The Bar Kokhba Revolt Under Hadrian

The event

Sixty years after the destruction of the Second Temple, tensions between Rome and the Jewish population of Judea flared into open war once more. The emperor Hadrian's plans to found a new pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem, complete with a temple to Jupiter where the Jewish Temple had stood, along with (according to some ancient sources) restrictions on circumcision, provoked a fierce rebellion beginning in AD 132, led by a charismatic commander named Simeon bar Kosiba, better known by his nickname bar Kokhba ('son of the star'), whom the influential rabbi Akiva reportedly hailed as the promised messiah.

The rebels achieved remarkable early success, driving Roman forces out of large parts of Judea and even minting their own coins to mark what they clearly believed was a restored, independent Jewish state. Hadrian responded by pouring legions into the province from across the empire under the general Julius Severus, and the reconquest, when it came, was executed with grinding thoroughness. The Roman historian Cassius Dio reports staggering casualty figures — hundreds of thousands of Jewish dead and hundreds of villages destroyed — figures that, even allowing for ancient exaggeration, reflect a catastrophe on the scale of the AD 70 war.

In the revolt's aftermath, Hadrian moved to erase the very memory of a Jewish homeland: Jerusalem was rebuilt as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina, with Jews forbidden to enter it at all except on a single day of mourning each year, and the province itself was renamed from Judea to Syria Palaestina. This crushing defeat sealed nearly two thousand years of Jewish dispersion from their ancient capital — even as the church, by this point increasingly made up of Gentile believers spread throughout the empire, continued to grow largely undisturbed by this particular conflict.

Dating

The revolt's outbreak in AD 132 is secure. The traditional end date is AD 135 (fall of Betar and death of Simon bar Kosiba), but epigraphic work by Werner Eck — reconstructing Hadrian's second imperatorial acclamation and the triumphal honors granted to the governors of Judaea, Syria, and Arabia — has persuaded many scholars that fighting was not finally suppressed until early AD 136, and many references now print 132-135/136. The difference does not affect the outline: the revolt's crushing, the ban on Jews entering Jerusalem, and the refounding of the city as Aelia Capitolina are all firmly established.

Other witnesses

• Cassius Dio, Roman History 69.12-14
• Eusebius, Church History 4.6

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 133: Christianity and Judaism — free full issue