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Antiochus IV. He believed Jews would recognize a universal god named Zeus.
Bust of Gneus
Pompey,
Roman general.
Jewish writers continued an attempt to glorify Jewish culture, to defend it as the oldest in the world, to describe the Jews as teachers of other peoples rather than having been influenced by others. Around 150 BCE, a writer named Eupolemus wrote that Abraham was one of those who had survived the flood, that it was Abraham who had built Babylon, that Moses was the world's first philosopher, and that Moses had invented letters and had taught the Greeks. Around 100 BCE, a Jew named Artapanus wrote a book entitled On the Jews in which he asserted that Moses had originated Egyptian civilization and had taught the Egyptians the worship of the bull-god, Apis, and the bird-god, Ibis. Another scribe, named Cleodemus (or Malchus), asserted that two sons of Abraham had joined the mythical Greek hero Heracles (Hercules) on his expedition into Africa and that Heracles had married the daughter of one of the sons.
A few Jews argued that if there were gods, the gods did not care. The devout countered with the claim that Yahweh cared but that he worked in ways that were mysterious to people because mortals were limited in their understanding of Yahweh's labors, and they argued that eventually the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked punished.
After his successful war against the Ptolemies of Egypt and before his disastrous war with Rome, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III, ruling from Syria, took control of Judea. He left Judea's High Priest and Council of Elders to run Judea, and he exempted the temple at Jerusalem from taxation. But after the Romans defeated him and forced him to pay tribute, Antiochus burdened the Jews with increased taxes -- to as much as a third of all crops harvested.
Many in Judea had favorable memories of rule by the Ptolemies. In 175 BCE, rule passed to the third son of Antiochus III, Antiochus IV, and he suspected that Judea's High Priest, Onias III, favored Egypt's Ptolemy VI. Onias was a member of the Zadok family, a dynasty that had ruled as High Priest since the time of King David. Onias was assassinated, and Antiochus IV appointed Onias' brother, Jason, as Judea's High Priest. To some extent Jason supported the Greek way of life practiced by Antiochus. It was now that a gymnasium was built in Jerusalem, in which young men performed athletics without the inconvenience of robes. Jerusalem was renamed Antioch -- one of many cities so named. Jerusalem's elite -- its wealthy and its aristocratic priests -- accepted these changes, and common people did not. Then a faction among Jerusalem's cultural elite won support from Antiochus by advocating more Hellenization than Jason was offering. In 172 Jason was replaced as High Priest, and the Zadok family line of High Priests came to an end.
In 171, war between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies erupted again. Antiochus IV invaded Egypt, and while Antiochus was in Egypt, Jason and a group of his supporters moved to regain power. They threw the new High Priest, Menelaus, into prison and slaughtered some of his supporters. To broaden his support, Jason joined forces with a fundamentalist, anti-Hellenist movement called the Hasidim. With the Hasidim, Jason created a reign of terror in Jerusalem, and they drove from the city the troops Antiochus had garrisoned there.
While passing through Palestine on his way back to Syria, Antiochus and his troops entered Jerusalem, pulled down Jerusalem's walls, slaughtered Jason's backers and looted the Holy Temple. Jason fled, and Antiochus restored Menelaus as High Priest. Antiochus again had troops garrisoned in Jerusalem, and he fortified Jerusalem's citadel.
As a part of his attempt to unify the different cultures of his empire and to eliminate a source of resistance to his authority, Antiochus ordered the Jews to begin worshiping the universal god spoken of by the Greeks as Zeus, and he commanded that they end circumcision and their celebration of the Sabbath. In exchange, Antiochus offered Jerusalem the right to govern itself in other respects, to mint its own coins, to participate in the Olympic games and other inter-city cultural events, and to join with other cities for mutual defense - that which he allowed other cities.
Antiochus wrongly assumed that the worship of Yahweh among the Jews could be transformed into the worship of the universal god, Zeus, as easily as such transformations had been made in his dominions farther east -- where Jews worshiped Yahweh under the name of Zeus Sabazions. He wrongly assumed that the Jews of Judea would easily accept the notion that all worshiped the same God. In 167 he had the temple in Jerusalem rededicated as a shrine to Zeus. a problem in semantics developed. Some Jews saw Antiochus as compelling them to practice idolatry -- something neither the Persians nor the Ptolemies had tried to force upon them.
