Category: Biblical Geography

Herod, Bar Kochba, Trump and Huckabee: A Battle for Eternity

On By SarahIn Ancient Rome, Archaeology, Architecture, Biblical Geography, Book Review, Crisis, Eikha, Fourth of Juy, Hebrew, Heroism, Holy Sites, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Identity, Nationalism, October 7, Religion, The Destruction of the Temple, Tisha B'Av, War, Western CivilizationLeave a comment

Last week, on a beautiful June night, I found myself in the eastern Judean desert, not far from Bethlehem, at the foot of ancient Herodium, a lavish palace built by King Herod between 23 and 15 BCE. Herod was a widely despised, Roman-appointed client king of Israel, Jewish in name only, who displaced the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans, descendants of the Maccabees, had won Jewish self-rule a century earlier, a victory still celebrated each year at Chanukah. Herod’s tyrannical, paranoid reign ended in the murder of his own wives and children. He was also an ambitious builder, and many of his grand projects still punctuate the landscape of modern Israel: Masada, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and most prominently his expanded Temple Mount, including the Western Wall.

Aerial View of Herodium Fortress (Source: Menahem Kahana/ AFP )

The fortress looms above the surrounding desert for miles. It was my first time visiting, and while the winding, unfamiliar drive there was a bit stress-inducing, the moment I first glimpsed the site from afar, it took my breath away. Herod demanded a fortress so grand it could be seen from Jerusalem, and the terraformed desert mountain remains a masterful feat of engineering. Efforts are now underway to make the site, located in a politically sensitive area, accessible to the broader public. The evening was the kickoff to an academic conference on Israeli heritage in Judea and Samaria. Present were archaeologists, political figures, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who was presented with a special award by the Ministry of Heritage. At the entrance, we were greeted by a recreated period marketplace, complete with actors dressed as Roman legionnaires scuffling with Israelite locals, a role which I suppose included the rest of us too. An illuminated theater had been erected inside the massive ancient pool Herod once, inexplicably, managed to fill with water in the middle of the desert. As the stars came out, we sat for an original production titled “Herod vs. Bar Kochba: The Battle for Eternity.”

A sense of the scene (note the looming mound of Herodium on the right)

Bar Kochba was a Jewish guerilla leader who led a three-year revolt against Roman occupation in Judea, seventy years after Rome destroyed the renovated Second Temple, another Herodian project and the catastrophe still mourned each year on the fast of Tisha B’Av. The play follows a young Jewish rebel, his wife, and son, camped out at a Herodium that has by then fallen into disrepair. Recent excavations at the site have in fact uncovered a trove of Bar Kochba-era coins; I was handed a replica of one at the event. As the rebels onstage dig tunnels, ration water, and prepare for battle, they are visited by the ghost of Herod, who still haunts his beloved palace. He mocks their devotion to Jewish sovereignty, a doomed cause, he insists, even a century after his own death, given the strength of Rome. Herod argues for compromise and accommodation – you are all headed towards death (forgive my paraphrase, I didn’t think to record at the time). Herod tells them: “Choose life, choose prosperity.” All that is needed, he suggests, is to submit to Roman rule, pay their taxes, and allow a few of their gods and statues into the Jewish holy places. The rebels are unconvinced. They are willing to die at Roman hands not because they love death, but because they are playing a longer game. “Perhaps it will be a few years, perhaps a thousand,” the mother tells her son, “but one day we will march back into Jerusalem and worship our God.”

Roman Legionary Deigns to Take a Photo With the Israelite Riff-Raff

The play then shifts into an ahistorical debate between Herod and Bar Kochba themselves. Herod, played to perfection by the legendary Israeli actor Shuli Rand, makes the (correct) case that modern Israel is no direct heir to Bar Kochba’s fanatical legacy. “Look around you,” he says. “You’re sitting in a theater. Who brought theater to ancient Israel? Do you love culture? Wine? Good food?” These are not the tastes of single-minded desert warriors. Bar Kochba counters that modern Israelis may indeed enjoy a comfortable life, but when crisis strikes, as it did on October 7th, they will fight to their last breath for their people and their land. Bar Kochba himself left little behind. No children, no followers, nothing approaching the scale of what Herod built. His revolt’s brutal defeat left hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians dead or enslaved. Rome expelled the Jews from Jerusalem, renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and rebranded the province itself Syria Palaestina, scrubbing Judaea from the map entirely. But the play’s argument is that the fighting spirit that Bar Kochba drew on persists in the modern state regardless, a key part of its ethos from its founding to today.

