"In the ancient world, rulers worshipped as gods sent out great armies to create great empires." "(DRAMATIC MUSIC)" "These emperors changed the course of history by conquering country after country." "One tiny nation conquered again and again was the Israelites." "Perhaps no people in history were more likely to be forgotten." "But these were not just any people." "These were the people of the Book." "The people of Abraham, the first to encounter the one true God." "Of Moses, the only human being to see God face to face." "And of David, warrior, king and adulterer." "The Israelites' stories taught unique lessons about God." "And in the hands of great rabbis like Hillel... and preachers like Jesus of Nazareth, the Israelites' Bible would change how human beings understood what was right and what was wrong and how they should treat one another." "And against all odds, the Israelites would change human history as much as any empire that ever existed." "(DRAMATIC PERCUSSION)" "In 589 BC, the people of Judah, the last of the Israelites, rebelled against the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar." "(FRANTIC yelling)" "He responded by ordering his troops to lay waste to Jerusalem... and destroy the Judeans most precious possession." "The Temple of Solomon." "Then, Nebuchadnezzar ordered that the King of Judah should watch his sons be put to death as a sign to all that his royal line had come to an end." "(SOLEMN MUSIC)" "Afterward, the Babylonians led the people of Jerusalem into e xile in Babylon." "As they travelled the 600 miles from their tiny homeland to Babylon, the Judeans future looked grim." "Only a few generations earlier, the northern tribes of the Israelites had been taken into e xile and vanished forever." "Now the Judeans too seemed destined to disappear, with all memory they had e xisted as a people lost forever." "(BlRDSONG)" "Their mood was captured in a poem from the Book of Psalms." ""By the rivers of Babyblon we sat and wept" ""when we remembered Zion." ""On the poplars there we had hung up our harps," ""for our jailers asked us to sing them a song." ""But how can we sing a song of the Lord in a strange land? "" "(BlRDSONG)" "In spite of their despair and the incredible odds against them, the Judeans decided to fight for their survival as a people." "(LAMB BLEATS)" "They chose to fight not with spears and swords, but by writing a book." "In every spare moment they could find, the greatest of the Judean scribes began to rewrite and edit together stories about their past, which had been handed down to them by their ancestors." "The book they compiled was the first edition of the most influential work in human history... the Hebrew Bible." "The Bible was the first... book." "And you can argue it's good history writing or bad history writing." "I think it's extraordinarily... remarkable history writing for humans' first time out." "But it is the first." "It's the first time humans set down a story like that through many generations." "And the fact that we did it so well the first time out and that it impacted for so long is, uh... it's a wonder." "The scribes were driven by what they saw as a sacred mission... to bring the lessons taught by the stories alive for their fellow e xiles, so they would understand why they were in Babylon and how they could get home to Jerusalem." "Their book was a guide to how the Judean e xiles should live, not a literal history." "MAN:" "Many sceptics today want to ask are the stories in the Hebrew Bible true in any sense?" "They are true in some senses and not in others." "In other words, the biblical writers want to expand upon events to shed light upon their meaning, as they understood that meaning." "We moderns say "But wait a minute." "We want to know what really happened. "" "So for us, sceptical or not, the question is often" ""Can stories which are not true in every detail" ""nevertheless be morally edifying? "" "My answer is yes." "The Bible does not have to be literally true in every detail to be true in other senses." "The story said that the father of all Jews was Abraham." "Abraham was born in the city of Ur, in Mesopotamia." "According to the Jewish book of tradition and law, the Talmud, the people of Abraham's land worshipped the sky and each city venerated a different heavenly body." "Abraham's father made and sold idols to the people of the city of Ur." "But Abraham could not accept his father's ideas about religion." "MAN:" "There's a very famous legend that says that when Abraham was a young boy, his father, Terah, owned a shop." "The shop was full of idols." "One day, he said to his son" ""Watch the store for a while while I go out. "" "And when he came back, he found that every idol in the store had been smashed, except for the largest idol, that had a wooden staff in its hand." "The father said to Abraham "What went on?" "I left you in charge." "What happened? "" "Abraham said "Don't get mad at me." ""The largest god here destroyed all the others. "" "His father said "What, are you nuts?" "They're wood and stone! "" "And Abraham said "Aha!" "That's the point." "They're just wood and stone. "" "And that story comes to tell us that it was Abraham who was the first one to discover the idea that there was one God in the universe." "That God created the heavens and the earth and not the other way around." "(CAMEL SNORTS)" "According to the stories, once Abraham began to voice his belief that the universe was ruled by a single God, that God gave him a mission." ""And the Lord said to Abraham" "'Leave your country, your kindred and your father's house 'for a country which I will show you." "'And I will make you a great nation." "'I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you." "'And all clans on earth will bless themselves by you. '" "The stories say God led Abraham to a land near Egypt, called Canaan." "(DARK MUSIC)" "In Canaan, God tested Abraham, and Abraham tried to learn about God." "In their most disturbing meeting," "God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son." "'Abraham, Abraham' God called." "'Take your son, your only son, 'your beloved Isaac, 'and offer him as a burnt offering 'on one of the mountains which I shall point out to you. '" ""Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering" ""and loaded it on Isaac. "" ""When they arrived at the place," ""Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood." ""Then Abraham stretched out his hand" ""and seized the knife to kill his son." ""But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven." "'Abraham, Abraham' he said," "'Do not raise your hand against the boy." "'For now I know you fear God." "'You have not refused your son, your only son." "'Take the ram which I have provided and sacrifice it instead. '" "MAN:" "I regard this as a game of chicken." "At the last moment, when Abraham has the knife poised and ready to make the sacrifice, who blinked?" "Well, God, or his angel, says "Okay." ""I'm satisfied." "Don't do it. "" "Would Abraham have done it?" "Nobody says." "Maybe he was testing the deity just as the story tells us the deity was testing Abraham." "(SOLEM N M usic)" "The stories say that because of Abraham's obedience," "God made him a promise." "'I swear by my own self 'because you have done this, 'because you have not refused me your son," "'I will shower blessings on you." "'I will make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven. '" "(THUNDER RUMBLES)" "Abraham is, I think, a..." "if you will, a mythic figure." "Whether he existed in history or not is almost incidental to what he represents, which is the turning away from idolatry and the notion that we become one people who worship one God." "In Jewish imagination," "Abraham is noted for his hospitality, for his welcoming of others, and I think that is the corollary of his monotheism - that we all are brothers and sisters and therefore we are all welcome under the same tent." "(MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "The story of Abraham's relationship with God would speak so powerfully to future generations that Abraham would be embraced as a founding figure of Islam and Christianity, as well as Judaism." "(MEDlTATlVE MUSIC)" "But for the scribes in exile in Babylon, simply writing down stories about their ancestors was not enough." "Their great challenge was to make sense of their own world." "How had the people that God promised Abraham he would make a great nation wound up on the verge of e xtinction in Babylon?" "FRIEDMAN:" "One of the burdens of monotheism is you got nobody to blame when you're in trouble." "In pagan religion, if another nation defeats you, you can say their god was more powerful than your god." "But in monotheism, if you're suffering, it must be that you did something wrong." "(UNSETTLING MUSIC)" "The scribes' book was, above all, an explanation to their fellow exiles of what the Israelites had done to lose God's favour." "(CROW CAWS)" "The story began with the life of the man to whom the scribes devoted more words than any other." "His name was Moses and he was one of the most unlikely heroes ever portrayed." "According to the Bible," "Moses's ancestors had fled from Canaan to Egypt during a famine and been enslaved there." "Then Moses had to flee Egypt after killing an Egyptian who was abusing an Israelite slave." "In the desert, he married a nomad woman and was given the menial job of tending his father-in-law's sheep." "But God had a different job in mind for Moses." "(LOUD THUNDERCLAP)" ""God appeared to him in a flame, blazing from the middle of a bush." ""Moses looked." "There was the bush, blazing." ""But the bush was not being burnt up." ""Moses said 'I must go across and see this strange sight. '" "(DRAMATIC MUSIC)" ""When God saw this, he called to Moses from the middle of the bush." "'I am Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, 'the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, 'the God of Jacob." "'I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt 'and I am sending you to Pharaoh 'for you to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. '" ""Moses said to God" "'Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" "'" ""God said 'I shall be with you. '" "(DRAMATIC DRUM ROLL)" ""Moses then said to God 'Please, my Lord, send someone else, 'for I have never been eloquent." "'I am slow and hesitant of speech. '" "MAN:" "The sense that we get from the Bible is that Moses is overwhelmed, humbled and frightened." "He's frightened because Moses recognises that meeting God is not only an exhilarating experience, but it makes demands on the human being that meets God." "And Moses knew, from that moment on, his life couldn't be the same." "And because he had just achieved a stable life, you get from him both a sense of 'This is an enormous moment for me' - as it would be for any human being- and 'I wish I could run away from it. '" "(MlDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "Reluctantly, Moses went to Egypt." "There, on God's orders, he inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians." "During the tenth plague, which gave rise to Passover," "Moses told the Israelites to put blood on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would pass over as it struck dead the firstborn son of every Egyptian family." "According to the stories, after the tenth plague, Egypt's Pharaoh let the Israelites go." "Moses then led them out of Egypt and into the Sinai Desert." "DEVER:" "In later traditions in the Hebrew Bible, the Exodus story is the point of beginning." "That is where the great epic of Israel starts." "But is any of it true?" "According to the stories in the Bible, for instance, there would have been as many as 2 or 3 million Israelites wandering around in the wilderness." "A list of dozens of sites that they visited is given." "The fact of the matter is, the desert could never have supported more than a few thousand nomads." "And of all the dozens of sites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, we can identify only one or two." "So most archaeologists have given up trying to provide any archaeological background for the stories of the Exodus." "We don't have any evidence." "For the scribes, it was impossible to write an historically accurate account of what had taken place as much as 700 years before their time." "What was possible was to communicate to their fellow e xiles the eternal lessons that Moses' story taught." "WOLPE:" "Modern scholarship disputes many parts of the story of the Exodus." "But what is central about the story is not that it is factual, but that it is true." "In other words, the story of the Exodus is a story that embodies some of the deepest and most profound truths of the human condition - what it is to be in the wilderness, what it is to hope for a promised land," "what it is to escape slavery and to be both bewildered and exhilarated by the prospect of freedom." "And this is a story that is a sacred story because it not only embodies truths but it embodies truths that are animated by and inspired by God." "And so the story of the Exodus can actually be a story by which we lead our lives, even if there weren't 600, 000 men that left Egypt." "Even if there were five, even if there were none." "T o the writers of the Bible, the most important truths of all were found in the story of how God gave Moses the laws that his people were to observe for all time." "The Bible says God gave those laws to Moses in his only face-to-face meeting with a human being." "(MYSTlCAL MUSIC)" ""The Lord descended on Mount Sinai," ""and called Moses to the top of the mountain," ""and Moses went up." ""Then God spoke all these words." ""He said 'I am Yahweh, your God, 'who brought you out of Egypt." "'You shall have no other gods to rival me." "'You shall not make carved images, or bow to them, or serve them." "'You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh." "'Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy." "'Honour your father and your mother." "'You shall not kill." "'You shall not commit adultery." "'You shall not steal." "'You shall not give false evidence." "'You shall not set your heart on any of your neighbour's possessions. '" ""When Moses came down from Mount Sinai," ""the skin of his face was radiant" ""because he had been talking to God. "" "WOLPE:" "The revolution in the Ten Commandments was that God cares not so much for how human beings treat God." "That was, after all, the pagan ideal- you have to sacrifice to us the right way, you have to watch all your observances, because the gods will treat you well if you treat them well." "But the Ten Commandments says" "God cares how human beings treat each other." "It shifted the focus from 'You honour God by treating God well' to 'You honour God by treating well the person standing in front of you. '" "The Ten Commandments summarised the essence of the Jewish message for all the ages." "To the scribes, what happened at Sinai was key to understanding why they were in trouble with God." "For the Ten Commandments were the heart of a binding covenant between God and the Israelites." "FRIEDMAN:" "One of the great discoveries of scholarship of the last century was that in the ancient Near East there were all sorts of legal documents, treaty documents, between nations and individuals." "And, in the Bible, the covenant between God and Israel follows the form of those ancient treaties." "It's in the legal terminology of the day." "It would be as if, if the covenant were given today, it would say something like" ""Hereinafter in this covenant, God will be known as the party of the first part" ""and Israel will be known as the party of the second part." ""Whereas the party of the first part brought the party of the second part" ""out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage," ""therefore, you shall have no other gods" and so on." "The covenant is really in legal terminology." "It was understood to be a contract between God and Israel." ""God has done this, this and this for you." "Now here's what you have to do. "" "(MYSTlCAL MUSIC)" "After Sinai, all the rest of the stories of the Israelites would, at their core, be about whether or not they had obeyed God's commandments." "It was a challenge they would face without Moses to guide them." "For, according to the stories, after leading his people through the desert to the promised land of Canaan," "Moses himself was forbidden by God to enter." "(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)" ""Moses went up Mount Nebo" ""and Yahweh showed him the whole country." "'This is the land which I made an oath to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 'saying "I shall give it to your descendants."" "'I have allowed you to see it, but you shall not cross into it. '" ""Then Moses, servant of Yahweh, died." ""Since then, there has never been such a prophet as Moses..." ""the man who knew Yahweh face to face. "" "WOLPE:" "Here is somebody who didn't want to be a prophet in the first place, who was forced to it by God, all with the aim of entering the promised land, and now, at the very foot of the promised land," "is told "You cannot enter and you must die. "" "And the pain of that moment, and the sense that we have that Moses's life, for all its triumphs, was ultimately a life of frustration, is almost unbearable." "And the only thing that makes it possible for the reader to go on is that the Bible ends by saying that Moses saw God face to face." "So, even though Moses didn't get to see the land, which was the aim of his life, he did get to see God, which, the Bible tells us, is the aim of every life." "(unsettling PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)" "(unsettling PERCUSSlVE MUSIC)" "The stories say that after Moses's death, the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan." "God made the walls of Jericho fall before them and they swept the Canaanites from the land in a series of great military victories." "But according to historical evidence, the Israelites did not invade Canaan at all but were, in fact, Canaanites themselves." "(HAUNTlNG MUSIC)" "DEVER:" "Why would archaeologists today argue that the earliest Israelites are not newcomers to Canaan at all but indigenous peoples?" "How do we know that?" "We know it from such things as their pottery, which is in the old Late Bronze Age Canaanite tradition." "There is nothing new in the pottery of these 12th-century settlements that we call 'Israelite'." "They're making a style of pottery that local people had made for centuries." "We also know that the oldest passages of the Hebrew Bible describing Israelite religion make it look very much like Canaanite religion." "So the continuities between Canaanite culture of the Late Bronze Age and so-called Israelite culture of the Iron one are very striking." "(SERENE M usic)" "The historical evidence suggests that the Israelites were the underdogs of Canaanite society- slaves, shepherds, nomads- who started new lives together in the hill country of Canaan." "They became a people not by fighting battles, but by telling stories." "MAN:" "One of the mysteries we face is how to explain how a people becomes a people." "How does ethnic and cultural identity come into being?" "If early Israel was a motley group of shepherds, nomads, peasants, bandits, how is it that they moved into this area and formed an identity that was so strong?" "One of the things that we've learned in recent years is that cultural identity is very much a cultural fiction." "This is how the Israelites made their identity, in large part by telling these stories." "It is as much as if the story were shaping the people as much as it is that the people are telling the story." "The stories told by the Israelites were well suited to inspiring and guiding a new community, for they contained an incredible richness of detail about the lives and interactions of human beings." "After they became a people, the Israelites continued to tell stories which explored the good and evil inside the human heart, to teach lessons about God and his covenant with Israel." "One of the greatest portraits ever of a human being, in all his strengths and weaknesses, was the story of King David." "MAN:" "David is a story of a human being that really throbs with realism." "It's not just a hero story." "It's a story of a highly dysfunctional family and a very flawed man, but a man who could not be ignored." "And that inspired some early literary genius, perhaps the first literary genius in history, to set this man's life down on paper or, if you will, on parchment." "(SHEEP BLEAT)" "In the first story told about him," "David was only a peasant boy." "Until, one day, God spoke to the prophet Samuel." "'I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem, 'for I have found myself a king among his sons. '" "Samuel journeyed to Jesse's home to search for the future king." ""Samuel looked at Jesse's eldest son" ""but Yahweh said to Samuel" "'Take no notice of his appearance or his height, 'for I have rejected him." "'I do not see as human beings see." "'They look at appearances, 'but I look at the heart. '" "One by one, God told Samuel to reject seven of Jesse's sons." ""Samuel then asked Jesse 'Are these all the sons you have?" "'" ""Jesse replied 'Only the youngest is left." "'He is looking after the flock. '" ""God said 'Get up and anoint him." "He is the one. '" "The Israelites already had a king named Saul, but he was a tormented man who had angered God." "(GENTLE HARP MUSIC)" "Unaware of David's destiny," "Saul brought the young boy into his palace to play the harp to soothe his spirits." "Soon, David was like a son to Saul." "Then, one day, word reached the palace that the greatest warrior of the Philistines, Goliath, had challenged the Israelites to send someone out to fight him, one on one." "(OMlNOUS MUSIC)" "No one dared to take up the challenge." "Except... for the king's young harpist." "(PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)" ""With his sling in his hand, David went to meet Goliath." ""The Philistine looked at David, and what he saw filled him with scorn" ""because David was only a boy." ""The Philistine said to him" "'Come over here and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air 'and the beasts of the field. '" ""But David answered" "'You come against me with sword and spear." "'But I come against you in the name of the Lord God. '" "For the writers of the Bible, the story of the underdog, David, killing Goliath was about far more than just one battle." "MAN:" "Despite certain fantasies they entertained of being a powerful people and being more numerous than the stars in the heavens and so forth, they knew that they were tiny people and there were these vast empires to the south and to the east" "that could, at any moment, overwhelm them." "So, again and again, they stress the idea that there is something more important in the affairs of men than physical power." "After David killed Goliath, his fame spread throughout Israel." "King Saul's love turned to jealousy and he tried to kill David again and again." "David fled Saul's court and became an outlaw." "Then, one night, from his hideout, David spotted Saul and his army." "(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)" "To David's men, it was the perfect chance both to save David's life and make him king." ""In the dark, David and one of his men made their way towards the enemy force" ""and found Saul lying asleep inside the camp." ""The man then said to David" "'Let me pin him to the ground with his own spear. '" ""David replied 'Do not kill him." "'But let us take the spear beside his head, and his pitcher of water, 'and let us go away. '" "When he reached a nearby hilltop," "David held up Saul's spear and called out to him." "ALTER:" "David comes out and makes a big speech to Saul saying that he has no ill intention against Saul." "Then, all of a sudden, in one of those breathtaking pivots that are so remarkable in biblical narrative," "Saul says "Is it your voice, my son David? "" "And he cries." "(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)" "After King Saul died in battle with the Philistines, the young shepherd boy's destiny was finally fulfilled." "David was crowned king." "But using his new power wisely turned out to be David's greatest challenge." "And by far, the most important lessons taught by David's story come from his failures." "KIRSCH:" "David is NOT a plaster saint." "He's not a perfect man." "He's a man governed by his passions and ambitions... specifically, his passions for women." "So, parallel to his struggle for power, the Bible allows us to see the intimate details of his private life, his love affairs with many women, the most famous of which is his love affair with Bathsheba." "(TANTALlSl NG M usic)" "One day, while standing on the roof of his palace," "David saw a young woman bathing on a nearby rooftop." ""David made enquiries about this woman" ""and was told 'Why, that is Bathsheba. '" ""David then sent messengers to fetch her." ""She came to him and he lay with her. "" "When Bathsheba told him she was pregnant," "David arranged to have her husband killed in battle." "ALTER:" "He looks out the window of the palace and sees this beautiful woman bathing on the roof of a house below him." "And that's where he gets into trouble." "But the trouble is not just sex." "The trouble is his bumbling attempts to cover up the adultery and when he can't do that, to get rid of the husband by murder." "Once he's done that, everything starts to fall apart in his life." "After David married Bathsheba, God sent a prophet to confront him." "And David confessed to his sin." "WOLPE:" "In the ancient world, the king is the law." "And the key moment of this story of David and Bathsheba is when David stands there and says" ""Yes, I sinned and will be punished. "" "Because it is at that moment that we realise that Israel's revolution has won, that, in fact, David recognises that God is above all human beings and that no human being-not a king, not a warrior, not even a prophet" "can be above the law." "(MELANCHOLY PERCUSSlVE MUSIC)" "In punishment for his sin," "God cursed David and his descendants." ""For this, your household shall never be free of the sword." ""You have worked in secret, but I shall work for all Israel to see. "" "In his later years, David would be betrayed by his favourite son and grow to be a frail and lonely old man." "For the writers of the Bible," "David's breaking of the commandments and God's curse upon his house helped to e xplain the disasters Israel would suffer in the years after David." "The Bible says, and the archaeological record confirms, that in 720 BC, the Assyrians conquered the northern ten tribes of the Israelites and deported them to the far-flung reaches of their empire." "Before long, they assimilated with their new neighbours and most of the Israelites were lost forever from the pages of history." "Soon after, the Assyrians began to threaten the last remaining tribe of the Israelites..." "Judah." "The account of what happened is one of the most important in the Bible, for hidden within it is the surprising story of how monotheism actually took root in Judah." "In 640 BC, the land of Judah was ruled by King Josiah." "Josiah was desperately afraid that his people were unprepared to face the threat, not just from Assyria, but from Egypt and Babylon." "Most Judeans were still rural people who cared nothing about Jerusalem and its king." "They also knew little about Israel's covenant with the one God." "In fact, many Judeans appear to have worshipped a goddess named Asherah, who they believed was the God of Israel's wife." "DEVER:" "FROM a superficial reading of the Hebrew Bible, you would suppose that all the early Israelites were monotheist." "Most archaeologists and most biblical scholars now believe, however, that monotheism developed very late and perhaps did not emerge full-blown until after the fall of Jerusalem in the early 6th century." "So, most of the early Israelites were polytheist." "They worshipped a new god, Yahweh, perhaps, but alongside them they worshipped El, the old male deity of the Canaanite pantheon." "And, above all, they worshipped Asherah, the mother goddess." "We now know that." "This is very disturbing to many people, but God had a lady friend." "But King Josiah and his allies among the temple priests in Jerusalem decided to rally the nation around the belief in one all-powerful God." "And so, in 622 BC, they claimed that, deep within the Temple, they had found an unknown book written by Moses called Deuteronomy." "(MYSTERIOUS MUSIC)" "MAN:" "While they were cleaning out the Temple, suddenly someone comes running out to the high priest." ""Look!" "We found a book in the Temple. "" "Now, from the language of..." "in which this book is quoted, we know that we are dealing with the Book of Deuteronomy." "Contemporary scholars believe that the Book of Deuteronomy was actually written around that time and placed in the Temple to be discovered in order to motivate the reform." "The Book of Deuteronomy banned the worship of Asherah and other pagan gods." "Even more importantly, it said that Yahweh himself could only be worshipped at the Temple in Jerusalem." "And so, according to the Bible," "Josiah sent his troops to the mountaintops where Israelites had been making sacrifices for centuries." ""Josiah destroyed all the shrines on the high places" ""which the kings of Israel had built to provoke Yahweh's anger." ""All the priests of the high places who were there," ""he slaughtered on the altars..." ""and on those altars burned the human bones. "" "FRIEDMAN:" "It was one of the major religious revolutions of ancient Israel because now you couldn't just go any place you wanted to sacrifice the animal." "You could only do it at one place." "This was the beginning of monotheism in Israel." "The archaeological record and the biblical record itself attest to the fact that monotheism didn't catch on overnight." "People didn't just run out saying "Oh, I see!" "There's only one God." ""I'll just get rid of all these statues I have in the house" ""that belonged to my great-grandfather and everyone before him" ""and I'll stop worshipping all these gods that I've always worshipped. "" "It was an extraordinary new thought for people." "Deuteronomy was an incredible achievement." "It brought monotheism to life for Judeans by retelling the story of Moses, focusing above all on his teachings about how human beings should treat one another." "The first to be inspired by the new book was one of the great social prophets, Jeremiah, who told the people of Judah of the promise God made to them in Deuteronomy." ""If you truly treat one another fairly..." ""if you do not steal from the stranger, the orphan or the widow..." ""if you do not shed innocent blood..." ""and if you do not follow other gods..." ""then I shall let you stay in this place," ""in the country I gave forever to your ancestors of old. "" "VISOTZKY:." "The demand is that we care for one another, and love one another." "And in so doing, the prophets tell us, that is how you find God." "The social prophets are ferocious in their insistence that if you have wealth, it must be shared." "You can't just simply, as Amos says," "Iie on your couches of ivory and drink wine." "If you're not feeding the poor, it doesn't make a difference whether you go to church or synagogue, you're failing God." "With the nation now governed by the laws of Deuteronomy," "King Josiah believed he would have God on his side in his battle to save Judah." "(MEN CONVERSE EXClTEDLY)" "He decided to launch a surprise attack on the Egyptian-Assyrian alliance that he judged to be the greatest danger to his people." "In 609 BC, Josiah and his men ambushed an Egyptian army." "But in the battle that followed, the Judeans were routed... and King Josiah was killed." "(FLUTE PLAYS WlSTFULLY)" "After Josiah's death, the kings that followed him re-established the worship of Asherah and all of the other gods." "In response to their abandonment of monotheism, the prophet Jeremiah told the people of Judah that he had received an ominous message from God." ""The word of Yahweh came to me." "'Make your way down to the potter's house. '" ""So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was, working at the wheel." ""But the vessel he was making came out wrong," ""as may happen with clay when a potter is at work." ""So he began over again." ""Then the word of Yahweh came to me." "'House of Israel, can I not do to you what this potter does?" "'Listen." "I am preparing a disaster for you. '" "According to Jeremiah," "God was so angry, he decided to send the Judeans into e xile and start over." "(FIERCE, PERCUSSIVE MUSIC)" ""Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babyblon, advanced on Jerusalem..." ""and carried off all the treasures of the temple of Yahweh" ""and all the treasures of the palace." ""Then he carried Jerusalem off into exile. "" "(MOURNFUL MUSIC)" "With the Babylonians' conquest of Judah, the scribes had come to the end of their story of how the chosen people were sent into e xile." "Yet, even with this new Bible in their possession, the Judeans seemed destined to disappear," "like all the other tiny nations uprooted from their homelands." "For in a world where empires swept away all who stood in their path, how could a book of stories save a people from extinction?" "But in Babylon, something remarkable happened." "As the Judean exiles read and studied the Bible, their vision of who they were was transformed." "FRIEDMAN:" "These would be great stories even if they were just stories of the past." "But for the people of Israel, these stories were THEIR story." "So when you learned the story of Israelites becoming free of slavery in Egypt and experiencing extraordinary things on the way out, you didn't just read that as a great story to tell the kids." "It was your own belief in the power, the importance of liberation, of becoming free." "So it's not just history, it's not just memory." "It's a life." "It's part of you." "The exiles also came to a new understanding of why they were in Babylon, from reading the Bible." "ZEVIT:." "It contains a record of the covenant between the people of Israel and their God." "But it also lists the penalties for violating the covenant and among the penalties that are listed is exile." "Here, you have a historical book that tells a religious story." "It's not a real historical book, it's a..." "vehicle expressing a religious philosophy, but the religious philosophy is 'God is fair' and if you are punished, there's a reason for it." "The stories also contained another message." "For those who accepted their guilt and changed their ways, there was hope." ""If you return to your God," ""if, with all your heart and all your soul, you obey his voice," ""then he will bring back your captives." ""Should you have been banished to the very sky's end," ""your God will gather you again even from there. "" "ZEVIT:." "For the short term, it was obvious what they had to do." "They had to look at the covenant and they had to start living by the covenant in exile." "And what you actually see in the Babyblonian exile is the transformation of Israelite