This brief and culturally uncharacteristic piratical adventure points to factors which continue to spur instances of piracy. 1) Piracy can be a method of continuing insurgency as much as a criminal activity. The Joppa pirates were refusing to adapt to a Roman-occupied, non-Temple-centric, post-High Priest hierarchy in Judaea. 2) Relatively small, cheap craft of local construction can cost a hegemonial power a lot in both economic and military terms. Roman squadrons had to be brought to the theater from elsewhere costing the Romans disproportionately to the value of the theater. 3) These moderately sized tactical operations threatened Roman strategic interests Mediterranean-wide. The Jewish pirates were a threat to the grain fleets from Egypt which prevented starvation in Rome itself.
The paper will include discussions of terminology per se, since the Roman Empire had the same difficulty we have in dealing with groups occupying the frontier between political insurgency and crime. Scholars of “banditry” in antiquity have noted that the terms “bandits” and “pirates” in ancient sources often refer to groups and operations which are not state-sponsored yet are never treated simply under criminal law. This can also be complicated by the vocabulary chosen by local property-owning elites who judge theft harshly and are more likely to value hegemonial authority over insurgency. This in turn gets entangled with the problem of who gets to define Judaism.