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Caligula Tried to Put His Statue in the Temple

Pilate set Caesar's portraits over Jerusalem in the dark. The crowd walked to Caesarea, lay down in front of him and bared their necks.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Faces That Came In at Night
  2. The Water and the Daggers
  3. The Emperor Who Called Himself a God
  4. The Chain Agrippa Hung Over the Treasury
  5. The Owl on the Rope at Caesarea
Caligula Tried to Put His Statue in the Temple Click for full size

The Faces That Came In at Night

Pilate moved the army up from Caesarea to winter in Jerusalem, and he brought the ensigns with him. Every standard carried a small portrait of Caesar in metal. Governors before him had left those ornaments behind at the coast, because the law of the country forbade the making of images at all, and no procurator had wanted the argument. Pilate marched at night. When the city woke, the emperor's face was already standing over the Temple mount.

The people walked down to Caesarea and asked him to take the images away. He would not. They asked again the next day, and the next, for five days. On the sixth he had a judgment seat set up in the open place of the city, with the soldiers arranged where the crowd could not see them, and when the petitioners started again he gave the signal. The troops closed around them three deep. Pilate told them that anyone still standing there when he finished speaking would be killed.

They lay down on the ground and pulled their collars open and offered him their necks. Nobody ran. Pilate looked at several thousand men waiting to be cut, and sent the images back to Caesarea.

The Water and the Daggers

He learned from it. When he decided to bring water to Jerusalem from two hundred furlongs away, he paid for the aqueduct out of the Temple treasury, and the crowd came at him again, tens of thousands of them, shouting in the street.

This time the soldiers were already inside the crowd. Pilate had dressed a great number of them in ordinary clothes and sent them in with daggers under their garments, and when he gave the signal they used clubs and blades on whoever was nearest. They struck harder than he had ordered. The men shouting and the men standing quietly were beaten down together, and none of them had come armed. The gesture that had worked at Caesarea did not work twice.

Other Romans read the country better. When Vitellius came south with two legions to fight the king of Arabia, the leading men met him on the road and asked him not to march ensigns full of images through their land, and he turned the whole column onto the great plain and went up to Jerusalem with only his friends. While he was there he gave back the high priest's vestments, which Rome had been keeping in a sealed stone chamber with a guard captain lighting a lamp beside them every day.

The Emperor Who Called Himself a God

Caius, whom Rome called Caligula, went to the Capitol and announced that he was the brother of Jupiter. When a daughter was born to him he carried the infant up and set her on the knees of the statue and said the child had two fathers, and left the city to work out which father was greater. He stripped the Greek temples of their carvings and had the pieces sent to his gardens. He wanted the great Zeus of Olympia brought to Rome and gave up only because the architects said the workmanship would not survive the road. And he ordered a statue of himself set up inside the Temple at Jerusalem, in the house of a God who had no face anywhere.

The man who killed him was a tribune named Cherea. Caius had put him in charge of collecting the taxes and then mocked him for going slowly, because Cherea pitied the people he was squeezing. Every day Cherea came for the watchword, and every day the emperor handed him a woman's word to carry back to the guard, and the other tribunes waited for it so they could laugh. On the last day of the shows Cherea asked for the watchword again, in a narrow passage behind the theater. Caius gave him another of them. Cherea drew and struck him between the shoulder and the neck, and the breastbone stopped the blade. Caius did not shout. He did not call for anyone. He groaned and stumbled forward, and Cornelius Sabinus forced him down onto his knees, and the rest closed in, and Aquila gave the stroke that finished it.

The Chain Agrippa Hung Over the Treasury

Agrippa had once worn an iron chain in a Roman prison. Caius, in a generous mood, had given him a golden one made to the same weight. When Claudius sent him home to rule, Agrippa went up to Jerusalem, offered everything the law required of him, paid to have the heads of poor Nazirites shorn, and hung the gold chain up inside the Temple precinct, over the treasury, where anyone could see it. He wanted it on the wall as the record of a man bound for a small cause and unbound again, so nobody would mistake his crown for something he had earned.

Not long after, the young men of Doris carried a statue of Caesar into the Jewish synagogue there and set it up. Agrippa went straight to Petronius, the president of Syria, who sent a centurion to collect the offenders and wrote to the magistrates that the emperor's face sat more conveniently in the emperor's own temple than in somebody else's meeting house.

The Owl on the Rope at Caesarea

Three years later Agrippa held games at Caesarea. On the second morning he came into the theater in a garment woven entirely of silver, and the early sun caught it, and the light coming off him was hard to look at. His flatterers began calling out from around the seats that he was a god, that they had reverenced him until now as a man and would do better from here on. He did not stop them.

Then he looked up and saw an owl sitting on a rope over his head, and a pain started in his belly. He turned to his friends. "I, whom you call a god, am commanded to depart this life," he said, "and I am bound to take what is allotted me." They carried him into the palace. The whole city put on sackcloth and lay down in the open with their wives and children, begging for him. He lasted five days. From the high chamber where they had laid him he could see them stretched out on the ground below his window, and he wept at them, and then he died.

