Onkelos Raised Three Roman Enemies to Ask About the Jews

Onkelos ben Kalinikos was the emperor's nephew, which meant he had everything Rome considered worth having, and he was not satisfied.

He wanted to know which nation was honored in the world to come. This is a question Rome could not answer because Rome's understanding of honor was entirely organized around this world. Conquest, administration, wealth, the approval of powerful people: these were Rome's measures. Onkelos understood that these measures were self-referential and that they could not tell him anything about what mattered after all of it was over.

He turned to necromancy. He did not consult a living sage. He raised the dead, specifically the dead of Rome's enemies, because only a witness who had already lost every excuse for flattery or propaganda could be trusted to tell the truth about honor.

Titus Answered From the Other Side

He raised the spirit of Titus first. Titus had destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. If Rome's victory meant anything, Titus was the man who had proven it most dramatically. Onkelos asked which nation was most honored in the world to come.

"The Jews," Titus said.

He did not say this gladly. He still warned Onkelos away. The commandments were many. The burden was heavy. The demands on a convert would be real and the advantages in this world would be few. But he could not deny what he knew from where he stood. Imperial propaganda no longer had any force in the world where he existed. He knew the truth and he reported it, along with his honest assessment of the difficulty, because that is what witnesses without stakes can be expected to do.

Balaam Named the Enemy

Onkelos raised Balaam next. Balaam was the pagan prophet who had been hired by Moab to curse Israel and who had found himself unable to speak anything but blessing. He knew Israel's spiritual worth from direct prophetic experience, which made him a different kind of witness than Titus. Titus knew Israel from conquest. Balaam knew Israel because God had put Israel's worth into his mouth despite his intentions.

Balaam confirmed what Titus said. The Jewish people are honored in the world to come. When Onkelos asked about the gentile nations, Balaam gave a harder answer about what awaited those who had opposed Israel. The Babylonian Talmud's accounts in Gittin 57b and Avodah Zarah 11a differ slightly in which enemies Onkelos summons and in the exact content of each spirit's testimony, but the structure is consistent: every hostile witness confirms the same truth from a different angle.

Zechariah's Blood Would Not Stop Bubbling

The fate of Rome's enemies in the afterlife is not simple punishment. It is the continuation of the logic they operated by in life. Nebuzaradan, the Babylonian captain who burned Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar, found blood bubbling up from the ground in the Temple mount after the destruction. He killed thousands of Israelites trying to appease what he thought was an angry spirit. He finally learned whose blood it was: Zechariah ben Jehoiada, the prophet murdered inside the Temple by the people he had rebuked. His blood had been crying out since then.

Nebuzaradan, recognizing what had been done and what he himself had done in killing innocents trying to address it, converted. The tradition records his conversion as genuine and consequential. He had arrived as a destroyer and left as a penitent. The blood that brought him to that moment was still calling out after hundreds of years. The voice of murdered righteousness does not stop when the political situation changes.

Onkelos Translated the World Into Aramaic

After his conversion, Onkelos produced the Aramaic translation of the Torah that bears his name, Targum Onkelos. The Hebrew Bible opens with God creating the heavens and the earth. Onkelos translates with remarkable fidelity while introducing subtle theological adjustments. Where the Hebrew says God's ruach hovered over the waters, Onkelos renders it as a breath from before God, avoiding any suggestion that the divine spirit was a separate entity that moved through space. The man who raised the dead to find the truth about honor became the translator who spent his life ensuring the truth about God reached Aramaic-speaking Jews without distortion.

The necromantic consultation and the translation project are the same impulse. Onkelos was a man who needed testimony he could trust and was willing to go to extreme lengths to obtain it. The dead were more reliable witnesses than the living Romans around him. The Hebrew text was more reliable than any interpretive tradition that might cloud it. His life was organized around finding the most direct route to truth and then doing the painstaking work of transmission.