In this book, Fabian E. Udoh offers an exhaustive study of all the sources relating to taxation in Roman Palestine. Udoh concludes that by the standards of the Roman Empire, taxation in Palestine was not oppressive. This has implications for thinking about the environment in which Jesus functioned; the cause of the Jewish Revolt (66 CE – 70 CE); and Roman taxation generally.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb9hm
Judea (that is, Jewish Palestine) entered, as part of the province of Syria, into Rome’s sphere of influence in 63 B.C.E. after the Roman forces led by Pompey the Great together with the Jewish forces loyal to John Hyrcanus II had defeated Aristobulus II. Josephus says that, after reducing and reorganizing the Jewish state, Pompey made it tributary to Rome, which means that Pompey imposed some kind of direct, annual tribute on the Jews. The Senate, it appears, contracted the right to collect the tribute to one of the Roman public companies, the publicani. This book is a study of...
In the summer of 63 B.C.E., the combined Roman and Jewish forces under Pompey defeated the Hasmonean king, Aristobulus II, in Jerusalem. One consequence of this defeat, Josephus says, was that “the country and Jerusalem were laid under tribute.”¹ Scholars do not dispute the fact that from then on the Jewish state became tributary to Rome. The problem is that Josephus, apart from simply remarking that the Jewish state became tributary, provides no account of the tribute imposed by Pompey.² Therefore, everything is left to speculation.
One such conjecture is that Pompey reimposed upon the Jewish state the same tribute...
One usually should not speak of “favors” where taxes, and in particular colonial taxes, are involved; however, the arrangements that Julius Caesar made with the Jewish state may rightly be called “favors.” Josephus, in citing the documents from which our knowledge of these arrangements comes, describes the various grants made by Caesar to the Jewish state, including the taxes, as “honours given our nation” (A.J. 14.186). Josephus sets them in the context of the personal privileges and honors that Julius Caesar gave to Hyrcanus II and Antipater, rewards for their services to Caesar in the winter of 47 B.C.E. during...
C. Longinius Cassius’s struggle with and eventual success against P. Cornelius Dolabella for control of Syria¹ following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.E. and the outbreak of civil war in 42 B.C.E. brought fresh chaos and exactions to Syria and Judea.² Although Hyrcanus took pains to ensure, through Antony and Dolabella, that the favorable policy pursued by Caesar survived Caesar’s death (A.J. 14.217–27).³ Cassius, who arrived in Syria at the beginning of 43 B.C.E., did not honor Caesar’s tax arrangements for Judea. If Cassius’s speech to the Rhodians that Appian provides reflects anything of his attitude, then...
Herod the Great received the kingship over the Jewish state against his expectations (if we believe Josephus’s account).¹ He was a fugitive to Rome from the Parthian forces, which had engulfed Syria and had installed the Hasmonean Antigonus as king in Jerusalem in 40 B.C.E. (Josephus, A.J. 14.330–89; B.J. 1.248–85). Antigonus’s father, Aristobulus II, had resisted Pompey in 63 B.C.E., and until he and Alexander, his first son, were executed by the Pompeians, he and his family had led Judea’s resistance against Rome.² Antigonus himself, aided by the partisans of Cassius, had previously led a revolt in Judea,...
If our conclusion in the previous chapter is correct, namely, that the Jewish state paid no tribute to Rome under Herod and his successors, Judea (the region) began to pay tribute again, for the first time since 40 B.C.E., after the deposition of Archelaus and the consequent annexation of Judea in 6 C.E.¹ This period ended when the territory was granted to Agrippa I in 41 C.E. At Agrippa’s death in 44 C.E., the whole of Jewish Palestine again was annexed into a province. The territory of Herod Antipas, which had been given to Agrippa I by Gaius in 39...
The fact that Caesar and the Roman Senate included the payment of tithes in their decree on taxation for Judea emphasizes the importance of tithing to the Jewish state. As it has often been noted, Jews paid tithes on top of other religious dues² and state taxes.³ In order to clarify the Senate’s decree and its practical application, I shall discuss in some detail three main problems that have often been raised in relation to tithing in the Second Temple period, that is, from about 538 B.C.E. to 70 C.E.: (1) the beneficiaries of the so-called Levitical tithes (priests or...
At the end of this study, the reader might want an explicit answer to the question that has dominated the discussion of the economic conditions of Jewish Palestine during the early Roman period: namely, whether or not taxation in Roman Palestine was “oppressive.” This question may be traced back at least to the work of Gerald D. Heuver, who wrote in 1903: “The background of Jesus’ teaching is one of business depression, panic, and poverty.” In his view, “[n]otwithstanding all the advantages which Palestine had in Jesus’ time, advantages of soil, climate, location, commerce, and immigrants, the people were very...
Posts
Stumble It!
