אמרו חז”ל (איכה רבא פ”ב סי ‘ה) על בן כוזיבא ואנשיו: ובשעה שהיו יוצאין למלחמה היו אומרים לא תסעוד ולא תסכיף
As we have already explained, the armed rebellion of Bar Kokhba against the Romans was very successful at the beginning . So much so that the Emperor Hadrian had to bring his best general, Julius Severus, from Britannia, and more than 10 legions – something unprecedented – to face the brave Jewish fighters. But in the end the war against Rome did not have the expected success.
The Rabbis explained, among other things, that some of the soldiers who were fighting in Bar Kokhba’s army, with an excess of arrogance because of their first victories, deliberately quoted incorrectly a verse from Tehillim (Psalm 60:10) and said: “Now HaShem, let us fight the Romans alone. We do not want You to fight with us or against us.” This arrogant attitude of some soldiers was seen by the Sages as one of the reasons for the horrific defeat
The rebellion of Bar Kokhba was brought to an end in the year 135. The Romans were looking for the “final solution”. They did not take Jewish prisoners to sell them as slaves, as they did in the war of the year 68. By orders of the emperor, they carried out a systematic and calculated genocide in all the territory of Judea, killing women, men and children. According to the texts of the Roman historians themselves, like Dio Cassius , 50 fortified cities and almost 1000 villages were completely razed, and a total of 580,000 Jews were killed. 90% of the inhabitants of Judea were massacred.
The final battle took place in the city of Betar, the most powerful Jewish fortification and where Bar Kochba resided along with the remaining soldiers and with the most important Sage of the time: Ribbí El’azar of the city of Modiín. Betar was a city of Tora and with many people. Better was considered unconquerable.
After months of constant siege with more than 100,000 soldiers the city finally fell. The city fell on the 9th day of Ab of the year 135.
Adriano punished very hard the rebellion of the Jews and did something that until the moment was unprecedented. He did not allow the bodies of the dead Jews to be buried. The romans piled hundreds of thousands of corpses in a large vineyard, watering the fields with the blood of the dead, and left them there, as a cynical tribute to their victory.
This horrible episode, a national trauma, was recorded in the collective memory of the Jewish people. The Sages tell that miraculously the dead bodies remained without decomposing until the decree of Hadrian expired and finally they were able to bury the dead of Betar.
There are different versions of how much time passed until the Romans allowed the bodies to be buried. According to some historians this happened in the year 138, when Hadrian יש”ו finally died, since according to the old laws and traditions all the decrees of a king expired with his death.
The Sages tell that on the day it was announced that the corpses could be buried the rabbis of Yabne formulated a special blessing “hatob vehametib” (HaShem exceeds in his kindness to us “) which is, ever since then, recited in the Bircat haMazon, the blessing we say after eating a meal with bread. This special thanksgiving to HaShem was officially established because Jews were able to bury the corpses and they did not decompose. But it is also possible that in this Berakha there is something else and deeper: it is true that at that time, say 138, we no longer had Jerusalem or Yehudah or even a land named “Israel” because after the falling of Betar Hadrian changed the name of Judea to “Palestine”.
But somehow, once the emperor who tried like no one else to eliminate the Jewish people and Judaism was dead, our hopes were reborn, and so it was. The Jews settled in the North of Israel: the Galil, the Golan, Bet She’arim, Tiberia, etc. and at the end of the second century many beautiful Yeshibot flourished there, under the leadership of Ribbí Yehudá haNasí, the author of the Mishna
