It is time to review our main results. Since I have emphasized the importance of thinking about historical method, I first summarize the method and then the substantive conclusions it has produced.

METHOD

While writing these chapters I have imagined a critical voice objecting: “Your prattling about historical method doesn't make any difference, does it? You have cited passages from Josephus and material remains in support of your reconstruction, choosing your favourites and ignoring others, just as everyone else does!” In case my readers have heard the same voice, or perhaps they own it, I would like to explain in light of the foregoing chapters. A metaphor may help.

We usually approach Josephus as we would a house made of brick and stone. We can see the materials from which the house is constructed. If we are interested in some small part of that structure ‒ in Pontius Pilate, the upper priesthood, the causes of the war ‒ we look at what Josephus has done with that part and suspect that we could do better. In building his house, we believe, he had a skewed perspective and/or unimaginative vision: fealty to the Flavians or some pathetic effort to exculpate his kind from war guilt. But no one doubts that he used excellent materials, and they don't make them like that any more! So our best bet is to dismantle his house and salvage those materials for our building. We can identify good material through a combination of intuition and educated guesswork about its provenance: Is this a brick that he himself made ad hoc, a solid older one, or a piece of excellent stone? To help us decide, we use the principle that whatever does not seem to fit his building design is likely older and not made by him. Even better, not too far from Josephus’ house are piles of loose bricks ‒ fragmentary material remains ‒ that are wonderful for us because they do not belong to any existing structure. They are free for us to use along with the best bits from Josephus as we build a more robust structure.

Having stretched the metaphor to breaking point, I shall leave it there. My implicit criticism is directed at all of us, myself included.

Polybius relates a number of stories in which Greek and Roman generals capture seemingly unconquerable cities that are of no great value in themselves, but their conquest sends a message: This display of force generates power (Chapter 3). Because defenders trust their such strong walls and remote locations, their fall has a shattering didactic effect. A general capable of doing that must be obeyed. Although Cestius and Vespasian fully exploited display violence to establish local power, as we have seen, Cestius’ rebuff outside Jerusalem left the viability of this fortress polis, deep in Judaea's hills, an open question. Years later, after Titus had safely returned to Rome, his enablers would credit him with the unprecedented achievements of a fortune-blessed conqueror (Chapter 1). But that discloses nothing about his actual intentions in the spring of 70, his changing plans over time, or what transpired between his arrival in the spring of 70 and his departure from a city in ashes.

When Vespasian turned his attention to Jerusalem toward the end of 67, he must have prepared for various outcomes. Galilee had submitted instantly and Samaria was securely in hand (3.307–15). But how long the Judaean campaign would last and what it would entail depended on factors beyond Vespasian's control. Clearly he had to secure the Judaean mother-city in one way or another, but because he faced a human enemy his approach would need to be reassessed constantly. Would Jerusalem capitulate before his arrival, as Sepphoris had, and would its leaders request a garrison as protection against Judaean and neighbouring violence? Among other unknowables, the Flavians could not have known that a lightweight from Galilee, John, would soon become an intransigent leader in Jerusalem.

With respect to high Roman politics, Vespasian could not have imagined when he left ruined Gamala in October 67 that the still-young emperor would take his own life within a few months, launching a bloody civil war.

When ancient Jewish and Christian writers discussed the Judaean War in retrospect, their interests tended to be theological: “Why did God allow (or cause) his house to be destroyed? What help does biblical tradition offer in understanding the catastrophe?” Josephus shared those concerns, but fortunately for us, he historicized the problem by marrying cosmic drama with concrete personalities, incidents, and situations (Chapter 2). His account leaves countless loose ends, to be sure, and inexhaustible food for thought. One simple question that he does not pose in a systematic way, although he narrates much relevant material, is: Why and how did this war begin?

In this chapter we re-examine the war's beginnings, as a foundation for the rest of our inquiry. We should not assume that early grievances remained the same throughout, but having an idea about how Judaeans came into lethal conflict with Rome's legions will help us to understand later developments.

In exploring the war's causes, we need to avoid seductively simplistic paths. Because Rome and Judaea ended up at war, it has usually seemed obvious that the Judaeans must have had serious grounds for complaint. For such a humble David to have taken on such a Goliath, these grievances must have become intolerable and finally popped the cork of rational restraint. In 1893 the eminent Heinrich Graetz put it thus:

Although scholars have refined their explanations in countless ways, this picture has remained more or less intact. Leading military historians take it for granted that: “Judaea caused incessant trouble to the Romans. … The people defended their religious identity and culture from the efforts of provincial authorities to impose Greek and Roman culture. …” The image of a Judaea seething with anti-Roman fervour has filtered out from scholarship into the best-researched novels and films, …

D. A. Russell wrote this in 1966 concerning Plutarch's Lives. Others have issued similar warnings about trying to extract raw facts from texts while ignoring their nature, structures, and themes. In principle all survivals from the past, material or literary, need first to be understood for what they are if we are to use them to answer other questions. Recognition of this in the case of Josephus’ War and Antiquities–Life has been recent and partial. This chapter is mainly an effort to understand Josephus’ War, because it is the most important literary source for the following chapters. We need to begin, however, by clarifying where the interpretation of evidence fits in the larger project of historical investigation. And this requires us to think about the surprisingly difficult question: What is history?

