The devastating Jewish revolt against the Roman empire

It was under the rule of the infamous Emperor Nero that the Great Revolt, the first of the Jewish-Roman Wars, began, sparking many decades of continuous conflict. Speaking to James Osborne for this episode of the History Extra podcast, Barry Strauss, whose latest book is Jews vs. Rome, traces the story, following the fate of the Jewish rebels and the legacy of the conflict. In the book, you look at the first Jewish Roman War, the Diaspora Revolt and the Barkokwa Revolt, and this is a series of wars between the Roman Empire and the Jewish people. You could say that this entire episode begins in 66 AD with the Great Revolt, which is the first of the three wars, but of course there's a lot of backstory here.

Could you please sketch the story of the Jewish people up unto this point and explain Judea's position at this moment in antiquity? Judea, which is what ancient Israel was called at this period, was a very old country. The earliest evidence we have of the Jews' presence in the Holy Land is the end of the 13th century BCE in an Egyptian inscription. We know that there was a kingdom or kingdoms in the Iron Age, and that Judea was conquered first by the Assyrians and then by the Neo-Babylonians, and in the beginning of the 6th century BCE. The elite at any rate was exiled, Jerusalem was captured, Jerusalem the capital, the first temple was destroyed, and part of the population was exiled to Babylonia, to what's now southern Iraq.

And then with the conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire by the Persian Empire, they were allowed to return. And some of them did, some of them stayed in Babylonia, some of them returned to Judea, rebuilt Jerusalem, and the temple. And Judea was first a Persian province for several centuries, then conquered by Alexander and the Macedonians, went back and forth between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, and then in the second century BCE it won its independence under the Maccabees and was an independent state for about a century when the Romans entered the scene in the year 63 BCE. They conquered Judea.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (44 minutes, 7,146 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.