Rather than allow time for Jews to start using Greek as the name for God, a military expedition was sent around Judea to force compliance with the new laws of worship. The expedition came upon an old priest in the village of Modein who refused to offer a sacrifice to Zeus. The priest, Mattathias, struck down another Jew who was about to do so. To escape punishment, Mattathias, and his five sons - the Maccabees family -- went with other Jews into the Gophna Hills. Their rebellion won support from people throughout Judea. It was supported too by the author of the Book of Daniel -- which was written during the time of the war that was unfolding -- the Maccabaean war.
The rebellion became partly a civil war and partly a war of national liberation. Its opposition to the rule of Antiochus IV pleased Rome because Rome wished to see Antiochus IV weakened. To strengthen his forces against Antiochus, the leader of the revolt, Judas Maccabeus, made a treaty with Rome, which made the success of his rebellion more likely.
The Maccabaean rebellion took control of much of Judea, but because Judas Maccabeus was not from the kind of aristocratic family that qualified him to be the High Priest, that highest position among the Jews went to a priest and supporter named Alcium. Some among those fighting for independence objected to the appointment, believing that Alcium was insufficiently devout and insufficiently hostile to foreigners and foreign influences, and Alcium had sixty of these critics executed.
In 141 BCE, more than twenty-five years into the rebellion (and shortly after Greece lost its independence to Rome) the Jews finally expelled the Seleucid dynasty's garrison from the citadel in Jerusalem. By now, Antiochus IV, Judas Maccabeus and other Maccabees had died. The last of the five Maccabeus brothers, Simon, ruled. With the strength of Rome behind the Maccabees, Judea won formal independence: an independent Jewish state for the first time in more than four centuries. Simon Maccabeus was chosen by popular assembly as High Priest despite his lack of qualifications by birth. He also took the position of "ethnarch," or Ruler of the Nation, announcing that his family would rule only until a true prophet should arise. He created a festival called Hanukkah to celebrate both Judea's independence and the day that his rule began.
During the Maccabaean rebellion a small faction claimed that their worship of Yahweh was unadulterated and that worship by other Jews was not. After failing to win the rest of Judea to their point of view they left Judea and went to Damascus, where they hoped to establish a "New Covenant" of repentance. There they would remain a sect and fade into oblivion.
The Maccabaean war exacerbated divisions in Yahweh worship, the two most prominent divisions being the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees tended to be men from the lower classes -- including craftsmen. They accepted the newer, popular doctrines: the conflict between good and evil spirits, Satan as an independent and evil force, and resurrection. The Sadducees were aristocrats and hereditary priests, and among them were the priests who managed Jerusalem's temple. They rejected the new doctrines and saw the Pharisees as contributing to the vulgarization of their religion. Although the Sadducees were the more religiously conservative of the two factions, they were the more Hellenized. According to the Hellenized Jewish historian Josephus (A.D. 37-95?), the Sadducees were haughty and harsh toward common Jews and disliked by commoners. Common Jews tended to see the Pharisees as "expounders of scripture," as scholars of Judaic law and as defenders of religious tradition against Hellenistic influences. This was encouraged by Pharisee insistence on a strict interpretation of Jewish law, including diet and dress, and a strict adherence to ceremony and observance of the Sabbath.
However much they failed to acknowledge it, the Pharisees drew from Hellenism. They had been attracted by the student-teacher relationship that had been common in the Hellenistic world but alien to Judaic society. They had been impressed by that part of Hellenistic education that tried to develop character in students and that had a high regard for individuality. Under Pharisaic influence the synagogue became a university for the Jews, a place where they gathered to learn and read the words of sacred writings from the past, where they read from the Five Books of Moses (The Torah), studied, sang and prayed.
The Pharisees were impressed by the Stoic teaching of an inner standard impervious to happenstance and suffering. And the Pharisees were attracted to Hellenistic law-making: Greek-style legislative bodies. The Pharisees created the Beth Din ha-Gadol (Great Legislature) as a lawmaking, law-transmitting and law-confirming body -- an institution they did not learn of from scripture. But they saw their legislative body as having its authority in God rather than from a constitution, and they saw the laws created by the legislature as having originated in divine revelation.
The Pharisees left interpretations of Judaism's laws open to discussion and scholarly debate. And in debate they invented the cross-examination that was to become a part of modern jurisprudence. They believed that God alone was able to look into the conscience of individuals and measure whether they lived by The Law.
