135 CE Beitar in Memory: Rabbinic Lament and the Legacy of the Fall

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL 

135 CE

Beitar in Memory: Rabbinic Lament and the Legacy of the Fall

The fall of Beitar, the Mishnah states occurred on the 9th of Av, passed from history into memory. Rabbinic literature, above all Lamentations Rabbah and the Jerusalem Talmud, recast the catastrophe in theological language: rivers of blood, the unburied dead, the leader slain by a serpent. In doing so, the rabbis transformed defeat into lament, folded Beitar into the calendar of mourning, and read the disaster as both the wages of sin and the memory of a lost sovereignty.

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Rabbinic tradition transformed the fall of Beitar into legend and lament. The Jerusalem Talmud and Lamentations Rabbah recount, in heightened language, the siege of the city: the vast armies of Hadrian, the rivers of blood said to flow to the sea, the refusal to bury the slain until a later emperor relented. These stories, of Hadrian slaying “eighty myriads” at Beitar, of Bar Kochba telling heaven neither to help nor hinder his fighters, are not sober history but memory refracted through grief. They reveal how deeply the disaster cut, and how the rabbis sought to explain catastrophe as the wages of sin, even as they preserved the memory of resistance. In their hands Beitar became less a military event than a wound in the national soul.

The rabbinic sources press these images toward theological extremes. Lamentations Rabbah and the Palestinian Talmud describe Hadrian, the “wicked”, as the owner of a great vineyard, eighteen Roman miles by eighteen Roman miles, fenced with the corpses of Beitar’s slain, set upright with outstretched arms. A related tradition holds that for seven years the gentiles fertilized their vineyards with the blood of Israel and needed no manure. The dead were denied burial until a later emperor, often identified by later interpreters with Antoninus Pius, relented, and the bodies, by a miracle, had not decayed.

On the day burial was granted, linked to the festival of the fifteenth of Av, the sages of Yavneh are said to have instituted the fourth blessing of the Grace after Meals, ha-tov ve-ha-meitiv, “Who is good and does good”: “good” because the slain had not putrefied, “does good” because they were finally given to the earth.

A parallel tradition concerns the leader. The Jerusalem Talmud recounts that Bar Kochba was slain not by Roman or Samaritan hand but by a serpent, a death read as divinely ordained. When his body is shown to Hadrian, the serpent reveals that heaven, not a human killer, has struck him down. Another strand holds that he killed his uncle, R. Elazar HaModa’i, suspecting him of collaboration, and so forfeited the divine protection on which Beitar depended. In either case, the moral drawn is constant: the revolt failed because Israel had sinned, and its prince was judged by heaven rather than conquered by Rome. The lament thus performs a double work, preserving the memory of resistance even as it explains the catastrophe as the wages of iniquity.

The catastrophe was also absorbed into the rhythm of Jewish time. The Mishnah’s notice that Beitar fell on the ninth of Av placed it in the same company as the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the day on which, by rabbinic reckoning, national disaster recurs. The day the slain of Beitar were finally granted burial was linked to the fifteenth of Av, a minor festival thereby freighted with the memory of mourning lifted. Through such calendrical associations Beitar ceased to be merely a place and became a station in the annual cycle of lament, recalled alongside Jerusalem and the ruined sanctuary.

The rabbinic response to Beitar is marked by a deep ambivalence. The revolt had been hailed, in some learned circles, as the dawn of redemption. Its ruin demanded explanation. The rabbis answered by reading the defeat as divine judgment, Israel’s sin, the leader’s presumption, the shedding of innocent blood, while still preserving the names and the heroism of the fallen. Later tradition even recast Bar Kochba as Bar Koziba, “Son of the Lie,” a bitter verdict on messianic hope betrayed. Yet the lament never wholly repudiated the resistance it mourned. Beitar endured in memory as both warning and wound: the place where the last hope of sovereign Judea perished, and a catastrophe whose meaning Jewish tradition would continue to wrestle with for centuries to come.

Sources and Further Reading

Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Mor, Menahem. The Second Jewish Revolt: The Bar Kokhba War, 132–136 CE. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Schäfer, Peter, ed. The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003.

Schwartz, Seth. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian. Leiden: Brill, 1976.