Description
At the heart of the storm
With all of this now on the table, we return to the perfect storm: to the build-up of pressure from the Roman Empire in one direction, the thousand-year hope of Israel from another direction, and the cyclone itself, the strange and powerful purposes of God, sweeping in from yet a third angle. The gale of imperial pressure was bearing down on the Middle East. Some Jews, long before, had seen the Romans as potential allies against more immediate and localized enemies, but most now recognized Rome as the latest and perhaps the nastiest in a long sequence of pagan overlords stretching back half a millennium to Babylon and, a millennium before that again, to Egypt. But that recognition simply increased the high-pressure system of Jewish hopes, since the great Exodus story, celebrated time and time again, reminded Israel that when the tyrants did their worst, God would win the victory, liberate his people and come to live among them once more...