ONE

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

IN THIS CHAPTER I provide some of the political and social background for the discussion in chapter 2 of the functioning of a loosely integrated Palestinian Jewish society in the later first millennium B.C.E. I focus here on some of the crucial episodes in the prehistory of Jews’ political and social integration: the activities of Ezra and Nehemiah (about which little can really be known), the Maccabean revolt, the fundamentally important but little studied or understood Hasmonean expansion, and, perhaps rather surprisingly, the activities of Herod. I also offer an account of “hellenization,” a process—or rather a complex of processes—that might have been expected to hinder the Jews’ internal integration by introducing or sharpening social divisions between Jews and by allowing some or many among the elites to cease regarding themselves as Jewish at all. But hellenization is a rather misleading concept that requires critical attention.

Persian Sponsorship of the Jerusalem Temple and the Torah of Moses¹

I assume that the Israelite religion, as practiced before the destruction of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., was distinct from the religion practiced by the Israelites’ putative descendants, the Jews, in the Second Temple period.² The Israelites, to be sure, worshiped Yahweh, whose cult was then, as later, centered in Jerusalem, and they seem to have shared many other practices with the Jews. For example, males seem to have been circumcised, pigs were rarely consumed, and mourning rituals seem to have included fasting, sackcloth, and ashes. But on the whole, except for brief periods of pietistic reform, most Israelites were not henotheists, and they may not have known of many characteristic biblical observances, such as the festivals of Passover and Sukkot, allegedly instituted either by the reformist king Josiah (reigned 639–609 B.C.E.) shortly before the Babylonian conquest or by Ezra or Nehemiah, in the fifth century. And their rituals seem often to have included practices forbidden by the Pentateuch, such as skin cutting, a mourning custom. Most importantly, perhaps, there is no evidence that the Israelites possessed a single authoritative “Torah” that bore any resemblance to the Pentateuch. The implications of the shift from the Israelite religion to Judaism will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Here we will briefly consider some aspects of its history.

This history is controversial and poorly understood. According to the biblical books of Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah, the Persian emperors permitted several groups of Judahite exiles to return from their exile to Judah and build a temple in Jerusalem. The temple, devoted to the worship of Yahweh alone, was completed in 515 B.C.E. Two generations later, Artaxerxes I permitted first Ezra and then the courtier Nehemiah (or perhaps the order was reversed) to return to Judah and establish the “Torah of Moses,” apparently a book, as the official law of the Judahites. To judge from the biblical accounts, this book closely resembled the Pentateuch but may not have been identical with it. The account of Ezra’s career is incomplete, but Nehemiah is said to have been successful in his mission, mainly because of his political skill.

In the absence of external confirmation, it is difficult to know what to make of these stories. Most scholars, impressed by their meaningful translatability into rational historical narrative (i.e., their verisimilitude), have been inclined to take them seriously, notwithstanding some problematic details. Others, perhaps a growing number, reject the stories on the grounds that they are after all stories, whose biases are quite conspicuous.3 We need not solve this problem, since it is nearly certain that the Jerusalem Temple was built under the aegis of the Achaemenids, and likely too that some version of the Torah became the authorized law of the Jews in the same general period, if not in the circumstances the biblical books describe. We may wonder why the Persian emperors should have been interested in imposing Judaism on the Jews.

In comparison to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who were mainly interested in collecting tribute from their subjects, and punished brutally those who failed to pay, the Persians were mild but interventionist. Cyrus posed as a liberator, a restorer of gods and peoples following the depredations and deportations of the Babylonians, and this pose became a fixture of Persian imperial rhetoric. In practice, the Persians tended to patronize native oligarchies, preferably those with strong connections to temples, and encouraged them to try to regulate the legal and economic activities of their provinces. This last consideration may help explain the imperial patronage of the Torah. Though probably the work mostly of reformists and radicals, the Torah claimed to be the traditional law of the Israelites and was the only Jewish law code available. An Egyptian text informs us that the emperor Darius I had created a committee of Egyptian priests to compile an authoritative code of Egyptian law, and Artaxerxes or another Persian emperor, in authorizing the Torah, may have been doing the same sort of thing for the Jews.4 The desired and sometimes attained result of the Persians’ interventionism was a smoothly running, peaceful, and consistently profitable empire, which depended on the loyalty of the hand-picked oligarchs, a royal provincial administration more elaborate than anything the Babylonians had had, and mild intimidation produced by the presence everywhere of small numbers of Persian-commanded garrison troops.⁵ Persian policy thus contrasted with Babylonian, with its alternating periods of complete laissez-faire and brutal terror. In some cases, then, Persian interventionism practically created the nations the Persians ruled. It is in the light of these practices that the events reported in the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah should be seen.

The regime initiated in Judaea by the Persian emperors and their Jewish vassals lasted, with a few interruptions, until the middle of the second century B.C.E. Though the history of Yehud/Judaea (the province acquired its Greek name after Alexander the Great conquered it in 332 B.C.E.) in much of this period is very obscure, the apparent institutional stability of Judaea suggests that the impression of calm created by the silence of the sources, preceding the well-attested dynamism and disorder of the two and a half centuries beginning in 170 B.C.E., is no mirage.

Hellenization: A Constraint on Group Integration?

According to 1 Maccabees (1:11), some Jews in the early second century B.C.E. believed that their people’s separation from the surrounding nations was the source of all their woes. The implication, that the Jews were less integrated into their eastern Mediterranean social environment than many of their neighbors, is probably correct. But enduring integrative pressures forced them to find ways to circumvent the separatist requirements of Jewish law; this may explain, for example, how the Tobiad family, regarded as Ammonite in the book of Nehemiah, despite their marriage alliance with an important Jerusalemite priestly family (Nehemiah 13:1–8), were considered Jewish by sometime in the third century B.C.E.6 The same pressures also encouraged the Jews to embrace aspects of the common culture of the eastern Mediterranean, which Jewish law did not unambiguously prohibit.

The most significant cultural development in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth century B.C.E. and following was the process modern historians call “hellenization” (there is no precise ancient equivalent for the word). This term is used to denote a confusing variety of phenomena, ranging from non-Greek’s use of imported Greek tableware to development of a taste for Greek and imitation Greek painted vases and sculptures to worship of Greek gods to adoption of the Greek language and reading of Greek literature to, finally, the acquisition of citizenship in Greek cities, that is, becoming “Greek” (citizenship, at least as much as descent, was an essential requirement for Greekness). To confuse matters still further, Jewish and Christian scholars, especially, use the term with a marked lack of chronological specificity—this at a time when ancient historians and classicists are increasingly recognizing the distinctions between the still rather exclusivistic Hellenism of the Hellenistic period, the characteristic urban culture of the high imperial Roman east, which simultaneously served to integrate the upper classes of the empire and was a site of subtle resistance to Roman rule, and the Greek paideia of the late empire, which first united and then divided pagans and Christians.7

In recent decades, interest in the hellenization of the Jews in the high and later Roman Empire has waned, in part because some of the main issues seem relatively uncontroversial—the material culture of Roman Palestine appears quite unambiguously hellenized—but also because the opposing viewpoints about the extent to which the rabbis participated in the common culture of the Roman east are frozen in place and no longer in dialogue. In reality, these issues are far more complex and interesting than they have come to seem, and I will discuss them in detail in the relevant sections of this book.

By contrast, the question of the hellenization of the Jews in the Second Temple period is enduringly controversial. Scholars still disagree as to whether “the Jews” were hellenized or not, as if the answer to such a question could ever be meaningful. Even those who admit that the real cultural situation was complex often regard Hellenism as a defining issue in Jewish society after 332 B.C.E. Differing attitudes to Hellenism are thought to have generated social fissures and even conflict. In what follows, I will briefly explain how and why I disagree.⁸

The process of hellenization in Jewish Palestine in the Second Temple period seems on the whole to have been relatively unproblematic. As elsewhere in the Greek east, the practice of adopting the trappings of Greek culture functioned to sharpen the divisions between rich and poor and city and country, which existed in any case. But hellenization rarely produced divisions or catalyzed conflicts. Furthermore, it is misleading to crowd all the effects of Macedonian rule under the rubric of hellenization. The latter may have been an important consequence of Alexander’s conquests and their aftermath, but scholars have too often tended to think that all Jewish cultural production of the Hellenistic period is best viewed as a set of artifacts either of hellenization or of opposition to it. In what follows, therefore, I will first of all introduce some terminological precision, by distinguishing several types of hellenization, and then pay special attention to those novel aspects of Jewish culture in the Hellenistic period that would be unilluminating to understand in relation to Greek culture.

Let us begin by separating hellenization in the sense of “acting Greek” while maintaining one’s own cultural identity from hellenization in the sense of “becoming Greek” and so necessarily abandoning one’s previous cultural identity.9 (One of the differences between Greekness in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods was that in the former it was not compatible with open retention of other ethnic or cultural identities).¹⁰ Hellenization in the first sense might culminate in hellenization in the second sense, but need not do so. In fact, it may even function to preserve a native non-Greek culture. And hellenization in the second sense need not presuppose, rather surprisingly, prior hellenization in the first sense.¹¹ For the time being it is the first type of hellenization that concerns us.