Each member of the large audience was given a copy, in Hebrew translation, of Barry Strauss’s excellent new book, Jews vs. Rome. The book supplies more nuance than any play could, making a convincing case that the two-hundred-year Jewish struggle against Rome, a struggle with an outsized influence on both Rabbinic and Christian tradition, cannot be separated from the larger contest between empires playing out at the same time, namely between Rome and Parthia, heir to the Persian empire. No small nation in the Mediterranean basin could survive in that era without aligning with one power or the other, and the Jews knew this as well as anyone. Strauss argues that the revolt against Rome was also a desperate, ultimately futile bid to draw Parthian intervention to the Jewish cause.

The timing felt almost too fitting. That same morning, at the G7 summit in France, Trump had defended a newly signed Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, located more or less where Parthia once stood. The MOU calls for a sixty-day ceasefire, during which the US would release significant funds to Tehran, and involves the Iranians trying to bolt-on an Israeli ceasefire in its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The MOU was met with disappointment, to put it mildly, by many Israelis who had hoped for a more decisive outcome, not to mention concern that it will limit Israel’s existential struggle against Iran’s proxies. President Trump, in an attempt to push the MOU forward, voiced some criticism of recent Israeli military action in Lebanon, adding: “Without the United States there would be no Israel, without me there would be no Israel.” Trump’s claim here is characteristically over-the-top. Yet some 1,900 years after Judea’s doomed insurgencies against Rome, we are reminded once again of the painful necessity, for a small nation, of relying on a great power ally.

However, the United States is no Roman Empire, and as the evening at Herodium testified, Jewish life is flourishing across the Land of Israel and increasingly taking on a confident, nationalistic character. Three years into a war launched by the October 7th massacre, our strategic position is far stronger, our enemies considerably weakened, and the shekel is soaring (much to the frustration of American expats still earning in dollars). Modern Israeli culture has reclaimed figures like Bar Kochba and Shimon Bar Giora, who led the Zealots in the earlier Great Revolt, despite their crushing defeats at Roman hands. They represent a spirit of Jewish agency and independence that still underlies many of Israel’s great military and cultural achievements. Strauss, in his book, quotes Churchill’s line after a 1940 war cabinet meeting: “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those who surrender tamely are finished.”

It was against this backdrop, both contemporary and ancient, that I especially appreciated Ambassador Huckabee’s remarks when he accepted his award. He spoke twice that night, once in a smaller, filmed setting that has since been clipped and mocked by Tucker Carlson and others with little sense of the context in which it was deliveed. But in his similar, full remarks before an audience of more than a thousand, Huckabee noted that the United States is approaching the 250th anniversary of its independence this July 4th, a milestone that might seem almost laughable set against 3,800 years of Jewish history in this land. “To you, we’re mere children,” he said. “You’ve been around a lot longer, and your history is not only your history, but I want to say this, and I hope you understand, your history is also our history.” He went on: “Without you and your history, and your preserving God’s purpose and God’s law, there would never be Western civilization. There would never be an America, because America was founded on the principles that were established right here in this land all those many thousands of years ago.” Many read Huckabee’s words as a direct answer to Trump’s comments earlier that day. His message was that Israel owes real gratitude to its current great power patron, the United States. But the United States, rooted as it is in biblical values, is itself a kind of outgrowth of the Jewish struggle against Rome that played out nineteen centuries ago. That struggle was the crucible from which both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were born.

