Onkelos Converted Every Legion Rome Sent to Arrest Him

The emperor's sister's son had traded the eagle for a fringe. Word of it came back to Rome like a fever. A nephew with eagles on his shoulders was family. A nephew in tefillin (the small scripture boxes strapped on for prayer) was a wound the street could see.

Click for full size

Onkelos bar Kalonikos had been raised inside the palace, close enough to inherit treasuries. Now he sat in a house in the Land of Israel and taught letters older than the empire. The court could not let the insult stand.

The Merchandise Lying on the Ground

It began as a clever lie. Onkelos told his uncle he wished to go abroad and trade. Hadrian, by some tellings the emperor of the day, offered him the treasury outright. The young man wanted counsel, not coin.

"Any merchandise you see lying low and cast down upon the ground," the emperor said, "deal in that. In the end it will rise, and you will profit."

Onkelos went out among the nations. He found one people lying lower than any other. He bought into it with his whole life.

When he came back, his face had changed. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua saw it first and said to each other that this Roman had been learning Torah. Hadrian saw it too.

"Why is your face changed?" he demanded. "Has your trade collapsed? Has some man wronged you?"

Onkelos said no man had wronged him. He had studied Torah. More than that, he had circumcised himself.

"Who told you to do this?"

Onkelos smiled at the trap closing on his uncle. "You did. You told me to buy what lies cast down, for it will rise. I went among the nations and found none lying lower than Israel. In the end they will rise, and kings will stand before them."

A counselor at court heard the verse and panicked. He told Hadrian to kill the nephew now. Hadrian struck the counselor across the cheek and shouted him down. The man climbed to the roof and threw himself off rather than live to see those kings stand. Hadrian could kill an advisor's fear. He could not kill the argument.

Before Onkelos had even crossed, he had summoned the dead. Titus, who had burned the Temple, told him the Jews were too burdensome. Balaam told him not to seek their welfare. Each spirit spoke from the grave of a man who had opposed Israel. Each one warned him off. He crossed over anyway. So Hadrian reached for the only instrument an empire trusts when reason fails.

The First Cohort Never Came Back

A company was dispatched to drag Onkelos to Rome in chains. They arrived armed, credentialed, certain. He received them like guests. He did not argue and he did not preach. He sat them down and opened the Scriptures, drawing them along verse by verse the way a man shows a friend a thing too beautiful to keep to himself.

The soldiers had come to seize a renegade and march him home for execution. By the time he finished, every one of them had stepped across the line he had crossed first.

No prisoner returned to Rome. Only the silence of a cohort that had vanished into the thing it was sent to crush.

The Torch That Walks in Front

Hadrian sent a second company, stricter than the first. Speak nothing to him. Take him and go. They seized Onkelos and marched him out the door, jaws set, eyes forward.

"Let me tell you one small thing," he said, walking in their grip. "Does a minor official carry the torch in front of a senior officer?"

They said no.

"Does the senior officer carry it before the governor?"

No.

"And before the emperor himself, who walks ahead with the flame?"

None of them, they admitted. A lesser light never goes before a greater.

Onkelos let the answer sit, then turned it over. "And of the Holy One it is written that He went before Israel by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire, lighting their road (Exodus 13:21). The King of the world carried the torch in front of His servants."

The hands on his arms loosened. The second company converted in the road.

The King Who Stands Guard Outside

Now Hadrian sent a third, with the harshest instruction of all. No conversation. No reply. Not a single word, no matter what the man said. They took hold of Onkelos and pulled him toward the threshold.

At the doorpost his hand came up and rested on a small slanted box, and he laughed softly to himself. The soldiers held out against his silence as long as they could. Then one of them broke.

"What is that?"

Onkelos turned the question back. "You tell me."

They could not. So he told them. "In the way of the world, a mortal king sits inside his palace and his servants stand outside in the dark, guarding his sleep. The Holy One does the opposite. His children sit inside their homes, and He stands outside the door and guards them, as it is written, the Lord shall guard your going out and your coming in (Psalm 121:8)."

His fingers were still on the mezuzah (מזוזה), the doorpost scroll, as the third cohort laid down its mission and converted on the spot.

Rome Runs Out of Soldiers

Word came back to the palace the way it always did, by the absence of the men who had been sent. The first company, gone. The second, gone. The third, swallowed by a doorframe and a single verse. Each squad dispatched to put Onkelos in irons had instead unbuckled its own armor at his table.

The emperor commanded armies that had broken nations and burned a Temple. Against one convert at a doorway he could not field a single soldier who would stay a Roman long enough to make the arrest.

So the manhunt simply stopped. There was no one left to send. The nephew who had bought the most despised people on earth went on to render the whole Torah into Aramaic, the translation that scattered communities would read beside the Hebrew for as long as Jews kept reading at all. The empire had wanted him back in chains. It got back nothing, not even its own men.