Sublime

The Bible does not tell us what happened to the ten tribes of the northern kingdom who were dispersed. The story of the exile highlights the dangers—to any people—of forced migration, which both Jews and Arabs would endure again in the twentieth century. Whatever had happened to those lost biblical tribes, as the…

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But after the Bar Kokhba War (132–136 CE), the second major revolt against the Roman Empire of the people inhabiting the territory known as Roman Palestine, this allegiance was increasingly challenged.

this inscription suggests that a people called Israel lived at the Eastern Mediterranean coast in the very…

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all the references to the same event elsewhere in the gospels—even where it stares one in the face, as in Luke 13:1–5—have been read as general warnings of hellfire in an afterlife, rather than the literal and physical divine-judgment-through-Roman-judgment that we have seen to be characteristic of Jesus’ story.

For the fact was that religious conversion wasn’t sufficient. Rather than letting other ‘nations’ extol God, the Jewish leadership demanded that all ‘nations’ become fully Jewish; there was no room for Egyptian-Jews or Roman-Jews, let alone Germanic-or British-Jews, but only for Jewish-Jews. Given the remarkable success they achieved, this ethnic

The fact that Jesus effected only a brief cessation of sacrifice fits perfectly with the idea of a symbolic action. He was not attempting a reform; he was symbolizing judgment. We may remind ourselves of the horror with which Jews contemplated the cessation of the regular sacrifices.209 Jesus’ action symbolized his belief that, in returning to

Elias Bickerman, a noted scholar, has pointed out that Mattathias did not demand the right of freedom of religion, nor did he fight for individual conscience. This was “a conflict between earthly power and the law of the state of God”—opposition to a King’s order that was at variance with the commandments of God.