religion into something new that we can call the earliest form of Judaism." "In Babylon, the Judeans embraced the belief in one all-powerful God as never before." "And soon, in one of the most remarkable twists in history, their conviction that their God would allow a faithful people to return home was going to come true." "(STIRRING MUSIC)" "In the 6th century BC," "Judean captives in Babylon wrote the first edition of the Hebrew Bible." "After they returned to Jerusalem, this new book would define the Judean people," "giving them a sense of what was right and what was wrong." "But then they would be faced with a choice... give up their faith or fight to defend it." "No threat would prove more dire than when Alexander the Great and the Greeks swept through the Middle East, bringing with them the most exciting culture the world had ever seen." "But Judaism would not die." "It would instead be transformed by the new belief that the Bible was not just a book but a divine testament authored by God himself, and that those who were faithful to God would be rewarded in an afterlife." "Faith in this new Judaism would become so strong that the Jews would become the first people in history willing to fight... and die for their religion and their God." "(PLAINTIVE MUSIC)" "In 538 BC, the Persians conquered Babylon." "Then the Persian king freed all of the Babylonians' captives." "One people he encouraged to return home were the Judeans." ""Cyrus, King of Persia, says this:" "'Yahweh, the God of Heaven, 'has given me all the kingdoms of the earth 'and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem in Judah." "'Whoever among you belongs to the full tally of his people, 'may his God be with him." "'Let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah 'and build the Temple of Yahweh, God of Israel. '" "But returning to a land their grandparents had left decades before was a daunting challenge." "And many Jews who had made successful lives for themselves remained in Babylon." "It was the adventurous and the deeply religious who were drawn to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple." "As soon as the exiles arrived in Jerusalem, work on the Second Temple began." "The Book of Ezra described the excitement that filled the air." ""The people contributed money for the masons and carpenters," ""and food, drink and oil for the men from Sidon and Tyre" ""who brought cedar wood from Lebanon by sea," ""for which Cyrus, King of Persia, had given permission." ""The priests in their robes stood forward with trumpets," ""and the Levites with symbols, to praise Yahweh." ""Then all the people raised a mighty shout of praise" ""since the foundations of the Temple had now been laid." ""Many of the older priests and heads of families," ""who had seen the First Temple, wept." ""But many others shouted aloud for joy! "" "But the Temple was the only source of joy for the returnees." "The rest of their world was grim." "The only Judeans the Babylonians had left behind were the poorest of the peasants." "Now their descendants were on the verge of starvation as they struggled to eke out a living from the land." "The only others living nearby were peoples who had been forcibly resettled in Israel after the northern tribes were exiled." "These foreigners would do all they could to keep the returnees from gaining a foothold in Jerusalem... for they viewed them as rivals for control of the region." "(WIND BLOWS, SHEEP BLEAT)" "But the worst burden for the returnees to bear was that their ancestral home, Jerusalem, was a wasteland." "MAN:" "The city of Jerusalem is still in ruins." "The people who come back to live in the area of Jerusalem go and inhabit those stone buildings that were left standing from the time of the Babyblonian destruction." "So you have half of the city where people are living in ruined homes, and then another half of the city where nobody is living and the buildings are still standing empty." "It would have been..." "something depressing." "And, after a while, all hope would have gone out of the people, and people would have settled down to a life of discontent." "(GLOOMY MUSIC)" "Soon, even the building of the Temple slowed to a crawl, crippled by conflict between the returnees and the foreigners." "The ruthless uprooting of groups like the Judeans, who were then resettled with peoples of entirely different ethnicity and religion, had led to turmoil throughout the Middle East." "In Judea, law and order had completely broken down." "By convincing the Persians that the Jews were planning to rebel, the foreigners won an order suspending the rebuilding of the Temple." "Eventually, the Jews received permission to continue, but were too poor and too apathetic to finish the work." "Eighty years after they arrived, the return home of the exiles seemed like a horrible mistake." "But then a remarkable man arrived in Jerusalem." "His name was Ezra, and he had been sent by the Persian king to restore order to Jerusalem." ""Artaxerxes, king of kings, to the priest Ezra." ""Greetings." ""Now, here are my orders." ""You are being sent to Judah and Jerusalem." ""You are to appoint magistrates and scribes" ""to administer justice for all who know the law of your God." ""And you are to teach it to all who do not know it. "" "ZEVIT:." "Ezra is a scribe and a priest." "One didn't become a scribe because he was born a scribe." "One became a scribe by dint of talent, intelligence, literacy and creativity." "So now comes back to Jerusalem a man of rank and privilege and political power." "(PERCUSSION  HORN)" "Ezra had come from Babylon where Jewish scribes had written the first edition of the Hebrew Bible." "But the mostly illiterate returnees knew nothing about the book or its stories or its laws." "Now Ezra had a surprise for them." "MAN:" "Ezra didn't come to Jerusalem empty-handed." "He came with a book." "And that book was almost certainly the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in the form that we have it today." "And he said to the people" ""This is what we're about and this is how you must live. "" "In what would prove to be one of the most important events in history," "Ezra gathered all of the people of Judea together in a square near the Temple and read them the first five books of the Bible, the Torah." "(Man reads in Hebrew)" "FRIEDMAN:" "That makes Ezra kind of a new Moses." "He's the law giver, he's the one who stands up and tells the people" ""Well, you haven't known exactly the right thing to do until now" ""but from this day forward you will always know the right thing to do." ""And it's in this scroll, right here. "" ""You are the children of Yahweh, your God." ""You must take all the tithes of your harvest for the year" ""and gather them together in your community." ""Then the foreigner, the orphan and the widow" ""living in your community will come and eat." ""I'm giving you this command." ""Always be open-handed with your brother" ""and with anyone in your country who is in need and poor." ""Remember that you were once a slave in Egypt" ""and Yahweh, your God, redeemed you." ""That is why I am giving you this order. "" "(GENTLE MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "FRIEDMAN:" "The central possession of the Jews is the Torah and it became the central possession of the Jews THAT day, the day that Ezra had it read in Jerusalem." "Before that, they had parts of the Torah but that day they had the whole thing." "And for the 2500 years since then, that's been the governing force of the Jews, the highest ideal." "All of it, the history, the laws, the principles of Torah, all come out of that moment in history." "After the ceremony in which Ezra read the Torah, the people of Judea were asked to sign a contract agreeing to live according to the laws of the Bible." "The document they signed was revolutionary... proof that the Israelites' God cared not just about kings and priests, but about farmers and weavers, mothers and fathers." "MAN:" "This is a profoundly democratic religious revolution." "What Ezra declared that day is there is no secret knowledge in Israel." "In traditions all over the world, there were always mystery priests and rites that other people couldn't know, but the Torah is full of the exact rites that the priests follow in the Temple, and what that means is every Israelite can know" "what the priests know, what the teachers know." "God's revelation is for anyone who chooses to understand it." "Not one revelation to the prophet and one to the priest, and then a lower order of revelation to the average person in the street, but rather, everyone can seek God, everyone can understand God's teachings." "Ezra's call for all Jews to participate in the covenant revitalised Jerusalem." "The Temple, especially, was transformed." "The Torah required that the Temple play a central role in Jewish life." ""You must not put the firstborn of your herd to work" ""or shear the firstborn of your flock." ""You must eat it..." ""you and your household, each year," ""in the presence of Yahweh, your God. "" "MAN:" "During the time of the Second Temple, there was only one place where sacred time and sacred space came together." "And it was the whole spectacle and structure and ritual of the sacrifices that was the vehicle by which people came close to God." "So if you lived in the north of Israel, and it came time to celebrate Passover, you wanted to bring an animal- one of your animals-to the Temple and you would sell your animal, take that money," "make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, buy another animal and bring it to the Temple." "And you can imagine, with all of that preparation, what that moment must have been like for a penitent who came all that distance, went to all that trouble." "That moment finally came when he laid his hands on this animal and established it as 'This is my gift to God." "'This is what I'm going to eat along with God, in God's presence. '" "Imagine the power of that!" "In addition to its laws about how human beings should treat God, the Bible had a great deal to say about how human beings should treat each other, making it one of the most sophisticated law books in the ancient world." "And yet, for a man to administer laws that were written centuries earlier was not an easy task." "One law forbid Jews to marry foreigners, to keep them from worshipping foreign gods." "(STIRRING MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "But in the tumultuous years since the return, many Judeans had married foreign women." "After great deliberation," "Ezra decided he had no choice but to order these men to divorce their wives." ""You have committed treason by marrying foreign women." ""You have added to the sin of Israel." ""But now, give thanks to Yahweh, the God of your ancestors," ""and do his will by separating from your foreign wives. "" "MAN:" "Ezra's conception of the Jewish people was as a holy people..." "'zera hakodesh', he called them." "And that was important to him precisely because they lived not alone, but among other peoples." "So it was very, very important to create a kind of religious state, um, apart from the actual physical state." "The religious state would be the Jewish people... marrying their own kind and constituting, therefore, the holy seed." "The divorcing of foreign wives, with which some Jews bitterly disagreed, was a sign of the challenges to come." "The Bible often spoke in metaphors, and from the time Ezra made it public, people would argue fiercely about its true meaning." "KUGEL:" "There are all kinds of societies that have disagreements and certainly that is likely to be the case with a group of people returning from exile." "They all have their vision of what society ought to be once we get back there." "But precisely because it happened among people whose eyes were focused on the past, who were in this mode of return, meant that their disagreements would quickly become disagreements about the text that talked about that past, disagreements about scripture." "And this tradition, as it were, of disagreeing about scripture really became the kind of leitmotiv of the entire post-exilic period." "One of the most important disagreements was triggered by a book that dared to challenge the message put forth by the scribes who edited the Bible." "The scribes' explanation of Jewish history was based on their belief that God was fair and he rewarded the good and punished the evil." "But a new book, written after the return, argued that God did not work that way at all." "(HAUNTlNG FLUTE MUSIC)" "The hero of the book, a wealthy and upright man named Job, suffered a series of catastrophes." "Job's crops were destroyed by drought, his flocks killed by disease and all ten of his children died." "Then Job's own body was racked by illness." "As he sat by the roadside mourning the loss of all he held dear, in sackcloth and ashes," "Job posed one of life's great questions." "Why is it that bad people often prosper while good people often suffer?" ""Why are the wicked allowed to live, grow old and win prosperity?" ""Yet they had said to God" "'Away from us." "We do not want to know your ways. '" ""I rescued poor men when they cried, and orphans," ""people none would help." ""Desperate ruined men would bless me" ""and I brought song to the widow's heart." ""Yet horror has rode over me..." ""and driven off my dignity like wind." ""My wealth has vanished like a cloud" ""and now my life is spilling out of me." ""I hoped for good, got only wrong." ""I hoped for light, got only darkness." ""I go about in the sunless gloom. "" "MAN:" "Job seems to be reacting to the view that there is basically one powerful good god in the world who can be counted on to reward the righteous and punish the wicked." "This is the central idea of most of the biblical books and certainly of all the biblical histories." "And Job is reacting against this by saying simply that this is not the case." "This is just not reality as we know it." "Reality doesn't bear out the thesis that God consistently rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked." "Job did not expect to receive his reward for being a good man after he died." "Into the 4th century BC," "Judeans viewed the Bible as a book about their past, not their future, and few believed in an afterlife." ""Even a tree has hope." ""If you cut it, it sprouts again." ""But man, when he wearies and dies," ""when a human gives out," ""where is he, then?" ""Water vanishes from a lake." ""Rivers dry up, parched." ""And man lies down and does not rise. "" "The philosophy of Job would become a critical challenge to Judaism." "If there was no reward for being good, no punishment for being bad, then why bother obeying God's laws?" "It was a question that would prove even more difficult for Jews to answer when the chance arose to embrace an entirely new and exciting way of life." "In the 4th century BC, a remarkable people invaded the Middle East." "They were the Greeks." "Led by one of the greatest generals in history," "Alexander the Great, the Greeks would conquer the world from Greece to India." "But there was far more to the Greeks than military prowess." "The Greeks had created the most sophisticated civilisation the world had ever seen." "Their magnificent art was inspired by a reverence for the human body, which also found its expression in the athletic feats on display in their Olympic Games." "But the Greeks also revered the mind." "And their greatest thinkers were responsible for the flowering of philosophy, science and mathematics." "As a result, Hellenic architecture, politics and economics were centuries ahead of the other peoples of the world." "For the Jews, the takeover of most of the known world by the Greeks was a threat more dire than any a mere army could pose." "MAN:" "When the Greek world expanded ever eastward, ultimately the Jews of the land of Israel found themselves almost literally smack in the middle of the Hellenistic Empire." "We were surrounded by Hellenistic culture and, willy-nilly, we found ourselves becoming Hellenists." "This triggered both a great advance and a great struggle within the Jewish people for how we would identify." "Would we simply succumb to Hellenism?" "Or would we somehow maintain our unique identity as a people?" "The Greeks brought brilliant innovations to Judea that would completely transform daily life." "For thousands of years, the people of the Middle East had survived through barter." "But the Greeks encouraged the widespread use of money." "Suddenly, merchants throughout the region could sell their goods to anyone, anywhere." "MAN:" "Economically, the world was now open." "People started leaving their villages, leaving their towns." "For the first time in world history, we find large numbers of people moving more than 20 or 30 miles from their village." "And Jews were no different from others." "This, I think, was the great innovation of the Hellenistic world... mass movement." "Greek culture offered Jews exciting new opportunities." "The many farmers who produced olive oil could now sell their oil in cities from Alexandria to Athens." "As this trade flourished," "Jewish communities were established in cities throughout the Greek Empire... and new Greek cities were built in Judea." "But as the Greek influence in Jewish life grew, more and more Jews worried that their own culture was about to be crushed." "MAN:" "We can understand how the ancient Jews regarded Hellenism simply by reminding ourselves how traditional societies around the world have regarded the coming of American culture... movies, Western styles of dress, Western technology." "In our own times, we