The Bar Kokhba Revolt | Son of the Star | The Second Jewish Revolt

Bar Kokhba Revolt, also called Second Jewish Revolt, (132–135 CE)
Bar Kokhba, (Aramaic: “Son of the Star”)
Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Judaea. The revolt was preceded by years of clashes between Jews and Romans in the area. Finally, in 132 CE, the misrule of Tinnius Rufus, the Roman governor of Judaea, combined with the emperor Hadrian’s intention to found a Roman colony on the site of Jerusalem and his restrictions on Jewish religious freedom and observances (which included a ban on the practice of male circumcision), roused the last remnants of Palestinian Jewry to revolt. A bitter struggle ensued. Bar Kokhba became the leader of this second Jewish revolt (see First Jewish Revolt [66–70]); although at first successful, his forces proved no match against the methodical and ruthless tactics of the Roman general Julius Severus. With the fall of Jerusalem and then Bethar, the fortress to the southwest of Jerusalem where Bar Kokhba was slain, the rebellion was crushed in 135. According to Christian sources, Jews were thenceforth forbidden to enter Jerusalem.

Bar Kokhba, (Aramaic: “Son of the Star”) Kokhba also spelled Kochba, also called Bar Koziba, original name Simeon bar Kosba, Kosba also spelled Koseba or Kosiba, (died 135 CE, Bethar, Palestine [now Battīr, West Bank]), Jewish leader who led a bitter but unsuccessful revolt (132–135 CE) against Roman dominion in Judaea.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/...


During his tour of the Eastern Empire in 131, the Roman emperor Hadrian decided upon a policy of Hellenization to integrate the Jews into the empire. Circumcision was proscribed, a Roman colony (Aelia) was founded in Jerusalem, and a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus was erected over the ruins of the Jewish Temple.

Enraged by these measures, the Jews rebelled in 132, the dominant and irascible figure of Simeon bar Kosba at their head. Reputedly of Davidic descent, he was hailed as the messiah by the greatest rabbi of the time, Akiva ben Yosef, who also gave him the title Bar Kokhba (“Son of the Star”), a messianic allusion. Bar Kokhba took the title nasi (“prince”) and struck his own coins, with the legend “Year 1 of the liberty of Jerusalem.”
The Roman historian Dion Cassius noted that the Christian sect refused to join the revolt. The Jews took Aelia by storm and badly mauled the Romans’ Egyptian Legion, XXII Deiotariana. The war became so serious that in the summer of 134 Hadrian himself came from Rome to visit the battlefield and summoned the governor of Britain, Gaius Julius Severus, to his aid with 35,000 men of the Legion X. Jerusalem was retaken, and Severus gradually wore down and constricted the rebels’ area of operation, until in 135 Bar Kokhba was himself killed at Bethar, his stronghold southwest of Jerusalem. The remnant of the Jewish army was soon crushed; Jewish war casualties are recorded as numbering 580,000, not including those who died of hunger and disease. Judaea was desolated, the remnant of the Jewish population annihilated or exiled, and Jerusalem barred to Jews thereafter.

The original diversity of late second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity meets the bottleneck of the great clashes between the Jewish rebellions and the Roman Empire. Out of the Anvil and the Hammer will emerge a new religion and a new Judaism forged from this dynamic explosive mix of civilizations.

The elite, lead by the powerful high priest, tried to cooperate with Rome. They resigned themselves to the existence of large pagan cities in their country: Sepphoris in Galilee for example, and Caesarea, where a temple had been erected for the worship of the emperor. Other Jews were less easy-going. Ever since the death of the last king of the Jews, Herod the Great, people had pointed out that paying taxes to the emperor was a blasphemous act, because God was the one and only lord of Israel. Besides, it was widely believed that in the seventy-seventh generation after the creation, the Messiah would come to restore Israel.
Nobody knew exactly what this meant was the Messiah a warrior?
a priest?
a teacher?
expectations were high.

When king Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, the emperor Augustus divided his kingdom between his three sons. Herod Antipas was to rule Galilee and the east bank of the Jordan as a tetrarch until 39 CE
https://www.livius.org/articles/place...


"Caught between the anvil and the hammer
In the forging house of a new life,
Transforming the pangs that delivered me
Into the joy of new songs"
Kofi Awoonor

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