Simon bar Kokhba

Lore & Background

Documents discovered in the 20th century in the Cave of Letters give his original name, with variations: Shimon bar Kosevah, Bar Kosevaʾ or Ben Kosevaʾ. It is probable that his original name was Shimon bar Koseva. The name may indicate that his father or his place of origin was named Koseva(h), with Khirbet Kuwayzibah being a likely nominee for identification; others, namely Emil Schürer, think the surname may have been an indication of his place of birth, in the village known as Chozeba (maybe Chezib) but might as well be a general family name. During the revolt, the Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva regarded Simon as the Jewish messiah. The Jerusalem Talmud (Taannit 4:5) records his statement that the Star Prophecy verse from Numbers 24:17, 'There shall come a star out of Jacob,' referred to him. This was based on identification of the Hebrew word for star, kokhav, and his name, bar Kozeva. The Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 4:5) and the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 93b and 97b) mention him by the name of Bar Kozeva. According to Eusebius' Chronicon, he severely punished the Christians with death by different means of torture for their refusal to fight against the Romans.

Reader's Guide

Despite the devastation wrought by the Romans during the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE), which left the population and countryside in ruins, a series of laws passed by Roman Emperors provided the incentive for the second rebellion. Based on the delineation of years in Eusebius' Chronicon (whose Latin translation is known as the Chronicle of Jerome) the Jewish revolt began under the Roman governor Tineius (Tynius) Rufus in the 16th year of Hadrian's reign, or what was equivalent to the 4th year of the 227th Olympiad. Hadrian sent an army to crush the resistance, but it faced a strong opponent, since Bar Kokhba, as the recognised leader of Israel, punished any Jew who refused to join his ranks. Two and a half years later, after the war had ended, the Roman emperor Hadrian barred Jews from entering Aelia Capitolina, the pagan city he had built on the ruins of Jewish Jerusalem. The name Aelia was derived from one of the emperor's names, Aelius. According to Philostorgius, this was done so that its former Jewish inhabitants 'might not find in the name of the city a pretext for claiming it as their country.' For many Jews of the time, this turn of events was heralded as the long-hoped-for Messianic Age. The Romans fared very poorly during the initial revolt facing a unified Jewish force, in contrast to the First Jewish–Roman War, where Flavius Josephus records three separate Jewish armies fighting each other for control of the Temple Mount during the three weeks after the Romans had breached Jerusalem's walls and were fighting their way to the center. Being outnumbered and taking heavy casualties, the Romans adopted a scorched earth policy which reduced and demoralised the Judean populace, slowly grinding away the Judean will to sustain the war. During the final phase of the war, Bar Kokhba took up refuge in the fortress of Betar. The Romans eventually captured it after laying siege to the city. The Jerusalem Talmud makes several claims considered as non-historical by modern scholarship. One such claim is that the duration of the siege was of three and half years, although the war itself lasted, according to the same author, two and half years. Another part of the Talmudic narrative is that the Romans killed all the defenders except for one Jewish youth, Simeon ben Gamliel II, whose life was spared. According to Cassius Dio, writing several decades after the or

Did You Know?

• Simon bar Kokhba's original name was likely Shimon bar Koseva, as shown by documents from the Cave of Letters.
• The Jerusalem Talmud (Ta'anit 4:5) records Rabbi Akiva applying the Star Prophecy (Numbers 24:17) to Bar Kokhba, linking the word 'kokhav' (star) to his name bar Kozeva.
• According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews were killed in the war, and 50 fortified towns and 985 villages were razed.
• After the revolt, Hadrian barred Jews from entering Aelia Capitolina, the pagan city built on the ruins of Jerusalem.
• Bar Kokhba's severed head was reportedly brought to Hadrian, who observed a serpent wrapped around it, leading him to say that only God could have killed him.