Rom und Judaea is a series of five lectures delivered by Werner Eck at the invitation of the Schools of Philosophy and Theology at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in May 2005. The purpose of the university's Tria Corda lecture series is to familiarize its audience with “substantial problems and issues of current research on Hellenistic-Roman antiquity, ancient Judaism and early Christianity.” The research contained in these lectures is, in part, the fruit of Eck's ongoing work as a participant in the preparation of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaea-Palaestinae, a forthcoming resource documenting all inscriptions from the region from 500 BCE to 614 CE according to language. These five lectures serve as a summary and synthesis of much of Eck's recent English-language work on the topic of Roman Judea/Palestine.Footnote ¹

In his foreword, Eck assures the reader that the published text does not differ from the original oral presentations in any significant way (x). With this in mind, he subsequently warns his readers not to expect a comprehensive or systematic treatment of the secondary literature on Roman Judea. He does not directly take up the work of modern scholars in the body of his text, and he also insists that space restrictions limited the extent and the detail of his citations (xi). This lack of space is apparent to anyone who glances at the end of Rom und Judaea, which has a select ancient source index (249–53) followed by brief indices of persons, places, and topics (254–63). There is no bibliography and no index of ancient authors.

The first chapter (“Judaea wird römisch: der Weg zur einständigen Provinz”) treats the history of Rome's contact with Judeans, aiming to clarify how Judea went from being an independent state during the Hasmonean period—which started with Judas's purification of the Temple in 164 BCE—to becoming a full-fledged Roman province in 66 CE under the watchful eyes of successive senatorial governors. Eck here pays particular attention to two issues: the proper nomenclature of Roman officeholders in Judea (e.g., praefectus, procurator) and the actual territorial status of the Jewish homeland from 6 to 66 CE.Footnote ² He argues that the Roman governors of Judea who arrived after the deposition of Herod's son (and “ethnarch”) Archelaus were in fact prefects and not procurators, as evinced by the Tiberieum dedicatory inscription recently found in Caesarea (17). Pontius Pilate, it turns out, was a “prefect” and not a procurator. It is only during the reign of the Emperor Claudius (51–54 CE) that praesidial procurators (i.e., governors of small provinces) are found in the archaeological record—the other classes of “procurators” being agents in charge of imperial holdings or in charge of provincial tax collection (32).Footnote ³ Based on contemporary inscriptions such as those from northern Spain denoting a praefectus Asturiae and a praefectus Gallaeciae, Judean prefects are to be understood as having had limited power over local ethnic groups under the authority of the provincial governor, namely, the legatus. Footnote ⁴ To Eck's credit, such an explanation fits well with the numerous recorded intercessions of Syrian legates in Judean affairs throughout the first century.Footnote ⁵

In his second chapter (“Die römische Herrschaft und ihre Zeichen”), Eck explores the ways in which Roman power was made manifest in Judea, focusing his attention on everything from legionary standards to honorific statues. Important to Eck in this regard is the symbolic power of images of Roman hegemony and their ability to function as expressions of civic pride (54). He treats the famous “standards incident” as one such example: Pontius Pilate wanted to express his Roman pride in a way that had been the general Roman custom. He did not, however, seek to offend any Judeans by this action because he brought the Roman standards in at night into a strictly Roman space (58). Eck is adamant that the eruption of violence was a result of a misunderstanding, but he does not further specify its nature. Eck goes on to discuss the epigraphic record of Jerusalem from its time as a Roman colony. The few inscriptions that do survive from Aelia Capitolina, given the probable size and cost of their accompanying structures, are indicative of the existence of numerous others (74). The remainder of the chapter is rounded out by an equally impressive set of epigraphic analyses of the columns, statues, and structures of Caesarea, especially those that were erected for (or in some cases by) the local holders of Roman power, namely, the legate (92), the procurators (96), and various other officials such as custodes, frumentarii, and adiutores (85).

Eck's third chapter (“Repression und Entwicklung: Das römische Heer in Judaea”) discusses the nature and distribution of the Roman military forces in Judea as well as the history of their deployment there. Prior to 70 CE, these forces, based in (but not limited to) Caesarea, comprised one mounted and five infantry cohorts recruited from the non-Jewish peoples of Sebaste, Caesarea, and Ascalon (107).Footnote ⁶ When Judea became a province in 70 CE in the aftermath of the Great Revolt, the tenth legion, formerly stationed in Syria, was set up in Jerusalem. Eck notes the unique fact that the new senatorial governor was also the legionary legate, but he offers little in the way of explaining why Vespasian made such a decision (110). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to determining the significance of the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–36 CE, which did not result in an increase of Roman troops stationed in the region. Eck points out that it was only after the war that Hadrian took on the title imperator in his official nomenclature, and that he felt it necessary to award the prestigious ornamenta triumphalia to no fewer than three generals, one of whom, Iulius Severus, had to undergo a demotion in order to assume the governorship of Judea. There is also papyrological and inscriptional evidence to the effect that Jews and Nabataeans living in the province of Arabia participated in the revolt (134). The argument that Hadrian faced a much more dire military threat than had previously been supposed is convincing.Footnote ⁷

