Rabbi Akiva Names a Star: The Bar Kokhba Revolt Opens Against Rome

Sixty-two years had passed since the destruction. Most of the fighters this dispatch concerns had never seen the Temple standing. They had grown up in a country without a Sanctuary, administered by Roman officials from Caesarea, and for the most part they had kept their heads down.

Then Hadrian came through. The emperor toured Judea and — the earliest sources say — first suggested rebuilding the Temple as a gesture of goodwill. He then reversed himself. In place of the Temple he ordered Jerusalem 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. In a separate decree, he banned circumcision throughout the empire as barbaric.

Shimon bar Kosiba was a fighter of a kind the Talmud describes with cautious respect — a man who could catch a Roman catapult stone on his knee and throw it back. When he raised his army, he demanded that new recruits cut off a finger to prove they meant it. The Sages objected. He agreed to a different test, and gathered his force.

Rabbi Akiva was the greatest sage of the generation, an unlettered shepherd who had come to Torah at forty and become the teacher of a hundred thousand students. He looked at Bar Kosiba and applied a verse from Bilaam's blessing: 'A star has come forth from Yaakov.' The Hebrew 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, improbably, it worked. Jerusalem itself was briefly retaken. Sacrifices actually resumed on the Temple Mount. Coins were minted — some survive — reading 'For the Freedom of Israel' and 'Year One of the Redemption of Israel.' A full Roman legion, the XXII, disappears from Roman records around this time; most modern historians think Bar Kokhba's fighters destroyed it. Hadrian recalled his best general, Julius Severus, all the way from Britain to deal with it.

Severus was patient. He avoided open battle. He cut villages off from each other, blocked supply lines, and starved out fortresses one by one. By the fourth year of the revolt, a single stronghold in the Judean hills was still holding out. Beitar. What happened there is the next dispatch.