Iudaea Capta Vs. Mother Zion: the Flavian Discourse on Judaeans and Its Delegitimation in 4 Ezra

Journal for the Study of Judaism 49 (2018) 498-550 Journal for the Study of Judaism brill.com/jsj Iudaea Capta vs. Mother Zion: The Flavian Discourse on Judaeans and Its Delegitimation in 4 Ezra G. Anthony Keddie1 Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada [email protected] Abstract This study proposes that the empire-wide Iudaea capta discourse should be viewed as a motivating pressure on the author of 4 Ezra. The discourse focused on Iudaea capta, Judaea captured, was pervasive across the Roman empire following the First Revolt. Though initiated by the Flavians, it became misrecognized across the Mediterranean and was expressed in a range of media. In this article, I examine the diverse evidence for this discourse and demonstrate that it not only cast Judaeans as barbaric enemies of Rome using a common set of symbols, but also attributed responsibility for a minor provincial revolt to a transregional ethnos/gens. One of the most distinctive symbols of this discourse was a personification of Judaea as a mourning woman. I argue that 4 Ezra delegitimates this Iudaea capta discourse, with its mourning woman, through the counter-image of a Mother Zion figure who transforms into the eschatological city. Keywords Iudaea capta/Judaea capta − Flavian dynasty − 4 Ezra − Roman iconography − Jewish-Roman relations − Mother Zion − apocalyptic discourse − First Jewish Revolt 1 I would like to thank Steven Friesen and L. Michael White for their helpful feedback and insightful suggestions on earlier versions of this study. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700631-12494235Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 11:31:49PM via free access Iudaea Capta vs. Mother Zion 499 According to the traditional scholarly paradigm, the function of 4 Ezra was to provide consolation, comfort, and hope2 for Judaeans during their time of trauma in the wake of the temple destruction.3 While one can scarcely doubt that this apocalypse, which vividly describes Ezra’s distress and confusion during the Babylonian captivity following the destruction of the first temple, con- tains a reaction to the destruction of the second temple by the Romans, it is not as clear why this event which occurred in 70 CE served as the motivation for a Judaean author writing towards the end of the first century CE. Schol- ars have profitably sought answers by appealing to collective memory. Dereck Daschke, for instance, has argued that the text offers an apocalyptic cure for Judaeans grappling with the memory of this traumatic experience, and Phil- ip Esler has also suggested that the text was intended to reduce dissonance caused by this dramatic event.4 Focusing specifically on the implications of the destruction on collective identity, Hindy Najman has similarly contended that 4 Ezra evinces “radical hope” in the form of a “reboot” focused on rewrit- ing tradition.5 While these important studies have investigated motivations internal to Ju- daean communities, however, external pressures on Judaean perceptions of the destruction have received far less attention—pressures such as the development of anti-Judaean sentiments across the empire in the decades following the destruction. In this study, I attempt to contribute to understanding some of these external pressures which helped to instigate and shape 4 Ezra’s apocalyptic discourse.6 I demonstrate, in particular, that the apocalypse delegitimates the ongoing Flavian discourse on Judaeans while at the same time legitimating an alternative apocalyptic epistemology and its heralds.7 2 E.g., Breech, “Form and Function.” 3 E.g., Berthelot, “Is God Unfair?”; Stone, “Reactions to Destructions.” 4 Daschke, City of Ruins, esp. 13–19; Esler, “Social Function.” 5 Najman, Losing the Temple. 6 A couple of recent studies have briefly noted external pressures on Judaeans following the temple destruction: Najman mentions the Iudaea capta coins (Losing the Temple, 143) and Grabbe notes that the fiscus Iudaicus would have been “a nagging reminder of their situation” (“4 Ezra and 2 Baruch,” 228). In a short but insightful essay, Esler recognized Roman ideology in the aftermath of the destruction, and the Iudaea capta coins in particular, as part of the historical context of 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham (“God’s Honour”). This study attempts to expand and nuance Esler’s work. 7 This analysis builds on my work on the social and political functions of apocalypticism in Revelations of Ideology. On the politics of legitimation in apocalyptic discourses, see further Carey and Bloomquist, Vision and Persuasion; Carey, “Early Christian Apocalyptic Rhetoric.