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Questions about First Jewish Revolt

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HT:
Recently I finished my reading of Josephus' Jewish War, now I have 2 questions:
http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/coins.htm
http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah/messianic_claimants12.html#John
http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah/messianic_claimants14.html
(1)From those websites, how can we guess who else minted which type of coins?

http://askelm.com/temple/t980504.htm
(2)Looks like the present Western Wall is the remain of Antonia, so is it possible? In War 7.1.1, Romans just preserved the 3 towers and the wall as enclosed the city on the west side only. So which one is this Western Wall actually?

Waiting for you answer, thanks very much :laugh: :).

PeterD:
The Western Wall is the side of the platform upon which stood Herod's temple (Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount) and is also called the Wailing Wall.

The Antonia Fortress was to the north of the Temple Mount. Herod re-built it in 36 BC and named it for his friend Mark Antony, but it was completely destroyed by Titus in 70 AD.

Hope that answers your second question.

Robert_Brenchley:
At the beginning of the revolt, the insurgents had an aristocratic, priestly government which issued, guess what, shekels to pay the Temple tax with. This issue continued unchanged throught the revolt, and I bet they were minted within the Temple or at least nearby, under governmental control. this was the centre of power at that point, after all, and the site of a very large treasury which could well have supplied the silver. This issue is, of course, characterised by the absence of images. The images on the shekel of Tyre had never previously been an issue, and my guess is that they followed the same practice as the later Rabbis when two commandments conflicted, and argued that the requirement to have a pure silver shekel overrode the ban on images, given that this was the only available pure silver currency. All the evidence points to a rise in what we would nowadays call fundamentalism in the years before the revolt, and they probably became less tolerant of the images as time passed.

In Years 2 and 3 of the revolt, they issued vast quantities of image-free prutot. The issue of AE coin in Judea was always sporadic, presumably ceasing when demand was satisfied. I'd suggest that this issue was intended to provide kosher, image-free coin for the ordinary peasant. The aristocratic regimes of Eleazar ben Ananias and Ananus ben Ananus, which were often at odds with popuist leaders, probably weren't responsive to this need. In the winter of 67-68, during Year 2 of the revolt, counting from May of 66 when the Romans withdrew from Jerusalem, this government was overthrown by the populist John of Gischala. I think he was probably responsible for the prutot.

Many of these coins have the inscription 'The Freedom of Zion'. This was a manifest reality; Jerusalem was indeed free from the Romans. In Year 4 (69-70) a new inscription appears; 'The Redemption of Zion'. Redemption didn't carry anything like its modern, Christian, spiritualised meaning; in the Old Testament a redeemer is a relative who buys back land which has been sold due to poverty, or who buys back someone who has had to sell themselves into slavery. So there's a connotation of property restoration and the upholding of the rights of the poor. Every 50 years the Jews were supposed, according to Leviticus 25, to hold a 'Jubilee Year' during which slaves were freed and land was returned to its original owners, again restoring the rights of the poor. There's not a shred of evidence that this ever happened, and it was probably akin to the sort of promise politicians tend to make at election time, designed to get the poor 'on side' with the government. But it's pretty clear that many, at least, of the poor did in fact dream of the Jubilee, it's an important concept in the New Testament, and it crops up in the Dead Sea Scrolls and elsewhere. One revolutionary leader, Simon bar Giora, seems to have wanted to carry out such a project, since Josephus says that he proclaimed 'freedom for the slaves and rewards for the free'. In April of 69 - right at the end of Year 3 - the government of John of Gischala was overthrown by an alliance between Simon and the High Priests. Simon now became the dominant figure, and I'd suggest that this last inscription represents his manifesto; property was going to be 'redeemed' and given to the poor.

Unfortunately, of course, I can't prove any of this, but it's fun to speculate.

HT:
Thank you for telling!! :) :laugh:
The platform is shown in the picture (yellow zone) but in the west, so the western platform is present Wailing Wall, is it?

PeterD:
The Western (Wailing) Wall is the west wall of of the platform - where the blue "W" is in the picture.

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