Until 332 B.C.E. the Judaeans and their neighbors were subject to Persia, far in the east, but they remained part of the cultural and economic world of the eastern Mediterranean, which included not only the cities and nations of the Syro-Palestinian coast and Egypt but also the old Greek cities of western Asia Minor and, at its western fringe, Greece itself. There had been trade and other contacts between Greece and the east coast of the Mediterranean, including Israel, for as long as there had been boats. The Philistines, who infiltrated the coastal cities of Palestine around 1200 B.C.E., probably came from the Aegean and had close ties to the Mycenaean Greeks. Greeks served as mercenaries in the armies of the kings of Judah and Israel, and Greek traders were not unknown in the region in the same period.¹² Presumably, though, there was nothing noteworthy about these people—they were just part of the general eastern Mediterranean ethnic stew, along with Egyptians, Phoenicians, and various groups of Asians.

The Greek victory over Persia in 478 B.C.E., the subsequent rise of the Athenian empire, the consolidation of classical Greek culture (which was among other things an important item for export), and of Athenian economic dominance, which survived the decline of their empire, changed matters. By the fifth century, Greek goods predominated over all other imports in the cities of the Syro-Palestinian coast.¹³ The well-to-do there had always liked nicely decorated imported goods, but the trickle of Greek imports now turned into a flood—a development of profound cultural significance that is frustratingly difficult to interpret. Why, apart from the commercial strength of Athens, should Greek products and the Greek style have acquired such prestige in coastal Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine in the fifth century B.C.E.? What are the implications of this development? In the absence of written sources, it is almost impossible to say.14

By the fourth century, the flood of Greek goods reached the Palestinian interior, including Judaea. The coins of Persian Judaea, for example, are all modeled on Greek, especially Athenian, coins. Indeed, the practice of stamping pieces of preweighed silver (probably originating in the seventh century B.C.E. in the kingdom of Lydia in western Turkey) spread in the eastern Mediterranean in the sixth and fifth centuries primarily due to Greek influence;¹⁵ the minting of coins itself was thus in some measure an aspect of hellenization. The coinage of Judaea’s northern neighbor, Samaria, is similar to that of Judaea, but remarkably enough some of these tiny coins bear Greek inscriptions. These coins were almost all of very small denomination and so intended for local use, not interstate trade.¹⁶ They reflect the tastes and interests of Judaeans and Samarians, not their foreign commercial partners. When Alexander the Great conquered the east coast of the Mediterranean in 332 B.C.E., he found a world that was not completely foreign to him, in which certain aspects, at least, of Greek culture already enjoyed widespread acceptance.

The Macedonian Conquest and Its Impact

Josephus recounts that when Alexander marched down the Palestinian coast, he detoured to Jerusalem to meet the high priest, Jaddus (Yaddu‘a). When he saw that venerable figure, he at once realized that it was Jaddus who had appeared in his dreams, foretelling his victory over the Persians; so the great conqueror prostrated himself at the old man’s feet. (Ant 11.321–39) This is surely a folktale. In reality, Alexander never left the coastal road but entrusted the reduction of the Palestinian interior to a subordinate.17 The following decades, down to 301, were chaotic. Alexander died in 323, and his immense empire, stretching from Greece to India, fell into several pieces, each ruled by one of Alexander’s generals initially eager to seize the whole. Palestine was especially controversial, since it was claimed by Ptolemy son of Lagos, whose base was Egypt; Seleucus, the ruler of Mesopotamia and Syria; and Antigonus the One-Eyed, the greatest of all of Alexander’s generals. In the event, Ptolemy’s conquest of the region in 301 B.C.E. was decisive, and Palestine remained part of Ptolemy’s kingdom until 200 B.C.E., when Seleucus’s descendant Antiochus III wrested it from Ptolemy V. Although coastal Palestine and Phoenicia in this century witnessed nearly constant warfare between the two dynasties, Judaea, which was a poor hill country district off the main roads and of little strategic interest, remained at peace.¹⁸

Alexander and his successors retained much of the administrative structure set in place by the Persians. Like the Persians, they tended to grant subject nations, such as the Jews, limited autonomy. And like the Persians, they nowhere actively forced their own language or culture on their subjects. However, the rulers themselves were adamantly Greek (despite, or because of, not actually being Greek at all, but Macedonian), instinctively assumed the superiority of Greek culture, and seem to have preferred Greeks as administrators, friends, and courtiers.¹⁹ These preferences induced wealthier, politically ambitious natives to adopt elements of Greek culture. But Alexander also introduced an unprecedented practice that had profound though probably unintended consequences in all the lands he conquered. To secure his empire throughout the Near East, he founded cities to be settled by his mainly Greek or Greco-Macedonian veterans and other Greek immigrants. These cities were “Greek,” that is, they had constitutions and a public life loosely modeled on those of Athens, were legally autonomous (because “freedom” was an essential characteristic of Greekness; in reality, of course, as opposed to self-aggrandizing rhetoric, the cities were subjected to the kings), and had a rural territory assigned to them. These territories were farmed not like those of the cities of Old Greece, by citizen farmers, but, by native peasants who were subjected to the citizens, and enjoyed very few civil rights.

Thereafter, founding new Greek cities became a normal activity for all of the so-called Hellenistic kings who succeeded Alexander, and, even more so, for the Romans who succeeded them, so that the entire eastern Mediterranean and Near East was eventually linked by a web of Greek cities. These cities enjoyed no more legal rights than autonomous non-Greek nations did, but they were unquestionably prestigious and prosperous, their self-confidence enhanced by royal patronage and friendship. They were thus soon joined by ancient non-Greek cities, like Sardis in Asia Minor, or Tyre and Sidon in Phoenicia, which in the third century succeeded in transforming themselves into Greek cities, though few of their citizens were of Greek descent.20

Given the omnipresence of Greek cities in the Fertile Crescent and the pressures on better-off natives to adopt Greek culture wholesale and even to become Greek (pressures, it bears emphasizing, not consciously imposed by the rulers but rather built in to their system of rule), the stakes in hellenization changed dramatically after Alexander the Great. It was now not unthinkable that nations long in existence or established by the Persians might simply be willed out of existence by their upper classes’ desire to be Greek, to reconstitute themselves as the citizen body of a Greek city. Indeed, such a process, indirectly attested for many cities of Asia Minor and Phoenicia in the third century, may be precisely what occurred in Jerusalem and Shechem in the second century, precipitating the Maccabean revolt.

The Tobiads

We can get some sense of the complex effects of Macedonian rule on Jewish society, and the limits of the utility of hellenization in explaining them, by briefly considering two bodies of information. The first of these is Josephus’s “Tobiad romance,” a historical fiction embedded in book 12 of the Antiquities (154–236). Josephus misdated the story to the early years of Seleucid rule, though its content makes it clear that the story is set in the last generation of Ptolemaic rule.²¹ The second body of information consists of several pieces of writing from the third and early second centuries, which allow us to see how Macedonian rule affected the concerns of Judaean priests and scribes, but in ways that have no obvious connection to hellenization.

In Josephus’s account, Joseph son of Tobias, a member of the Tobiad family mentioned previously and nephew of the Judaean high priest Onias II, succeeded in wresting the tax-farming contract for Judaea from his ineffectual uncle. (The Ptolemies collected taxes by auctioning tax-farming contracts district by district, often to wealthy natives; the tax farmers were then left to raise what they could. They had to pay for shortfalls out of their own pockets but could keep profits.) Josephus embroidered Joseph’s exploits and those of his son and heir, Hyrcanus, with so many swashbuckling details that it is tempting to dismiss the entire tale as a fabrication produced by an adventure writer. Nevertheless, the story is not wholly devoid of interest. It suggests that Ptolemaic policies created important opportunities for men with capital, even if they were not exactly members of the traditional ruling classes. The story also portrays the Tobiads as Jewish heroes who take a kind of accountants’ revenge on the Judaeans’ traditional enemies in the Greek cities of Palestine by exacting taxes from them with special rigor. The Tobiads’ assertive Judaism is striking in light of their non-Judaean ancestry; but their Judaism is of a peculiarly modern-seeming secular-nationalist kind. The story portrays Joseph and Hyrcanus as persistent and unself-conscious violators of Jewish law. And for all their alleged hostility to the Greek cities, they are entirely comfortable in the Hellenic environment of the Ptolemaic royal court in Alexandria, Egypt. The family’s ease around high government officials, at least, is confirmed by some papyri written in the 250s B.C.E. concerning the business and political arrangements of one Toubias, possibly Joseph’s father, a large landowner whose private army had been integrated into the Ptolemaic forces, and the royal agent Zenon.22 Thus, despite the dubious details of Josephus’s story, it introduces us to an element of the Judaean elite in the process of transformation, in the form of a wealthy, marginally Jewish but Jewishly well-connected family. This family had greatly benefited both economically and politically from the Ptolemies’ preference for capital-rich subjects and participated in the common Greek culture of eastern Mediterranean elite society. Yet it resisted actually becoming Greek and, successfully walking this tightrope, came to play an important role in Judaean society.