In making this case, Huckabee charts a third way, distinct from the two offered onstage that night. It is not Herod’s path, accommodation purchased through submission and the gradual erosion of what makes a people distinct. Nor is it pure Bar Kochba – righteous rebellion that goes down fighting, in flames. Huckabee’s third way is partnership felt as kinship, a great power and a small nation bound not merely by shared interest but by shared inheritance. America’s strength flows from values Israel gave the world long before America existed to receive them. It is a relationship that asks Israel to feel gratitude without shame, and asks America to remember that the debt runs both ways. Driving home that night, I watched Herodium recede in the rearview mirror, its massive dome holding the dark a little longer than everything around it before finally sinking under the horizon. Herod built it to be seen from Jerusalem. Two thousand years later, it is still a fixed point in an old argument about what is needed for a nation, and the set of ideas it embodies, to fulfill its destiny.

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Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric

On By SarahIn Amos, Biblical Geography, Book Review, Crisis, Hebrew, Israel, Leadership, Nationalism, October 7, Poetry, Politics, Prophecy, Religion, Review, Sukkot, ZionismLeave a comment

One of our family’s favorite songs to play in the car here in Israel is a feel-good anthem called “Al Tira Yisrael,” (“Have No Fear, Israel”). The version we listen to, by Israeli singer Itay Levi, is meant to inspire confidence during the difficult period following October 7. Its refrain includes a quote from the Biblical Book of Amos: “Do not fear Israel, do not be afraid, / For are you not a young lion?/ And if a lion roars—who won’t be afraid?/ Who won’t be afraid?”

The Roaring Lion of Tel Hai (Public Domain)

The sentiment of Israel roaring like a lion reached its pinnacle during the “Sha’agat HaAri” (“Lion’s Roar”) joint US–Israeli campaign against Iran, which took place between Purim and Pesach this year. This, too, draws on Amos and suggests continuity with the “Rising Lion” campaign that took place against Iran one year ago in June. Yet a closer reading of Amos reveals a more complex context for the line, “If a lion roars, who will not be afraid?” One might even ask whether its fear is meant for our enemies or for our own society.

Amos was a Judean shepherd and farmer living in the eighth century bce in a place called Tekoa, located on the edge of the desert southeast of Jerusalem. Despite living in a time of relative tranquility, he is called upon by G-d to warn the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, largely residing in Samaria, to stop their corrupt behavior or face destruction. Amos prophesies using rich and vivid literary language. The lion is one recurring motif among many that the prophet employs to stunning and devastating effect.

Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom, a well-known Tanach teacher based in Los Angeles, authored a wonderful volume entitled Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric published by Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers in Jerusalem. The book is part of a series of scholarly volumes that address specific Biblical books. Each book is designed to be read on its own but also serves as a learning supplement. It offers deep, line-by-line analysis of a book’s language that is sensitive to the history of traditional interpretation, as well as to its historical and archaeological context, and to a peshat-based “close reading” of the text itself. In this spirit, Rabbi Etshalom’s Amos marries rabbinic interpretation with scholarly analysis, while demonstrating an unyielding dedication to making sense of Amos’s brilliant but dense and sometimes elusive prophetic rhetoric.

For the full review see the Summer 2026 Issue of Jewish Action Magazine

From Meitzarim to the Strait of Hormuz: Living the Bible in Real Time

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Bereishit, Biblical Geography, Classics, Diaspora, Grief, Hebrew, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Identity, Leadership, Nationalism, October 7, Passover, Purim, Redemption, Religion, Simchat Torah, Tanakh, Western Civilization, ZionismLeave a comment

On the seventh morning of this past holiday of Passover in Israel I walked gingerly to synagogue, still groggy from a 3:00 am siren, wondering what had come of President Trump’s ultimatum to Iran issued before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with a weary look – common among parents of five young kids who have been jumping off the walls for nearly six weeks at home during a war. Her youngest lay at her feet on his belly whacking a stick into a muddy puddle leftover from the previous day’s rainstorm. “How are you?” I asked, “actually now I’m great!” she smiled, “did you hear the news? There’s been a ceasefire. They opened the Straits of Hormuz.”

I hadn’t heard, but as I entered the synagogue, the congregation had just risen to hear the Song of the Sea, the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea, which is read on the final day of Passover each year when our tradition believes the event took place. Of course, I thought, Trump’s warning had to be issued on the eve of this miraculous commemoration, of course it involved another body of water being opened up to free passage. Of course, if the ceasefire holds, this would mean that the war had run for a course of 40 days more or less, a time period associated with transformation in the Bible. The Hebrew word for Egypt is “Mitzrayim,” which in Jewish thought is often read as “meitzarim,” or “narrow straits.” Could it just be a coincidence that a Strait is at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler with his grubby stick started to take on cosmic significance – a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea.

