Fighting in National Armies 81
THE SECOND COMMONWEALTH
The wars of the Maccabees were national struggle for survival with the forces of a mighty empire. National and religious emotions combined to make this a bitter struggle, eventually won at a huge cost. The religious group responsible for the war adopted a policy which permitted both defensive and offensive fighting on shabbat.’ Nothing about this was mentioned anywhere in the Bible and it is unlikely that the armies of the Israelite and Judean kings rested on the sabbath. We know nothing about the development of the detailed shabbat laws. The tradition prohibiting fighting developed in centuries when Jews were no longer engaged in warfare.
From the time of the Maccabees (165 B.C.E.) through the rule of Herod (37 B.C.E.— 4 C.E.) to the end of the revolt of Bar Kochba (135 C.E.), the Land of Israel was subjected to almost continuous warfare. The record of these struggles has mainly been preserved in the Books of Maccabees and the historical writings of Flavius Josephus . The fighting was savage and the cruelties were recorded without comment.’ By this time large Jewish communities, possibly the majority of the Jewish population, lived outside the Land of Israel in Egypt , Mesopotamia , and the Roman Empire.
Later reports of the revolts against Roman rule in 68-73 C.E. and 132 C.E. were very limited in the traditional Jewish literature. The entire period was glossed over or suppressed as the Jewish leadership wished to stop further revolts with their tremendous loss of lives. There was no further development even of theories of warfare. The subject was generally ignored as it seemed irrelevant. The sole Jewish involvement in warfare was among the legendary Chazar kingdom(ca. 900 C.E., about which we know very little."
The changed view, forced upon us and then adopted after the bloody defeats inflicted by the Romans, led to the abandonment of this topic. The rabbinic leadership moved in a different direction after