The New Wisdom

There are several pieces of Judaean literature that most scholars agree were composed in the third century B.C.E. These works introduce us to a different segment of Judaean society from that which is the subject of Josephus’s stories. The priestly and/or scribal circles who produced the literature were no less affected by the new conditions created by Macedonian rule than Josephus’s Tobiads were, but they changed at first in more subtle ways. For despite the ascendancy of people like the Tobiads, the Temple and the Torah remained the centrally important institutions in Judaea. Scribes now presumably needed to be literate in Greek, but acquisition of this skill can have posed little challenge to a class whose main characteristic had always been linguistic talent.23

I have argued elsewhere that the Ptolemies may not have recognized the traditional autonomy of the Jews. This would help explain the rise of the Tobiads and perhaps others like them and might also help explain the spotty evidence for tensions between the high priests and the Ptolemies, as well as the apparent fact that the high priest, Simon, openly supported the Seleucids (which may in turn explain why Antiochus III recognized Simon’s authority over the Jews).²⁴ Nevertheless, for all their interventionist aspirations, the Ptolemies still ruled mainly through local elites, especially in their non-Egyptian holdings. Thus, the priests and scribes remained empowered, if not as extensively or as exclusively as under the Achaemenids.²⁵

Despite the essential stability of the scribal and priestly classes in the third century, things were changing for them. We can see this clearly if we look at the way they transformed the classical Israelite/Jewish wisdom tradition, the recording of which was one of this class’s chief literary activities.²⁶ In the earliest complete example, the biblical book of Proverbs (seventh-sixth centuries B.CE.?), wisdom is an adjunct of official Jewish piety. Here fear of God is identified with wisdom, the righteous with the wise. Like the Deuteronomic history and some of the Psalms, Proverbs supposes that wisdom/righteousness is the key to prosperity. Though Proverbs has an undeniable worldliness, its central themes are specifically and conventionally Israelite.

This bureaucratic piety was subjected to criticism.²⁷ The book of Job (fifth century B.C.E.?) had already drawn on Second Isaiah’s transcendental monotheism to reject, in a rhetorical tour de force, the traditional Deuteronomic piety, which supposed that a powerful but immanent God could be counted on to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. Jewish writers of the third century produced even more radical revisions of the wisdom tradition. The author of Ecclesiastes, who came closer than any other ancient writer in Hebrew to producing a Greek-style philosophical treatise, as opposed to the loose collection of sayings typical of Israelite-Jewish wisdom, went well beyond Job in taking for granted God’s total withdrawal from the world, the unchanging character of nature, and the futility of all human endeavor, including righteous behavior and the seeking of wisdom.28 If Ecclesiastes recommended pious behavior at all, it was only for pragmatic reasons: conformity with the laws of the Torah was likely to be less painful than nonconformity.

Another Jewish book written in the third century B.C.E., known as 1 Enoch, is preserved not in the Hebrew Bible but only in translation into Ge‘ez (see the next chapter for more discussion). Fragmentary manuscripts of the work in the original Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.²⁹ This book, like Ecclesiastes and Job, is much concerned with the presence of evil in the world, but its explanation may be the most radical of all. 1 Enoch 1–36 is based on the brief and enigmatic biblical story, which immediately precedes the story of Noah’s flood, of the sons of God who descended to earth and took for themselves the daughters of man (Genesis 6:1–4). 1 Enoch follows Job in imagining that God’s ways are mysterious, though in contrast to Job, Enoch seems to think that some humans actually have access to God’s mysteries. Chief among these mysteries is that God, having created the universe, quickly relinquished control over it, allowing humanity to fall into the hands of wicked deities (the sons of God of Genesis). These deities were God’s servant angels, who had successfully rebelled against their master. God responded by withdrawing to the remotest part of heaven but promised that one day he and the angels who had remained loyal to him, together with a selected part of humanity, would overthrow the forces of evil and restore God’s sole rule over the universe.

1 Enoch thus responds to the claim of traditional Israelite wisdom that the one God is both good and powerful (a claim made problematic by the presence of evil in the world) not by reducing the reader to awed and uncomprehending silence, like Job, or by dismissing the claim with a resigned and world-weary shrug, like Ecclesiastes. 1 Enoch solves the problem of evil by infusing the biblical cosmology with myth, by restoring to his rewriting of Genesis 1–11 the divine drama and tension that the biblical author was so careful to omit. The result is a worldview that is closer to dualism than monotheism and certainly supposes that many divine beings aside from God can act independently and are extremely powerful. 1 Enoch is also deterministic: its human characters are more or less pawns to be manipulated by the divine protagonists.

The Wisdom of Ben Sira, composed in Hebrew soon after the Seleucid conquest of Palestine in 200 B.C.E., is unique among ancient Hebrew books written after the biblical books of the Prophets in that the author reveals his identity and tells something of himself—a characteristic the book shares with Greek literature.30 Ben Sira had been a government official and had taught wisdom to the well-to-do youth of Jerusalem. He was a great admirer of the high priest Simon and was perhaps a priest himself. His book constitutes a ringing reassertion of the views of the author of Proverbs and of the Deuteronomic historian. In what is very likely to be an intentional rejection of the radicalism of Job and Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira repeatedly emphasizes the traditional identification of wisdom and fear of the Lord. Like all wisdom writers, Ben Sira contemplated the meaning of nature. Although for Job nature proved God’s inscrutability, and for Ecclesiastes it proved the fundamental amorality of the world, for Ben Sira, as for the Psalmist, nature demonstrates only God’s majesty. Ben Sira doubts not for a moment that the righteous prosper and, in an apparent rejection of the views of 1 Enoch, eschews the pursuit of hidden wisdom. Ben Sira did not react against inner-Jewish developments alone. Though his own wisdom, like that of Proverbs, is heavily borrowed from Egyptian and perhaps even some Archaic Greek sources, his insistent identification of righteousness, or Torah, as the font of all wisdom has been understood as a reaction against a growing vogue for Greek literature among the wealthy youth of Jerusalem.³¹

For all the radicalism of these books, there is little in them that is demonstrably Greek. The Israelite wisdom tradition is transformed in these works but remains recognizably itself—the books are motivated by traditional Israelite-Jewish concerns and in every line betray their authors’ familiarity with earlier Israelite literature. Apparently, Palestinian Jews were not yet composing books in the Greek language and in Greek genres (at least no such works have been preserved), as their coreligionists in Egypt had already begun to do (though in content such works were often far more conservative than the more formally traditional Palestinian books). Although it is overwhelmingly likely that there is some connection between the intellectual crisis of the priestly and scribal classes and the new conditions created by Macedonian rule, it is very difficult to say precisely what this connection may have been. Indeed, the new literature, except perhaps for Ben Sira, demonstrates that the search in Jewish sources for Greek influence and native resistance in the form of opposition to Hellenism is largely misguided. We should be conducting instead a more subtle search for cultural reorientation.³²

The Maccabean Revolt (175–134 B.C.E.)

If Judaean society in the Second Temple period was characterized by a constant tension between internal and external integration—between separatism and assimilation—then the reformist high priests of the 170s and 160s tried to resolve that tension by downgrading the Jews’ separatism, if not eliminating it. Thus, Jason may have tried to transform Judaea into a Greek city-plusterritory, following the example of the rulers of Tyre, Sidon, and Sardis, among others.33 Like them, Jason may have intended to preserve elements of his native tradition and in fact seems not to have attempted to alter the traditional cult of the Jerusalem temple, or to have prevented the Jews from observing Jewish law. This limited retention of Judaism may explain why there was no discernible armed opposition to Jason’s reforms. But it also made the reforms inherently unstable, since Judaism, unlike the traditional religions of the Phoenician cities, was exclusivistic: the God of Israel, unlike Melqart, tolerated the worship of no other gods.³⁴

Elias Bickerman famously speculated that this fact (among others) underlay the more drastic reforms imposed by Antiochus IV in 168–167 B.C.E., in which observance of the laws of the Torah was prohibited and the Jerusalem temple was rededicated to Zeus Olympios-Baal Shamim—reforms inspired by Jewish leaders more radical than Jason. This hypothesis, like Tcherikover’s suggestion, that the royal persecution was a reaction to a revolt centering on the temple that had broken out the previous year, rests on the failure of the sources to provide a satisfactory account of the events of about 169–167. Aporia seems the only solution to this disagreement, barring new discoveries.

The debate about the character of the revolt, which gradually coalesced under the leadership of the Hasmonean family after the imposition of the royal reforms, may be more easily resolved. A close reading of the sources does not sustain Tcherikover’s view of the Maccabean revolt as a mass popular uprising. 1–2 Maccabees consistently describe the rebel forces as being small, enjoying only fluctuating popular support, and having enemies even apart from the relatively small numbers of radical reformists. Indeed, the Hasmoneans’ initial military opposition to the Seleucids ended in failure with the death of Judah and the routing of his army in 161; Jonathan emerged as a leading figure in Judaea only in 152, under circumstances that cannot be reconstructed due to the failure of 1 Maccabees to say anything at all about the previous eight years. The dynasty was established only after having risen through the ranks as Seleucid courtiers, and, once established, had to deal not only with royal treachery but with unceasing domestic opposition. In sum, Bickerman was surely right to argue that the revolt was the work of a committed minority, not the Jewish masses. Furthermore, it is reasonable to suppose, following Joseph Sievers, that it succeeded, ultimately, by patching together an inherently unstable coalition of different and competing interest groups.35 It is, finally, clear that the eruption in 164 of a century-long war of succession in Antioch was essential for Hasmonean success—a point made already by Tacitus (Histories 5.8.3) and obvious from even a cursory reading of 1 Maccabees: the constant warfare in Syria generated for the pretenders an enduring need for vassals who disposed of manpower, apart from making them ever less competent to press their proprietary claims over their subjects. Hasmonean independence was always contingent on Seleucid weakness and came to an end when the Seleucid empire expired in 63 B.C.E.³⁶

Why the Hasmoneans Fought

Scholars have occasionally doubted the Hasmoneans’ claim to have been priests of the order of Yehoyarib—another unresolvable debate.³⁷ It seems certain, though, that the family resisted neither Jason’s reforms nor Antiochus’s, at first. In fact, whatever their ancestry, their ties to Jerusalem seem initially to have been weak; they were influential mainly in their native town, Modein, in the western part of the border zone between Judaea and Samaria.³⁸ They thus constituted another case of a peripheral but aggressive family exploiting local disorder to seize power at the center, like the Tobiads earlier and the Herodian family later.39 This observation may help explain the Hasmoneans’ rise structurally, but we must still wonder about the mechanisms of their rise, especially their shifting and varied self-presentation. In other words, we must wonder why the Hasmoneans claimed to be fighting.