Pharaoh and His Army Drown in the Sea. Isfahan, Iran. 19th Century. Property of the Israel Museum

Personally, I have never been one for modern miracle stories, for Bible codes or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns in the Torah. I teach literature, so naturally I love stories and myths. But I understand them as just that, human attempts to find patterns in the world in which we live and imbue it with meaning and significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset has begun to shift. There is something about being in a land with so much Biblical significance that makes a person start to feel like she is living in the Bible herself.

Take the start of this recent conflagration with Iran, on the morning of the Shabbat before Purim commonly known as “Shabbat Zachor,” “the Sabbath of Remembering.” On this Shabbat we are required to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been having a bit of a moment lately in the American anti-semite camp. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek is mentioned in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, Tucker Carlson and others have been latching onto it as yet another example of Israeli and Jewish treachery. This despite the straightforward nature of the commandment – to destroy an evil nation that, if given the chance, would gladly murder us first, with a particularly malicious focus on abusing the weak, elderly, infirm, etc. In truth, the commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek” has never really made it to the rotation of practical commandments for religious Jews. We recall it every year as a kind of symbolic reminder of the limits of moral relativism – that we are commanded to wipe out evil as best as we can.

This past Shabbat Zachor was the most memorable one of my life. Synagogues all around the country closed early as sirens rang out, and it was clear that most Israeli Jews would not be able to hear the biblically mandated passage read aloud from a Torah scroll in its proper context. In my case, word got out that it was going to be read on a nearby street corner, and at noon sharp dozens of neighbors emerged from their homes and safe rooms as if out of nowhere. Just as the Torah reader unfurled his scroll and began to chant, an early missile warning rang out. I assumed everyone would run home but one older man shouted “just keep going,” and the biblical verses were read out in a clear and precise fashion. Upon completion, the actual oncoming missile siren blared and everyone listening disappeared almost as suddenly as they had emerged. Later that evening we would discover the improbable news that the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his senior leadership had been killed that same morning by an Israeli strike. Of course, this occurred right around the same time Zachor is normally read in synagogue.

The Purim which followed was a constrained one as the war with Iran increased in intensity and rockets rained down all across Israel. Celebrations were cancelled, public readings of the Scroll of Esther were curtailed, children across the country were devastated that they would not be able to show off their costumes to their teachers and friends. Purim in the Bible takes place not in the Land of Israel but in Persia, the ancient forerunner of Iran. Purim celebrates the improbable overturning of the plot of Haman, the evil advisor to the Persian King Ahashverosh, to destroy the Jewish people. The catchphrase of the holiday is “v’nahafoch hu,” “and it was reversed.” And indeed, what we experienced was the great reversal of a terrible lot that had been cast against the Jews by the neo-Persian Islamist empire. Decades of Iranian sponsored terrorism, money and training funneled to Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror groups, all for the purpose of strangling Israel and murdering its Jews. Finally, our fortunes were reversed, thanks in significant part to the assistance of a great world power and friend (Esther and Mordechai didn’t do it alone either). Now, the sovereign Jewish state directed and influenced the sort of situation in which we previously found ourselves the victim.

One Funny Meme Among Many

Since we were stuck inside for a great deal of that Purim, humorous memes circulated like wildfire. Khamenei contains the same letters as Haman, Trump likened to Ahashverosh (in addition to his relative Cyrus the Great), Benjamin Netanyahu to the righteous Mordechai (who the Bible says is from the tribe of Benjamin). Who then is Esther? Ivanka Trump? Miriam Adelson? At a certain point the analogies turned into Purim parody but no one could doubt that something remarkable was happening. Legends of the past were turning into reality, past and present mingling. One friend said “Purim may have been cancelled but this was the truest Purim we’ve ever had.”