The fourth chapter (“Latein als Sprache Roms in einer vielsprachigen Welt”) shows its origins as a lecture by starting out with a pop culture reference, citing Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2005), in which Pontius Pilate is made (erroneously) to speak Aramaic to his Jewish subjects. Rome had no official linguistic policy; most of the post-106 CE legal documents in the Babatha and Salome Komaise archive, for example, were written in Greek, even though Roman officials who received them would have labeled them and communicated their contents in Latin to their superiors (180). In Judea, at the Court of the Gentiles in the Second Temple, there were stelae in Greek warning foreigners not enter into the wrong precinct.Footnote ⁸ In Ascalon, there was a funerary inscription dedicated to one Gaius Comisius Marmor, a state transport employee, written in both Latin and Greek. While the former connected him to his origins in the Latin West, the latter aimed to communicate with local residents. Eck argues that this inscription demonstrates the existence of a society unified by its multilingual nature, and not divided by it. Here, Eck discusses the purpose of his current project, the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaea-Palaestinae, as recording official and everyday communication alike by language. Thus far, the result is that Greek can be shown to have slowly emerged as the most common language used for inscriptions in Roman Palestine, especially by local residents throughout Judea with the notable exception of Jerusalem, where records show a preponderance of Hebrew and Aramaic ossuary inscriptions (172). Eck contends that the preponderance of Greek in the Jewish grave inscriptions at Beth Shearim, fifth- and sixth-century synagogues, and contemporary churches evince a genuine communal decision to employ the lingua franca of the Roman Near East. Singularly Latin inscriptions, on the other hand, are shown to appear in military (graves, milestones) and administrative (Aelia Capitolina, imperial cult) contexts (185).

Finally, in the fifth chapter (“Städte und Dörfer”), Eck investigates the way in which Rome, with a relatively small governing apparatus, was able to control and maintain their territories. Judea was a particularly small province, a fact that made the uneven ratio of Roman officials to the overall population somewhat less significant (202). And yet, in the frequent absence of senatorial and equestrian officials, Judea was like any other province. Eck discusses the Roman tendency to support local city-states by allowing them to govern their own territories, and proceeds to recount the growth and decline of city-states in Judea from the time of Pompey's conquest of Syria in the mid-60s BCE. Still left unanswered are many details pertaining to the actual mechanics of city councils during the reign of Herod and his successors, such as their makeup and responsibilities. The two most important literary sources for the administration of Judea, Pliny the Elder and Josephus, tell us much about toparchies, which were regions rather than proper cities. Eck goes on to discuss the towns for which these taxation zones were named, their relation to the surrounding countryside, and their role in identifying persons mentioned in various legal papyri dating from the early second century. The question of exactly how Romans extracted taxes and tolls from the towns in the regions is still open (210).

The remainder of the chapter surveys the epigraphic record for evidence of Roman and local administration among new foundations, polities given colonial status, and hitherto “Jewish” cities during the reigns of Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimus Severus. Eck places particular emphasis on coinage and its potential use as proxy evidence (e.g., legends, iconography) for a city's administrative structure (228). Rome gradually replaced the toparchy system with self-governing cities that had control over adjacent territories.

All five chapters work very well together as a monograph: they contribute to an understanding of Roman government in Judea.Footnote ⁹ One wonders whether the volume might be more appropriately titled Rom in Judaea for its pervasive focus on the nature of the Roman administration of the Jewish homeland as opposed to treating native reactions to Roman rule. The book is unified by the repeated claim that Roman Judea was subject to the same politico-administrative structure as all the rest of the Roman provinces (40, 75, 178, 202).

The decision to intersperse plates in the main text will help the reader better follow Eck's arguments and explanations without having to leaf constantly through the back of the book. Students and faculty alike will find the size of this book (at just 18 × 11 × 1.5 centimeters) convenient. This volume, as a synthesis of the author's recent work on the history of Roman Judea and as a model for how to draw on inscriptional evidence, is a must-read for any student or scholar of Jewish or Roman history.