The Empire That Tried to Replace Israel with Dr. Katell Berthelot

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast once again. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova. Today we're going to be talking about one of my most favorite topics to talk about on this show, and we have with us Dr. Katell Berthelot. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Thank you for having me.

Johnny Ova: Before we get into the rivalry itself, I have to ask a question. How did you first become drawn to studying the relationship between the Jews and the Romans, and what led you to see it as something far deeper than just an empire ruling over a conquered people?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Well, it all started with an article on Philo of Alexandria. Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher and commentator on the Bible who lived in Alexandria in Egypt, roughly at the time of Jesus. He wrote about the Greeks, but he didn't write much about the Romans. I started to investigate how exactly he positioned the Jews versus the Greeks on the one hand and the Romans on the other. It made me realize that in some ways he saw the Jews as being in a kind of parallel relationship to the Greeks, as the Romans were. And I started to realize that he had a kind of discourse between the lines in which he was criticizing Rome and positioning the Jews as the superior people, not only in relationship to the Greeks but also to the Romans.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: But that was an implicit discourse, not really open. It's easy to understand why, because Philo was living in the Roman Empire. He led a Jewish delegation to Rome in 38 to 39 CE, after there had been huge riots against the Jews in Alexandria. So he was trying to defend his community in front of Roman imperial power, and you have to be really cautious. So that's the way it started.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. You bring up a fascinating point. In researching some of your work and watching some of your videos, most people think about the Jews under Rome as this oppressed little minority just trying to survive. But some of your research really flips that script. How did the Jews actually see themselves in relation to Rome?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: First we have to keep in mind that the Jews were very diverse and experienced all kinds of situations within the Roman Empire. We have Jews who were perfectly at ease in the Roman Empire. We know that Philo's nephew himself was a Roman citizen, and not only a Roman citizen, but he made a brilliant career serving the Roman Empire. He was procurator of Judea from 46 to 48. He was governor of Egypt from 66 to 69, and he was a general in the Roman army that besieged Jerusalem with Titus in 70. So you couldn't find a Jew who was more committed to the success of the Roman Empire than Philo's nephew.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: But there are many other cases, less extreme. We have evidence from inscriptions, for example, that some Jews were soldiers in the Roman army, even at times when there were the big Jewish revolts against Rome. Not only in 66 to 70, the first great Jewish revolt that led to the destruction of the Second Temple, but also during the Diaspora revolt in 115 to 117 CE or the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 to 136 CE. So we had Jews who really felt at ease living in this Roman Empire.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: On the other hand, we have many literary testimonies of Jews who resented being dominated by Rome, who even felt that Rome was a worse empire than the empires Israel had been confronted with in the past, like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks. And what I argue in the book, Jews and Their Roman Rivals, is that some Jews even felt that Rome was in some way trying to substitute itself for Israel, taking Israel's place in God's projects and in world history. That's really the thesis of the book.

Johnny Ova: Interesting, and we'll have that book linked up in our descriptions on YouTube, Apple and Spotify, so please make sure you get yourself a copy. My question then would be, where does this Jewish counter-narrative begin? When do we first see Jewish writers and thinkers positioning Israel as Rome's rival rather than its subject? I'm assuming the writers of the Scriptures are writing through a specific lens with a specific objective. They wouldn't be like Philo's nephew, loving the life of Rome. The Bible is being written by people who seem to be oppressed by Rome. So where do you think this first began?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: The counter-narrative, the fact of challenging Rome's domination over the Jews, you can find in many writings such as the apocalypses. We have many Jewish apocalypses in the first century CE. For example, a book called Fourth Ezra, or another one called Second Baruch, written at the end of the first century CE. They were desperate because of the destruction of the Second Temple, and they clearly identify Rome with Babylon, as in the Revelation of John in the New Testament. This is a way of positioning Rome via this coded language of Babylon. It is a way of saying that Rome is this other city which also destroyed a Jerusalem temple, as Babylon destroyed the first temple and now Rome the second one.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: They are arguing basically that one day God will avenge his city and his people and will ultimately give the victory to the Jews. That's a kind of conventional discourse, a resistance discourse: yes, we have been defeated, but God is ultimately in charge of history, and one day we will prevail and the Roman Empire will be gone. This kind of argument is also found in the writings of Flavius Josephus, the famous Jewish historian who wrote the Judean War and the Jewish Antiquities. And it is found in rabbinic literature, which has many passages describing the way God will judge the nations, and especially Rome, at the end of times. So this is the first way to cope with the challenge of Rome: to claim that in the end the Roman Empire will crumble, Israel will be restored, and there will be messianic times or a new kingdom of Israel, because God will ultimately judge Rome for its sins.

