The Third Day

were destroyed.”

“The same day?” asked Bryson.

Lavon shrugged. “Close enough; probably.”

Markowitz turned back to our table. “The destruction of the Temple wasn’t the end of the fighting, was it? Weren’t there other revolts?”

Lavon nodded. Historians had recorded two: an uprising in 115 called the Kitos War after the Roman general sent to suppress it, and a final explosion of fury in 132, known as the Bar Kochba revolt.

“How many Jews died in each one?” Markowitz asked.

“Nobody’s really sure,” Lavon said. “We know even less about those conflicts than we do about the AD 70 siege. If either of the latter rebellions had the equivalent of a Josephus to chronicle the event, his writings haven’t survived.”

“What are the best estimates?”

“Accounts of the Kitos War only describe ‘a great slaughter.’”

Lavon didn’t elaborate, though after what we had seen so far, a mental picture of what that entailed required no huge imaginative leap.

“What about Bar Kochba?” Bryson asked.

Like most people outside Judaism and the Biblical scholar community, I had never heard of the man. I had no idea that this warrior — a messianic figure whose name translated as “Son of the Star” — had led the greatest rebellion of all.

Lavon explained that around AD 130, the emperor Hadrian — the same man who leveled the early Christians’ shrine — visited Jerusalem and decided to rebuild it as a pagan city along Roman lines.

For starters, he issued decrees outlawing Jewish customs like circumcision, which the Romans considered mutilation. But his crowning insult was his plan to build a shrine to Jupiter on what remained of the Temple Mount.

“What happened?” asked Bryson.

“As any fool could have predicted, the Jews rebelled,” Lavon said. “And in contrast to the situation sixty years earlier, this time Jewish resistance was unified.

“Ultimately, the Romans had to bring in twelve legions to put down the revolt — almost half their entire army at the time. The fighting dragged on for three years. Roman historians described their own casualties as enormous.”

“How many Jews died?” asked Markowitz.

“That’s even more of a guess than Josephus’s war, and I’m not trying to evade the question. Unlike the Great Revolt, the Bar Kochba rebellion didn’t end with the siege and fall of a major city. Instead, the last surviving rebels fled with their families to hideouts in caves.

“Rather than suffer even more casualties rooting them out, the Romans simply sealed up the cave entrances as they discovered them. The people inside eventually starved. Some of my colleagues have unearthed whole clusters of their skeletons.”

“So how many died?” asked Markowitz.

“Cassius Dio said about 500,000. Others cite figures in the millions.”

“Take an average; about a million, then?”

Lavon shrugged. “I suppose.”

“A million here, a million there,” said Markowitz. “It was as if the Nazis had risen up and had another go at us — twice!”

“Come on now,” said Bryson. “The Romans weren’t Nazis. There’s no record of their going for all that racial purity crap or trying to exterminate the entire population.”

Markowitz didn’t answer. Instead, he just stared out the window for a few minutes before turning back to face us.

He spoke with a subdued voice. “All we wanted was our small piece of land. We had our place, our Temple. They destroyed it and cast us out of our ancestral home forever — people who had done them no harm.”

“Don’t tell me you’d want to go back to sacrificing lambs and doves, literally?” said the Professor.

Markowitz stared down at the floor, lost in thought.

“We wouldn’t have to do that,” he finally said. “We’d figure something out. We always have.”

The two of them continued to wrangle back and forth, but I noticed Lavon had gone quiet. Given our current circumstances, he didn’t want to acknowledge that Markowitz’s last point was essentially true.

After crushing the revolt, Hadrian set out to eliminate the last vestiges of what he considered a stubborn and rebellious people. He banned surviving Jews from entering Jerusalem and renamed the area ‘Palestine’ after their traditional enemies.

The Diaspora had really begun only after Bar Kochba.

“I’ll buy a gun,” said Markowitz. “I’ll learn how to shoot. I’ll come back, and the first thing I do, I’ll kill Pilate. He’ll never know what hit him. None of them will.”

He turned back to watch the Temple ceremonies. “We’ll protect this place,” he said. “By God we will.”

Bryson started to reply when I held up my hand. I refilled Markowitz’s goblet again and handed it to him.

“I’ll show you how to handle firearms,” I said, “but in the meantime, drink up. For you to achieve what you’ve planned, we have to make it home first ourselves, and we’re not going anywhere else today.”

I watched with some relief as the combination of the alcohol and the waning of his adrenalin rush began to take effect. After a few more minutes, he yawned and rubbed his eyes. Lavon and I guided him toward the bed and covered him with a blanket.

***

While Markowitz dozed, the rest of us just stood at the window’s edge, lost in thought.

“You know he’s serious,” I finally said.

“He’s gone crazy,” said Bryson.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “All that stuff about tossing the Romans out of Judea — he meant every word of it.”

“He’s obviously suffering from the stress,” Bryson replied. “Anyone would be after spending a night in that hellhole, not to mention having to fight like he did.”

“That’s true enough,” I replied, “but that kind of pressure can drive a man to actions he otherwise never would have considered.”

Bryson grudgingly conceded the point.

“That’s why you must destroy that transport machine just as soon as we all get back safe,” said Lavon.

Bryson glared at him in shock, as if the archaeologist had asked him to butcher his first born child.

But Lavon had spoken my sentiments exactly.

“He’s right, Professor. You’ve admitted yourself that his father has legal rights to the fruits of your research. He’ll get in somehow, with or without your permission.”

“He has no idea how to operate it,” Bryson argued.

“Do you have documentation?” asked Lavon.

Bryson nodded.

“There you have it,” I said. “You’ve done the hard work of inventing the thing. The rest is simply a matter of following the protocols you’ve developed. Even if he can’t figure out how to work the device himself, he has the resources to hire someone who can.”

Bryson shook his head. “No. It won’t be a problem to keep him away. We have other safeguards.”

“I don’t think you understand what we’re dealing with here,” I said. “As for me, just buy some Wal-Mart and Cisco for my account and I’d go away a happy billionaire. But he’s not going to do that; not now.”

“Even if he returned, a single man acting alone wouldn’t be able to accomplish much,” Bryson argued.

Lavon started to point out the contradiction between that statement and the Brysons’ earlier position on changing history, but he decided to back off. The device, and what it could prove, was not something the Professor would give up easily.