ra40 when Herod died, he left behind far more than

A
SEETHING POPULACE
EAGER TO EXACT REVENGE
ON HIS FRIENDS
AND ALLIES!

He also left
a mob of jobless poor
who had flooded into Jerusalem from the rural villages
to build his palaces & theaters?! Herod's monumental building spree,
and especially his Temple expansion project, had employed tens of thousands
of peasants and day laborers, many of whom had been driven off their land by drought
or famine or, often enough, the malevolent persistence of the debt collector. But with the end
of the building boom in Jerusalem and the completion of the Temple shortly before Herod's death,
these peasants & day laborers suddenly found themselves unemployed
ànd cast out of the holy city to fend
for themselves?!

As a result
of the mass rusticaction, the countryside once
again became a hotbed of revolutionary activity,
just as it had been before Herod was declared king! It was around this time
that a new and far more fearsome group of bandits & brigands arose in Galilee, led by a
magnetic teacher & revolutionary known as Yehudah the Galilean: the traditions say that this Yehudah
was a son of the famed bandit chief Yechezkel/Hezekiah, the failed messiah whom Herod captured &
beheaded already forty years earlier as part of his campaign to clear his whole countryside of bandit
menace; after Herod's death, Yehudah the Galilean joined forces with another mysterious Pharisee
named Tsadok to launch a wholly new independence movement that Flavius Josephus later terms
the "Fourth Philosophy," so as to differentiate it from the other three 'older' "Philosophies":
the Pharisees (parshim), the Sadducees (tsaddukim),
& the Essenes (chassidim)!

What set these
members of this Fourth Philosophy apart
from the rest was their unmistakable unshakable
extremely fanatic commitment ('kana'im'knipoog to 'freeing Israel'
from any kind of foreign rule & their very
fervent insistence, even unto death,
that they would serve 'no
Lord save the
One G d'
...

And there was
of course also again a very well-defined term
for this type of belief, one that all pious Jews,
regardless of their political stance,
would have recognized ànd
very proudly claimed
for themselves:
ZEAL.
24 nov 2015 - bewerkt op 27 nov 2015 - meld ongepast verhaal
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