Johnny Ova: So Rome was trying to take that position of, we're the nation God is using, we're the nation God is blessing, not Israel. Am I correct on that?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: The way Rome could be perceived as trying to play a role in God's project is through the ideology of universal peace and prosperity. Many Roman writings emphasize that the Roman Empire was bringing peace, the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, to the world. That was partly true. Roads were safer, it was safer to travel by sea, there were fewer pirates. This was not all ideological discourse. It was partly a reality, but they really built on that for the sake of propaganda. They claimed they were also bringing more prosperity and some kind of legal order to the nations they conquered. Obviously they were aware that in some parts of their empire, some nations had very old and important legal traditions. They didn't think the Greek cities were without a legal order. But in other parts, like northern Africa or the East, sometimes they didn't really take into account the legal traditions of the people there.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: And there was this discourse in Roman sources that the Romans were really the best jurists you could ever imagine, that they had the best laws ever, even better than those of the Greeks, better than everybody else. Now think about the way Jewish sources, already in the Bible, define Israel and its mission, especially with the notion of the Messiah and messianic times. What is Israel bringing to the world? First, Israel is the people who received the Torah, God's law. So they received the best possible law, because it's divine. Here we have a direct competition between the Roman claim of being the best legislators ever and the Jewish claim of having received the best possible law because it's divine.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Second, in messianic times the Messiah is supposed to bring universal peace to the world. So here again, seen from the Jewish perspective, not the Roman one, it could look to some Jews as if Rome was claiming the role of the Messiah in bringing this peace to the world. And of course some Jewish authors claimed that real peace could only come from Israel and in no way from Rome, and they strongly condemned Rome as a violent power. As far as the legal aspect was concerned, they said the Roman tribunals were not performing correctly, the judges were bribed, it was full of corruption and violence. They really opposed these Roman claims very strongly.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Now, to go back to your previous question about where we see the rivalry motif emerge in Jewish sources. We see it very clearly in rabbinic texts. Why? Because in rabbinic texts we have a very explicit identification of the Roman Empire with Esau, Jacob's twin brother, Israel's twin brother. This is a very surprising identification. As we said, in the apocalypses Rome is identified with Babylon. That is something we can understand: two cities, two enemies of Israel. But why identify the Romans with Jacob's twin brother, a descendant of Abraham? The Jews knew the Romans were not descendants of Abraham in any way. In the Bible the Romans are sometimes called the Kittim, the people from the western islands. They were not part of the Middle East or of the genealogy we have in Genesis.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: So it's very surprising, and I think it is because the rabbis realized there were similarities in the self-presentation and self-definition of the Romans on the one hand and the Jews on the other, and they perceived the danger of Rome substituting itself for Israel, claiming to be in a way the new Israel. But we have to take into account two factors. First, the ideological factor, the Roman or pro-Roman discourses and the way they presented Rome's mission. On the other hand, we must also take into account Roman policies toward the Jews in the first and second centuries CE. The Jewish military defeats, the failure of the revolts, and the Roman policies that followed played a big role in the elaboration of this image of Rome as a rival of Israel.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: What happened after 70? The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, but they took the utensils of the temple, the menorah, the seven-branched lamp that was lit all the time within the sanctuary, and all the other sacred utensils used by the priests, and the Torah scrolls, and they brought them back to Rome. We know, thanks to the writings of Josephus and also the frescoes of the Arch of Titus on the Roman Forum, which is a kind of iconographic proof, that these utensils were carried in the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in Rome after the defeat of Judea. Then they were put in the Temple of Peace, which Vespasian built to commemorate the victory over the Jews. So imagine: these holy vessels were transported from Jerusalem to Rome and put in a temple dedicated to a pagan goddess, the goddess of peace.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Vespasian and the Roman emperors after him never allowed the reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple, and as we know, until today the temple is not rebuilt. Vespasian also had the other Jewish temple that existed at that time, in Leontopolis in Egypt, closed. So it was a very deliberate move to suppress all the places where there was a sacrificial cult to the God of Israel. This is very important, because the Jews could continue to live in a Jewish way and pray in a Jewish way, but they had no place anymore where they could sacrifice to their God. In the ancient world, in a pagan world, sacrifice is everything in your relationship to the deities. So this was a way to really put an end to the Jewish cult.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: In addition, Vespasian decided to levy a new tax on all the Jews in the empire, a tax which has received the name Fiscus Judaicus. Even the Jews who had not revolted against Rome had to pay it. It was a very severe humiliation for Jews everywhere. The amount was the same amount traditionally paid to the temple in Jerusalem for the cult of the God of Israel. So now the money that used to serve the God of Israel was sent to Rome, where it was used to rebuild the temple of Jupiter, which had been destroyed by fire in 69, and other temples and buildings associated with the Roman gods. Imagine the humiliation for the Jews throughout the empire, and the frustration.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Later on, what caused the Bar Kokhba revolt, which started in 132, was the decision of another Roman emperor, Hadrian, to have the city of Jerusalem rebuilt and refounded as a Roman colony called Aelia Capitolina. We know from archaeological digs that there was work going on in Jerusalem in the 120s, up to 130, when Hadrian visited the Levant. He visited Jerusalem and probably held a ceremony for the foundation of the new Roman colony there. This was probably the main reason that sparked the third great Jewish revolt against Rome, because the Jews understood they would never get the temple back. They would never be able to rebuild it, because he was deleting Jerusalem, the Jewish city, and replacing it with a Roman colony full of temples dedicated to the gods of Rome.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: This is also a way to understand that some Jews could perceive Rome as substituting itself for Israel, physically too. They were substituting a Roman city for Jerusalem, the most holy city of the Jews. So you see why they could feel that this empire was not the same challenge previous empires had been. No other empire in the history of Israel had replaced Jerusalem with a Persian city or an Assyrian city. They killed people, they levied taxes, but from a symbolic and ideological point of view they did not go as far as Rome did.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Thank you. That picture is painted very clearly. I did not know a lot of that information. The Hasmonean dynasty, I know, is also a major piece of this puzzle. For listeners who may not know much about the Hasmoneans, who were they, and why does their period of independence matter so much for understanding how Jesus saw themselves on the world stage?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: You mean how Jews saw themselves on the world stage.