History and interpretation

Historians are often impatient with theory. We feel that we know what we are doing, and abstract philosophizing can get in the way. We should just get on with the hard work. Going theory-less, however, can create miscommunication. In the final months of preparing this book I have heard professional historians express such views as these: History is the past or an authoritative account of it; historians must follow the evidence and avoid speculation; history concerns itself with elite literary texts and neither material evidence or the life of ordinary folk, which are the province of archaeologists; historians are either maximalists or minimalists, realists or postmodernists, left-wingers or conservatives, or they fall in some other two-kinds-of-people scheme. A problem relevant to this chapter is the notion that those who care about the meaning of texts must be literary types unconcerned with the actual past. And these positions are held by historians. If we include more popular ideas about history, including those espoused by political leaders and school boards, the picture becomes bewildering.

This is not the place, my publisher insists, for a head-on discussion of the nature of history. Dedicated discussions of the problem are easy to find, even if I cannot recommend one that perfectly matches my outlook.

Josephus’ Titus explains why Vespasian did not pursue a strategy we associate with Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). The Prussian soldier-spy emphasized the need to concentrate forces on the enemy's “focal point of force and movement” (Schwerpunkt). Commanders must resist temptations to divide their forces for small contests, which never decide a war and are hazardous besides: “In a word, the first principle is: to act with as much concentration as possible. The second principle is: to act as swiftly as possible; therefore to permit no delay or detour without sufficient reason.” Josephus has Titus claim that because a concentrated assault on Jerusalem was the only sensible method of national punishment, Vespasian's decision to linger in the north proves that he was motivated by kindness (τὸ φιλάνθρωπον) and gentleness (ἡ πρᾳότης).

It is not necessarily so. Clausewitz had in view states with regular armies. With irregular resistance fighters who were indistinguishable from ordinary folk, the Romans had either to annihilate the population or to drain the morale of potential militants (Chapter 3). Because they chose the latter, their aim became the reestablishment of control and domination at minimal risk. With psychological considerations paramount in both cases, the main difference between Vespasian's campaign and that of Cestius was that Vespasian had the time to be much more deliberate. He had nothing else to do but to suppress whatever revolt had been expressed in the massacre of the auxiliary garrison and the ambush of Cestius.

As we saw in Chapter 3, Liddell Hart proposed that the indirect approach was actually the essence of strategy. It kept the enemy off balance and in constant fear while forcing them to disperse their defences.

One of the great puzzles of the Judaean War is the event that set it in motion: the expedition to Jerusalem by the legate C. Cestius Gallus, in September–October of A.D. 66. Until that time, as we have just seen, Judaeans had been in conflict only with the largely Samarian auxiliary (Chapter 4). Now Cestius marched south with a reported force of 30,000, anchored in the Twelfth Legion, with auxiliaries and regional allies from the north plus ad hoc recruits (War 2.499–502). Within two months, most of that being travel time, he was back in Antioch, disgraced and disconsolate after losing an alleged 5,300 men. Even if the real number were much smaller, he suffered a serious humiliation. No one could doubt that this would swiftly be avenged. Judaeans began preparing for that retaliation (War 2.562–79). But how did Cestius come to such grief? What was he intending, and was he so utterly incompetent to see it through?

Assuming that Judaea was already in open revolt against Rome and that Cestius’ objective was to crush Jerusalem, analysts have found his behaviour baffling. His apparent dithering en route and abrupt departure from Jerusalem, capped by the catastrophic ambush in the Beit-Horon pass, have seemed evidence of staggering ineptitude. The successful ambush gave an incalculable boost to Judaean morale (War 3.9). And because it clearly demanded revenge, more than any other single event it created the Judaean-Roman War. Josephus’ formulaic repetition of “the blunder(s) of Cestius” brings this episode into the orbit of “the Varian disaster” (clades Variana) of A.D. 9, in which an emeritus legate of Syria lost three legions and his own life in Germany.

Cestius lived long enough to suffer the ignominy, but not long enough to redeem his reputation. A generation later Tacitus reflects that “he suffered varied fortunes and met defeat more often than he gained victory” (Hist. 5.10).

Most of us, happily, do not need to think about surviving combat. Because the remaining chapters of this book explore episodes of lethal confrontation, therefore, we should pause to condition our thinking. We do not yet know which Judaeans fought Roman soldiers or why. Whatever we decide about that, some Judaeans plainly did fight Rome, and legions were unleashed against them. Our research questions will be sharper, and our imagining of scenarios more plausible, if we take time to think about the nature of this kind of warfare in the Roman period.

