanians 106, 107, 117–123, 125, 127, 134, 135, 137, 154, 157, 165, 198 Sasanids see Sasanians Scythians 190, 191 Seleucid Empire 2, 18, 26, 61–68, 103, 106, 165 Seleucus I Nicator, Alexander’s general 26, 61, 62 Seljuqs 168, 169, 177, 203, 208 Seljuqs of Rūm 168, 208

Sennacherib, Assyrian emperor 34–36, 85 Septuagint 46 Severus, Sulpicius 70, 71 Shahrbarāz, Parthian ruler 123 Shalmaneser V, Assyrian emperor 34 Shimon bar Yoḥai, Rabbi 137–138 Sicarii 75, 104 Sidon 170 Socrates 61 Sophocles 61 Sophronius, bishop of Jerusalem 122, 129–133, 140, 143, 158 Subotai, Mongol general 193 al-Sulamī, ʿAlī ibn Ṭāhir 174, 176–178 Syncellus, Theodore 145 Syria Palaestina 101, 103 al-Ṭabarī, Muḥammad ibn Jarīr 123, 174 Tacitus 70, 87 Talmud: creation and structure of 5, 20, 97–108; stories of destruction in 108–111 Tehran see Rayy Temüjin see Chinggis Khan Terah 186 Tertullian 70, 88, 90–96 Theodoret of Cyrus 90 Theodosian Code 142 Theodosius I, Byzantine Emperor 121 Theodosius II, Byzantine Emperor 142 Therapeutae, Jewish sect 72 Thermopylae, Battle of (480 BCE) 60 Thomas the Presbyter 133 Thucydides 60 Tiamat, goddess 2 Tiberius, city 99 Tiberius, Roman emperor 72–74 Tiglath-Pileser III, Assyrian emperor 34 Titus, emperor 71, 76, 83, 87, 99; destruction of the Temple 70, 76, 79, 84, 86, 99; reputation 70, 78, 84 Tobiad Family 64, 66 Toq-Toghan 201 Trajan, Roman emperor 82, 99–101 Transoxania 8, 184, 186, 195 Tripoli, County of 169 Tyre 170 Ukraine 194 ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb 118, 124, 129, 131, 138, 140, 156; death of 137

226 Index Umayyads 22–24, 124, 125, 137, 139, 143, 153, 156, 194 ʿUqba ibn Nāfīʿ 174 Utrar see Otrar Vespasian, Roman emperor 76–78, 83, 99, 103, 108–109 Visigoths 145 Xenophon 17 Xerxes, Achaemenid Persian emperor 61 Xi Xia 208 Xiongnu 191 Yaghī Siyan 170 Yaʿqūb ibn Hārūn al-Rashīd see al-Muʿtaṣim

al-Yaʿqūbī, Aḥmad ibn Wādiḥ 123 Yavneh 5, 99, 100, 107; Rabbinic academy at 101–105 Yisügei 182 Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi 103–110 Yuan Dynasty 198, 199, 208, 209 Zacharius, Patriarch of Jerusalem 131 Zealots, Jewish sect 72, 74, 75 Zechariah ben Avkulas, Rabbi 109, 100, 115n107 Zedekiah, king 32, 37, 38, 48–55, 85, 86, 97 Zhongdu 183, 196 Zīrids 173 Ziyād ibn Abī Sufyān 139 Zoroastrians 119, 154