Rome and Jerusalem by Martin Goodman

Author:Martin Goodman [Goodman, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54436-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

GOVERNMENT

ALTHOUGH, as we saw in Chapter 5, Jews and Romans had different -ideas about the ultimate authority on which their governments were based, that there should be states and governments of some kind was not generally questioned in either society. But how should governments operate and relate to individual citizens? When did the good of the community override the rights of the individual? And when was the use of force justified in imposing the will of the state?

In one crucial area of government, the extraction of tax to pay for the activities of the state, Jews and Romans were in general agreement, although in practice the impact of taxation in the first century CE on the inhabitants of Jerusalem was far greater than its impact on the inhabitants of Rome. In theory, the right of the authorities to extract tax in order to pay for communal facilities of all kinds was taken for granted in both societies. But in contrast to the land tax levied in Judaea by both Herod and Roman governors, direct taxation on property, which brought in the bulk of the income of the Roman state, was not levied at all under the emperors either in the city of Rome or in the rest of Italy. Romans considered such taxes on the property of citizens as suitable only for emergencies when state finances were in severe difficulties, and since the mid-second century BCE there had been sufficient income from Rome's overseas conquest for such emergencies to be very rare. In this respect, then, those who lived in Rome got off lightly, but Romans as much as Jerusalemites paid indirect taxes on sales, and they too found the price of goods raised by tolls levied on goods imported into the city.1

What did Romans and Jews expect their states to do with the money thus raised?

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