have seen how violently the more traditional elements of Islam and Judaism and Christianity have regarded the materialistic, secular culture of the Western world." "As this remarkable new culture swept from its cradle in Greece across the Middle East, devout Jews faced a monumental challenge." "How could Judaism, with its focus simply on being good, compete with the vibrant and exciting way of life the Greeks had to offer?" "(WIND whistles)" "But then, Judaism underwent a revolutionary transformation." "(Man talks in Hebrew)" "It began with a teacher who lived in the 2nd century BC, named Ben Sira." "Ben Sira was deeply influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition of Socrates and Plato." ""Happy the man who meditates on wisdom" ""and reasons with good sense..." ""who studies her ways in his heart and ponders her secrets. "" "GAFNI:" "One can almost categorise Ben Sira as being one of the first Jewish philosophers, that is to say, a lover of wisdom." "And much of the Book of Ben Sira is devoted to this great respect for wisdom, for learning wisdom, for institutionalising wisdom within an academy, and this is something uniquely Greek." "Ben Sira's brilliant innovation was to apply the Greek tradition of study and debate to the Bible." "He believed that if his students studied the Bible as a story, they would learn more about how to live from Moses than from Socrates." ""FROM Moses, he produced a generous man" ""who found favour in the eyes of all mankind." ""Beloved by God and man, Moses of blessed memory." ""God allowed him to hear his voice," ""gave him the Commandments face to face," ""the law of life and knowledge. "" "KUGEL:" "Ben Sira looks at the stories of Abraham and Moses and for him, they're not stories about the past." "Their lives embodied eternal lessons." "He really has the mentality of a sage." "But at the same time, he did something that no previous sage had ever done." "He talked about scripture." "He regarded the Torah as nothing less than the great book of divine wisdom." "And so his job as a sage, in order to know as much as a person can know about God's will, wasn't what other sages had done or had seen as their job- namely, to look at the world and draw lessons from it " "but to read the book." "It was a new approach to Judaism." "Ezra had given the people the Torah to live by its laws." "But thanks to Ben Sira and others like him," "Jews eager for an alternative to Greek culture began studying the lives of the Bible's heroes, searching for the divine wisdom their stories revealed." "As this practice became more and more widespread, a new idea arose... that the writers of the Bible were divinely inspired and, therefore, everything in the Bible was true." "KUGEL:" "The idea of divine inspiration of scripture seems to have emerged actually rather slowly and piecemeal." "There are many, many biblical prophets who say what they say in the name of God..." ""God told me to say this and here's what he said. "" "But gradually, as time went on, this notion of the divine inspiration of scripture, or the divine authorisation of scripture, came to be spread rather uniformly to all parts of the Bible." "The Greeks might be the richest and mightiest people in the world, but devout Jews now had a powerful weapon of their own... a book they believed was authored by God himself that revealed how he wanted them to live." "But exactly what God was revealing in any particular passage of the Bible was often hard to figure out." "For now, many centuries after it was written, the Bible's meaning was open to interpretation." "KUGEL:" "People like to think of the Jews as the people of the book but they were the people of the interpretation of the book." "I guess there are very few texts nowadays that you could say unambiguously just mean one thing." "But when it comes to a text that was very old, that, in some cases, used words that were no longer understood or used them in a way that was quite different from the way those words are used nowadays," "people needed on that most basic level to be helped to understand what the text meant." "(Man reads in Hebrew)" "The uncertainty over what the Bible was saying gave its interpreters tremendous freedom." "Soon, new beliefs were arising that would shape Judaism and Christianity for the next two millennia." "(GENTLE religious singing)" "The most important new belief was an answer to the great question of why human beings should be good." "For in the 2nd century BC, some Jews began to believe that the dead would one day be resurrected and judged, with the good sent to heaven and the evil, to hell." "Those who embraced this belief pointed to the brief hints in the Bible about an afterlife as proof." "KUGEL:" "At this point in Jewish history," "I think people began to look more and more to the afterlife as a kind of place of final reckoning." "It will be in the world to come that these accounts will be settled." "And so they turned to scripture in order to find support for this idea and, of course, support was not lacking." "(TRADITIONAL MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "The belief that the Bible was inspired by God also gave rise to great interest in its prophecies about earthly events." "The most influential prophecy of all was that a time of turmoil was coming, and during it, God would stand by those who, like the patriarchs of old, stood by the covenant." "These new ways of understanding the Bible not only transformed Judaism, they prepared it for a war of survival." "After the death of Alexander the Great, a new Greek dynasty called the Seleucids seized control of the Middle East." "The first of the Seleucid kings were content to let Greek culture gradually transform their subjects into Greeks." "But in 185 BC, a very unusual man ascended to the Seleucid throne." "He was Antiochus Iv but he was known to his subjects as Antiochus the Madman." "One of Antiochus' first decrees, recorded in the book of Maccabees, demanded that all his subjects replace their ancestral traditions with Greek ones." ""The king issued a proclamation to his whole kingdom" ""that all were to become a single people," ""each renouncing his particular customs. "" "Many peoples of the region had already adopted the Greek way of life, but not devout Jews." "Now they would be faced with a choice... give up their faith or fight to defend it." "Antiochus relied at first on a faction of Jews who had embraced all things Greek." "To increase their influence, he sold one such Jew the most important job in Jerusalem... high priest of the Temple." ""Jason usurped the high priesthood" ""by giving Antiochus a promise of 360 talents of silver." ""As soon as he was in power," ""Jason set about converting his fellow countrymen" ""to the Greek way of life. "" "GAFNI:" "For a high priest in Jerusalem in the 2nd century, the question was quite simple- do I jump on the Greek bandwagon or not?" "Do I remain separate or do I throw my lot in with a social process that had taken over all of the Middle East at this time?" "We find high priests that were willing to take that extra step and to throw their lot in with the lot of Antiochus IV Epiphanes." "This would create a reaction, a violent reaction, because there were Jews who considered this to be nothing less than heresy." "(TRADITIONAL MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "Circumcision was the ultimate symbol marking a man as a Jew." "But under the new high priest, many Temple priests began having cosmetic surgery to disguise their circumcisions so they could take part naked in the Greek games." ""The Hellenising process reached such a pitch" ""that the priests ceased to show any interest in the services of the altar." ""They would hurry to take part" ""as soon as the signal was given for the games. "" "MAN:" "There were certain things about Greek culture and civilisation that were totally unacceptable to the Jews." "Among these, of course, was the religious concept of a multiplicity of gods." "You cannot possibly imagine such a thing as being acceptable to Jews." "Also, there were certain kinds of behaviour." "For example, the gymnasium, with naked athletics." "But really, behind that isn't so much the nakedness as the virtual worship of the human body." "These types of concepts, theological and, we might say, behavioural, were just totally unacceptable to most Jews." "According to the book of Maccabees, the ultimate insult to the Jews came when Antiochus ordered that the heart and soul of Judaism, the Temple in Jerusalem, be transformed into a Greek temple." ""The King sent a man to compel the Jews to profane the Temple in Jerusalem" ""and dedicate it the Olympian Zeus." ""The Temple was filled with revelling and debauchery by the pagans," ""who took their pleasure with prostitutes" ""and had intercourse with women in the sacred precincts. "" "The uprising against Antiochus began in the countryside, for the king had ordered his men to travel from village to village with an idol of Zeus." ""The king's commissioners came to the town of Modein" ""to make them sacrifice." ""Many Israelites gathered around them," ""but Mattathias and his sons drew apart." ""The king's commissioners then addressed Mattathias." "'You are a respected leader, a great man in this town." "'Be the first to step forward and obey the king's decree." "'You and your sons shall be honoured with gold and silver 'and many presents. '" ""Raising his voice, Mattathias retorted" "'Even if every nation living in the king's dominion obeys him," "'I, my sons and my brothers 'will still follow the covenant of our ancestors. '" ""As he finished speaking," ""a Jew came forward in the sight of all" ""to offer sacrifice on the altar." ""When Mattathias saw this, he was fired with zeal." ""He killed the king's commissioners and tore down the altar." ""Then he fled with his sons into the hills. "" "Mattathias and his sons would soon become known as the Maccabees." "Their uprising was proof that the Jews' commitment to the religion of the divine book had become so strong they would die to defend it." "MAN:" "The Maccabees went to war to put an end to the religious persecution, to reclaim the Temple, to purify it." "In the history of the world, this is the very first war that we know of that people went to war over religious freedom or freedom of conscience." "It's the first time the state tampered with a religious tradition which resulted in the people saying" ""No, we will go to fight, we cannot tolerate this. "" "That is the war of the Maccabees." "Many of the Maccabean rebels hid in caves in the countryside to avoid Antiochus' army." "Not only were they greatly outnumbered, they faced the serious handicap of having to fight according to biblical law." "The Bible said it was illegal to fight on the Sabbath day." "So when the Greeks tried to smoke out a large group of rebels during Sabbath, the rebels decided they would rather die and seek their reward in the next life than break God's law." ""They offered no opposition." "Not a stone was thrown." ""There was no barricading of the hiding places." ""They only said 'Let us all die innocent." "'Let heaven and earth bear witness 'that you are massacring us with no pretence of justice. '" ""The attack was pressed home on the Sabbath itself." ""And they were slaughtered with their wives and children" ""to the number of 1000 persons. "" "GAFNI:" "This introduces the issue of martyrdom for the first time in something of a systematic way." "We hear of Jews, for instance, refusing to fight on the Sabbath and they are martyred." "The Maccabean uprising, then, not only became the classic example of Jews fighting for their religion, but it became the first classic example of Jews willing to die for their religion." "But after the massacres, the surviving rebels decided to reconsider the matter of Sabbath observance." "And the uncertainty that existed over the Bible's meaning gave them the freedom they needed." ""They said to one another" "'If we all do as our brothers have done and refuse to fight, 'they will only destroy us the sooner from the earth. '" ""So then and there, they came to this decision." "'If anyone attacks us on the Sabbath day, 'we will resist them." "'We must not all be killed 'as our brothers were in the hiding places. '" "SCHIFFMAN:" "The Maccabees ruled, and it seems to have been followed by Jewish tradition forever after, that in a defensive war, one not only was permitted to set aside Sabbath restrictions but one was obligated to do so." "(dramatic M usic)" "After the death of Mattathias, his son Judah took over the leadership of the rebels." "Judah was both a brilliant military strategist and a charismatic leader who used the stories of the Bible to inspire his followers." ""First light found Judah preparing for battle in the plain." ""Though his men lacked the armour and swords they could have wished," ""Judah said to his men, 'Do not be afraid of their numbers 'and do not flinch at their attack." "'Remember how our ancestors were delivered at the Red Sea 'when Pharaoh was pursuing them in force. '" "(SOLEMN MUSIC)" ""The foreigners looked up" ""and, seeing the Jews advancing against them," ""came out of the camp to join battle." ""Judah's men sounded the trumpet and engaged them. "" "(WEAPONS CLANG)" ""The pagans were routed and fled toward the plain" ""and all the stragglers fell by the sword. "" "After a string of victories over the Greeks," "Judah's men began to call him Judah the Maccabee..." "Judah the Hammer." "SCHIFFMAN:" "Judah Maccabee is some kind of amazing giant figure in our historical tradition." "Here you've got this man who rises up against the unbelievable power of the Seleucid empire, who fights battles with massive armies and who stands, on the one hand, for Torah and tradition but, on the other hand, knows how to make deals with the Romans" "and how to fight against the Seleucids." "So we are speaking here about someone who must have been literally a giant in his own time." "In 1 64 BC, three years after the revolt began, the Maccabees finally conquered Jerusalem." "Their first official act was to remove all Greek influence from the Temple and rededicate it to their one true God." ""Maccabeus and his companions restored the Temple and the city." ""They purified the sanctuary and built a new altar." ""Then, striking fire from flints," ""they offered the first sacrifice for two years..." ""and burned incense and lit the lamps. "" "GAFNI:" "Judah Maccabee will enter the city." "He will have to purify the Temple because the Temple had gone through a process of Hellenisation, pagan rites had been introduced into the Temple." "And Judah Maccabee would purify, rededicate the Temple, this, of course, leading to the renowned festival of Hanukkah, the dedication of the Jewish Temple anew." "(SOLEM N M usic)" "For all of the portrayal of Hanukkah as a triumphant moment of victory... it was, unfortunately for the Maccabees, not where the story ended." "Antiochus' troops soon counterattacked and dealt the rebels a crushing blow by killing Judah Maccabee." ""All Israel wept and mourned him deeply." ""And for many days, they repeated this dirge..." "'What a downfall for the strong man... 