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the holy city with Gauls, Spaniards, Romans, Greeks, and Syrians—all of them foreigners,
     all of them heathens—obligated by law to make sacrifices in God’s own Temple on behalf
     of a Roman idolater who lived more than a thousand kilometers away.
    How would the heroes of old respond to such humiliation and degradation? What would
     Joshua or Aaron or Phineas or Samuel do to the unbelievers who had defiled the land
     set aside by God for his chosen people?
    They would drown the land in blood. They would smash the heads of the heathens and
     the gentiles, burn their idols to the ground, slaughter their wives and their children.
     They would slay the idolaters and bathe their feet in the blood of their enemies,
     just as the Lord commanded. They would call upon the God of Israel to burst forth
     from the heavens in his war chariot, to trample upon the sinful nations and make the
     mountains writhe at his fury.
    As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God’s chosen people to Rome for some
     coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was
     an insult to God. It was a blight upon the entire land.
    It had to be wiped away.

Chapter Two
King of the Jews
    In the years of tumult that followed the Roman occupation of Judea, as Rome became
     enmeshed in a debilitating civil war between Pompey Magnus and his erstwhile ally
     Julius Caesar, even while remnants of the Hasmonaean Dynasty continued vying for the
     favors of both men, the situation for the Jewish farmers and peasants who harrowed
     and sowed God’s land steadily worsened. The small family farms that for centuries
     had served as the primary basis of the rural economy were gradually swallowed up by
     large estates administered by landed aristocracies flush with freshly minted Roman
     coins. Rapid urbanization under Roman rule fueled mass internal migration from the
     countryside to the cities. The agriculture that had once sustained the meager village
     populations was now almost wholly focused on feeding the engorged urban centers, leaving
     the rural peasants hungry and destitute. The peasantry were not only obligated to
     continue paying their taxes and their tithes to the Temple priesthood, they were now
     forced to pay a heavy tribute to Rome. For farmers, the total could amount to nearly
     half their annual yield.
    At the same time, successive droughts had left large swaths of the countryside fallow
     and in ruin as much of the Jewish peasantrywas reduced to slavery. Those who managed to remain on their wasted fields often had
     no choice but to borrow heavily from the landed aristocracy, at exorbitant interest
     rates. Never mind that Jewish law forbade the charging of interest on loans; the massive
     fines that were levied on the poor for late payments had basically the same effect.
     In any case, the landed aristocracy expected the peasants to default on their loans;
     they were banking on it. For if the loan was not promptly and fully repaid, the peasant’s
     land could be confiscated and the peasant kept on the farm as a tenant toiling on
     behalf of its new owner.
    Within a few years after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, an entire crop of landless
     peasants found themselves stripped of their property with no way to feed themselves
     or their families. Many of these peasants immigrated to the cities to find work. But
     in Galilee, a handful of displaced farmers and landowners exchanged their plows for
     swords and began fighting back against those they deemed responsible for their woes.
     From their hiding places in the caves and grottoes of the Galilean countryside, these
     peasant-warriors launched a wave of attacks against the Jewish aristocracy and the
     agents of the Roman Republic. They roamed through the provinces, gathering to themselves
     those in distress, those who were dispossessed and mired in debt. Like Jewish Robin
     Hoods, they robbed the rich and, on occasion, gave to the poor. To the faithful,