Giday, I'm Gary Stevens.

And welcome to the third season of the History in the Bible podcast.

In this final season, I explore how the Jews and the Christians constructed new religions when they

were sent spinning into the void after the destruction of the temple.

All of the history about all of the books beyond the Bible. Episode 3.7, After the Temple Part 1, the Judeans.

In the last episode, I concluded my account of the great revolt, that civil war within a rebellion.

For the Jews living in Judea, the destruction of the capital

and of the temple was devastating. The rituals of the year, with their festivals and temple

sacrifices were shattered. The power of the temple political hierarchy was broken forever.

The Levites were lost to history.

The Pharisees and Sadducees disappeared as organized factions.

The Essence vanished.

The later rabbis depicted the Judean revolutionaries as either misguided fools or sinners. How could they be otherwise? Eliezer and Simon and John were deluded into thinking they could triumph against

an overwhelming power. That they spent most of the war slaughtering each other's forces rather than the Roman army, only damned them more.

The terrible irony is that the war began as a quarrel between the Judeans and their neighbours,

because the imperial power had reneged on its century-old compact to protect

Judean interests.

The rebel leaders transformed that into an unwinnable war against their former guardians.

By the mid-20th century, Jews understood the revolt as a symbol of Jewish heroism

and the exemplar of the many bitter struggles that the Jewish people would later face in a hostile world.

Israeli archaeologists in the 1960s excavated the fortress of Masada.

They unearthed bones and botchirts and scrolls and weapons.

...