The news of the uprising in Jerusalem quickly spread like wildfire throughout the region, and soon people throughout the entire province of Judea retaliated against the Jews living among them. It didn’t matter whether or not their Jewish neighbors had anything directly to do with the uprising in Jerusalem. The persistent agitation and terrorists acts by Jewish zealots over the previous 60 years, ever since the time of Judas the Galilean, had soured the Gentile inhabitants and Roman citizens in Judea against all Jews. To them, every Jew was now suspect of being a zealot terrorist.
And so, the uprising in Jerusalem sparked open conflicts between Jews and Gentiles all throughout the province of Judea. Seventy miles away, in the coastal town of Caesarea, the people there took vengeance on and killed 20,000 Jews. In retaliation, the Jews in the surrounding towns of Caesarea attacked numerous Gentile towns as well.
Chaos Throughout Judea
In some cases, there were Jews who were wholly against the uprising in Jerusalem and who thus ended up siding with the Romans and fighting their fellow Jews. One such Jew was a man named Simon ben-Saul who had fought against and killed many of his fellow Jews in the city of Scythopolis. After the Jews of the city eventually were able to surround him in one of the groves just outside the city, instead of surrendering and allowing himself and his family to be tortured by the seditious, Simon instead slew his own father, then his wife and children, before turning his sword on himself.
Throughout numerous cities—Askelon, Ptolemais, Tyre, Hippos, and Gadara—the local Jews of those places were slaughtered mercilessly as a consequence of the revolt that the zealots had ignited in Jerusalem.
Needless to say, fear and paranoia gripped the heart of virtually everyone in Judea—both Jew and Gentile alike. During this time, Agrippa had left his kingdom to travel to Antioch in Syria to appeal to the Roman general Cestius Gallus for help…and troops. Agrippa had left a man named Noarus in charge, but when seventy Jews from Batanea came to request that they’d be given a small army to help protect the Jews of the area in case another conflict arose, Noarus acted on his own paranoia, and instead sent the king’s army to kill all seventy men. When Agrippa found out what Noarus had done, Agrippa quickly relieved him of his duties, but the damage Noarus had done proved to be irreversible.
The result was that the Jews were pushed further and further into the camp of the zealots—the Gentiles were attacking them; the army of their supposed Jewish king was attacking them. To whom else would they turn? And thus, the strange irony regarding extremism—after 60 years of consistently sowing the seeds of sedition, the zealots had finally ignited the fuse of rebellion in Jerusalem. But it was the vengeance taken to the opposite extreme by Gentiles upon Jews throughout the region who had not been involved in the uprising in Jerusalem, many of whom might have originally been against talk of revolt, that served to further push those very Jews to the side of those very extremist zealots.
Chaos in Alexandria
The fires of chaos and revolt reached as far as Alexandria. For 300 years, ever since the time of Alexander the Great, when he had granted the Jews equal rights and privileges, there had been tensions between the Greeks and Jews of Alexandria. Even when Rome took over Egypt, Caesar Augustus chose to continue to grant the Jews those same equal rights and privileges. Yet, when the news of the revolt that had happened in Jerusalem reached Alexandria, it pushed the Greeks of the city over the edge, and they proceeded to attack the Jews, who in turn repaid in kind.
There were riots throughout the city. Tiberius Alexander, the governor, in an attempt to restore calm, sent his delegates to convince the Jews of the city to calm down and cease from fighting, yet the Jews refused to listen to his appeals, and chose to escalate the fighting. At that point, Tiberius then sent two Roman legions throughout the city and cracked down on the Jews who had refused to stop fighting—50,000 Jews were killed.
Meanwhile in Antioch
Meanwhile in Antioch, Agrippa’s appeal to Cestius had paid off. He proceeded to send the entire 12th legion from Antioch into Galilee. Agrippa sent his army as well. Cestius first marched to Ptolemais, and then continued on to Caesarea. Once Caesarea was subdued, he sent part of his army to Joppa, where they killed 8,000 people. He sent the other part of his army, under the command of Gallus (same name, different man) to the major city of Sepphoris to liberate it from the rebels who were occupying it. After the rebels fled the city and Gallus was welcomed as a liberator, he returned to Cestius in Caesarea.
The initial mission in Galilee had been accomplished. The region had been retaken rather quickly and efficiently. And so, Cestius then set his sights on Jerusalem.
