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voice take the sword out of my hand.” Judah is joyously reunited with his
mother and sister, all of them miraculously healed.
Ancient Background
The film Ben-Hur tells the story of a fictitious Jewish prince who comes to
embrace Christianity, beginning in ad 26, in the reign of the emperor
Tiberius. The film spends only a brief time in Rome itself, concentrating
most of the cinematic action in the city of Jerusalem and the surrounding
areas within the province of Judaea. Thus Ben-Hur crosses some of the
same geographical and chronological space as the earlier film, The Robe
(1953). After many years of riots and political insurgencies, which were
exacerbated by the incompetence of the local rulers, the emperor Augustus
(ruled 27 bc–ad 14) established the Roman imperial province of Judaea
in ad 6 as an autonomous part of the Roman province of Syria (Grant,
334–42). Until ad 41, the province of Judaea was governed by a Roman
military prefect, who would discharge many of his official duties in the
city of Jerusalem, the Jewish center of Judaea and site of the great Temple.
During the early years of the provincial government, the occupying
Romans and the local people experienced an unsteady détente. While the
Jewish elite, led by the high priests, seemed resigned to the presence of
large Greco-Roman communities in their land and generally attempted a
program of cooperation with the Roman administration, other Jews were
resentful of the occupation with its attendant pagan symbols and statues,
military accouterment, and the burdensome taxation required by the
Roman emperor. Many Jews anticipated the coming of a Messiah who
would restore the spiritual nation of Israel, a belief that had become more
widespread ever since the death of Herod the Great in 4 bc.
When a few messianic claimants appeared on the scene, the Roman
authorities were abundantly alarmed by the popular idea that the Messiah
would be a Jewish national leader who would liberate the Jews from the
Roman occupation. Because of the rising messianic fever in the province
and Judaea’s reputation for civil unrest, the prefect had at his command
two cohorts of auxiliary troops, about one thousand men, stationed at the
old Herodian palace and the Fortress Antonia in Jerusalem, while a third
cohort guarded the Roman capital at the seaside city of Caesarea. In case
of a serious uprising, the prefect could call on his superior, the Roman
governor of Syria, to send a legion, a unit of about 5,500 heavily armed
infantrymen. One of the early prefects of Judaea was Valerius Gratus, who
66 BEN-HUR (1959)