Johnny Ova: Yes, I'm sorry.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: No problem. Now we are going back in time. The Hasmoneans were a family of priests in Judea in the second century BCE, still in the Hellenistic period. This is the Maccabean crisis, which is narrated in the books of the Maccabees, First and Second Maccabees. We also have a Third and Fourth Maccabees, but they are much later and not of direct interest here. First and Second Maccabees tell the story of a revolt led by a certain Judas and his brothers against the Seleucids, namely the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who, the story tells us, forbade some Jewish practices and the Jewish way of life in Judea. He forbade the Jews to circumcise their children and to observe the Sabbath, and he forced them to eat pork. The sources call this a great persecution. Some historians think it did not happen exactly that way and that the sources exaggerate, but that's basically the story First and Second Maccabees tell.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: This family, Judas and his brothers, were successful in resisting and challenging the power of this Seleucid king. Progressively they made alliances with other Seleucid rulers and became generals and administrators for these other kings. In the end they managed to re-establish a royal dynasty in Judea which enjoyed a kind of independence, an autonomy between the major players in the area. It was not full independence or full freedom, but nevertheless they took the title of king, which is surprising because they were priests. In the Bible you're not supposed to have a priest as a king. You're supposed to have a descendant of David, at least in the kingdom of Judah. So they had all the powers: priestly power, kingly power and military power. John Hyrcanus, one of them, even claimed to be a prophet. This aroused a lot of opposition within Judean society.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: It is in this context that we see texts start to argue that the Messiah, the anointed king chosen by God, needs to be a descendant of David, a point that features very prominently in the Gospels. It's not that clear in sources before that period, and it's probably partly a reaction against the Hasmoneans, because they were not descendants of David, and some Jews thought they were not legitimate rulers or kings of Judea. So it is a period that remains in Jewish memory as a time of independence from foreign powers, a kind of revival and restoration of Israel as an autonomous nation. On the other hand, it is also a period of tension within Jewish society. We see the emergence of several groups, such as the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Essenes. Those tensions and divisions lead to the events of the first century, where we have a Jewish society confronted with Roman domination but also very much divided from within.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: The Hasmonean period is also when the Jews encounter the Romans for the first time. At first they see them as a great power that could help them in their fight against the Greeks, so they send an embassy to make an alliance, a treaty of friendship with the Romans. So it starts in a very positive way. But we know the story ends in a much more negative way.