'the man who kept Israel safe. '" "There are two ways of looking at this question of whether the Maccabees won because the Seleucids came back and kicked them out." "So apparently, this thing that we celebrate on Hanukkah is not really the final victory." "In the true story of the Maccabees, it was not military might that ultimately won the day but politics and negotiations." "After Judah's death, his brother Johnathan took over leadership of the rebels." "By 1 52 BC, Jonathan had 1 0,000 soldiers under his command." "But instead of starting a new war," "Jonathan made a bargain with one of two Greek generals who were fighting for control of the Seleucid empire." "There were two pretenders to the Seleucid throne competing for the rule of Syria." "Jonathan shrewdly threw his weight, and his soldiers, behind the weaker, getting in return an agreement that he would be high priest and ruler of the Jewish people." "Jonathan's bargain was successful." "Judea was independent for the first time since the dynasty of King David." "The reign of the Maccabees brought a sense of renewal to Judea." "Those Jews who looked to their divine book to understand the world drew particular encouragement." "For them, the Maccabees' victory against overwhelming odds was proof of the Bible's promise that God would come to the aid of those who were willing to fight for their faith." "GAFNI:" "The meaning that was attached to Hanukkah was obvious... that if one is fighting a righteous war, the few can defeat the many, the righteous can defeat the wicked." "This becomes a mainstay, not only in Jewish tradition, I would say, but in Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea that one ought to be willing to die for one's belief, martyrdom, and clearly the steadfastness," "I think the word is almost 'zealotry'." "In fact, the Book of Maccabees almost plays on this idea that one should be zealous for the law and God comes to the aid of those who are." "This conviction - that the fate of the Jews depended on defending God's laws at all costs- would only grow in the years ahead." "And it would set the stage for a true cataclysm when another great empire arrived in the Middle East... the Romans." "(SOLEMN MUSIC)" "In 63 BC the Roman general Pompeii led his legions into the land of Judea." "For 100 years, Judea had been an independent nation and many Jews believed that as the Chosen People of the one true God, they would remain free forever." "But it soon became clear that the world's greatest empire could not be resisted." "The triumph of the Romans produced a crisis of faith among the Jews." "For some, the only explanation was that the final battle between good and evil, the End of Days, was at hand." "They would soon see evidence of their belief, for the years ahead in Judea would be one of the most bloody and chaotic periods in human history." "This is a story of terrorists and political assassination, of brutal overlords who crucified thousands and of the siege of Jerusalem, with over 100,000 people trapped inside." "But it is also the story of how, amid the chaos, two new religions began to flower." "Religions that would change mankind's ideas about justice, mercy and God." "(MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "When Roman troops rushed into Jerusalem, the capital of Judea, they were unaware that they were about to meet the most extraordinary people they had ever tried to conquer." "The defenders of the city retreated not to a fortress, but to the temple of their unique god to make their last stand." "According to the historian Josephus, when the Romans attacked the Temple their commander Pompeii was amazed by the behaviour of the Jewish priests." ""Pompeii could not but admire" ""that they did not at all intermit their religious services," ""even when the temple was being attacked on all sides." ""Nor indeed, even when the temple was actually being taken" ""did they leave off the divine worship appointed by their law. "" "(GONG RINGS)" "For the temple priests, performing the rituals that honoured their god was more important than life itself." "For centuries reports that the Jews believed there was only one god in the universe had fascinated the other peoples of the ancient world." "And the Jews' Temple in Jerusalem was famous far and wide for the amazing rituals the priests performed to worship their god." "The Roman general Pompeii was among those who was intrigued by the Jews' unusual religion." "(DRUMBEAT)" "He was particularly curious to see what their mysterious god looked like." "According to Josephus, as soon as the Roman general gained control of the city he went inside the Temple in search of its most sacred sanctum, the Holy of Holies, where the god of the Jews was reputed to live." ""There was nothing that affected the nation," ""in all the calamities that they were under," ""as that their holy place, which had hitherto been seen by none," ""should be laid open to strangers." ""For Pompeii went whither it was not lawful any to enter" ""but the high priest himself. "" "Instead of the great statue of marble or bronze that he expected," "Pompeii saw... nothing." "According to the Jews, their god was so great he could not be captured by an idol or any other man-made image." "He was without form, timeless, and present everywhere." "To Romans like Pompeii, it was incomprehensible that the Jews would be so dedicated to the worship of a single god." "Like the rest of the ancient world, the Romans had a huge pantheon of gods but their most deeply-held belief was that might made right." "That conviction had won the Romans control of an enormous empire." "To them, Judea was only a tiny piece in a great strategic puzzle." "They needed to conquer Judea in order to gain easy access to Egypt." "But to the Jews, Judea was the Promised Land given to them by God to be theirs alone." "This clash of cultures between the Romans and the Jews would lead to a vicious and bloody conflict that would last 200 years." "Even worse for the Jewish people, it was a conflict that would pit Jew against Jew as never before." "The Romans come into power and it stimulates an immediate debate among the Jews about whether to revolt against them or not to revolt and effectively from the very beginning there were Jewish groups that basically wanted to revolt and others which cautioned, and said "We really don't need to go so far. "" "So these groups are vying with one another constantly in the period of Roman rule." "Before long, the fierce disagreements between different groups of Jews over how to deal with the Romans would trigger a Jewish civil war." "The physical violence between the different factions grew from the depth of their spiritual conflict." "Each group believed that it alone understood the true will of God as revealed in the Bible." "And each had nothing but contempt for all who disagreed." "The Temple high priest and his allies formed the most wealthy and influential of the Jewish groups." "The rituals that the priests had been performing for centuries had become so important to their fellow Jews that the Temple was the political and economic heart of Jerusalem." "Each year, hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims flooded the city's markets to buy sheep, wheat, wine and oil to bring as offerings to the Temple." "The pilgrims spent freely, for according to biblical law, offering sacrifices at the Temple was the only way Jews were permitted to worship God." "(PERCUSSlVE MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)" "Once inside the Temple the pilgrims turned their offerings over to the priests, for they were the only ones allowed to mediate between God and mankind." "If you walked into the Temple, what you would see is priests who had been designated as priests simply because their fathers were priests, only men." "You would also see Levites, people whose fathers were Levites, who were assisting these priests." "There would be animal sacrifices, blood, guts... all of the unpleasant smells of animals being slaughtered and you would have a real sense of life and death there." "One of the most important rituals the priests conducted each year was Passover." "While in Jerusalem, the historian Josephus attended the festival." ""It is a memorial of their delivery from slavery in Egypt" ""and they offer more sacrifices than at any other festival." ""A group of at least ten come with every sacrifice" ""for it is not lawful for them to feast singly by themselves." ""And many of us are twenty in a company." ""An innumerable multitude come there from the land," ""and even from beyond its borders, to worship God. "" "For the high priest and his allies, temple rituals like Passover were not only a spiritual outlet but were the source of great wealth and power." "So long as the Romans did not interfere with the Temple, they were willing to help the Romans rule Jerusalem." "But there were other Jews who believed that the high priest was a traitor." "From the day the Romans took over Jerusalem," "Jewish rebels began launching raids against them from mountain and desert hideouts." "They believed that if they fought bravely enough" "God would grant them a miraculous victory as in the Bible stories of old." "To deal with the rebels, the Romans chose a commander known both for his boundless ambition and extreme cruelty." "An Arab prince named Herod." "SCHIFFMAN:" "Herod is perhaps one of the most amazing characters in history." "What was the guy, really?" "First of all, they debate, was he Jewish, or not Jewish?" "His mother was actually an Arab princess, so he wasn't Jewish." "Now, Herod had worked under his father in the government because Herod's father was a kind of... almost secretary of state, but it means head of everything." "As a result of this, Herod was involved in what we might call police actions." "And eventually he built up enough of a power base that he was able to make himself king of the Jews." "To many Jews, the crowning of a king who was not a descendant of David was blasphemy." "And so the rebels decided to come down from the mountains and lead the people of Judea in an all-out revolt." "But Herod had Rome behind him, and according to Josephus, he decided to make an example of the rebels." ""Whole masses were slaughtered." ""In alleys, crowded in their houses," ""and even taking refuge in the Temple." ""There was no mercy for either young or old," ""nor were the weakest women spared." ""Like madmen, they took vengeance on all ages. "" "The last of the rebels fled to caves dug into cliffs, where they were convinced Herod would not be able to reach them." "SCHIFFMAN:" "Herod was really a ruthless guy." "He would bring his soldiers to these caves where these rebels were hiding." "What he used to do is, he'd build these scaffolds, lower soldiers down..." "When the soldiers got down there, they'd throw a sort of smoke bomb, or smoke grenades, into these caves." "And when the women and children came to the edge of the cave, they'd yank them with hooks and throw them to their death." "Once he'd tightened his grip on the throne," "Herod did the unexpected." "Sensing the Temple's essential role in the nation's cultural and economic life, he decided to make it into the most impressive monument on earth through a rebuilding project that required mountains of stone and gold." "MAN:" "The Temple in Jerusalem, firstly, was one of the great wonders of the world." "Tourists came to see it." "Maybe for our taste it was a little bit glitzy but it was golden, it shimmered." "People thought it was one of the most beautiful places on earth." "Gentiles came to bring sacrifices, to offer gifts, because they thought it was a place with power, that it represented something to them, God's seat on earth." "And for Jewish people, of course, it was quite literally that." "It was God enthroned on earth in a place." "But no T emple beautification plan could make the Jewish rebels accept Herod as king of the Jews." "The rebels continued to fight and Herod continued to kill them." "The endless violence was no surprise to another group of Jews who believed that God did not want them to fight the Romans." "He wanted them to prepare for the End of Days." "(wind BLOWS)" "On the lifeless, heat-scorched shores of the Dead Sea" "lived a group of Jews called the Essenes." "The Essenes had withdrawn from civilisation into an apocalyptic landscape that reminded them at every moment that the end was near." "To them, that was the only possible explanation for why God had allowed the Romans to conquer Judea." "MAN:" "There are here deep echoes from the biblical times, reminding them that this had been a land which God had given to Israel and he had purged it of foreigners." "And now here were the foreigners ruling once again." "So, what was to be done about this?" "This required some drastic new thing." "So the notion arose that there must be some final act introduced by God himself through his chosen messengers or community that would make things right again." "There must be an End of Days, there must be a last time when all would be made right." "The Essenes followed the cleanliness rituals of the priesthood and rejected both sex and personal possessions." "They were determined to live as perfectly as humanly possible until the end came." ""There are about 4000 men who live in this way" ""and never marry wives." ""They teach the immortality of souls" ""and esteem that the rewards of righteousness" ""are to be earnestly striven for. "" "The Essenes spent much of their time making new copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible and other sacred texts so that their eternal wisdom would survive the final battle between good and evil." "They were especially drawn to the Book of Daniel which spoke of the reward that the righteous would receive after the End of Days." ""It will be a time of trouble" ""the like of which has never been since the nation came into being." ""At that time, your people will be rescued," ""all who are found inscribed in the Book." ""And those who lead the many to righteousness" ""will be like the stars, forever. "" "WOMAN:" "They believed that everything was pre-ordained by God." "And that when the End of Days arrived, there would be a 40-year-long war between the forces of good and the forces of evil." "They were the forces of good, they called themselves the Sons of Light." "Everybody else, including the other Jews, were the forces of evil, the Sons of Darkness." "And they believed that the outcome of this 40-year war was pre-ordained and that at the end of it, they would be the victors." "The Essenes stored their writings in caves they found in the cliffs above the Dead Sea." "It was a plan that showed remarkable foresight, for two of their premonitions would come true." "A time of trouble more terrible than any the nation had seen was coming." "And their Dead Sea Scrolls would survive it." "In 4 BC, Jerusalem erupted in celebration." "After 40 years on the throne, King Herod was dead." "Now all those determined to throw off Roman rule saw their chance." "More and more armed groups began roaming the countryside, attacking isolated Roman garrisons and looting the caravans of merchants bound for Egypt." "But the rebels did most of their fighting not with the Romans, but with their fellow Jews." "(HEAVY DOOR IS BOLTED)" "For nothing enraged the rebels more than a Jew who had abandoned Jewish traditions for Roman ones." "(DESOLATE MUSIC)" "To the rebels, the worst culprits were wealthy Jews who broke the law God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, restricting the enslavement of fellow Jews." "The mistreated slaves offered the rebels a perfect opportunity to add to their ranks." "(DOOR UNBOLTS)" "And so they began attacking the estate of one wealthy Jew after another, freeing the slaves and inviting them to join the rebellion." "(DRUMBEAT)" ""They have an unconquerable love of freedom." ""For them, God is the only lord and master." ""They think it little to submit to torturous forms of death" ""and punishment of their family and friends" ""if only they can call no man master. "" "In the eyes of the Romans, these Jewish freedom fighters were brigands and bandits and that's how they're described in the ancient sources." "In their own eyes, and in the eyes of Jewish history, they were not bandits at all, they were like Robin Hood or, if you will, Che Guevara." "They were revolutionary figures and heroes of a resistance against a foreign oppressor." "But the rebels, too weak to overthrow Rome, only succeeded in plunging Judea into chaos." "For decades the region remained trapped in a vicious cycle of Roman repression, rebel uprisings and civil war between Jews." "You've got Jewish groups, some pro-revolutionary, some anti-revolutionary, fighting within themselves." "And you have, at the same time, Roman procurators that are rapacious, taking as much tax as they can and not maintaining law and order." "At the same time, you have Roman soldiers all over the place with no respect for the Jews and their religion." "So the whole thing is careening towards an ultimate explosion." "But even as most Jews fell into despair about the disaster towards which they seemed to be headed, others were proposing a very different vision of the future." "In the centuries since the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the other heroes of the Bible had been collected, scholars throughout Judea had been studying in search of lessons on how to live." "One group of scholars was called the Pharisees." "The most influential of the Pharisees was Hillel." "Unlike the rebels, Hillel thought the issue of who was ruling Judea was of little importance." "What was important was to live one's own life honestly and ethically and treat one's fellow human beings with mercy and compassion." "Hillel's philosophy was summed up in three simple questions." ""If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?" ""If I am only for myself, who am I?" ""If not now, when? "" "What Hillel teaches is that each and every human being is created in the image of God." "And the imperative to me is to understand first my own image and then to be able to recognise the image in everybody else." "And when we've built a society that recognises the image of God in every human being, then we have a society which is just, which is moral, which is compassionate and kind." "According to the stories handed down about him," "Hillel was born to a wealthy family but as a young man took a vow of poverty." "For half of each day, Hillel chopped wood to support himself." "For the other half, he studied the Bible." "Unlike the priests, Hillel and his fellow Pharisees believed that one did not have to be a member of the priesthood to communicate with God." "They had the revolutionary idea that anyone could communicate with God simply by studying His word in the Bible." "NETTER:" "The way to access God through Pharisaic Judaism is through study." "To be a priest, one had to be born into it." "To be a king, one had to be born into it." "To be a scholar, one had to study." "And anybody could study." "Unlike the Essenes, the Pharisees did not believe in withdrawing from the world." "But how to live ethically in the 'might makes right' world of the Romans was the subject of intense debate between Hillel and his great rival Shammai." "According to one story, a passerby one day mocked the two Pharisees by asking them to explain the Torah while standing on one foot." "Shammai angrily told the man to go away." "NETTER:" "When the man comes to Hillel, he says "Teach me the Torah while standing on one foot. "" "Hillel says "What is hateful unto you, do not do unto others." ""All the rest is commentary." ""Now go study. "" "What Hillel did was to successfully reduce all the tradition to a single sound bite." "That sound bite is that if you want to serve God there's a way that you have to treat people." "You cannot demonstrate that you love God if you hate people." "Hillel's vision of Judaism would influence many others in the years to come, including a young carpenter from Nazareth." "By 30 