ABSTRACT
The most important historical event in the era of rabbinic Judaism was the so-called Bar Kochba revolt. This second Jewish uprising against Rome is only comparable in its significance and its far-reaching consequences with the first uprising of 70 CE, although there is one essential difference to this initial revolt: the source material on which we must rely in order to reconstruct the events is incomparably inferior to that for the earlier Jewish war, not least because we lack a historian of the stature of a Flavius Josephus, to whom we are indebted for the greater part of our knowledge of the first revolt. We are therefore forced to rely on a few, mostly legendary accounts in the rabbinic literature and a handful of comments by the Graeco-Roman authors, although these have recently been supplemented by the finds from the Judaean Desert, which represent a not inconsiderable addition to our knowledge of the period.