Until the end of the persecution and the restoration of the traditional cult in the late autumn of 164, there seems little doubt that the Hasmoneans presented themselves primarily as champions of the Torah and the temple, that is, of Judaism. This claim must have lost some of its utility subsequently. Simon’s public celebration of his reduction of several Seleucid fortresses, and his claim that a set of standard royal concessions amounted to Judaean independence, probably indicate that he posed not only as preserver of the Torah but as liberator of the Jews, though whether Judah and Jonathan had done the same is unknown.

In fact, the Hasmoneans’ precise religious inclinations are difficult to recover. They certainly behaved in untraditional ways and introduced innovations in law and temple procedure. Their very assumption of the high priesthood and secular authority, without possession of either Zadokite (legitimate high priestly) or Davidic descent, was at the very least problematic. Their constant exposure to corpse impurity was a more or less blatant violation of biblical law. There were surely other changes, too, about which less is known. (One especially striking case, their decision to regard vast numbers of non-Judaean Palestinians as Jews, will be discussed presently.) Many Judaean traditionalists quickly developed reservations about the Hasmoneans, and some openly opposed the dynasty, while others, less willing to incur the dangers of open opposition, unhappily reached a modus vivendi. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Hasmoneans were in general terms traditionalists. They may have engaged in a creative interpretation of the Torah that differed from what their Zadokite predecessors had done, but still they upheld the Torah’s validity as the constitution of Judaea.⁴⁰ This may have been enough to satisfy most Judaeans.

Despite the Hasmoneans’ essential traditionalism, in some respects they stood for integration as surely as Jason did, though on different terms. Every Judaean leader living under Persian, Macedonian, or Roman rule had to mediate between the integrative pressures of the eastern Mediterranean environment and the separatist pressure exerted by the Jews’ gradually deepening devotion to the Torah. The Hasmoneans demonstrated that it was possible, at least under certain political conditions, for Judaea to participate politically and economically in an increasingly tightly knit eastern Mediterranean world without surrendering that which made it distinctively Judaean. Embracing elements of Greek culture facilitated the Hasmoneans’ integration with their neighbors.41

Although the author of 2 Maccabees believed Judah Maccabee was engaged in a battle against Hellenism,⁴² he was surely wrong, if by Hellenism we mean the adoption of elements of Greek culture by non-Greeks. The evidence is unambiguous. Even Judah had counted the most culturally hellenized Judaeans among his partisans. One of these was an aristocratic priest named Eupolemus, whose father, John, had led the Judaean embassy to Antiochus III in 200 B.C.E. securing the king’s benefactions to the temple and nation of the Judaeans. John could not have addressed the king if he did not have some grasp of Greek rhetoric, a skill necessarily shared by his son Eupolemus, who in 161 B.C.E. led Judah’s embassy to the Roman senate, which permitted easterners to address it in Greek. Furthermore, in 159 B.C.E., Eupolemus published a History of the Judaean Kings, of which only brief excerpts survive. This book was composed in the Greek language according to the canons of Greek historiography. The excerpts concern David and Solomon, and one wonders whether the point of the book might not have been to argue that Judah and his brothers were worthy heirs of the ancients, notwithstanding their deficient ancestry. It is in any case surely significant that the earliest Palestinian Jewish book to have been written in Greek was published by a partisan of Judah Maccabee at the height of the Maccabean revolt and may well have been addressed to a mainly local Jewish audience.⁴³

The Maccabean brothers necessarily acquired facility in the Greek language, if they did not have it from childhood, and must have learned, like the Tobiads before them, how to behave in the presence of royal officials (a point Gruen missed). In their political behavior in Judaea, too, they depended heavily on Greek norms, demonstrating that hellenizing pressures came not only from the eastern Mediterranean environment but from Judaea itself. The engraving of the resolution of the assembly convened by Simon in 140 B.C.E. on tablets, and their display in the temple, conform with practices that originated in the Greek cities of the later sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. In the same period in Judaea, the public assemblies convened by Ezra and Nehemiah produced not inscribed resolutions but oral oaths. When Simon’s son John Hyrcanus I wished to give material expression to Judaea’s independence, he minted coins—another practice derived from the cities of Old Greece.44 Like the much earlier coins of Persian Yehud, these coins were almost all of very small denomination and so intended only for local use. In the case both of Simon’s resolution and of John’s coinage, it is apparent that it was the Jews themselves, or some section of them, whose expectations about the behavior of their rulers were under strong Greek influence.

The Hasmoneans exemplified the proposition that adopting Greek culture could function in the Hellenistic world to preserve a native culture. They also resolved, for the time being, the tension between exclusivity and integration fairly strongly in favor of the former and were surely helped in doing so by the progressive decrepitude of their Seleucid overlords.⁴⁵

Expansion

Hasmonean policies and actions changed the character of Palestinian Jewish society in more blatant ways, too. The most consequential set of events under Hasmonean rule was their territorial expansion, begun toward the end of the reign of John Hyrcanus I, and extended by his sons Aristobulus I and Alexander Yannai. In 130 B.C.E. the boundaries of Jewish Palestine contained only the district of Judaea, but by 100, the Hasmoneans ruled the entirety of the Palestinian hinterland, from the high hills of Upper Galilee in the north to the edge of the Negev Desert in the south, and from the Jordan River, or even slightly beyond it, in the east to the edge of the coastal plain in the west. The people who dwelled within these boundaries, who had apart from the Judaeans previously been a mixed multitude of Edomites, Samarian Israelites, and in Galilee probably a mixture or patchwork of Arabs, Greeks, and Syrian pagans (some of remotely Israelite descent) now became in some sense Jewish.⁴⁶

Josephus, the main source for the expansion, provides only sketchy information about the causes and the progress of this momentous set of events. According to Josephus, when John was freed of Seleucid domination by the death of Antiochus VII in Parthia, in 129 B.C.E., he undertook a series of campaigns. Recent excavations suggest, however, that Josephus’s chronology of these campaigns is incorrect. They all seem to have come toward the end of his reign.47 John first conquered territory across the Jordan River that he apparently failed to retain, probably because the east bank of the Jordan was claimed also by the increasingly powerful Nabataean kingdom. He then marched against the Judaeans’ northern neighbors, the Samaritans, conquered their main city, Shechem, and destroyed their temple on Mount Gerizim, just outside of Shechem. Evidently, the Samaritans, who were Israelites, were expected to switch their religious loyalties to the Jerusalem temple, and in return were regarded by the Judaean authorities as Jews.⁴⁸

Also perhaps later than Josephus dates it was John’s conquest of the Judaeans’ southern neighbors, the Idumaeans, and their main cities, Marisa and Adora. These people were descendants of the biblical Edomites, who had settled in southern Judaea (from Beth-Zur just south of Bethlehem and south to the Negev Desert) when their traditional homeland south of the Dead Sea was infiltrated by Arab tribes starting in the sixth century B.C.E.⁴⁹ Like the Samaritans, the Edomites/Idumaeans had a centuries-long history of close relations with the Judaeans, the earliest stages of which are reflected in the biblical stories about the ambivalent relationship between Jacob, ancestor of the Israelites, and his twin brother Esau, ancestor of the Edomites. As the biblical stories suggest, the Idumaeans were not Israelites but shared many customs with them, including male circumcision (cf. Jeremiah 9:24ff.; Ezekiel 32:29).⁵⁰ John is said to have demanded that the Idumaeans adopt the customs and laws of the Judaeans or leave their country. Many of the Idumaeans acceded to John’s demand and from that time on began to regard themselves and to be regarded as Jews. Since circumcision was evidently an inescapable requirement for entry of males into the community of Israel, the fact that the Idumaeans perhaps already practiced it obviously facilitated their conversion. Nevertheless, some Idumaeans fled to Egypt, and some of those who stayed behind remained secretly devoted to their ancestral religion.51

John’s final conquests, apparently in the last years of his reign, were of the Greek cities Samaria and Scythopolis–Beth Shean. These cities John treated differently from the territories of the Samaritans and Idumaeans. He “destroyed” them, which almost certainly means that he threw down their walls, deconstituted them, enslaved part of their inhabitants, reduced the remainder to subjection, and perhaps installed Jewish colonies. John’s treatment of the Greek cities thus forms a sharp contrast to his treatment of the non-Greek ethnic territories, which he apparently recognized as partly autonomous components of his state, provided the inhabitants became Jewish.

John’s son Aristobulus (reigned 104–103) seems to have conquered all or part of the district of Galilee, hitherto a pagan area with a small Jewish minority partly (?) ruled by an Arab tribe called the Ituraeans. Like the other non-Greek inhabitants of Palestine, the Galileans were forced/encouraged to convert to Judaism. The Ituraeans among them may, like many Arab tribes, have practiced circumcision in any case, but this is uncertain.

