Read Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth for Free Online

the religious beliefs and practices
     of subject peoples. Most of the lands they conquered were allowed to maintain their
     temples unmolested. Rival gods, far from being vanquished or destroyed, were often
     assimilated into the Roman cult (that is how, for example, the Canaanite god Baal
     became associated with the Roman god Saturn). In some cases, under a practice called
evocatio
, the Romans would take possession of an enemy’s temple—and therefore its god, for
     the two were inextricable in the ancient world—and transfer it to Rome, where it would
     be showered with riches and lavish sacrifices. Such displays were meant to send a
     clear signal that the hostilities were directed not toward the enemy’s god but toward
     its fighters; the god would continue to be honored and worshipped in Rome if only
     his devotees would lay down their arms and allow themselves to be absorbed into the
     empire.
    As generally tolerant as the Romans may have been when it came to foreign cults, they
     were even more lenient toward the Jews and their fealty to their One God—what Cicero
     decried as the “barbarian superstitions” of Jewish monotheism. The Romansmay not have understood the Jewish cult, with its strange observances and its overwhelming
     obsession with ritual purity—“The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred,”
     Tacitus wrote, “while they permit all that we abhor”—but they nevertheless tolerated
     it.
    What most puzzled Rome about the Jews was not their unfamiliar rites or their strict
     devotion to their laws, but rather what the Romans considered to be their unfathomable
     superiority complex. The notion that an insignificant Semitic tribe residing in a
     distant corner of the mighty Roman Empire demanded, and indeed received, special treatment
     from the emperor was, for many Romans, simply incomprehensible. How dare they consider
     their god to be the sole god in the universe? How dare they keep themselves separate
     from all other nations? Who do these backward and superstitious tribesmen think they
     are? The Stoic philosopher Seneca was not alone among the Roman elite in wondering
     how it had possibly come to pass in Jerusalem that “the vanquished have given laws
     to the victors.”
    For the Jews, however, this sense of exceptionalism was not a matter of arrogance
     or pride. It was a direct commandment from a jealous God who tolerated no foreign
     presence in the land he had set aside for his chosen people. That is why, when the
     Jews first came to this land a thousand years earlier, God had decreed that they massacre
     every man, woman, and child they encountered, that they slaughter every ox, goat,
     and sheep they came across, that they burn every farm, every field, every crop, every
     living thing without exception so as to ensure that the land would belong solely to
     those who worshipped this one God and no other.
    “As for the towns of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance,”
     God told the Israelites, “you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You
     shall annihilate them all—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites,
     the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deuteronomy
     20:17–18).
    It was, the Bible claims, only after the Jewish armies had “utterly destroyed all
     that breathed” in the cities of Libnah and Lachish and Eglon and Hebron and Debir,
     in the hill country and in the Negeb, in the lowlands and in the slopes—only after
     every single previous inhabitant of this land was eradicated, “as the Lord God of
     Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10: 28–42)—that the Jews were allowed to settle here.
    And yet, a thousand years later, this same tribe that had shed so much blood to cleanse
     the Promised Land of every foreign element so as to rule it in the name of its God
     now found itself laboring under the boot of an imperial pagan power, forced to share