Mount Carmel, both largely populated by Gentiles. To the north were the Syro-Phoenician Tyre, Sidon and their dependencies. On its eastern boundary lay the equally heathen Gaulanitis, Hippos and Gadara. And even in the south it was separated from Judea by the Hellenistic territory of Scythopolis (Beth Shean), and the whole hostile province of Samaria. In consequence, although Transjordan, or Perea, shared the same government as Galilee during the New Testament period, the fact remains that to a large degree the province constituted an autonomous and self-contained politico-ethnic unit.
Its overwhelming Jewishness was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the eighth century BC the prophet Isaiah wrote of the ‘District (Gelil) of the Gentiles’,2 the phrase from which the name Galilee derives. The colonization of the conquered Northern kingdom of Israel by Mesopotamian peoples3 can hardly have altered this situation though, clearly, Israelite occupation never ceased altogether. The Jewish minority nevertheless came under such pagan pressure at the time of the outbreak of the Maccabean rebellion, that Simon Maccabaeus, having brought temporary relief by defeating the local Gentiles and their outside allies, decided on a drastic rescue bid and removed the whole of Galilean Jewry to Judea.4
The refugees no doubt returned to their homes after the final Maccabean triumph, but it was not until the very end of the second century BC (104–103 BC) that Northern Galilee and its adjacent districts were annexed to the Maccabean-Hasmonean realm as a result of the victory of Aristobulus I over Iturea.5 Josephus also reports an ultimatum issued by the victors to the vanquished that their presence would only be tolerated if they were prepared to ‘be circumcised and to live in accordance with the laws of the Jews’.6
In regard to the governmental systems in force in Roman Palestine during the first half of the first Christian century, the province of Galilee possessed an administrative machine distinct from that of Judea, a fact that cannot have failed to reinforce Galilean self-awareness. After the banishment of Archelaus to Vienna in Gaul in AD 6, the ephemeral rule of Judea by a Herodian ethnarch was replaced by a direct Roman take-over. Following the census ordered in the same year by Publius Sulpicius Quirinius of Gospel fame, the legate of Syria, a Roman knight, Coponius, was appointed prefect of Judea, and as such, made directly responsible to the emperor for the military, financial and judicial administration of the region.7 Thus, despite the real power still possessed by the Sanhedrin and the aristocratic chief priests and Temple officials, Judea could not help but be humiliated by the presence of imperial Rome.
Galilee was spared this outrage altogether. From 4 BC until AD 39 – throughout the whole life of Jesus – it was administered, together with Perea, by a Herodian tetrarch, Antipas, and after him by a king, Agrippa I (AD 39–44). Rome did not appear on the scene except between AD 44 and 66, and even then the region of Lake Tiberias came under the jurisdiction of Agrippa II between AD 54 and 66. The Herodians were the native aristocracy of the province, and in addition the administrators of the 204 cities and villages of Upper and Lower Galilee and of the Valley, i.e. the Tiberias region,8 such as the archon (chief official) Jairus, described as president of the synagogue (the two functions being the same),9 were Galileans, as were the tax-collectors whose duty it was to fill the tetrarch’s, not the emperor’s, treasury.
No direct evidence points to a Galilean senate and high court similar to the Jerusalem Sanhedrin, the principal legal, political and religious institution of Judea, but the council (synedrion) set up by the proconsul Gabinius in 57 BC in Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee,10 may be presumed to have continued until Herodian times, or to have been reinstituted then. It can, in fact, hardly be a coincidence that the Galilean magistrates drawn by Josephus into his military government during the first revolt were, like the members of the Judean Sanhedrin, precisely seventy in number.11
The Galilee of Jesus was populous and relatively wealthy. ‘Never did the men lack courage nor the country men’, writes Josephus.12 The reason for its economic well-being was the extraordinary fertility of the land and the full use made of it by its people. As Josephus describes it, it is ‘so rich in soil and pasturage and produces such variety of trees, that even the most indolent are tempted by these facilities to devote themselves to agriculture’. Although smaller than Perea, its resources were greater, ‘for it is entirely under cultivation and produces crops from one end to the other’.13 One of its products was olive oil, which was exported in large quantities to Jews in Syria, Babylonia, Media, Egypt and Cappadocia, Diaspora regions lacking in this important commodity.14 This rich farming industry, together with the fishing on the Lake, and employment in the usual crafts demanded by everyday life,15 gave Galilee a self-sufficiency which, with the legacy of its history and the unsophisticated simplicity of its life, is likely to have nourished the pride and independence of its inhabitants.
Galilean Rebels
From the middle of the last pre-Christian century it was the most troublesome of all Jewish districts. Simon Dubnov exaggerates only slightly when he writes:
From Galilee stemmed all the revolutionary movements which so disturbed the Romans.16
In fact, if the identification of Judas the son of Ezekias as Judas of Gamala, known as Judas the Galilean, is correct,17 the main inspiration of the whole Zealot agitation sprang from the same rebellious Galilean family.
Ezekias, described as a ‘chief brigand’, was the patriarch of the revolutionaries who in the middle of the first century BC ravaged Upper Galilee. Captured and summarily executed in about 47 BC by the young Herod, the then governor of Galilee,18 his activities were carried on by his son Judas, a man with royal aspirations, who when Herod died broke into the king’s arsenal in Sepphoris in 4 BC and ‘became an object of terror to all men’.19 Ten years later this same Judas surnamed ‘the Galilean’ incited his compatriots to revolt at the time of the census, enjoining them to pay no taxes to Rome and, in general, to recognize no foreign masters. With a Pharisee named Zadok, he thus became the co-founder not only of a band of agitators, but also of a politico-religious party, that of the Zealots.20 Some forty years later still, during his procuratorship of Judea from AD 46 to 48, the wholly Romanized Tiberius Julius Alexander, nephew of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, tried and sentenced to crucifixion two of Judas the Galilean’s sons, Jacob and Simon.21 His last surviving offspring, Menahem, captured from the Romans the stronghold of Masada and attempted, in AD 66, at the beginning of the first Jewish War, to assert his supreme authority among the rebels by entering the Temple in royal apparel. However, he and most of his followers died in the feud which raged at that time between the various revolutionary factions in Jerusalem.22 One of those who escaped the massacre was another descendant of Judas the Galilean. This was a nephew of Menahem, Eleazar, the son of Jairus, the legendary captain of Masada, who at the head of a few hundred Zealots continued resistance against Rome for four years after the fall of Jerusalem.23
The struggle against the Empire was nevertheless not just a family business, but a full-scale Galilean activity in the first century AD. Those pilgrims whose blood Pontius Pilate mingled with their sacrifices must have been Galilean revolutionaries,24 and it was again a group of Galileans who, in AD 49, urged the Jewish masses in Jerusalem to resort to arms, assert their liberty, and reject the intolerable slavery imposed on them by Rome.25 Furthermore, one of the bloodiest leaders of the AD 66–70 war was John the son of Levi from Gischala (Gush Halab) in Upper Galilee.26 He and his supporters, ‘the Galilean contingent’, acquired particular notoriety in besieged Jerusalem for their ‘mischievous ingenuity and audacity’.27 Thus, all in all, it is not surprising that to the first-century AD Palestinian establishment the word ‘Galilean’ ceased merely to refer to a particular geographical area and took on the dark political connotation of a possible association with Judas the Galilean.28 Even the Mishnah’s ‘Galilean heretic’ is an extreme nationalist who reproaches the Pharisees for including the name of the emperor in the dating of