Alexander Yannai (reigned 103–76) greatly extended the Hasmonean conquests, concentrating on the Greek cities of coastal Palestine and the mainly Greek cities east of the Jordan River. It is likely that his normal treatment of these cities was to “destroy” them in much the same way that his father had destroyed Samaria and Scythopolis, but it is not impossible that he judaized some of the cities and simply reduced others to subjection and tribute; Josephus is remarkably vague. He was not invariably successful in his campaigns, especially in Transjordan, where he came up against the Nabataeans.⁵²

Character, Causes, and Consequences of the Expansion

Several factors have suggested to many scholars that the conquests were not quite what they seem from Josephus’s sketchy accounts, including the speed and ease with which the conquests of the Palestinian interior (but not the Greek cities) occurred, the fact that the newly conquered districts never rebelled, and the shakiness of the Hasmonean kingdom at the time of the conquests, under John Hyrcanus I and Aristobulus I. Some have argued that the conquests may be more profitably viewed as a series of alliances formed by the Hasmoneans with the leaders of the non-Greek districts surrounding Judaea aimed primarily against the local Greek cities. In return for adopting Judaism, probably more gradually and incompletely than Josephus implies, the Idumaeans and the rest received not only Hasmonean protection but also a chance to share in the spoils of further conquests.53

This is an attractive hypothesis that likely contains some truth, but it fails to explain why Josephus speaks so unambiguously of conquest. In all likelihood the expansion depended on a combination of coercion and persuasion, and gave the annexed nations a status that combined subjection and alliance—but was in any case distinct from the fate of the conquered Greek cities. The annexed districts seem to have retained a sort of limited autonomy under the rule of native governors who may have enjoyed the status of “friendship” with the Judaean king (cf. Ant 14.10). In a Hellenistic context, “friendship” is a semiformal state of reciprocal obligation, not necessarily between equals.⁵⁴ Thus, the Idumaeans became Jewish but remained simultaneously Idumaeans. The Judaism of the annexed districts must indeed have been gradually adopted and was perhaps not at first very deep. Surely it involved loyalty to the Jerusalem Temple and submission to the legal authority of the high priest. Its main initial effect, though, must have been to change the character of the public life in the annexed districts. John Hyrcanus I shut down not only the Israelite temple on Mount Gerizim but also the pagan temples of Idumaea. Perhaps town markets were closed on the Sabbath. But otherwise, life, even religious life, in the annexed districts at first went on pretty much as before. Even if the Hasmoneans had wished to eradicate all traces of the pre-Jewish religions of the districts, they could not have done so; the state simply had no way to police the day-to-day activities of hundreds of thousands of people. Probably the judaization of the districts—which was in the long term successful in that Idumaea and Galilee remained Jewish even after the end of Hasmonean rule and were thoroughly incorporated in the Jewish nation—was helped by the profound cultural and religious ties that existed in any case among the non-Greek peoples of Palestine. Still, there was resistance. The Idumaeans who fled to Egypt in the late second century B.C.E. zealously cultivated there, over the course of centuries, the worship of their ancestral god Qos; and in the late first century B.C.E. an Idumaean associate of King Herod tried to restore the worship of Qos in his native district (Ant 15.253–66). It may, furthermore, be no coincidence that Christianity, which was from the start ambivalent about the central institutions of Judaism, originated in Galilee, another of the annexed districts.

Causes

It is unclear why the Hasmoneans undertook their expansion. An obvious answer should not be overlooked—they expanded because they could. Historically most states have viewed acquisition of territory and people with favor, and there is no reason for the Hasmoneans not to have done the same. Though they were weak, they may still have been stronger than poorly centralized districts like Idumaea and Galilee and surely had a more experienced army. Conquest tended to generate conquest because it was sensible to pacify conquered peoples by giving them a share in future plunder—one of the chief sources of new wealth in the premodern state.55 As to the Hasmoneans’ policy of judaizing the conquered nations, we have already seen that the notion that outsiders could join the Jewish nation was several centuries old by the time John Hyrcanus pushed it to its logical limits. The first description we have of a more or less formal ritual of conversion to Judaism appears in a work of fiction, the apocryphal book of Judith, probably written around the time of the Maccabean revolt; the second appears in 2 Maccabees, where, in one of the book’s more absurd scenes, Antiochus IV, on his deathbed, promises to convert to Judaism, having recognized the error of his ways! Although there was no precedent for mass conversion, it was at least based on firmly established conceptual ground, and the idea of conversion seems to have exerted special fascination in circles close to the Hasmoneans.⁵⁶ When they imposed Judaism on their subjects, the Hasmoneans may have been motivated by the biblical idea that the Land of Israel should be “unpolluted” by idolatry. Or they may have been inspired by the example of their allies and friends the Romans, who had for centuries been successfully expanding their territory by combining exceptionally violent military activity with judicious grants of Roman citizenship to some of the people they conquered.⁵⁷

Consequences

Obviously, the Hasmonean expansion exerted a profound effect on every aspect of Jewish and eastern Mediterranean history. The finances of the Jerusalem temple and the Judaean priesthood felt the impact of the vast expansion of their tax base, and the entire Judaean economy was unsettled by the influx of so much new wealth into the district.58 It is therefore especially frustrating that our main ancient source, Josephus, has so little to say about the expansion and its consequences. In part this was because Josephus, who lived in the wake of the expansion, was blind to its effect on Palestinian Jewish life and was hostile to and contemptuous of the non-Judaean Jews. It is nevertheless clear that as a result of the conquests Palestinian Jewish society became exponentially more complex, much richer, and much more turbulent than it had ever been. Otherwise, the effects of the expansion may be summarized in terms of four categories: demography, economy, politics, and religion.

Demography. The size of the population of ancient Palestine cannot be determined, but 500,000 is a plausible figure for the population of the Palestinian interior.⁵⁹ This would imply a population of 100,000–200,000 for the district of Judaea, and so approximately a two- to fivefold increase in the Jewish population of Palestine in the wake of the expansion, bearing in mind, though, that an unknown proportion of the inhabitants of the annexed districts fled.

Economy. The Hasmonean state was enriched by its constant warfare and plunder, especially of the wealthy Greek cities of the coast and the desert fringe, under Alexander Yannai. Much of this wealth went, first, into the pockets of the kings, second, into the temple treasury, and, third, to the priests, who were entitled to receive taxes in kind from all Israelites living in the land of Israel. But the general population profited, too, for it was they, especially perhaps the residents of the annexed districts, who formed the rank and file of the Hasmonean armies and kept part of what they plundered. Although we would like to have numbers, the ancient sources, as always, provide none. Perhaps of some limited heuristic value is Josephus’s statement that when the Roman general Crassus plundered the Temple in 54 B.C.E., only nine years after Pompey and at the height of the Judaean civil war, he found 2,000 talents of silver, a gold bar weighing 300 mnai (a mna is equivalent to at least one Roman pound), and 8,000 talents of gold plate—which should be worth the astonishing sum of 96,000 silver talents (Ant 14.105–6). But these figures may be unsalvageable. By contrast, Herod’s annual tax income was probably around 1,000 silver talents.⁶⁰

Politics. Little is known for certain about how the Hasmoneans administered their state, but it does seem likely that they ruled Judaea through the established national institutions, and the annexed districts through “friendly” native governors.61 The expansion strengthened the representatives of the Judaean institutions—the priests and scholars of the Torah—in some respects, for they now had at least some limited sort of jurisdiction over a vastly increased population. But the expansion weakened them in other ways, for they now had to compete for royal favor with non-Judaean generals and friends of the kings. This process was confirmed and accelerated by the lengthy Hasmonean civil war (67–37 B.C.E.), which tended to favor the advancement of the non-Judaean generals and friends and to marginalize the Judaean priests and Torah experts.

Religion. The mass conversions ought to have been controversial among Judaeans, yet there is surprisingly little evidence that they were. We know that some Judaeans were contemptuous of the annexed nations, but there is no indication that they were not regarded as Jews. What their Judaism consisted of is a different question, which has already been briefly discussed, and they may have introduced some of their own practices into standard Judaism. For example, archaeologists have traced the practice of burial in kokhim–niches hewn out of the walls of caves—from Marisa, the main city of Idumaea, in the third and second centuries B.C.E., to Judaea, in the first century B.C.E., to all of Jewish Palestine, in the first century C.E. and following.⁶²

The Civil War (67–37 B.C.E.)

Hyrcanus II, the elder son of Alexander Yannai and Salome Alexandra (reigned 76–67), had served as high priest during his mother’s reign and was named heir to the kingdom. When she died, however, he was immediately attacked and defeated by his brother Aristobulus II. Aristobulus assumed the high priesthood and royal throne and allowed his brother to live in retirement. However, Hyrcanus had a friend, an Idumaean called Antipater, whose father had been a friend of Alexander Yannai and had governed Idumaea on the king’s behalf. He had also prudently maintained ties of friendship or marriage in the Nabataean royal court.⁶³ Antipater convinced Hyrcanus to go to war against Aristobulus and promised him the help of the Nabataean king Aretas. For his part, Aristobulus seems to have enjoyed the support of some Ituraean dynasts who ruled the land just north of the Hasmonean kingdom in what is now Lebanon, and also a group of otherwise unidentified generals. One would have expected Hyrcanus to have inherited his mother’s patronage of the Pharisees, and Aristobulus therefore to have taken up his father’s Sadducees, yet these religious groups play next to no role in Josephus’s accounts of the civil war. The princes needed the support of generals and of others who could deliver military manpower, not of Torah scholars.

