Sicarii

The Sicarii ("dagger-men") were a violent faction of first-century Jewish revolutionaries who assassinated their enemies and helped ignite the war against Rome that ended in the Temple's destruction.

Overview

  • Sicarii is a Latin name meaning "dagger-men," given to anti-Roman Jewish rebels who mingled with festival crowds and killed their opponents with concealed daggers.
  • The historian Josephus counts them among the revolutionary movements and blames them for helping bring on the catastrophic war with Rome (AD 66–70).
  • They represent the extreme nationalist end of the spectrum of first-century Jewish groups — over against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes — and are alluded to in the New Testament (Acts 21.38).

Summary

The Sicarii were among the violent revolutionary factions of first-century Judea, named from the Latin sica, the short dagger they carried hidden in their cloaks to assassinate Romans and Jewish collaborators, often amid crowds at the feasts.[^jant] Josephus, who despised them, associates them with the wider "fourth philosophy" of anti-Roman zealotry and holds them partly responsible for the revolt that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. They mark the far nationalist edge of the diverse Jewish world of Jesus' day: where the Pharisees pursued the Law through study and the Essenes withdrew to the desert, the Sicarii sought to drive out Rome by the knife. The New Testament preserves an echo of them when a Roman officer mistakes St. Paul for "the Egyptian" who had led "four thousand men of the Sicarii" out into the wilderness (Acts 21.38). Cross-link Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Maccabean Revolt.

Sources

[^jant]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament (eds. Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford Univ. Press), essays "Jewish Movements of the New Testament Period" (Daniel R. Schwartz) and "Messianic Movements" (David B. Levenson) — the Sicarii ("dagger-men") as violent anti-Roman revolutionaries, Josephus's "fourth philosophy," and their part in the war of AD 66–70, (paraphrased). Scripture from the WEB corpus.