TempleRomeJosephusResistanceCaligula
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From the tradition

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The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Antiquities XIX.1-4Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Caligula declared himself a god and ordered a colossal statue of himself installed inside the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem. The Jews told the Roman general they would rather die, every last one of them, than allow it.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XVIII-XIX, Caligula's madness had been escalating for years. He called himself the brother of Jupiter. He plundered Greek temples and shipped their treasures to Rome. He executed senators to seize their wealth. When a Jewish delegation led by Philo of Alexandria came to protest anti-Jewish riots in Egypt, Caligula mocked them to their faces. Philo walked out and told his companions to take courage, because a man this arrogant had already turned God against himself.

Then Caligula sent Petronius, the governor of Syria, with two legions and orders to erect the imperial statue in the Temple by force if necessary. Petronius marched to Ptolemais and began commissioning the statue. Tens of thousands of Jews descended on his camp. They did not come armed. They came with their families. They told Petronius they would sooner be slaughtered, with their wives and children, than see the Temple desecrated.

Petronius was shaken. He saw an entire nation prepared to die rather than submit. He also noticed that the Jews had stopped planting their fields, which meant famine and the loss of Roman tax revenue. He wrote to Caligula asking for a delay. Agrippa, who was in Rome and had the emperor's ear, threw a lavish banquet for Caligula and used the occasion to beg him to rescind the order. Caligula, in a rare moment of generosity, agreed.

But Caligula then changed his mind and sent new orders commanding Petronius to proceed immediately, adding that Petronius himself should commit suicide for the delay. The letter traveled slowly. Before it arrived, Caligula was assassinated by his own Praetorian Guard in January of 41 CE. Petronius received news of the emperor's death before the suicide order reached him. The Temple was saved by twenty-seven days of favorable winds.

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Antiquities XVIII.3-5Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Pontius Pilate moved his troops into Jerusalem at night and brought Roman military standards bearing Caesar's image into the holy city. Every previous governor had known better.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XVIII, prior Roman administrators had always removed the images from their standards before entering Jerusalem, out of respect for the Jewish prohibition against graven images (Exodus 20:4). Pilate decided that accommodation was over. He smuggled the standards in under cover of darkness, and by morning the city woke up to find pagan images overlooking the Temple.

The Jewish reaction was immediate and massive. Crowds streamed to Pilate's headquarters in Caesarea and begged for five straight days that he remove the images. On the sixth day, Pilate summoned them to an open assembly, where soldiers he had hidden behind the seats suddenly rose and drew their swords. Pilate told the crowd they would die on the spot unless they accepted the standards.

The Jews threw themselves face-down on the ground, bared their necks, and told him they would rather be killed than see God's law violated. Pilate backed down. He ordered the images carried back to Caesarea. It was one of the only times a Roman governor reversed himself under pressure from an unarmed crowd.

But Pilate was not finished provoking the Jews. He later seized money from the Temple treasury, the korban (קרבן), sacred funds dedicated to God, and used it to build an aqueduct. When crowds protested during a festival in Jerusalem, Pilate sent soldiers disguised as civilians into the crowd carrying concealed clubs. On his signal, they attacked. Many died from the blows; others were trampled in the stampede. Josephus also records that Vitellius, the governor of Syria, later visited Jerusalem, was received warmly, and returned the high priestly vestments to Jewish control, reversing years of Roman custody. It was a rare gesture of respect in an era defined by escalating confrontation.

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Antiquities XIX.5-9Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston · Public Domain

Agrippa did something no Jewish king had done in a generation: he made the people feel like they had a ruler who was actually one of them.

The Josephus says in Antiquities XIX, when Claudius came to power after Caligula's assassination in 41 CE, he confirmed Agrippa's kingdom and expanded it to include Judea and Samaria, the territories his grandfather Herod had ruled. Agrippa was now king of a reunified Jewish state, governing from Jerusalem with Roman backing but genuine Jewish loyalty.

He earned that loyalty. He offered sacrifices daily at the Temple. He paid for Nazirite vows out of his own pocket. He hung the golden chain that Caligula had given him, the one that replaced his prison shackles, inside the Temple as a reminder that God reverses fortune. During the festival of Sukkot (the Festival of Tabernacles), when the Torah was read aloud before the people as prescribed (Deuteronomy 31:10-11), Agrippa wept when he reached the verse declaring that a foreigner could not be king over Israel. The crowd called out: "You are our brother! You are our brother!" It was a moment of genuine embrace between a Herodian king and the Jewish people, something that had never happened before.

Agrippa moved too fast. He began fortifying the northern walls of Jerusalem with walls so thick and high that Josephus says they would have made the city impregnable to any siege. The Roman governor of Syria reported the construction to Claudius, who ordered it stopped. Agrippa obeyed, but the message was clear: Rome would tolerate a Jewish king only as long as he remained useful, not powerful.

Agrippa died suddenly in 44 CE at a spectacle in Caesarea. He was forty-four years old and had reigned over the full kingdom for only three years. Josephus reports that the crowds in Caesarea, many of them non-Jewish, celebrated his death openly and hurled insults at his memory and his daughters. Claudius considered giving the kingdom to Agrippa's son but decided the boy was too young. He sent a Roman procurator instead. The last independent Jewish kingdom before the modern era was over.

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