Rabbi Akiva Names a King

Sixty-two years since the ruin. Most of the fighters this dispatch is about never saw the Temple standing. They grew up in a country without a Sanctuary, ruled by Roman officials in far-off Caesarea, and mostly they had kept their heads down.

Then Hadrian came through. The emperor visited Judea and — the earliest sources say — first suggested rebuilding the Temple as a friendly gesture. Then he changed his mind. Instead, he announced that Jerusalem would be rebuilt as a Roman city called Aelia Capitolina, named after his own family and the god Jupiter. A temple to Jupiter would stand where the Holy of Holies had stood. And in a separate law, he banned circumcision throughout the whole empire as 'barbaric.'

Shimon bar Kosiba had the kind of strength the Talmud writes about with a nervous respect — he could catch a Roman catapult stone on his knee and throw it back. When he called for fighters he made new recruits cut off a finger to prove they meant it. The Sages objected. He agreed to a different test. He gathered an army.

Rabbi Akiva was the greatest sage of the generation. He had come to Torah as an unlettered shepherd at age forty and become the teacher of a hundred thousand students. Rabbi Akiva looked at Bar Kosiba and applied to him a verse from Bilaam's blessing: 'A star has stepped out of Yaakov.' The word for star is kokhav. From that day the fighter was called Bar Kokhba — Son of the Star. Rabbi Akiva called him the anointed king.

For three and a half years, unbelievably, it worked. Jerusalem itself was briefly retaken. Sacrifices actually restarted on the Temple Mount. Coins were minted — some still exist — that read 'For the Freedom of Israel' and 'Year One of the Redemption of Israel.' A whole Roman legion, the XXII, disappears from Roman records around this time; most modern historians think Bar Kokhba's fighters wiped it out. Hadrian called his best general, Julius Severus, all the way back from Britain to deal with it.

Severus was patient. He didn't fight open battles. He cut villages off from each other, blocked supply lines, and starved out fortresses one by one. By the fourth year of the revolt, only one stronghold in the Judean hills was still standing. Beitar. The next dispatch is what happened there.