For many of us, these feelings have been gestating since the breakout of October 7th, for some of us even longer. While Hamas chose the timing of their assault to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, it was left to us to parse the significance of it occurring at the climax of the Jewish holiday and yearly Torah reading cycle. Precisely two years later, the anticipation toward the freeing of the final batch of hostages during Sukkot, also known by its Rabbinic name “the time of our joy,” made for one of the most joyous Sukkot celebrations many of us have ever experienced. This idea isn’t a new one in Judaism. The requirement to remember the Exodus from Egypt is a case in point. We don’t only remember the details of the story, or relay the miracles wrought by God. At the Passover seder we say, “in every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he has personally left Egypt.” Jewish tradition supposes a kind of reliving, not only a remembering, of the events of the Bible in every subsequent generation.

This past year I bought my myth and fantasy loving son a beautiful book called The Mythmakers, a graphic novel by John Hendrix which depicts the famed literary friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book aims, among other things, to get to the heart of what myth is – stories for which the category of “fact” or “fiction” is irrelevant because they explore the way a culture understands itself and its history. A true myth, the book’s wise Gandalf-line narrator explains, “takes place in a ‘time out of time’ and a ‘place out of place’ – separated from our reachable world.” This is part of the magic of myth, that something so completely distant and foreign can also feel so incredibly familiar. The book contains an entertaining visual romp through examples of ancient myths that include among them the book of Genesis and Jonath and the Whale.

What I’ve realized, I suppose, after the events of the last few years, is that moving to Israel means that the events of the Bible stop being myths and start to be something else, maybe something closer to prophecy – or a blueprint, a pattern, for the world we live in. This is different from the relationship that Jews outside of Israel have to the weekly Torah portion, which they read, find personal connections in, or use to generate a wise insight that connects to life in some meaningful way. That sort of reading treats the text essentially as myth, even if you happen to believe the myth is true even on a literal level. What’s going on now in Israel is actually a bit more prosaic than myth, maybe even less intellectually exciting. We don’t need to perform convoluted hermeneutic somersaults to see the connections between the Jewish story here in Israel and our foundational texts – rather the connection is simple and palpable. As sophisticated readers, we shouldn’t need the current war against Iran to be completely geographically aligned with our ancient Persian struggle in order to draw parallels (though it happens to be). The terrorists of Hamas don’t have to be actually located in ancient Philistine territory in order to be associated with those enemies (though they are). They don’t have to voluntarily call themselves Palestinians in order to recall those bloodthirsty adversaries of the biblical Israelites (though they do). We know how to read texts and draw subtle inferences, create complicated analogies, and find meaning where it isn’t obvious. But what is there to say when the parallels are so simple and present?

Another Biblical text we read over the Passover holiday is Ezekiel 37, the vision of the dry bones. The vision takes place after the first destruction of the Jewish temple, when the Jewish people are in the Babylonian exile. God places the prophet Ezekiel in a valley full of bones and asks him “O human being, can these bones live again.” We all know the answer, on a symbolic level. Old ideas can be refreshed; a once vanquished people can be reborn. Ezekiel probably has a sense of where God is going with this and starts prophesying. In the midst of his prophecy he is startled by a strange sound, “suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone.” To Ezekiel’s surprise this rich and literary parable has taken a literal turn: the breath of God enters the bones and they actually come to life. God does not say “as if.” He tells the people of Israel: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.”

Ezekiel Sees the Dry Bones (Dura Europos Synagogue, 244 CE)

The nice thing about myth is that, with enough exposure, you learn to read between the lines- to recognize where a narrative is heading and what it asks of us. Living the story in medias res (in the middle of things) is never as clear. Does this current ceasefire spell some kind of meaningful turning point for the Jewish people or is it just one pause in a long grind of missiles and war? Which of today’s leaders, like an aging and delusional Saul, is nearing his end—and who, if anyone, might emerge as a Davidic alternative? Living the Bible in real time doesn’t give us unique prophetic access to what the future holds. It doesn’t immunize us from mistakes, nor does it make our pain or grief over loss any less acute. But it assures us that what’s taking place now is far from random: that God’s magnificent plan for the Jewish people is still unfolding, and that the center of the Jewish story remains where it’s always been, here in the Land of Israel.