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 49 (2018) 498-550Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 11:31:49PM via free access 500 Keddie The Flavian discourse focused on Iudaea capta (“Judaea captured”) was far more coherent and widespread than is often appreciated.8 After the temple destruction, the Flavians initiated a discourse that cast the whole Judaean people (ethnos or gens), not just those in Judaea, as rebels against the empire. The common symbols of this discourse were pervasive across a range of media: coins, statues, monuments, and literature. The discourse also encom- passed a new form of taxation that targeted Judaeans throughout the empire. Altogether, the various manifestations of this discourse linked all “Judaeans” throughout the empire to the revolt and ensuing temple destruction in Judaea, demonstrating that Judaean identity involved much more than religion; it had social, political, and economic consequences based on ethnic allegiance to the Judaean homeland.9 This discourse was not simply top-down state “propaganda,” but was main- tained and regenerated through the dispositions of imperial subjects, and especially elites around the empire.10 To draw on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, this discourse materialized through the agency of individu- als who accepted its tenets as natural.11 The language and imagery of Iudaea capta became incorporated into the habitus of imperial subjects, or their “set 8 The “Iudaea capta discourse” is the label that I use to synthesize the related develop- ments involving attitudes toward Judaeans beginning in the immediate aftermath of the revolt. Mills offers a useful definition of discourse, “groups of utterances which seem to be regulated in some way and which seem to have a coherence and a force to them in common” (Discourse, 7). To this, I would only add that discourse incorporates not only verbal utterances, but also practices. I use the term discourse in this study to describe one heuristically isolable aspect, or trajectory, of Flavian ideology—namely the Iudaea capta discourse. In this way, I consider the relationship of discourse to imperial ideology as that of part to whole. 9 In this study, I discuss “Judaeans” instead of “Jews,” translating forms of Ἰουδαῖος and Iudaeus accordingly, in order to emphasize the ethnic and territorial dimensions of this designation that were so consequential in the period analyzed here. As Wendt puts it, “I find ‘Judean’ useful precisely because Iudaeus/ Ἰουδαῖος evoked a suite of specific cultural practices associated with Judea, of which the Jerusalem temple and sacred or oracu- lar writings were a central part. ‘Judean’ thus points to Judea in a way that Jewish does not, at a time when geography was foundational to how Romans imagined the religious practices, institutions, and paraphernalia that they understood to emanate from particular regions, regardless of where the latter were actually encountered” (Temple Gates, 87 n. 55). For similar perspectives, see Esler, Conflict and Identity, 63–74; Mason, “Jews”; Satlow, “Jew or Judaean?” 10 For reservations about the model of state controlled “propaganda” in the study of Roman art, see Stewart, Social History, 112. 11 For this type of approach, see further Ando, Imperial Ideology. Journal for the Study of JudaismDownloaded 49 from (2018) Brill.com10/06/2021 498-550 11:31:49PM via free access Iudaea Capta vs. Mother Zion 501 of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions.”12 The legitimation, or misrecognition, of this discourse enabled its widespread reproduction, and thus the reproduction and development of ethnic prejudice against Judaeans.13 For Bourdieu, this misrecognition constitutes a form of “symbolic violence” against social agents because it establishes their complicity through discursive media that mask the power mechanisms and differentials of domination.14 It is only by disrupting this symbolic system of misrecognition that agents can resist domination, although their resistance remains constrained by their habitus.15 The focus of this investigation is one of the primary symbols of the Iudaea capta discourse, a dejected Judaean woman who represents Judaea’s defeat by the Romans. I begin this study by examining the images of this woman on coins and statues before seeking to contextualize this symbol within the broader Iu- daea capta discourse as known from literary and material sources from around the empire. In the following section, I turn to the image of Mother Zion in 4 Ezra, arguing that the text delegitimates the Iudaea capta discourse through its empowerment of a troubled Judaean woman who serves as a counterpoint for the disconsolate woman featured in the Flavian discourse. 1 The Symbolic Violence of the Iudaea Capta Discourse Modern historians have often noted the uniqueness of the treatment of Judae- ans in the period following the First Revolt. In particular, they have noticed the unusual level of intensity for a discourse surrounding the military suppression of a revolt in a Roman province. Greg Woolf, for instance, explains that “Roman emperors often played down the seriousness of provincial revolts … because provincial unrest reflected poorly on their own claims to be the guarantors 12 Introduction by Randal Johnson in Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 5. See also Bourdieu, Outline, 78–86, 143–58; Bourdieu, Distinction, 169–74. Cf. Rey, Bourdieu on Religion, 46–50; Webb et al., Understanding Bourdieu, 21–44.

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