In 66 B.C.E., the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) invaded Asia Minor, defeated Mithridates VI, the Asian king who had expelled the Romans from the district, and accepted the surrender of his son-in-law, the Armenian king Tigranes. In 65, a Roman detachment arrived in Syria, and the warring brothers at once began to compete for the favor of the new regional superpower. (Meanwhile, a contingent of Judaean aristocrats tried to convince the Romans to remove the Hasmoneans altogether.) Pompey eventually backed Hyrcanus and in 63 B.C.E. marched into Jerusalem and captured Aristobulus. He then named Hyrcanus high priest (but not king), removed the Greek cities conquered by Alexander Yannai from Jewish rule, and restored their Greek constitutions.

Scholars often treat the arrival of the Romans in Palestine in 63 B.C.E. as a watershed in Jewish history. But little changed for the first 140 years of Roman rule. The Romans were more interventionist than their Hellenistic predecessors but initially preferred to rule through local agents. The Romans made many changes small and large in the administrative organization of Jewish Palestine and meddled tirelessly in the affairs of the Jewish ruling classes, but they allowed the Jews to remain a more or less autonomous nation centered on the Jerusalem temple and governed by the laws of the Torah. This changed only in the later first century C.E.

In any case, the short-term effect of the Roman conquest was to intensify the Jewish civil war. The Roman Republic itself collapsed into factional warfare, which among other things allowed each of the Jewish parties to have the support of one of the competing Roman senatorial factions. On the whole, the Hyrcanian party enjoyed the upper hand, largely because of the talent of Hyrcanus’s leading partisan, Antipater, at the all-important skill of making friends with whichever Roman senatorial warlord was more powerful at the moment. However, in 40, the Parthians took advantage of the chaos in the Roman world by attacking and conquering Syria and Palestine. Antipater’s sons Herod and Phasael tried but failed to win the Parthians’ favor. The Parthians named Antigonus, son of Aristobulus, king and dragged Hyrcanus off to Mesopotamia, after his nephew had sliced off his ear, thereby rendering him unfit to serve as high priest ever again. Phasael meanwhile committed suicide in the course of battle and Herod escaped to Rome.

There, the senate declared Herod king, without specifying a constituency or a territory, and assigned him the task of reconquering Palestine from the Parthians. Herod gradually conquered the Palestinian hinterland—the Jewish districts of Galilee, Samaria, Judaea, and his native Idumaea—with the help of a detachment of Roman troops and Jewish troops that he succeeded in raising himself. By unspoken agreement with his overlords, he left the Greek cities of the coast and the Transjordan in peace. Jerusalem was the last place to fall to Herod, and when it did, in 37 B.C.E., Herod’s Jewish troops committed a great slaughter of their coreligionists besieged in the city, which Herod restrained only with difficulty. This event, at first glance surprising, is not difficult to understand if we assume that the troops were non-Judaean Jews, like Herod himself. Among such people, resentment against the Judaeans may never have been far from the surface. King Antigonus was captured and sent off to Antony for execution, and Herod now reigned as king of the Jews.

Herod (reigned, 37–4 B.C.E.)

Herod was a product of the age of the civil wars, both Hasmonean and Roman, an age that offered great opportunities to the ruthlessly ambitious. From his grandfather and father he inherited a complex of friendships with Hasmoneans, Nabataean kings and courtiers, and important Roman personages. He exploited this inheritance brilliantly and extended it when, as a young commander and an administrator in Galilee, he earned the friendship of various local Jewish and pagan grandees. He deepened and broadened his relations with leading Romans, most importantly in the later 40s with Marc Antony, leader of the Caesarian faction for a time after the dictator’s assassination in 44 B.C.E. Thanks to his friendship with Antony, when the Parthians conquered Palestine in 40 B.C.E., the Roman senate granted Herod, and not a Hasmonean, the royal title and the job of providing local military support to the Roman legions in their attempt to reconquer southern Syria.64

Herod himself helped conquer Jewish Palestine and was later given extensive gifts of non-Jewish territory—the coastal Greek cities, the Golan Heights, and other rural territories in southern Syria—by Antony and subsequently the emperor Augustus. But he was considered and considered himself primarily king of the Jews; he seems to have administered the pagan territories on behalf of the emperor and senate and to have received a portion of the revenues from them.⁶⁵ But Herod was not of priestly descent, and so he could not serve simultaneously as king and high priest. He was furthermore not a Judaean but a judaized Idumaean, and many of his domestic policies reflected the concerns of the non-Judaean Jews and their sometimes ambivalent relations to the central Judaean institutions as they had been administered by the Hasmoneans.66 One of the main tendencies of his reforms seems to have been, in fact, to turn Judaean institutions into Jewish ones by enhancing their attractiveness to non-Judaean Palestinian Jews and Jews of the Diaspora.

Herod’s Reforms

Given his inability to serve as high priest, Herod had to reform the high priesthood. His reforms had several interesting characteristics. Under Herod, and after his time until the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., the high priesthood was no longer held for life and passed from father to son. Rather, the incumbents held the position for brief terms of irregular length, and the king retained exclusive right of appointment. Clearly Herod was interested in keeping tight control over a position that could easily turn into a focus of political opposition.⁶⁷ After Herod’s death the high priesthood became again de facto dynastic, since Herod’s descendants and Roman successors preferred to appoint to the post descendants of Herod’s high priests. But the only distinctive characteristic that Herod’s appointees shared, as far as we can tell, is that five of the seven who served in the course of the thirty-three years of Herod’s reign were not Judaean: one was brought from Babylonia, one resided in Galilee, and several came from Egypt. Of the Judaeans, one was Herod’s young brother-in-law, the Hasmonean prince Aristobulus (sometimes assigned the dynastic number “III”), of whom the king was profoundly jealous. He drowned under suspicious circumstances, to say the least, after a very brief term of office (Ant 15.50–56).

Herod failed to assign an important role to the old religious organizations of the Pharisees and Sadducees. We have already seen that after the death of Salome Alexandra in 67 B.C.E., the Pharisees and Sedducees, which had played an important administrative role previously, were pushed to the margins by the conditions prevailing in the civil wars. Herod ended the civil war but did not restore the sects. The fact that they had been elite Judaean organizations may explain Herod’s interest in depriving them of any significant role in his state. From now on they would be small organizations competing for the patronage of the royal women and high priests and vying with each other for a voice in temple affairs.68

Herod exploited his connections at Rome on behalf of the Jews of the Diaspora. These Jewish communities were permitted by Roman law and convention to conduct their lives according to Jewish law, even when it came into conflict with the laws of the cities in which the Jews resided, for example, Jews could not be forced to come to court on the Sabbath. However, local authorities did not always recognize the Jews’ rights, and Herod made a practice of intervening with imperial officials on behalf of these Jewish communities. His generous gifts to Greek cities and institutions such as the Olympic games may have been intended primarily to secure Greek cities’ goodwill from their Jewish residents.⁶⁹ Herod’s recruitment of high priests from the Diaspora also indicates his desire to cultivate the support of the Diaspora communities.

Josephus was perhaps right to think that Herod undertook his public construction projects for self-aggrandizement, but this was surely not his only motivation. Herod built and refurbished fortresses across the country, restored and fortified cities, and built a massive shrine at the cave of the Machpelah in the old Idumaean town of Hebron. The Jews regarded this site as the tomb of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, and the Idumaeans, also descendants of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Rebecca, may have done the same, even before they became Jewish. But Herod’s building projects had twin, closely related, centerpieces. He completely rebuilt a tiny, declining old Greco-Phoenician city called Strato’s Tower as a grand port city and named it Caesarea in commemoration of Herod’s friendship with Augustus Caesar. Archaeologists discovered in the 1980s and 1990s that Caesarea’s harbor, one of the largest in the eastern Mediterranean, was built according to the most up-to-date principles of Roman engineering. The city at once became the leading port of the southern part of the east coast of the Mediterranean, easily crowding out such competitors as Gaza, Ascalon, and Joppa, as well as the main point of entry for the burgeoning Jewish pilgrim traffic from the Diaspora.⁷⁰

The other twin star of Herod’s construction was Jerusalem, which was rebuilt from top to bottom. Although the amount of money flowing into the temple treasury had increased tremendously under the Hasmoneans, they undertook almost no public construction in the city. The residential quarters grew, and so the city walls were extended and a palace was built. But the temple remained the tiny structure built by Zerubbabel in the late sixth century, incapable of containing a vastly increased Jewish population. Herod rebuilt all the public areas of the city on a much grander scale than ever before, but the main feature of his construction was the new temple, now one of the largest structures in the Roman Empire, with a courtyard that could accommodate vast numbers of pilgrims. It was Herod’s Jerusalem that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder could describe as “by far the most famous city of the East,” and that a Talmudic storyteller could call the recipient of nine of the ten measures of beauty that God allotted to the world.71

Herod’s construction had several important effects. It created many thousands of jobs and would continue to do so for several decades after Herod’s death. The temple was not completed until 64 C.E., only six years before its destruction, and its completion is said by Josephus to have put 18,000 laborers out of work (Ant 20.219–22). Herod’s construction projects may thus be seen as the functional equivalent of the Hasmoneans’ conquests, now ruled out by the Roman peace, which had also provided incomes for thousands of Jews.

