This book is the long-awaited third instalment of R.'s trilogy on dissidence and dissent during the reign of Nero (a.d. 54–68). Unlike its predecessors (Political Dissidence under Nero [1993]; Dissidence and Literature under Nero [1997]), this volume turns from the political to the religious as R. tackles the causes and events of the Great Revolt in Judaea. Although the title of the book refines the scope to Nero's reign, there is much in here too for those studying the relationship between Judaea and Rome before and immediately after this period: Chapter 3 begins with Pompey's conquest of Judaea and ends in the time of Nero, and Chapter 7 deals with the years a.d. 68–70 and the destruction of the Second Temple. R. admits in his preface that he found himself outside of his sphere of expertise when first approaching Second Temple Judaism (pp. xi–xii), but it is safe to say that his years of careful research have paid off. R.'s work is thought-provoking, challenging and largely accessible. The only major flaw as regards accessibility is the notes. These are not included in the book, but are available to download from the publisher's website. This is because of their size – the notes in total add up to 1,217 pages (A4, double-spaced). While there is a vast amount of invaluable information within the notes for the specialist reader (R. confronts head-on a large number of controversial debates on Second Temple Judaism), it would have been better for his more general audience to have a limited selection of the footnotes in the book itself, so that references to the main pieces of relevant modern scholarship could be followed up more easily.

R. lays down many gauntlets in this book. I will mention two of particular note. The first comes in the preface, in which he characterises recent postmodernist scholarship on historiography (such as H. White's Metahistory [1973]) as perpetuating ‘an intellectual fad’ that encourages the practice of reductio ad absurdum (pp. xix–xxi, see also pp. 47 and 312). Against this trend, R. argues that we should not dismiss the ancient sources as ‘fictional’ just because they utilise rhetoric, but that careful handling of the ancient evidence (as we see in the works of Thucydides and Tacitus) will yield a more-or-less accurate, but fundamentally useful, picture of the ancient world. R. goes to great lengths to demonstrate what such handling can achieve when analysing his sources throughout the book, especially Josephus. While not all scholars will agree with R.'s criticisms, his engagement with this debate is necessary to justify his trust in Josephus as his main and often only source (see pp. 42ff.). Josephus is widely seen as a controversial and problematic writer, and as someone whose own agenda sometimes taints the accuracy of his work. R.'s argument, that Josephus’ texts are essentially useful and reliable when scrutinised properly (after all, Josephus’ audience would not have found his work credible if he had lied about events that took place within living memory), is employed persistently (e.g. pp. 81, 188, 279), even on the few occasions where alternative or supplementary explanations would have been welcome.

The second gauntlet challenges the positivist approach taken in literary and theological scholarship that ignores the role of visionary experience in apocalyptic, eschatological and Messianic texts. Recognising that religious dissenters in antiquity had a genuine belief in divine intervention is fundamental to R.'s ‘psychology of religious dissent’ (pp. 56–7). There are many events that took place in the lead up to and during the Great Revolt that do not make sense, R. argues, without taking into account the dissenters’ desire to trigger eschatological events in the knowledge that their faith in God would save them at the eleventh hour. This explains why the sicarii (a militant group that sprung from the ‘fourth philosophy’) slaughtered not only themselves, but also members of their own families (whom the Romans would probably have spared) at Masada in a.d. 73 (p. 267), and why Simon bar Giora destroyed the large amount of food stored in Jerusalem causing widespread famine and suffering during the final stages of the Roman siege (p. 302). R.'s analysis of religious dissent in psychological terms is compelling, and makes this book stand out amongst its competitors. However, it is a shame that we do not get to see R.'s critical skills exercised fully until nearly half way through the work.

Chapters 1–3 (‘The Vibrant Faith’, ‘The Breaking Point’ and ‘The Conquered Land’) present R.'s methodology (including how he will tackle the lack of ancient evidence) and contextual information about the period leading up to the Great Revolt (including a very useful discussion of Saducees, Pharisees and Essenes in Chapter 1). In Chapter 3, we begin to see in action the problems that R. faces when using Josephus’ texts, with differences apparent between the depictions of key historical figures in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum (published c. a.d. 75–81 and, for R., a ‘masterpiece’) and Antiquitates Judaicae (published 20 years after Bellum and far less satisfactory as a historical source) that are not easy to reconcile (e.g. pp. 125, 170). While these chapters provide useful context and a glimpse of what is to come, they could perhaps have been condensed somewhat in order to get to the body of the work sooner. Chapter 3 too, which surveys episodes of Roman intervention in Judaea from Pompey to Nero, comes rather unexpectedly after a chapter which introduces us to the key figures of a.d. 66, and would perhaps be more suitably housed in shorter form in the introduction.

Chapters 4–7 (‘The Fragile Balance’, ‘The Zealous Storm’, ‘The Dagger Men’ and ‘The Fateful Siege’) see R.'s psychology of religious dissent utilised to explain the immediate causes and events of the Great Revolt. Highlights of this half of the book include R.'s discussions of the zealots and the sicarii (‘dagger men’), as these groups embody violent religious dissent most clearly. In these chapters R. argues for Josephus’ own awareness of a psychology of religious dissent, despite the historian's tendency to downplay the role of religion in his narrative (p. 184). While some modern scholars have challenged Josephus’ accuracy when he says that dissenters such as the zealots acted against their own religious beliefs in order to commit atrocities during the war, R. maintains that Josephus recognised religious dissenters for what they were – that the zealots were perfectly capable of committing sacrilegious acts because they were certain that they had divine will on their side (p. 232). R. uses examples such as this convincingly to demonstrate how religious dissent is altogether different in character from political or economic dissidence.

One final feature worth drawing attention to is R.'s tendency to give modern parallels to explain his arguments about antiquity, which he does often throughout the book. For example, the zealot coup against the leader of the ‘first regime’, Ananus ben Ananus, is compared to the Bolsheviks seizing power from the Provisional Government in Russia in October 1917 (p. 217). While some might be reluctant to accept that the same psychological factors were at play in ancient Judaea and revolutionary Russia (and rightly so), R. does not use modern examples as his starting point from which to project back, but begins with the ancient evidence, and draws parallels from there. Consequently, these comparisons provide useful thinking points, rather than misleading anachronisms.

R.'s is an extremely ambitious and worthwhile project that has yielded a stimulating and original book. The typographical errors are so few that the reader will easily forgive them. While footnotes in the main text would have benefited the more general reader, and Chapter 3 could have been repositioned, this book will ultimately be of great value to interested lay readers and specialists alike.