AD, numerous preachers were responding to the apocalyptic mood in Judea." "Some claimed to be messiahs, come to lead a rebellion against the Romans." "Others taught their followers how to live amid the violence, like Hillel." "One preacher influenced by Hillel's school of Judaism was Jesus of Nazareth." "Hillel's admonition to treat others as he would like to be treated became, for Jesus, being willing to turn the other cheek to your enemies." "Most of the ethics of Jesus, the beautiful ideas you read about in the Sermon on the Mount, or on the plain, depending on what version you take, these are the types of ethics that the Pharisaic rabbis" "like Hillel and Shammai were talking about." "And this is something common to Judaism and Christianity and to our civilisation as a whole." "In his most famous sermon, on a hilltop overlooking the Sea of Galilee," "Jesus told his disciples how they should respond to the chaos that surrounded them." ""Blessed are the gentle," ""they shall have the earth as inheritance." ""Blessed are the merciful," ""they shall have mercy shown them." ""Blessed are the pure in heart," ""they shall see God." ""Blessed are the peacemakers," ""they shall be recognised as children of God. "" "Jesus' conviction that each human being needed to strive to make the world a better place, was part of a Jewish tradition that reached back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible." "MEEKS:" "The more we learn about Judaism in the 1 st century, especially about the variety of ways of being Jewish, the more Jewish Jesus looks." "The thought that this is a world in which God will reign alone and supreme is supremely Jewish." "The telling of parables in order to clarify, make his points, the very form of Jesus' rhetoric is Jewish." "Like the Essenes, Jesus was deeply influenced by the prophecies in the Bible, that during a period of incredible upheaval" "God would redeem the world once and for all." "He began to preach that the time had come." "MEEKS:" "He goes around preaching that the kingdom of God is about to begin and everyone must be ready for this kingdom of God." "So he clearly is one of those... eschatological prophets, those people expecting the End of Days, that we learn about from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Josephus tells us about." "He's part of this ferment that is..." "that feeds off the expectation that some final act of God must set the world right again." "With the countryside in turmoil and talk everywhere of messiahs who would lead the Jewish people to freedom, the Roman authorities were constantly arresting and crucifying those considered troublemakers." "In 33 AD," "Jesus of Nazareth was one of those singled out and crucified." "In the eyes of the Romans, he was just one more would-be Messiah who would not be leading a revolt." "But Jesus' followers among the Jews believed that the kingdom of which he was speaking was not of this world, but the next." "For the moment, these Jews, who would come to be called Christians, were just another of the many groups of Jews trying to understand the bloody and chaotic world of Judea in the 1 st century AD." "According to Josephus, in 52 AD, after years in which rebel attacks on the Romans and their Jewish collaborators were limited to the countryside, everything changed." "A new band of rebels arose who were determined to carry the fight to Jerusalem." ""There sprang up another group, which were called the Sicarii," ""who murdered men in the daytime and in the heart of the city. "" "To the Sicarii, anyone who wasn't fighting the Romans was a collaborator and worthy of death." "They were called the Sicarii for the long, thin daggers they used in their attacks." "The Sicarii's first victim was the most prominent Jew in Jerusalem, the high priest of the Temple." "Then they embarked on a wave of assassinations, killing wealthy merchants throughout the city." ""Many were slain every day" ""and the fear men were in was worse than the calamity itself," ""for everybody expected death every hour," ""as men do in war. "" "The willingness of the Sicarii and their fellow rebels to use murder to achieve their aims won them a name that would be given forever after to extremists." "They were called Zealots." "KIRSCH:" "The Zealots were one of several factions of freedom fighters who took up arms against Roman occupation and authority." "One faction among them, the so-called Sicarii," "Iiterally invented the art of political assassination and terror by adopting the practice of slipping into a crowd, standing next to a Jew who was assumed to be a collaborator with the Romans, stabbing him secretly, then raising a cry of alarm." "In the panicked crowd, the assassin would slip away and the bloody corpse would be left behind as a reminder to any other Jew ready to collaborate with Rome that death was the price of collaboration." "With the rebels determined to revolt, and other Jews convinced that it would be insane to rebel against Rome, the people of Jerusalem could hardly have been more divided." "Then the Roman governor did the only thing that could possibly unite them." "He ordered an attack on the Temple." "In 67 AD, Roman soldiers burst through the gates of Herod's Temple, bent on plundering it." ""The governor was eager to steal the vast treasures of God which it held" ""and his soldiers killed all those they came upon" ""as they forced their way in. "" "Outraged at the attack on the seat of God on earth, rebels and non-rebels alike united to repel the assault." "Then, in a fury, they overwhelmed the small Roman garrison stationed in Jerusalem and forced it to flee the city." "(STREET HUBBUB)" "With Jerusalem suddenly free of Romans, many in the city were seized by a giddy euphoria." "The Zealots' dream of an independent Judea seemed tantalisingly within their grasp." "But others argued that more fighting could only lead to catastrophe." "A follower of Hillel named Yohanan ben Zakkai was one of the most passionate voices for peace." "At the risk of being targeted by the Zealots for assassination," "Yohanan told his students that it didn't matter who ruled Judea." "What mattered was who ruled in their hearts." "He argued that what truly pleased the Almighty was not zealotry at all, but something far simpler... the acts of mercy and compassion they showed to those around them." "SCHIFFMAN:" "It seems Yohanan ben Zakkai was part of the peace party." "Numerous Jews, either because of their own closeness to the Romans, whether business or other reasons, or simply because they were absolutely convinced there was no hope to do such a crazy thing as revolt against Rome," "many Jews were really against the revolt." "Yohanan ben Zakkai was one of those Jews who felt that what needed to be done was to get some form of accommodation from the Romans that would guarantee Jewish religious freedom, then leave things as they were, with Roman rulers." "But Jerusalem was not yet ready for Y ohanan's vision of Judaism." "From the steps of the Temple, the Zealots made a public declaration of war against Rome." "Convinced they were mad, many other Jews decided to take up arms to stop the Zealots." "Fighting at this point broke out between those Jews and the rebellious Jews who had taken refuge among them and it was house to house, at some point." "Different neighbourhoods would belong to one party or the other and the streets ran with blood." "After a vicious week-long civil war, the Zealots were victorious." "(CROWD cries)" "They celebrated their victory by setting the city on fire." ""The Zealots set fire to the high priest's home and the palaces." ""Then they carried the fire to the place where the records were kept" ""and burned the contracts it held," ""thereby dissolving all of their debts." ""This was also done that they might persuade the multitude of the poor" ""who were debtors, to join in their insurrection. "" "News of the Zealots' uprising against Rome soon reached the nearby city of Caesarea." "Outraged, Romans and Syrians in Caesarea massacred thousands of their Jewish neighbours." "In revenge, Jews throughout Judea began killing Syrians and Romans living among them." ""It was common to see cities filled with bodies," ""still lying unburied," ""and those of old men mixed with women and infants, all dead." ""The whole region was full of inexpressible calamities," ""while the fear was everywhere" ""that there were even more barbarous times to come. "" "(HORSES GALLOP)" "The Romans were determined to crush the rebellion before it inspired others in their far-flung empire to challenge their rule." "They dispatched their greatest general, Vespasian, into Judea to lead an army of over 60,000 men." ""Vespasian marched to the city of Gedara and quickly took it," ""for he found it destitute of any men fit for war." ""He then killed all the children," ""the Romans having no mercy on any age whatever," ""and this was done out of the hatred they bore the rebels. "" "As news of Vespasian's atrocities swept through Judea," "Jews throughout the region began fleeing before his army toward Jerusalem." "When the Roman army finally reached the city," "Josephus estimated that more than 1 00,000 people were trapped inside its walls." "The Romans set up their camps in full view of the city in the hope that the mere sight of their military might would convince the people of Jerusalem to surrender." "Their force was composed of three battle-hardened legions drawn from garrisons in Rome, Egypt and Syria." "They were armed with catapults, battering rams, siege engines- the fearsome weapons of war that had helped them conquer the world from England to Persia." "But conquering Jerusalem was still a daunting challenge." "The city was surrounded by not one, but three walls, which together were nearly 60 feet thick." "And in the centre of the city, the Temple with its own massive walls and towers," "Ioomed as one of the most formidable fortresses in the world." "But behind those walls there was chaos." "SCHIFFMAN:" "The city of Jerusalem during the revolt was under complete siege." "Food and water were not entering, and inside, all normal governmental institutions had broken down." "They were maintaining Temple sacrifice but outside of the Temple there were all these rebel armies, actually, about six, controlling different quarters of the city, whose commanders were fighting over what to do." "So you had really anarchy and fear and, as Josephus describes it, tremendous starvation." "Inside the city, the catastrophe foretold by Y ohanan ben Zakkai was coming to pass." "The Zealots had begun fighting among themselves for control of Jerusalem." "When one band of Zealots broke into the territory of another, they would inflict the worst damage they could think of- burning their rivals' food supply." ""They set on fire those houses that were full of grain" ""and all the other provisions." ""And as soon as they were forced into a retreat," ""the same thing was done to them by the others." ""Accordingly, it came to pass" ""that almost all the grain in the city was burned," ""which would have been sufficient to survive a siege of many years. "" "With the food supply decimated, many decided their only hope was to flee Jerusalem." "But the Zealots believed" "God wanted the entire nation to confront the Romans as one." "They issued an edict that anyone who tried to leave would be considered a traitor and executed." "It's in many ways like the militarist within any society in our own time." "Those that are following a military mode in terms of the Islamic jihad or in terms of..." "those that we saw in Bosnia." "In other words, those that decide that the only way to work is through military means." "And that was a scary time for all Jews in Jerusalem at that time because most were not Zealots." "As the siege wore on, the situation inside Jerusalem grew more and more desperate." ""Of those who perished by famine, the number was great" ""and the miseries they underwent were unspeakable," ""for if so much as the shadow of any kind of food did anywhere appear," ""a war began," ""and the dearest friends fell to fighting one with another about it. "" "Soon, many people became so desperate that they were willing to risk death at the hands of the Zealots." "So they would creep out little-known doorways and gates to the city and gather weeds to eat." "But outside the city walls, they risked capture and incredibly brutal treatment at the hands of the Roman legionnaires." "MILES:" "The Nazi Holocaust of the 20th century has seemed to be an endless stream of ghastly stories, fiendish stories of... cruelty that seems to defy the human imagination." "But there's an appalling stream of such stories from... from this Holocaust as well." "For example, as people began to attempt to leave the besieged city secretly, when they were captured, mercenaries working for Rome would disembowel them, thinking that they might have swallowed gold or jewels and that they were hoping then to, you know, recover these" "after they'd defecated them later on." "This is not a strange or unusual practice on the part of people fleeing during time of war." "Guessing that this might have happened, they literally eviscerated these people," "looking for the occasional ruby or gold coin." "The Romans also took many of the men, women and children they captured and crucified them." "MILES:" "At the time of the siege of Jerusalem, thousands were crucified." "The historian Josephus says that the hills around the city were deforested so many trees were chopped down to make crosses on which to crucify Jews." "Josephus also describes what I would call terror crucifixions." "The city was still under siege, still holding out against the Romans, but crosses were erected on the hillsides around it so that the people inside could see what awaited them if they continued their resistance." "(M I DDLE-EASTERN M usic)" "Forced to choose between torture at the hands of the Romans, or starvation at the hands of the Zealots, the people of Jerusalem were in complete despair." ""A deep silence" ""and a kind of deadly night seized upon the city." ""Those that were distressed by the famine were desirous to die" ""and those already dead were thought happy. "" "It was the last chance for anyone hoping to escape alive." "And yet, it was only the decaying bodies of the dead that the Zealots would allow to leave." "Then, late one night, a procession approached a city gate." "It was a group of students carrying the body of Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had advocated peace instead of war." "According to the Jewish book of tradition and law, the Talmud, the Zealots were suspicious." ""Some of the guards asked 'Who is this?" "'" ""The disciples answered 'A dead body." "'Don't you know that dead bodies may not be kept in Jerusalem overnight?" "'" ""Then one of the Zealots decided to drive a dagger through the body." ""But one of the disciples restrained him, by saying" "'Do you want to be remembered 'as the man who pierced the body of the Master?" "'" ""So they opened the gate for the bier and it left the city. "" "The students' trick had worked." "Outside the gate, Y ohanan sprang up alive from the bier on which he had been surrounded by rotting meat." "Then he hurried away from Jerusalem." "Yohanan was convinced the starving rebels could no longer defend the city or the Temple." "And he had decided that the very survival of Judaism was on his shoulders." "After a four-month siege," "Rome's legions finally broke through the first wall of the city." "The Zealots rushed to meet them and fought with tremendous bravery." "But they could not prevent the Romans from fighting their way to the heart of the city, the Temple." ""The Romans proceeded as far as the holy house itself," ""then one of them set fire to it." ""Now the Jews suffered nothing to restrain their force," ""nor tried to save their lives," ""since their holy house was perishing. "" "The T emple, the only place on earth, according to the Bible, where God could be worshipped, was laid to waste by the Romans." ""As for a great part of the people," ""they were weak and without arms..." ""and had their throats cut wherever they were caught." ""In the Temple, around the altar," ""lay dead bodies heaped one upon another" ""and at the steps going up to it ran a great quantity of their blood." ""In the history of the world," ""no nation has ever suffered such a calamity. "" "The destruction of the Temple in the year 70 was the greatest catastrophe and trauma to happen to Jewish people," "I would argue, until our own time and the Holocaust." "It was the centre of their economic life, as if the Federal Reserve was housed in the Temple." "It was the centre of judicial life." "The supreme court was housed in the Temple." "It was the centre of religious life, as if the high priest was the chief rabbi, centred in that building." "And in a matter of hours, it was gone." "When the Temple was destroyed, everything was gone." "There was no other branch of government because it was all invested in the priesthood and the high priest and the Temple." "With the seat of God on earth in ruins, the religion of the priests and their rituals was lost forever." "How would Judaism and the Jews survive?" "In 70 AD, after a siege marked by starvation and terror crucifixions, the Roman army broke through the walls of Jerusalem." "Not only did they kill thousands of Jews, they laid waste to the Temple... the only place on earth, according to biblical law, where Jews could worship God." "It was the death of the religion of priests and sacrifices described by the Hebrew Bible." "But it would not be the death of