The construction also changed the character of Jerusalem and of Jewish Palestine as a whole. Jerusalem was no longer a remote hill country town, of interest mainly to Judaean peasants and to the occasional foreign general looking to steal some silver from the treasury of its temple. It was now the metropolis of all the world’s Jews, whether they were Judaean or hailed from the annexed districts of Palestine or the Roman or Parthian Diaspora. Jerusalem had perhaps long been the symbolic or sentimental Jewish center, but now it was so in reality, as well. It is only in Herod’s reign and later that we hear of throngs of Jews from all over the world gathered in the city for the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), or Sukkot (the Feast of Booths), and of the disturbances that sometimes broke out as a result.⁷²

In sum, Herod’s policies built on those of the Hasmoneans and turned Jewish Palestine into a single state, a state furthermore that was closely tied to the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. This achievement, which was of enduring significance, by no means contradicts the probable baseness of his motivations or the brutality of his character, but surely it is as deserving of attention as his sordid family life, which is the main concern of the ancient sources but will not detain us here.

Herod died in 4 B.C.E., and a series of small-scale uprisings at once broke out. Augustus decided to divide Herod’s Jewish state into several pieces and distribute them among Herod’s lesser sons, the only ones who survived. Archelaus was assigned Samaria, Judaea, and Idumaea, and Herod Antipas, Galilee. The pagan territories of southern Syria were assigned to Herod Philip. Archelaus was vicious and incompetent. In 6 C.E., the leading Jews and Samaritans asked Augustus to remove him, and he did so. Antipas ruled peacefully for forty-two years, a successful and competent ruler, notwithstanding his reputation among the early Christians, and Philip ruled until 34 C.E. Though Herod’s Jewish state did not survive his death as a political unit, as a religious, cultural, and social entity it fell only in 70 C.E.

 

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1 A bibliographical note: this chapter covers well-trodden ground; it would be counterproductive even to aspire to provide comprehensive annotation for relatively uncontentious points (there are no absolutely uncontentious points). It will suffice here to refer to the standard handbooks, especially E. Schürer, A History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), ed. and rev. by G. Vermes, F. Millar et al., 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1973–1987); L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), containing much recent bibliography. P. Schäfer, The History of the Jews in Antiquity (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), provides an especially accessible and reliable account of political history.

² I am following a tendency in scholarship that starts with Wellhausen and was much later taken up by Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), and has now gained widespread acceptance, especially in circles not influenced by Yehezkel Kaufmann; see, for example, N. P. Lemche, Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society (Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1988).

³ For discussion, see S. Japhet, “In Search of Ancient Israel: Revisionism at All Costs,” D. Myers and D. Ruderman, eds., The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 212–34, which cites the most important “revisionist” works. I agree with Japhet that the extreme skeptics are wrong. Indeed, they can actually be seen as naive positivists, since they tend to regard the stories as pure ideology (as opposed to complicated mixtures of history, tradition, invention, and folklore combined into ideologically driven, usually analysis-resistant narratives), written to serve the purposes of Jewish leaders in the third or second centuries B.C.E., as if they were more reliably attested than Nehemiah.

⁴ See W. Spiegelberg, Die sogennante demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 der Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1915), pp. 30–32; M. Dandamaev and V. Lukonin, The Culture and Social Institutions of Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 125; J. Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 239–42; E. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 29–32.

⁵ On the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, see A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 165–68; for a general characterization of the Achaemenid empire, see Dandamaev and Lukonin, The Culture and Social Institutions of Iran; for a discussion of and literature on the Achaemenids’ restorative radicalism, see P. Briant, “The Seleucid Kingdom and the Achaemenid Empire,” in P. Bilde et al., eds., Religion and Religious Practice in the Seleucid Kingdom (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1990), pp. 53–60.

⁶ The Tobiad family is discussed in more detail below. On the social, economic, and political importance of elite interethnic marriages in the pre-Roman eastern Mediterranean, see G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). S. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), has repeatedly argued that conversion to Judaism did not exist before the early second century B.C.E., an argument that I accept from a legal and institutional perspective. But I would suggest that the development of a ritual of conversion is just one episode in the long history in what was at least in antiquity the fixed systemic tension between separatism, enjoined by the Torah, and integration, required by the realities of life in the eastern Mediterranean. So, the Tobiads may not have converted, but they may have done something very like it.

⁷ Such distinctions are taken for granted in the work of an ancient historian who has recently begun to write about Judaism: E. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xvii.

⁸ Cf. L. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), pp. 3–32.

⁹ This is rather different from the distinction posited by U. Rappaport, “The Hellenization of the Hasmoneans,” in M. Mor, ed., Jewish Assimilation, Acculturation, and Accommodation (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992), pp. 1–13.

¹⁰ See S. Schwartz, “The Hellenization of Jerusalem and Shechem,” in M. Goodman, ed., Jews in a Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 37–45.

¹¹ Cf. S. Sherwin-White and A. Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire (London: Duckworth, 1993), pp. 141–49; F. Millar, “The Phoenician Cities: A Case Study in Hellenisation,” PCPS 209 (1983): 55–71; E. Will, “Poleis hellénistiques: Deux notes,” échos du monde classique/Classical Views 15 (1988): 329–51.

¹² See M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 1:32–35; on the Philistines, T. Dothan, The Philistines and Their Material Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

¹³ For a survey, see E. Stern, Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period 538–332 B.C. (Warminster, U.K.: Aris & Phillips, 1982).

¹⁴ The most serious attempt at interpretation is J. Elayi, Pénétration grecque en Phénicie sous l’empire perse (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1988).

¹⁵ On the origins and early history of coinage, see L. Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 6–23; C. Howgego, Ancient History from Coins (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–11.

¹⁶ On the Judaean coins, see L. Mildenberg, “Yehud: A Preliminary Study of the Provincial Coinage of Judaea,” O. in Mørkholm and N. Waggoner, eds., Greek Numismatics and Archaeology: Essays in Honor of Margaret Thompson (Wetteren: Cultura, 1979), pp. 183–96, with corrections of D. Barag, “A Silver Coin of Yohanan the High Priest and the Coinage of Judaea in the Fourth Century B.C.E.,” INJ 9 (1986–1987) 4–21. On the Samarian coinage, Y. Meshorer and S. Qedar, The Coinage of Samaria in the Fourth Century B.C.E. (Jerusalem: Numismatic Fine Arts International, 1991). See also my discussion: S. Schwartz, “On the Autonomy of Judaea in the Fourth and Third Centuries B.C.E.”, JJS 45 (1994): 159–61.

¹⁷ See V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1959), pp. 41–50; S. Cohen, “Alexander the Great and Jaddus the High Priest According to Josephus,” AJS Review 7–8 (1982–1983) 41–68; Josephus’s story has had some defenders, such as A. Momigliano, “Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to Jerusalem,” Athenaeum 57 (1979): 442–48; and A. Kasher, “Some Suggestions and Comments Concerning Alexander Macedon’s [sic] Campaign in Palestine,” Beth Mikra 20 (1975): 187–208 (in Hebrew).

¹⁸ The standard studies of Ptolemaic Palestine remain Tcherikover, “Palestine under the Ptolemies,” Mizraim 4–5 (1937): 9–90; and R. Bagnall, The Administration of the Ptolemaic Possessions outside Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1976), pp. 11–24. For a general political and military history of the period, see E. Will, Histoire politique du monde hellénistique (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1979).

¹⁹ See Sherwin-White and Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis, pp. 141–87; on the potentially profound cultural consequences for subjects of imperial preferences, see K. Hopkins, “Conquest by Book,” in John Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman World, JRA suppl. 3 (1991) 133–58.

²⁰ See S. Schwartz, “Hellenization of Jerusalem and Shechem.”

²¹ On the story, see most recently D. Gera, Judaea and Mediterranean Politics, 219 to 161 BCE (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 36–58.

²² See CPJ 1: 115–30; S. Schwartz, “A Note on the Social Type and Political Ideology of the Hasmonean Family,” JBL 112 (1993): 305–7.

²³ See Dandamaev and Lukonin, Culture and Social Institutions of Iran, 113–16; Naveh and Greenfield, “Hebrew and Aramaic in the Persian Period”; W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein, eds., Cambridge History of Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1:115–16.

²⁴ See Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, 73–89.

²⁵ This paragraph summarizes my argument in “On the Autonomy of Judaea.”

²⁶ For an account of the wisdom books emphasizing their “scribal” character (how many ancient books were not scribal?), see L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1995), pp. 154–62. For criticism of the “scribal” category, see C. Schams, Jewish Scribes in the Second Temple Period (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).

²⁷ On the bureaucratic character of Proverbs, see J. Blenkinsopp, Sage, Priest, Prophet (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), pp. 28–41.

²⁸ For recent discussion, positing an Achaemenid dating, and a rather too specific social context, see C. L. Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (New York: Doubleday, 1997), especially pp. 11–36; cf. E. J. Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1967), pp. 141–67.

²⁹ See J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976).

³⁰ For an excellent account of Ben Sira, see J. J. Collins, Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), pp. 42–111. P. McKechnie, “The Career of Joshua Ben Sira,” JThS 51 (2000): 3–26, has now argued that the book was composed in Egypt.

³¹ Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, 1:138–53.

³² This is an approach Martha Himmelfarb attributes (I think correctly) to Elias Bickerman; it has now been adopted by many Hellenistic historians. See M. Himmelfarb, “Elias Bickerman on Judaism and Hellenism,” in Jewish Past Revisited, pp. 199–211.

