jan 1, 66 - ***First Jewish-Roman War- Temple Permanently Destroyed 66-73

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The most important revolt of the Jewish people during this time, started the year 66. Now we're in the Common Era, so this 66 CE. It started in 66 with Jews in both Judea and Galilee revolting against Roman rule, they drove the Roman squadron out of Jerusalem, and in the year 70 the Romans finally, after four years of warfare, they had surrounded Jerusalem for a full two years, they finally took Jerusalem itself. They flattened--they destroyed the temple. So the destruction of the temple is the year 70, and that's probably the most important date for this course because a lot of important things in Christianity, the early Jesus movement, happened either before 70, and they're one kind of event, some of them happened right around the year 70, and we'll talk about that when we get to the gospel of Mark in a couple of times, and then some of them--most of the things happened after the year 70.
The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 is not only hugely important for Jews, right? because ever since then Jews have not had a sacrificial cult. If you are a Jew now where do you go to sacrifice? You can't go to the temple there's--Dome of the Rock sitting on where it's supposed to be. Jews substituted different forms of piety, reading the Torah, studying, praying, meeting in synagogues, meeting in other places, so Judaism changed radically beginning in the year 70, precisely because the place where you sacrificed was destroyed. Every ethnic group around the Mediterranean in the ancient world had its religion as some part of sacrifice. They all did. Sacrifice was just common among different groups around the Mediterranean. The year 70 caused the Jews to stop being primarily a sacrificial people, because they had nowhere to sacrifice. The end of the Jewish war is dated by most people to 74, because that's the time when the final battle took place, and the fortress that fell was called Masada. So if you go to Israel now Masada is a shrine. It's a tourist spot and a shrine that celebrates the defeat of the last of Jews at Masada, the fortress that Herod the Great had built.
After that Judaism changes you have--I'm not going to go into much detail because the way rabbinic Judaism--what you know as Judaism today, if you know anything about it at all, is a result of developments that happened after 70. It's the result of the rabbis recognizing that the temple cult is no longer there. The rabbis, who are teachers of the law and commentators of the law, they become the central organizing feature not the priests. The priesthood--you still have Jews named Cohen, right, which means "priest," but priests in Judaism don't really do much anymore. It's the rabbis who become important. At the beginning of--around the year 200 you have the rabbinic Judaism starting to develop its written text, the Mishnah, the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, and this is the birth during these centuries of rabbinism. That is rabbinic Judaism as it comes to be important.




Josephus wrote that 1.1 million people, the majority of them Jewish, were killed during the siege – a death toll he attributes to the celebration of Passover.[50] Josephus goes on to report that after the Romans killed the armed and elderly people, 97,000 were enslaved.[51] Josephus records that many people were sold into slavery, and that of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, 40,000 individuals survived, and the emperor let them to go wherever they chose.[52] Before and during the siege, according to Josephus' account, there were multiple waves of desertions from the city.[53]

The Roman historian Tacitus later wrote: "... the total number of the besieged of every age and both sexes was six hundred thousand; there were arms for all who could use them, and the number ready to fight was larger than could have been anticipated from the total population. Both men and women showed the same determination; and if they were to be forced to change their home, they feared life more than death".[54]

Josephus' death toll figures have been rejected as impossible by Seth Schwartz, who estimates that about a million people lived in all of Palestine at the time, about half of them Jews, and that sizable Jewish populations remained in the area after the war was over, even in the hard-hit region of Judea.[55] Schwartz, however, believes that the captive number of 97,000 is more reliable.[53] It has also been noted that the revolt had not deterred pilgrims from visiting Jerusalem, and a large number became trapped in the city and perished during the siege.[56]

Wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70_CE)

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