Judaism." "In the years ahead, some of the greatest religious minds in history would struggle to reinvent the religion of Moses and David." "But they would be forced to work during a period of almost inconceivable bloodshed and turmoil." "They would watch their people be expelled from Jerusalem on pain of death and see the name of their homeland changed from Judea to Palestine." "There would also be a monumental challenge from within... a breakaway form of Judaism called Christianity." "But amidst these epic struggles, Judaism would be reborn and the gifts of the Jews would be preserved for all humankind." "(DARK MUSIC)" "When the Romans laid waste to the Temple they destroyed far more than a building." "The Temple had been the economic, political and religious heart and soul of Judea and of Judaism." "The despair that filled the land after its destruction was captured by the poet Baruch." ""Blessed is he who was not born." ""Or he who, having been born, has died." ""But as for us who live, woe unto us..." ""because we see the afflictions of Zion" ""and what has befallen Jerusalem." ""Do thou, O sun, withhold the light of thy rays?" ""And do thou, O moon, extinguish the multitude of thy light?" ""For why should light rise again, where the light of Zion is darkened? "" "MAN:" "Jews looking at the destroyed Temple must have felt terribly, terribly depressed that their entire ability to worship God, to connect with God, had just been so severely compromised." "They'd been totally defeated by the Romans, many of them led off into captivity, and this was really a period of tremendous mourning and the need to begin somehow to deal with this terrible destruction." "The Romans now had Jerusalem and almost all the rest of Judea under their iron fist." "All except for one tiny plot of desert south-east of Jerusalem on the shore of the Dead Sea." "At Masada, a fortress built by King Herod atop a butte overlooking the sea, one rebel group was still holding out against Rome." "They were the Sicarii, who were named after the long, thin daggers they carried." "At the beginning of the rebellion they had taken the fortress in a surprise attack." "Herod had designed Masada so that a small force could hold it against an enormous army." "The historian Josephus described the trail that was the only way to reach the top." ""This trail was called the 'Snake'," ""as resembling that animal in its narrowness and its windings." ""There is also nothing but destruction, in case your feet slip," ""for on each side there is a deep chasm. "" "Because the Snake was so narrow, a handful of Sicarii had for years been able to beat back every attack by Rome's legions." "But then the Romans began to build a ramp that would enable them to reach the top of Masada." "For two years the Romans built their ramp." "And for two years the Sicarii waited." "On the day before the ramp was completed the leader of the Sicarii, Eleazar ben Yair, told his men they faced an awful choice." "If they surrendered the Romans would crucify them as an example to the would-be rebels throughout their empire." "Or they could die fighting and leave their wives and children to rape and slavery." "Then he proposed a third alternative." "Josephus learned what took place from two women who managed to slip away from the fortress." ""To avoid the miseries that were to follow from their enemies," ""they resolved on the necessity of doing their own execution. "" ""Miserable men, indeed," ""were they whose distress forced them to slay their own wives and children" ""with their own hands." ""The husbands tenderly embraced their wives" ""and took their children into their arms" ""and gave the longest parting kisses to them" ""with tears in their eyes." ""Yet at the same time," ""they did complete that which they had resolved on." ""Not able to bear the grief they were under for what they had done" ""and esteeming it an injury to those they had killed" ""to live even the shortest time after them," ""they then chose ten men by lot to slay all the rest." ""And they offered their necks" ""to the stroke of those who executed that melancholy office." ""And when these ten men had without fear killed them all," ""they made the same rule for casting lots for themselves" ""that he whose lot it was should first kill the other nine" ""and, after all, should kill himself." ""Now, for the Romans," ""they expected that they should be fought in the morning." ""But when they made their assault upon the fortress" ""they saw no enemy," ""but a terrible solitude on every side. "" "MAN:" "It is here that that tradition of self-imposed martyrdom reaches its most poignant expression." "And that is the very eloquent if heartrending statement that when I can no longer choose whether or not to die" "I can still choose how to die." "And that's what inspired the martyrs at Masada to take their own lives rather than to submit to slavery and death under Rome." "In just a few years most of the groups that had dominated Judea and Judaism for centuries had vanished." "The Sicarii and their fellow rebels were all dead." "The authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, had also been butchered by the Romans." "And with no Temple, the priesthood had become meaningless." "Just one group remained..." "The Pharisees." "According to the Jewish book of law and tradition, the Talmud, one of the leaders of the Pharisees, Yohanan ben Zakkai, had escaped the siege of Jerusalem by pretending to be dead." "Afterward, Yohanan journeyed to a town near the sea called Yavneh." "In a vineyard there he set up a primitive school for studying the Hebrew Bible." "Eventually, Yohanan and the other teachers would be given a new title..." "Rabbi." "It was at this point that the Pharisees effectively evolved into what we call the rabbis, that is, this group of lay teachers which essentially directs the religious activity and the religious study of the Jewish people." "And this transition from priest to rabbi, one might say, in terms of the leadership of Jewish life, is one of those things that marks Judaism in the period after the Temple." "The Talmud says that Yohanan's greatest challenge in keeping Judaism alive was his fellow rabbis' despair over the loss of the Temple." ""Woe unto us" Rabbi Joshua cried out," ""that the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for" ""is laid waste. "" ""My son" Rabbi Yohanan said to him, "be not grieved." ""We have another atonement as effective as this. "" ""And what is that? "" ""It is acts of loving kindness." ""For, as it is written," "'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice. '" "According to the story, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai says that now that the Temple has been destroyed, it's in acts of loving kindness, in actions such as burying the dead, caring for the homeless, feeding the hungry," "it is in those kinds of actions that the very same goals that were achieved in the Temple- of relating to God, of being in God's presence" "THAT'S the way one's in God's presence." "By seeing the presence of God in the needy person and reaching out and helping them." "Yohanan had found his answer to the loss of the Temple by studying the prophets of the Hebrew Bible." "He was following in an ancient tradition, for ever since the long-ago days of exile in Babylon men eager to learn about God had been discussing the stories and laws of the Bible in meeting places called synagogues." "With the Temple gone, the rabbis began to rebuild Judaism around the study of the Bible in the synagogue." "Here they debated how biblical law could be applied to living an ethical and compassionate life." "With the destruction of the Temple the synagogue is thrust into this tremendous vacuum and it has to pick up the slack of lack of access to God through a temple process." "That's where the synagogue really takes off." "Through the medium of prayer, the synagogue will be everything that the Temple had to be, but much more." "(Rabbi prays in Hebrew)" "In the Temple, only the priests had been allowed to communicate with God, through sacrifice." "Now, in the synagogue, rabbis and common people alike talked to God through prayer, a previously little-used practice favoured by the writers of the Book of Psalms." ""Lord, I am calling." "Hurry to me." ""Listen to me." "I am invoking you." ""My prayers rise like incense," ""my hands like the evening offering." ""Lord, set a guard at my mouth, a watcher at the gate of my lips," ""to let me feel no impulse to do wrong." ""To snare the godlessness of evil-doers. "" "GAFNI:" "What emerges is a spiritualised version of Judaism- prayer instead of sacrifice, rabbis instead of priests, synagogue instead of temple." "And the great question is, how much of this was consciously organised, formulated, by Yohanan ben Zakkai and the people of his generation?" "It could be that part of this is a retrojection of a later period back onto Yohanan ben Zakkai." "But I am convinced that Yohanan was aware of the dilemma of the post-Temple period and very, very keenly tried to set up alternatives without ever calling them alternatives." "In other words, you have to project a sense of continuity while in practice and in fact you are innovating and setting up alternative lifestyles." "(CROWD NOISES  MEDITATlVE MUSIC)" "But there was one thing that seemed impossible to replace." "The great Temple festivals that for centuries had kept people deeply connected to stories from the Bible." "One of the most important festivals had been Passover which commemorated Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt." "Then the rabbis who followed in Yohanan's footsteps created a new kind of Passover celebration called a Seder." "It was celebrated not in the Temple with tens of thousands of others but at home with family and friends." "MAN:" "When the Temple is gone, how do you observe Passover?" "." "It's there that the Seder was created..." "which means 'order'." "Out of the chaos of not having the animal and its blood to celebrate Passover comes the order of the echo of that event." "Of telling the story." "And so the text that they developed, which is still in use in every Jewish home on Passover Eve, is called the Haggadah which means 'the telling'." "In order to tell the story of Passover" "Jewish families used a lamb bone to represent the lamb whose blood their ancestors had painted on their doorposts in Egypt so that the Angel of Death would pass over." "And they used unleavened bread to represent the matzo the Israelites had eaten as they fled toward the Promised Land." "At the table during the Seder one of the adults read the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt." "Then everyone present ate the different Passover foods, each of which symbolised a part of the story." "NETTER:" "The great achievement of the sages of Yavneh is that they understood that if you no longer had the fires of the altar in Jerusalem what you had was the story." "The Temple was no longer, the physical sacrifice was no longer." "But the story is eternal." "And that's what we kept." "Slowly, in a process that would take hundreds of years, the rabbis were reinventing Judaism." "But even as they worked the world around them was becoming threatening once again." "During the 60 years after the fall of the Temple the Romans and their Jewish subjects lived in an uneasy truce." "Many Jews moved to the fertile area around the Sea of Galilee to try and rebuild their lives." "But for some, the rebuilding only brought on painful memories of the building they longed to reconstruct most-the Temple." "In 1 30 AD, anger at the Roman emperor Hadrian for refusing to allow the rebuilding of the Temple reached the boiling point." "Rumours of a new revolt began to spread." "GAFNI:" "Many Jews continued to consider Roman presence in the land of Israel to be illegitimate." "This was the evil empire, it had no business here." "Clearly, however, there must have been immediate stimuli to this war." "We're not sure what they were." "According to Roman historian Cassius Dio it was Hadrian's attempt at building a pagan city in Jerusalem to be called Aelia Capitolina that threw, as it were, the Jews over the edge into the abyss of military uprising." "Another Roman source claims it was an attempt by Hadrian to prohibit circumcision of Jewish children." "We cannot know." "But that would have been, at the very most, the final push into what must have been a popular resentment of Rome that needed some sort of stimulation." "The rebellion began among a band of outlaws" "living in the countryside." "Their leader was called Simon bar Kokhba." "The Romans had long considered Bar Kokhba merely a thief" "but to many of his fellow Jews he was another in a long line of freedom fighters who had refused to accept Roman rule." "Bar Kokhba was a Jew, like the Zealots," "like the defenders of Masada, who was willing to take up arms against Roman occupation, and was willing to fight for Jewish sovereignty, and, in fact, for a limited period of time achieved sovereignty." "We can hold in our hands the coinage that Bar Kokhba issued in his own kingdom, the last kingdom of Jewish sovereignty for another 2000 years." "Rather than confront the mighty Roman legions from a great city like Jerusalem, as in the last uprising," "Bar Kokhba came up with a plan for a guerrilla war." "A Roman historian described Bar Kokhba's preparation for the revolt." ""They occupied caves in the countryside" ""and strengthened them in order that they might have places of refuge" ""whenever they should be hard pressed." ""And they pierced subterranean passages from above at intervals" ""to let in air and light. "" "As plans for a rebellion began to leak out, rumours raced through the region that Bar Kokhba was the messianic leader foretold in the Bible who would lead the Jewish people to freedom." ""His name meant 'star'" ""and he claimed to be a luminary who had come down from heaven" ""and was magically enlightening those who were in misery. "" "SCHIFFMAN:" "Simeon bar Koziba, as we now know his name to have really been, is called Bar Kokhba - 'son of a star' - because there was a prophecy in the Bible that spoke of a star as a symbolic name for a messianic figure." "Now this fellow, Bar Kokhba, was a tremendous military leader who between 1 32 to 1 35 AD almost kicked the Romans out of Judea and, in fact, caused many Roman soldiers to be killed in the prolonged battles of the revolt he had brought into being." "But the key point to realise is that the Bar Kokhba revolt was a messianic revolt that people entered into believing firmly that the Messiah would come if they were victorious." "Bar Kokhba's charismatic leadership appealed to not just peasants and craftsmen but also scholars and sages." "Their fervour was stoked by certain prophecies in the Bible which they believed said this was the precise moment in history" "God had chosen for the Temple to be rebuilt." "NETTER:" "Just as the First Temple at one point lay in ruins and was rebuilt, so too would the Second Temple." "And they were, in their minds, God's agents." "They were going to defeat the Romans and the Third Temple was going to descend from the sky like a pre-fab, completely built, right on that same spot." "And that was in a sense its messianic mission." "That they were doing God's will to throw off the evil empire." "That's what God wanted." "In 1 32 AD, the most prominent rabbi in Judea publicly declared that Bar Kokhba was indeed the Messiah." "The ranks of the rebels swelled even more." "With hundreds of thousands now ready to follow him" "Bar Kokhba nevertheless remained patient." "In order to lull Hadrian and his legions into a false sense of security he counselled his followers to pretend to be happy and peaceful." ""So long, indeed, as Hadrian was close by in Egypt," ""the Jews remained quiet..." ""except that they made the weapons," ""which the Romans demanded of them as tribute," ""of such poor quality that the Romans rejected them." ""By this ruse, they were able to have use of these weapons themselves. "" "In a strategic masterstroke, Bar Kokhba bided his time until Hadrian was well on his way back to Rome." "Then suddenly he launched the revolt." "In the early days of the rebellion the rebels inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on the Romans." "KIRSCH:" "In the ancient world" "Jews were not known as bookish and prayerful and pious." "They were known as ruthless and ferocious fighters, they were highly prized as mercenary soldiers and they showed in the uprising against Rome exactly how effective they were on the field of battle." "The stunning success of the rebels forced the Romans to withdraw from the region." "Bar Kokhba then declared Judea to be an independent kingdom." "But the Romans were merely waiting to counterattack until they had assembled one of the greatest armies in their history." "They had sent three legions against Jerusalem in the rebellion 60 years earlier." "Now they sent 1 3." ""Hadrian sent against the Jews his best general, Julius Severus," ""who was dispatched from Britain." ""Hadrian ordered him to put to the sword all who stood in their path. "" "GAFNI:" "Rome responds to Bar Kokhba by throwing masses of its military force into the fray." "Legions would be brought in, not only from Judea, from Egypt, from the surrounding countries, but as far as across the Danube River." "A commander would be brought in from Britain." "There was absolutely no way that Hadrian could allow even partial success to this uprising." ""Severus did not venture to attack his opponents in the open," ""in view of their numbers and their desperation." ""Instead, he