The Star and the Sword

In 132 CE, a man named Simon ben Koseba — declared the Star of Jacob by the greatest scholar of his age — led the Jewish people of Judaea in the last armed uprising against the Roman Empire. For three and a half years, the rebel state minted its own coins, administered its own law, and fought one of the most costly wars Rome had endured in a generation. When it ended, the province of Judaea had been renamed, Jerusalem had become a pagan colonial city, and hundreds of thousands were dead. The Star and the Sword is a full-scale narrative history of the Bar Kokhba Revolt and its long aftermath. Drawing on the letters Simon ben Koseba wrote to his commanders, the extraordinary Babatha archive, the archaeology of Judaean desert caves, and the testimony of Roman, Jewish, and Christian writers, Marco MacManus reconstructs the revolt in all its dimensions — the military campaign, the messianic theology, the administrative machinery of a wartime state, and the catastrophic collision between Roman imperial ambition and Jewish covenant particularity. The book traces how the revolt's suppression accelerated the Parting of the Ways between Judaism and Christianity, erased a people's name from the map, and forced the most creative act of religious reinvention in ancient history. A story of courage, catastrophe, and extraordinary endurance, The Son of a Star is narrative history at its most compelling.