In the decades before the Great Revolt, Judea descended into a spiral of bandits, assassins, false prophets, and Roman brutality that made the final catastrophe feel inevitable.
According to Josephus in Antiquities XX, the violence started with a clash between Jews and Samaritans at the village of Ginea. Samaritans murdered Galilean pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem for a festival. The Roman procurator Cumanus, bribed by the Samaritans, did nothing. Enraged Galileans recruited a bandit leader named Eleazar ben Dinai, who had been hiding in the mountains for twenty years, and launched reprisal raids on Samaritan villages. Rome eventually intervened, but only after the emperor Claudius personally heard the case and banished Cumanus.
His successor Felix crushed the bandits but could not stop a new threat: the Sicarii (סיקריקין), dagger-men who concealed short blades under their cloaks and assassinated their targets in broad daylight, vanishing into festival crowds. Their first victim was the high priest Jonathan ben Ananus. After that, Josephus writes, the murders came daily. Nobody trusted anyone. The city lived in terror.
Then came the false prophets. An Egyptian Jew led thirty thousand followers to the Mount of Olives, promising that the walls of Jerusalem would collapse at his command. Felix's soldiers killed four hundred and scattered the rest. Other self-proclaimed prophets led crowds into the wilderness with promises of divine signs. Felix hunted them all.
The final procurator, Gessius Florus, was the worst of all. Josephus says the Jews actually looked back fondly on his predecessor Albinus, a man who had been thoroughly corrupt, because at least Albinus tried to hide his crimes. Florus committed his openly. He plundered entire cities. He punished the innocent. He deliberately provoked the Jews into rebellion, calculating that a revolt would cover up his own misdeeds. Josephus places the point of no return here, with Florus, the procurator who pushed a desperate nation past its breaking point.