Johnny Ova: Yeah, it takes quite a sharp turn. I know the book of Daniel plays a massive role in how Jews interpreted world empires. How did Jewish readers in this period use Daniel to frame Rome's place in history, and more importantly, Rome's end?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Daniel is a late book in the Bible, and it speaks in two visions of a succession of empires. The first vision, for those who don't remember clearly, is the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, in which he sees a statue composed of several components, starting with gold and ending with clay. This is an image describing a succession of empires that will be weaker and weaker. It is followed in chapter 7 by a dream Daniel has, in which he sees four beasts come out of the sea. These four beasts also represent four empires, and it is this second vision that is particularly interesting for us in connection with Rome, because the text describes the fourth beast as particularly dreadful.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: The verse says: "After this I saw in the visions by night a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces and stamping what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that preceded it, and it had ten horns." This description originally pertains to the Hellenistic kingdoms. The four kingdoms in the book of Daniel are the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks. But later on, for example in Josephus or in rabbinic literature, these four kingdoms were interpreted as the Babylonians, the Medes and Persians together, then the Greeks, and then the Romans. So the Romans become the fourth empire, the one that is particularly dreadful and different from the others. This is how they started to apply Daniel to the situation they were experiencing in the Roman Empire.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: And just to finish with this passage, if we read chapter 7 further, we see that God will put an end to this fourth and dreadful empire and destroy it through the one like a son of man who comes on the clouds. So obviously they also used this text to argue that God would put an end to the Roman Empire, no matter how dreadful it was.

Johnny Ova: Sure, give them some hope. How did Roman writers and intellectuals actually perceive the Jews? We spoke about how the Jews looked at themselves and Rome as kind of co-heirs, but how did the Roman writers perceive them? Were Romans even aware that Jews saw themselves this way, or was this an invisible war of ideas that only the Jewish people thought about?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: It was mainly something the Jews thought, and once again, not all the Jews. Some Jews. We can't know for sure how many Jews saw Rome like this. It was a kind of inner Jewish discourse. But there are some interesting things in Roman texts too. There were many, many Jews in the Roman Empire and also in the city of Rome. We start finding evidence for Jews in the city of Rome in the first century BCE. The great Roman writer Cicero speaks of Jewish crowds attending the tribunal at some times. We have many Roman texts speaking about Jewish customs or Jews in the city of Rome. We also know there were Jewish slaves because of all the wars. Some Jews were brought to Rome as slaves, and later they may have been manumitted and become Roman citizens.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: What is interesting is that some Roman authors, especially in the first century CE up to the beginning of the second century, complain that Jewish customs, the Jewish way of life, is spreading even among Romans, and they see it somehow as a threat. I'm not saying they felt threatened as if Rome would collapse. It was not that dramatic. But they were really annoyed that some Roman citizens could embrace Judaism, and for good reasons. If we accept the testimony of Jewish and non-Jewish authors describing proselytes, people who converted to Judaism, they agree in emphasizing that converts do not worship the gods of Rome anymore. That is what was expected of someone who converted to Judaism: he or she would only worship the God of Israel. This may not always have been the case in reality, but it was what was expected.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: And some Roman authors like Tacitus complain about people joining the Jewish people and not worshipping the gods of Rome anymore. From a Roman pagan perspective, it was dangerous if people stopped performing the rituals, offering prayers or sacrifices. It was important to maintain a good relationship with the gods, and to do so one had to be observant, one had to do things. Belief was not that important for the Romans, but rituals were very important, and they were very strict in the way things had to be performed. Tacitus also writes that converts no longer care for their families or for the Roman state. Juvenal, another Roman author, wrote that they don't care for the laws of Rome anymore, only for the laws of Moses. So for the Romans it was quite a betrayal. I would not say the Romans saw the Jews as rivals. That would be too extreme. But they definitely saw Judaism as something that could not really be combined with Roman identity and cult. They were very shocked, as most pagans were, by the exclusive dimension of the cult of the God of Israel. It made no sense to pagans to worship only one deity in an exclusive manner.

Johnny Ova: That was going to be my next question. I feel like that's what annoyed them, the exclusivity of their monotheistic belief: we're worshipping our God and our God only, and we will not also worship the gods of Rome. I think that really got under their skin.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Absolutely, and that was deeply countercultural in the ancient world, not only for the Romans but for the Greeks and for any person in the ancient Greco-Roman world around the Mediterranean. It didn't make sense to worship only one deity when you could use the services of so many deities. Why deprive yourself of the possibility of receiving help and blessings from so many deities? So first, it was absurd. And second, it was a problem if someone who had been born in a pagan context, not born a Jew, chose to renounce the ancestral gods of his family, his city and his nation.