isolated them in small groups." ""They dispensed with the rebels who were hiding in their caves" ""by filling them with smoke and guarding the exits." ""Then they surprised and killed all who came out to fight." ""580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles." ""And the number of those that perished by famine, disease and suffocation" ""was past finding out. "" "With the rebellion crushed, the people of Judea faced even worse retribution from the Romans than after the uprising 60 years earlier." "For the Romans now set themselves the goal of wiping the Jews from Judea." "The Bar Kokhba rebellion... was known, really, as the most disastrous single event that ever happened to the Jewish people, before the Holocaust." "In fact, when we look at the three literary accounts, we find that they all agree." "Nearly 600, 000 Jews were killed." "Over 900 Jewish villages were destroyed." "And for one small moment in Jewish history, again, it looked like Jewish history might have been over." "In the aftermath of the uprising, the Romans changed the name of the region from Judea to Palestine." "Then they banned all Jews from Jerusalem." ""The emperor then commanded by legal decree" ""that the whole nation of the Jews" ""should be forcibly removed from the district round Jerusalem," ""so that not even from a distance could they see their ancestral home." ""Thus the city came to be bereft of the nation of the Jews," ""and in honour of the emperor Aelius Hadrian" ""the name of the city became Aelia. "" "The outcome of the Bar Kokhba revolt is a much more serious policy on the part of the Romans prohibiting Jews from even going to Jerusalem." "And they plough over the Temple Mount and build a temple to their gods on that spot, thereby showing" "'You have no place here." "We clearly are the winners. '" "In the centuries that followed whole villages of Jews began to leave Judea in search of a new life." "They headed for the Jewish communities that had been flourishing for centuries in Babylon, in Greece, in Rome, and many other places." "But in their new homes they would soon face a challenge to their survival every bit as daunting as the Romans." "This threat would come not from outside, but from within... from a new kind of Judaism called Christianity." "Jesus of Nazareth had called his Jewish followers 'fishers of men'." "Since his death in 33 AD they had been telling all who would listen that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who, after his crucifixion, had risen from the dead." "These 'Christians' did not mourn the loss of the Temple and its sacrificial rituals, for they believed God had decided to sacrifice His only son once and for all." "The Christians preached to Jews and Gentiles alike but their message that a messiah had come to set the world right was at its heart a Jewish message." "WOMAN:" "For centuries, Christianity was a type of Judaism." "For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, one of the ones that's in the New Testament collection, that Jesus gives instructions to his followers on where they should stand when they pray in the synagogue, on how long their 'tzitzit', their prayer fringes, should be," "on what they should be like when they fast." "I mean, it's all this Jewish stuff." "And when you think of it, that makes sense because Christianity is a Jewish movement." "Like many other Jews, the Christians believed the Hebrew Bible was the word of God and therefore told the absolute truth." "But unlike other Jews, they believed that its most important stories and prophecies foretold the coming of Jesus." "Churchill once said that the Americans and the English are divided by a common language." "In the same way, the early Christians are divided from other groups of Judaism by a common Bible." "They're engaged in competition for the interpretation of this sacred scripture." "As the Christians won more and more converts the competition with other forms of Judaism intensified." "Churches sprang up alongside synagogues in Jewish communities throughout the Roman Empire." "And yet, because of their common roots, most Christians and Jews felt a kinship with one another." "But then Christianity gained perhaps the most important convert in its history... a man who was about to become the Roman emperor." "In 320 AD an army marched to war for the first time beneath a Christian cross." "The Roman Empire was in the middle of a civil war between two generals over who would be the next emperor." "According to an historian from the time, one of the generals, Constantine, was inspired by a vision to send his legions into battle carrying a cross." ""A most marvellous sign had appeared to him." ""He saw with his own eyes a cross of light in the heavens" ""bearing the inscription 'Conquer By This'." "With the cross at their head" "Constantine's troops were victorious." "The story of the battle of the cross was spread far and wide throughout the empire to win support for Constantine from the rapidly growing Christian movement." "FREDRIKSEN:" "There's nothing like a voice from heaven to clarify ambiguity." "And in the confusing political situation Constantine finds himself in, he and the bishops who were working with him clear up some of the political ambiguity by beginning to talk about voices from heaven, or signs from heaven which at crucial moments in Constantine's political career" "have indicated who heaven wants to be emperor." "For Jews throughout the empire, the new emperor's alliance with Christianity would prove disastrous." "The bishops who allied themselves with Constantine were part of the one branch of Christianity that was hostile toward Jews." "FREDRIKSEN:" "One edge of gentile Christian culture itself becomes extremely anti-Jewish." "And, unfortunately for later history, that particular edge of gentile Christianity wins the patronage of the Roman Empire." "The anti-Jewish Christian bishops became determined to stamp out the friendship that many Christians felt toward Judaism." "MEEKS:" "Take John Chrysostom, one of the great preachers of the 4th century." "He had trouble because people in his congregation thought that the festivals of the Jews were ever so much more interesting than the things that the Church put on, and so they would trot off during high holy days to visit the synagogues." "This infuriated John." "So he preached a series of eight sermons against the Judaisers, in which he first, as far as I know, coined the term the 'Christ-killers' in order to label those people that he didn't want his congregation associating with." "Obviously this term then is going to have very fateful after-effects in the history of Christian anti-Judaism." "In the centuries ahead, this new prejudice of Christians toward Jews would lead to anti-Jewish laws, violent attacks and mass evictions." "And so the Jews began to search for new homes in North Africa, in Spain, in Russia." "As the Jews became further and further spread out from one another" "Judaism was threatened with disintegration." "The laws that now governed how a Jew should live, from rituals to social relationships, had never been written down." "They existed only in an oral tradition passed from one generation to the next." "MAN:" "In order to have an ongoing oral tradition, you have to have a stable community." "How did you know you needed a driver's licence at 1 6?" "It's not because you read it in your particular state code, it's because somebody told you you needed a driver's licence at 1 6." "But that kind of oral tradition requires a stable community." "And if the community is disintegrating, as the Jewish community was in Judea, from the Bar Kokhba revolt in 1 35 until the end of the 2nd century, there was a strongly-felt need for editing that oral tradition so that it might be preserved." "(WlSTFUL acoustic guitar)" "The monumental work of genius that would enable Judaism to survive anywhere began to take shape in the 2nd century AD in the countryside in the mind of an illiterate shepherd named Akiva." "As Akiva spent day after day observing the natural world around him, questions began to flood into his mind about where it had all come from and what it all meant." "And so he taught himself how to read and began to study the Hebrew Bible." "According to the Talmud he was awestruck by the power of the Bible to help him see the world in a whole new way." ""Akiva noticed how the stone at a well" ""had been hollowed out by drippings from the buckets." ""He thought, if these drippings can penetrate this solid stone," ""how much more can the study of the word of God" ""penetrate the human heart? "" "Akiva was a simple shepherd..." "illiterate." "Didn't know an 'alef' from a 'bet' - an 'A ' from a 'B'." "At the age of 40, discovered that he needed to learn Torah." "And so he began to study with 5-year-olds." "And he learned 'alef', 'bet', 'gimel', 'dalet' and then he learned the entire alphabet." "Then he learned the Book of Leviticus, and then the entire Torah." "And in a few short years this illiterate shepherd became the leading sage of his age." "Akiva learned that in addition to the Bible there existed a vast collection of oral traditions, passed down to scholars like Hillel and Yohanan ben Zakkai, and passed on by them to Akiva's generation." "These teachings about justice, mercy and how to make them real in one's own life comprised the greatest of all the treasures of the Jews." "But because these teachings had been handed down only by word of mouth they were so disorganised that they were in danger of being lost entirely." "Then Akiva began using his remarkable mind to organise the centuries of Jewish tradition and law that had been inspired by the Bible." "GAFNI:" "Akiva, we are told, may have been the first rabbi to take this enormous mass of oral tradition that had accrued over hundreds and hundreds of years and to systematise it." "To create some sort of a thematic structure to this material." "We're actually told that Akiva is like a person going to the marketplace and buying these vegetables, those fruits, putting everything in his basket and then coming home and sorting everything out." "And similarly, we are told, Akiva sorted out oral tradition." "I think what we have here is a brilliant legal mind who realises that if this material is to last many more generations, some sense must be made of it, it must be put in order." "But Akiva lived during difficult times when Rome and the Jews were battling over the rebuilding of the Temple." "As a strong supporter of rebellion," "Akiva was arrested by the Romans." "According to the Talmud, the Romans then condemned Akiva to death." "But not just any death." "Aware of his fame as the greatest of all sages, they decided to make an example of Akiva to all who would rebel against Rome." "They sentenced him to be flayed alive." ""As Akiva was given into the hands of the executioner," ""it was just the time to recite the evening prayer." ""Though suffering agonies, Akiva recited his prayers calmly," ""full of devotion." ""And when he was asked whether he was a sorcerer," ""since he appeared to feel no pain," ""Akiva replied 'I am no sorcerer." "'But I rejoice at the opportunity now given to me 'to love my God with all my life, 'seeing that I have hitherto been able to love him 'only with all my means and with all my might. '" ""And with that word, he died. "" "He's being taken out to be executed and his last words are words of faith." ""Hear O Israel, the Lord is one" ""and one should love God with all his heart and soul. "" "And the beautiful Talmudic description has his disciples asking him" ""Akiva, how can you maintain that faith in these circumstances? "" "And he responds by saying "I've been preparing for this all my life." ""I've been reciting scripture all my life, wondering will I ever have to put up?" ""Will I ever have to actually perform these ultimate acts of faith" ""in a real world?" ""Now that I have the chance," ""how can I refrain from not giving up my life for my faith? "" "Akiva was dead." "But the work he had done to make the teachings of the Jews accessible to anyone anywhere, lived on." "Beginning in the 4th century AD, Akiva's heirs made his work the basis for an ongoing collection of law and tradition, called the Talmud." "It contained the teachings of scholars down through the ages on how Jews should practise Judaism." "SCHIFFMAN:" "For a Jew to live a proper life and a good life meant that on the one hand there was a set of rituals to be observed." "But along with the commandments that are ritual commandments there came a set of ethical commandments." "And these ethical commandments were as important or more important, whether it's the obvious ones, "Thou shalt not kill or steal", or the not-so obvious ones," ""Love your neighbour as yourself", probably the hardest one to do that most of us never really attain." "All of these types of beautiful ethics, family relations, relations with husband and wife, with children, with other people, with non-Jews, all of these ethical laws, when taken together with the religious commandments," "and with the theology of Judaism, constitute the life the Jew was and is called on to live." "But the T almud was not just a book of commandments." "It was also a record of great debates between sages about how to apply the eternal values of the Hebrew Bible to living here and now." "GEREBOFF:." "Abraham was not a person who was just dead for them." "Abraham was a living presence." "They read the story of Abraham in comparison to the story of Noah." "Noah, when he was told the world was going to be destroyed, they said, in reading the biblical text, they saw that Noah didn't talk to anybody, he just kept to himself." "But Abraham, when he heard Sodom was going to be destroyed," "Abraham went out and argues with God." ""Will you do this if there are really 50 righteous people there" ""or 40 people? "" "And from their way of looking at things, these provided-Noah and Abraham- provided two different models of how to live as a human being." "Do you just hear a message and keep it to yourself?" "Or if you hear a message that doesn't make sense do you have the willingness to ask for a clarification, or say "That doesn't make sense? "" "Above all, the T almud was a how-to book for practising Judaism." "Any community of Jews anywhere could study the lessons of the Bible and then debate among themselves how to apply its laws and traditions to their own time and place." "In synagogues from Spain to Russia to North Africa," "Jews who were isolated in ghettos could still maintain their connection to their culture and their God." "For instance, a community in Spain, which already existed in late Roman times, on the one hand isolated, hundreds of miles removed both from the land of Israel and from the other centre of rabbinic knowledge, Babyblonia." "But slowly, this Talmudic material in book fashion, as it were, makes its way to Spain." "And these Jews can now plug into this culture." "They can plug into this tradition." "They can interpret it." "They can use what is applicable to their own lifestyles." "So in many ways, it's a mobile tradition." "The Talmud would become in many ways the mobile tradition that reaches all corners of the Jewish world." "Nobody now is isolated from the focal point of Jewish religious activity." "You have the Talmud, you can study it." "You can elaborate, interpret, ask others what it means." "The Talmud now would be the walking Bible, this living Bible, for Jews throughout the world." "(SOLEMN MUSIC)" "With the T almud to bind them together" "Jewish communities around the world thrived in spite of the discrimination they faced." "And invariably their Muslim and Christian neighbours soon discovered that the Jews among them possessed unique gifts." "One of the skills Jews introduced to country after country was glass blowing." "Their neighbours also benefited from the Jewish community's advanced knowledge of medicine and were inspired by its practice of giving every child an education." "But most important of all, the Jews brought spiritual gifts." "KIRSCH:" "Among the many contributions that the Jewish people have made to world civilisation is this idea that what God demands of ordinary human beings is not merely the observance of a ritual or the holding of a particular belief or credo." "It's simply a fierce pursuit of justice." "Moses says "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue. "" "That's one of the credos of the Bible and of rabbinical Judaism and it is one of the moral gifts of the Jews to posterity." "And it finds its expression in both Christianity and Islam and in the world we live in today." "The importance of compassion for the less fortunate, of personal ethics, of laws that applied to everyone equally... these were just some of the gifts of the Jews." "DORFF:." "I think the Jewish tradition has given the world a sense of appreciation for family and for education." "A sense that we should not only be for ourselves, but also for others, as the rabbis themselves say." "And that we have to therefore make sure that we do our bit in making this a better world." "These eternal truths, communicated first through the stories of the Hebrew Bible, had become the unshakable foundation of Judaism." "A tiny insignificant people, seemingly destined to be destroyed by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, had instead survived and flourished." "Not through the power of their weapons," "like other great empires, but through the power of their beliefs and their ideas." "And in the end, they would have as much impact on who we are and what we believe as any empire in history."