Rome's legions have acquired the mystique of an unstoppable machine driven by a cool, purely military discipline, whereas Jewish-Judaean rebels appear in film (Ben-Hur, Life of Brian) as motivated by wide-eyed religious-nationalist fervour. On both sides, we easily forget the human conditions that affected both and their largely shared values. Obviously, they were in very different situations, one side boasting a well-armed professional force of empire and the other lacking even a standing army. But the alternation of guerrilla and siege warfare created by this situation brought challenges for both. Even if Rome's ultimate victory was not in serious doubt, we can only hope to grasp the hard choices their commanders faced if we lay aside “the glory that was Rome” and think more realistically. Helmet shapes, armour, and ammunition are certainly part of the story, but they need not detain us here. Countless academic and popular books as well as websites and even re-enactment clubs devoted to the Roman army are readily accessible. Nor should we assume that strategy and tactics, the hobby of our pipe-smoking forebears in their drawing rooms, are the most important considerations for understanding this war. Because the Judaeans lacked a trained army, our conflict does not compare with the great battles of the Roman Republic at Cannae, Cynoscephalae, or Carrhae. In those cases military historians can diagram opposed columns, using symbols and colours to mark unit types and arrows to trace their movements. That is all exciting from the distance of two millennia. A conflict such as ours, which saw no such set-piece confrontations, invites different questions.

After a preliminary sketch of the Roman army, highlighting some relatively neglected aspects, this chapter asks about the extent to which Judaeans could have looked to the Parthian empire as a guarantor or balance against Rome.

In the preceding chapter we surveyed Josephus’ account of the Flavian war in Judaea/Peraea and offered a preliminary analysis, rethinking the motives and outlooks of the main groups and individuals that appear. In this chapter we consider the most important evidence outside Josephus. Then we turn to the real-life scenarios that might best answer our questions about Judaean and Roman aims and explain the evidence that has survived.

Archaeological work in Jerusalem since 1967 continues to generate stunning results. We have repeatedly seen the need, however, to interpret, contextualize, and explain all survivals from the past. They do not declare their own meaning or significance.

Beneath the Umayyad, Byzantine, and Hadrianic layers, structures of King Herod's Jerusalem are sometimes recoverable, and archaeologists have also found artefacts of the city at war. Nahman Avigad directed excavations in the Jewish Quarter, comprising the eastern half of the Upper City, as that area was being rebuilt after 1967. His work exposed the sumptuous dwellings of the city's wealthiest pre-70 neighbourhood, on the large western slope facing the temple mount (Fig. 32). The half-dozen houses that dominated that space included a palatial mansion with three terraces on the slope, a frescoed wall, Latin-inscribed wine jars, and a peristyle courtyard that would have been at home in Pompeii. These residences belonged to wealthy priests, who needed to remain in a state of ritual purity for their work in the temple, and partly for that reason we see an abundance of locally produced stone vessels – stone and glass do not transmit ritual impurity – as well as private ritual baths (Fig. 32).

The so-called Burnt House was found in this wealthy neighbourhood. It is connected with the priestly family of Katros, known from the Talmud, by an inscribed stone weight found in the lower level. It boasted a stone-paved courtyard and a large but unknown number of rooms. The seven nonresidential rooms exposed on the (under)ground level include a kitchen, ritual bath, and workshop spaces, perhaps for perfume/incense manufacture for temple use, with stone tables and vessels, ovens, inkwells, oil lamps, and much pottery. This house was consumed by a raging fire, possibly intensified by oil stored there.

No site in modern Israel receives more attention than Masada, the striking mesa at the southwest end of the Dead Sea's main basin. And none offers more food for thought concerning the relationship between history and tradition (Chapter 1). Although Masada's meaning as a national icon has increasingly been questioned, the site continues to be seen as a symbol of the heroic struggle for national freedom. In 1932, 60-year-old German academic Adolf von Schulten and a former general named Adolf Lammerer camped below the hilltop for a month to study the Roman siege works. They were inspired by the thought that “the heroic struggle for the Fatherland has been and remains one of the most distinguished objects of historical research and writing.” In 2001, when Masada became Israel's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, the criterion was still that Masada symbolized “the continuing human struggle between oppression and liberty.”

What happened to create this image? That question is entangled with interests other than historical curiosity. Before and after Israel's creation in 1948, fascination was intense. Masada hosted thousands of hikers from the embryonic state. A preliminary survey in 1955 and 1956 prepared for full-scale excavations from 1963 to 1965. The latter were of exceptional duration, intensity, thoroughness, and international exposure. It helped that they were led by Yigael Yadin: soldier, Chief of Defence Staff, and archaeologist, later founder of a political party and Deputy Prime Minister. Yadin's patriotic interpretation of the stunning discoveries, especially in his popular book, helped to secure Masada's position in Israel's and the world's imagination.

The line between plausible reality and inspiring story quickly became blurred. American aviator-sailor-author Ernest K. Gann novelized Josephus’ brief Masada story in The Antagonists (1971), which Boris Sagal then brought into American living rooms as the eight-part television series Masada (1981). He used British actors to play the Roman imperialists, Americans for the death-defying Jewish patriots under Eleazar.

Historical scholarship could not indulge so obviously in emotional stakes, but it often seemed to pit heroic freedom-fighters against imperial enforcers just as clearly. Scholars debated exactly how the freedom-fighters died and what this might say about their moral character.