Johnny Ova: When the temple was destroyed in 70, Rome believed they had settled the question permanently, that they had finally fixed this. How did Jewish thinkers respond to that catastrophic, world-changing, faith-changing moment? Did it change the rivalry or intensify it, in your opinion?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: I think it played a real role in consolidating the perception of Rome as a rival, for the reasons I mentioned: all the substitution that started to happen because of the destruction of the temple, the fact that they took the holy vessels to Rome, and so on. So yes, the defeat in 70 played an important role in the development of this feeling of rivalry between Jews and Romans. It existed before and could be expressed in different ways, but it suddenly became more acute after 70, and even more acute after the failure of the two other revolts in the second century CE.

Johnny Ova: It also seems that some of the writers and historians who were watching or writing about this saw the fall of the temple as what some would call the judgment of God over Israel, the end of an age, the end of an era. Any thoughts or comments on that?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Yes, Josephus writes that. This is classical Deuteronomic thinking, Deuteronomic theology: when something catastrophic happens to Israel, it is because Israel has sinned. We have a lot of that in the Hebrew Bible. Josephus, writing about the war in Judea, has this kind of explanation. He writes that at least part of the population in Judea had sinned, because they rebelled not only against Rome but actually against God, and they committed many sins during the siege of Jerusalem. They massacred many people and shed blood in the sanctuary. Josephus is very hostile to the rebels, even though he himself was part of the rebellion at the beginning. But then he surrendered to the Romans, and when he writes his book in Rome many years later, he is very negative about the leaders of the revolt. He blames them and says that because of their sins the sanctuary was destroyed.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: But Josephus always remains faithful and hopeful that God will restore Israel. He never writes that God has rejected all the Jews. God rejected his people in Judea because there were people who sinned in Judea, and this led to the disaster in Jerusalem, but this is not the end of the story. Josephus thinks that ultimately God will restore Israel and Jerusalem. This is not completely explicit, but explicit enough for many scholars to draw this conclusion. In Christian literature we have a different perception. The beginning is the same: the Jewish people have sinned, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple is a punishment for those sins. But the sin here has more to do with the rejection of Jesus as Messiah and the crucifixion of Jesus. From the perspective of Christian authors, that's the big sin that leads to the punishment inflicted on the Jews in 70. This is an argument we find again and again in Christian texts, nearly up to the 20th century. It is only recently that the churches have developed a more positive vision of the Jews and of the covenant between God and Israel than they used to.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. So after the destruction of the temple and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt, how did the rabbis keep this counter-narrative alive? Did the rivalry with Rome continue in a different form?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: The main way the rabbis expressed this sense of rivalry with Rome is the identification of Rome with Esau, Jacob's brother, which we mentioned earlier. This motif grows and grows, and at some point the Roman Empire becomes Christian, and then the identification with Esau receives a new meaning, because now it is the Christian Roman Empire that is embodied in Esau, Israel's twin brother. It has an additional significance, because Christians are originally Jews. This is all about a Jewish Messiah and his Jewish followers. So the notion of brotherhood and rivalry is even more powerful in the case of a Christian Roman Empire. But it is important to keep in mind that it started with the pagan Roman Empire. It is not an invention of rabbis who experienced only the Christian Roman Empire. We find it in early sources before the Christianization of the empire.

Johnny Ova: I've got one more question for you, Dr. Berthelot, and I'm going to pump you up a little bit. You won the National Jewish Book Award for your book Jews and Their Roman Rivals. When people finish that book, what is the one thing you want them to walk away understanding that they probably never even considered before?

Dr. Katell Berthelot: I don't know if they've never considered this before, but what I would really want people to keep in mind is that we shouldn't have an essentialist vision of Judaism. Judaism is the product of many encounters with many different civilizations and also political powers. The encounter with Rome, with the pagan Roman Empire first and then the Christian one, contributed to the formation of rabbinic Judaism, which is the basis for Judaism as we know it today, be it Orthodox, Masorti or liberal. Rabbinic Judaism is the fundamental basis on which Judaism is built nowadays. Rome had an impact on the way the rabbis perceived themselves and their role in history, and on how they perceived the Torah, the law of Israel, as a national law rather than a universal law, as was the case in Hellenistic Judaism, for example.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: I have tried to argue that some of these major developments were a result of the rabbis' confrontation with the ultimate other that the Roman Empire embodied for them. So I think it is this vision of Judaism as evolving and in constant dialogue, even if it's in opposition, with the other cultures and peoples around the Jews. Not something secluded that would not change through time, because as a historian that's obviously something I cannot subscribe to.

Johnny Ova: Right, I gotcha. Dr. Katell Berthelot, thank you so much for your time today. I had a wonderful time. This was so informative, and I really think our listeners are going to be blessed by this. I thank you so very much.

Dr. Katell Berthelot: Thank you. Thank you for having me again.