³³ See Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization, pp. 152–74; E. Bickerman, God of the Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 38–42, arguing that Jason established not a Greek city but a Greek corporation within the still Jewish city of Jerusalem. (The sharply divergent accounts of Tcherikover and Bickerman remain fundamental, and my debt to them in the paragraphs that follow should be taken for granted). See also G. Le Rider, Suse sous les Séleucides: Les trouvailles monétaires et l’histoire de la ville, Mémoires de la mission archéologiques en Iran 38 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1965), pp. 410–11, supporting Tcherikover’s argument on the basis of such common Seleucid coin legends as Antiocheon ton en Ptolemaidi, in which the reference is clearly to a Greek city, not a Greek corporation in a native city; F. Millar, “The Background to the Maccabean Revolution: Reflections on Martin Hengel’s ‘Judaism and Hellenism,’ ” JJS 29 (1978): 10; C. Habicht, 2. Makkabäerbuch: Historische und legendarische Erzählungen, JSHRZ 1.3 (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1976), pp. 216–17. Verse 19: “Jason … sent as theoroi (envoys to a religious festival) men who were Antiochenes from Jerusalem [or, as theoroi from Jerusalem men who were Antiochenes], carrying three hundred silver drachmas.” This is, on the face of it, difficult to reconcile with Tcherikover’s view. Perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees himself misunderstood what his source, Jason of Cyrene, had written. For the comparison with Sardis, Tyre, and Sidon, see S. Schwartz, “Hellenization of Jerusalem and Shechem.”

³⁴ Some have argued that Jason’s reforms were less extreme: I. Heinemann, “Wer veranlasste den Glaubenszwang der Makkabäerzeit?” MGWJ 82 (1938): 145–72—also a comprehensive critique of Bickerman; Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, 28–31.

³⁵ The Hasmoneans and Their Supporters from Mattathias to the Death of John Hyrcanus I (Atlanta: Scholars, 1990).

³⁶ See Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, 18–22.

³⁷ See M. Smith, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1:320–26.

³⁸ See J. Schwartz and J. Spanier, “On Mattathias and the Desert of Samaria,” RB 98 (1991): 252–71.

³⁹ This summarizes my argument in “A Note on the Social Type.”

⁴⁰ Note Tacitus’s comment, Hist. 5.8.3, that the Hasmoneans “superstitionem [i.e., Iudaicam] fovebant.”

⁴¹ This is not a novel point, but it has now been argued with novel force, and in exhaustive detail, by Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, 1–40, with extensive bibliography.

⁴² See S. Schwartz, “Israel and the Nations Roundabout,” JJS 42 (1991): 23; Gruen’s rejection of this point (Heritage and Hellenism, p. 5 n. 8) is based on a reductive reading of the book: cf. M. Himmelfarb, “Judaism and Hellenism in 2 Maccabees,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 19–40.

⁴³ On Eupolemus, see C. R. Holladay, Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, vol. 1, Historians (Chico, Calif.; Scholars, 1983), pp. 93–156.

⁴⁴ That John was the first Hasmonean to mint coins has been proved by the recent excavations on Mount Gerizim: see D. Barag, “Jewish Coins in Hellenistic and Roman Time,” in T. Hackens et al., eds., A Survey of Numismatic Research, 1985–1990 1 (Brussels: International Society of Professional Numismatists, 1991), 1:106; this replaces the view of Y. Meshorer, Ancient Jewish Coinage (New York: Amphora, 1982), 1:35–47, that the Hasmonean coinage began with Alexander Yannai. Meshorer’s collection of material, though, remains standard.

⁴⁵ For a different, though complementary, account of the Maccabean revolt as a pivotal event in the history of Jewish self-definition, see Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 109–39.

⁴⁶ The recent excavations at Yodfat, Josephus’s Jotapata, in Lower Galilee, suggest a shift from pagan to Jewish habitation at the end of the second century B.C.E. and also suggest that the shift was not peaceful: M. Aviam, “Yodfat: Uncovering a Jewish City in the Galilee from the Second Temple Period and the Time of the Great Revolt,” Qadmoniot 118 (1999): 92–101.

⁴⁷ See D. Barag, “New Evidence on the Foreign Policy of John Hyrcanus I,” INJ 12 (1992–1993): 1–12.

⁴⁸ See S. Schwartz, “John Hyrcanus I’s Destruction of the Gerizim Temple and Judaean-Samaritan Relations,” Jewish History 7 (1993): 9–25.

⁴⁹ For a survey of the little known about the Idumaeans before their conversion, see A. Kasher, Edom, Arabia, and Israel (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1988), pp. 9–13; Kasher’s extensive discussion of the conversion (48–76) is highly problematic.

⁵⁰ See M. Smith in S. Cohen, ed., Studies in the Cult of Yahweh (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1:274–76. But R. Steiner, “Incomplete Circumcision in Egypt and Edom: Jeremiah 9.24–25 in the Light of Josephus and Jonckheere,” JBL 118 (1999): 497–505, has suggested that the Edomites did not practice circumcision in quite the same way as the Jews and so may have required “recircumcision.” On the Hasmonean conversions, see also S. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness, 13–24, 104–39.

⁵¹ On the Idumaean refugees, see D. Thompson [Crawford], “The Idumaeans of Memphis and Ptolemaic Politeumata,” Atti del XVII congresso internazionale di papirologia (Naples, 1984), pp. 1069–75; U. Rappaport, “Les Iduméens en Egypte,” Revue de Philologie 43 (1969): 73–82.

⁵² On the reigns of Aristobulus and Alexander, see Schürer-Vermes 1.216–28.

⁵³ See M. Smith, Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, 1:269–83, emphasizing the military alliance; Kasher, Edom, Arabia, and Israel, pp. 48–76, follows the old hypothesis of U. Rappaport in regarding the conversions as entirely voluntary; Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, pp. 109–39, presents a more complex and convincing account.

⁵⁴ See G. Herman, note 6, above.

⁵⁵ In other words, I am suggesting that Hasmonean imperialism was a small-scale version of Roman imperialism: see W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).

⁵⁶ See S. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 109–74

⁵⁷ So M. Smith, “Rome and the Maccabean Conversions,” in E. Bammel et al., eds., Donum Gentilicium: New Testament Studies in Honour of David Daube (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), pp. 1–7.

⁵⁸ See the final section of the next chapter.

⁵⁹ On the size of the population, see introduction, note 13.

⁶⁰ The commentators try to salvage Josephus’s figures by supposing that the gold plate was worth 8,000 silver talents. This is more plausible, but it is not what Josephus says. On Herod’s tax revenues, see E. Gabba, “The Finances of King Herod,” in A. Kasher, U. Rappaport, and G. Fuks, eds. Greece and Rome in Eretz Israel: Collected Essays (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1990), pp. 160–68, especially 161.

⁶¹ See S. Schwartz, “King Herod, Friend of the Jews,” in J. Schwartz, Z. Amar and I. Ziffer, eds, Jerusalem and Eretz Israel: Arie Kindler Volume (Tel Aviv: Rennert Center and Eretz Israel Museum, 2000) pp. 67–76.

⁶² See E. Oren and U. Rappaport, “The Necropolis of Maresha-Beth Guvrin,” IEJ 34 (1984): 149–51.

⁶³ On the importance of friendship in late Hasmonean and Herodian politics, see S. Schwartz, “King Herod, Friend of the Jews,” B. Shaw, “Tyrants, Bandits, and Kings: Personal Power in Josephus,” JJS 44 (1993): 184–89.

⁶⁴ On the importance of “friendship” in Herod’s early career, see S. Schwartz, “King Herod, Friend of the Jews,” and Shaw, “Tyrants, Bandits, and Kings,” 184–89.

⁶⁵ See Josephus, Ant 14.9, 15.373, 15.409, 16.291, 16.311; Nicolaus of Damascus apud Ant 14.9; Cassius Dio 49.22.6; Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.11; Persius, Saturae 5.180; Tacitus, Historiae 5.9.1–2; Strabo, Geographica 16.2.46; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 1.7.11–12; Aelian, De Natura Animalium 6.17; H. Cotton and J. Geiger, Masada II: The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963–5, Final Reports: The Greek and Latin Documents (Jerusalem: IES, 1989), nos. 804–16, with the comments on pp. 147–48. In these documents, Herod is called rex Herodes iudaicus.

⁶⁶ See S. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 13–24.

⁶⁷ See Schürer-Vermes, 2.227–36; P. Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 240–47; M. Stern, “The Politics of Herod and Jewish Society towards the End of the Second Commonwealth,” Tarbiz 35 (1966): 235–53.

⁶⁸ For a full discussion of this issue, see L. Levine, “On the Political Involvement of the Pharisees under Herod and the Procurators,” Cathedra 8 (1978): 12–28; also A. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees in Palestinian Jewish Society: A Sociological Approach (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1988), pp. 95–106. For a denial of the significance of the phenomenon, see G. Stemberger, Jewish Contemporaries of Jesus: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), pp. 117–19.

⁶⁹ On Herod’s benefactions, see Richardson, Herod, 174–96.

⁷⁰ See Richardson, ibid., and in general, A. Raban and K. Holum, Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective after Two Millennia (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

⁷¹ See N. Avigad et al. “Jerusalem,” NEAEHL, 2.717–57; Richardson, Herod, 174–215; M. Goodman, The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 51–75.

⁷² See L. Levine, “Josephus’ Description of the Jerusalem Temple: War, Antiquities, and Other Sources,” in F. Parente and J. Sievers, eds., Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 242–44; S. Weitzman, “From Feasts into Mourning: The Violence of Early Jewish Festivals,” Journal of Religion 79 (1999): 545–65.