The Maccabees family was renamed the Hasmonaeans, and among them, as among other ruling families, conflicts developed. In 134, a son-in-law of Simon Maccabeus, who was military commander of the region around Jericho, assassinated Simon and his two elder sons while they were his guests. A third son, John Hyrcanus, escaped the assassination. John was governor of a region in Judea along the Mediterranean coast and in command of a military force. He took power in Jerusalem, and there he was recognized as Simon's heir and made High Priest.
The Seleucid monarch, Antiochus VII, seeing Judea weakened by inner turmoil, decided to regain his family's control over Judea. Judea fell to his armies. But when Antiochus VII died in 129, John Hyrcanus renewed the treaty between his family and Rome. And fear of Rome left both Antiochus' successor and the Ptolemies of Egypt reluctant to violate Judea's borders.
With Rome as an ally, John Hyrcanus was able to expand Judea's frontiers. He destroyed the city of Samaria, having disliked the Hellenized city for what he saw as its heretical form of Yahweh worship and its opposition to the Maccabaean revolt. Then, in a series of military campaigns, he won territory that the Jewish state had lost during Nebuchadnessar's invasion some 470 years before. He annexed Idumaea and forced its population to adopt Judaism, including circumcision. He overran and annexed Galilee, and there, where Jesus was to preach a hundred a fifty years later, he forced conversions to Judaism -- conquest again to influence belief.
In 104 BCE, John Hyrcanus bequeathed rule to his wife and died. Their son, Aristobulus, was High Priest, and Aristobulus had his mother thrown into prison and starved to death, and he became king -- the first of Judea's monarchs to be both king and high priest. Aristobulus had one brother assassinated and his other brothers jailed. Then, after less than a year as king, Aristobulus died, and his widow released his brothers from jail and married the eldest of them: Jonathan. (She was thirty-seven, he twenty-two) Jonathan became king and high priest and was named Alexander Janneus.
Alexander Janneus launched wars in all directions against Judea's neighbors. Although he was a Pharisee, he allied himself with the aristocratic Sadducees and showed contempt for the Pharisees, and this precipitated an uprising against him and another civil war. The Pharisees hated Alexander so much that they sought an alliance with the Seleucid monarchy in Syria. The Seleucid monarch sent an army of both Syrians and Jews southward to overthrow Alexander, but those Jews who came south deserted and joined Alexander's forces. Alexander crushed the rebellion against him and took revenge against the Pharisees. He had eight hundred of them crucified in the center of Jerusalem and is said to have had the throats cut of their wives and children before their eyes, and to have watched some of the crucifixions from a window while dining among his harem. The executions helped to make Alexander Janneus unpopular. Independence had proven of little benefit for common Jews, but with the increase in their misery they intensified their hope for the coming a great king -- a messiah -- and a future life in a spiritual kingdom in heaven.
An attempt to improve matters followed the death of Alexander Janneus in 76 BCE. Alexander Janneus was succeeded by his widow, Salome Alexandra, now sixty-four. As queen of Judah she reversed the policies of her late husband and supported the Pharisees, and the Pharisees in turn recognized her right to rule, even though she was not a descendant of David as they believed a monarch should be.
Salome Alexandra died in 67 and her son John became John Hyrcanus II. Three months later John's brother, Judas Aristobulus, overthrew him, becoming Aristobulus II. John sought help from an Arab chieftain named Antipater, who was from nearby Idumaea and the head of a family called the Herods. Seeking an increase in influence in Judea, Antipater convinced John Hyrcanus II to wage war against Aristobulus II. Another bloody civil war followed. The Hasmonaeans still had an alliance with Rome, and the two brothers sought arbitration there. Rome responded by allowing its army in the east, under the command of Gneus Pompey, to intervene. Pompey marched into Jerusalem. The warring brothers remained willing to let Pompey arbitrate their differences, but their followers were not, and Pompey took military action to assert his authority. Supporters of Aristobulus held the ground around Jerusalem's temple, and for three months they held off Pompey and his army. Then Pompey's army broke into the temple, slaying the Sadducee priests they found there dutifully at prayer. The following year, 63 BCE , Rome made Syria and lands south to Egypt, including Judea, a single Roman province. The homeland of the Jews had lost its independence -- not to be regained until 1948.
Recommended Books
The Maccabaean Revolt, The Old Testament
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address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch17.htm