Rome didn’t just conquer Israel. It tried to become Israel. In this episode of the Dig In Podcast, I sit down with Dr. Katell Berthelot, one of the world’s leading scholars on Jewish-Roman relations and winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her groundbreaking work Jews and Their Roman Rivals. What she reveals in this conversation will reshape the way you think about the ancient world, the Bible, and the rivalry between two civilizations that both believed they were destined to rule the earth.
Dr. Berthelot takes us inside a story most people have never heard. While Rome was building an empire on military conquest and claiming to bring universal peace, law, and order to the world, Jewish writers and thinkers were building a counter-narrative that said everything Rome claimed for itself actually belonged to Israel. Peace? That comes from the Messiah, not Caesar. Law? The Torah is divine, and Roman courts are corrupt. And when Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 AD, stole the holy vessels, redirected the Jewish temple tax to rebuild the temple of Jupiter, and eventually erased Jerusalem itself to build a pagan Roman colony on top of it, the rivalry didn’t end. It intensified. The rabbis responded by identifying Rome as Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, Israel’s mirror image and ultimate rival. Two civilizations. Two claims. One God watching over all of it.
In this episode you will learn:
– How Philo of Alexandria subtly positioned the Jews as superior to both the Greeks and the Romans in his writings
– Why some Jews saw Rome not as just another empire but as something far more dangerous, an empire trying to take Israel’s place in God’s story
– The shocking details of what Rome did with the Temple vessels, the Jewish tax, and the city of Jerusalem after 70 AD
– How the Hasmonean dynasty created a template for Jewish political independence and why it still matters
– How Jewish readers reinterpreted Daniel’s four beasts to place Rome as the final and most dreadful empire
– Why Roman writers were genuinely annoyed that their own citizens were converting to Judaism and abandoning Roman gods
– The powerful rabbinic tradition of identifying Rome with Esau, Jacob’s twin, and what that metaphor really means
– How the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt didn’t crush the Jewish counter-narrative but made it stronger
– Why Dr. Berthelot argues that Judaism as we know it today was shaped directly by this confrontation with Rome
Get Dr. Berthelot’s award-winning book:
Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel- https://a.co/d/0iFUBs2Q
See her author page on Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/stores/Katell-Berthelot/author/B004MM3GOY?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=165231fd-c2f1-4eb2-a54c-19efdbaead37
Learn more about Dr. Berthelot’s research: https://www.judaism-and-rome.org
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