And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up. And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people. And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of Princes; but he shall be broken without hand.

DANIEL 8:23–25, KJV

THE REVOLUTION IN religious belief was a direct outcome of war and insurrection—not just the extraordinarily bloody events of the Maccabean revolt of the 160s, but also the cumulative violence of the following decades, when Jews fought each other. As we will see in the next two chapters, chaos and internecine conflict sprawled over more than a century, and that political agony had its direct impact on religious thought. These revolutions and wars provide the essential context for understanding the spread of radical new ideas and above all the Enochic visions of cosmic conflict and the struggle against supernatural evil.

To borrow a phrase from the famous story of Daniel, the whole Jewish nation now “fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace” (3:23). Like the young Hebrews who were the victims of that attempted execution, that nation also miraculously survived, albeit in a radically transformed way. They passed through the crucible.

THE FALL OF empires is usually followed by a chaotic period in which ambitious leaders and states struggle for a place in a new political order. The second century BCE was such a time of withdrawal and near collapse for the old Hellenistic powers that had dominated the Middle East, leaving a power vacuum.

The last great Seleucid ruler was the conqueror Antiochus III (241–187 BCE). Unfortunately for him, he faced a new rising power in the West in the form of Rome, which in a desperate series of wars had recently defeated its North African rival, Carthage. By 200 BCE, the Romans were deeply interested in affairs in Greece and Asia Minor, partly through natural aggressiveness, but also because they feared the rise of another enemy as fearsome as Carthage. (Rome’s deadly Carthaginian enemy Hannibal actually took refuge at Antiochus’s court.) The Romans resoundingly defeated Antiochus, culminating in the pivotal battle of Magnesia (190). In the ensuing peace treaty, the Romans imposed strict limitations on Seleucid military power. The Roman victory partly resulted from the tight organization and shrewd leadership of that rising state, but it also reflected an ongoing revolution in military affairs. Disciplined and flexible Roman legions easily defeated the unwieldy phalanxes of massed spearmen that had formed the mainstay of Greek military power for centuries. Magnesia was no chance victory, and it showed that the Romans were likely to win most conflicts with Eastern empires.1

The Romans expelled the Seleucids from western Asia Minor. They also imposed a vast war indemnity of fifteen thousand talents of silver, a fact that would have far-reaching consequences for later Jewish history. Severely weakened, Antiochus III struggled both to pay the indemnity and to reassert family prestige. Both strategies demanded finding easy and profitable wars to win, which was increasingly difficult in a Roman-dominated world. That was the situation inherited by his son Antiochus IV. The younger Antiochus won great victories in Egypt, coming close to annexing the whole land, but his attempt at a second campaign in 168 gave him a potent object lesson in the new realities of power. An elderly Roman ambassador confronted Antiochus IV and demanded his immediate withdrawal, or else he would face a new war with Rome. Nor did the ambassador even offer a diplomatic face-saving solution. Rather, he chose a crude assertion of Roman power, as he drew a circle in the sand around the god-king and ordered him to make his decision before he stepped beyond it. Antiochus capitulated.²

That imperial weakness supplies the essential background to the Maccabean revolt. Josephus reports that different factions were hungry for power, and “those that were of dignity could not endure to be subject to their equals.” We have traced the bloody series of coups and plots as the Oniads tried to regain power from the high priest Menelaus, who was supported by the Tobiads. Both sides tried to appeal to the Seleucid imperial court by presenting themselves as the purest exponent of Hellenism, until Jason finally used his private army to launch a coup in Jerusalem. Antiochus IV was returning from his latest humiliation at the hands of the Romans when he heard about this grab for power, which he viewed as yet another blow against his own authority and prestige. He stormed the city, raided the Temple, and suspended the sacrificial cult. Reputedly, he did so with the consent of Menelaus, who thereby earned the reputation of a national traitor. The king welcomed the opportunity to seize the Temple treasures, a predictable move in his desperate efforts to pay the Roman indemnity, and he grabbed a lucrative eighteen hundred talents. Meanwhile, the legitimate Oniad heir, Onias IV, fled to the protection of Ptolemy VI, and while in Egypt he built a facsimile of the Jerusalem Temple. After dabbling in numerous coups and conspiracies, Jason finally died in exile in the Greece he idolized, at Sparta.3

Antiochus IV did not wantonly decide to persecute or eliminate Judaism, out of either insanity or misplaced religious zeal; any such religiously motivated intervention would have been bizarre in the context of the age. Rather, he was imposing a specific punishment for insurrectionary actions. After facing repeated struggles and riots, his campaign moved to eliminate the distinctive traces of the Jewish religion and rededicated the Jerusalem Temple to Zeus Olympios (with the Samaritan Temple at Gerizim dedicated to Zeus Xenios, Friend of Strangers). Initially, the king won some successes. Gentile inhabitants had no difficulty sacrificing to particular deities, and many Jews agreed “to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols, to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised. They were to make themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane” (1 Macc. 1:47). Conceivably, they read the new Temple dedication as not to Zeus as an extraneous foreign deity, but rather to a syncretic form of YHWH, a new form of the old God. But others protested. Leading the fundamentalist reaction was Mattathias, a Jewish priest who attacked a Greek official who ordered the sacrifice to pagan gods. Mattathias had five sons, most famously Judah, whom the Christian Middle Ages remembered as Judas Maccabeus, the warlord leader of the ensuing revolt. Encouraging the Jewish dissidents were accounts of the Seleucid defeats in Asia Minor and of Roman strength. Rebellious subjects transformed the king’s title, Epiphanes, “God Made Manifest,” into Epimanes, “the Lunatic.”4

WHAT FOLLOWED WAS in large measure a civil war among Jews, in which one faction invited Antiochus IV to come to its aid. The war pitted the militant traditionalists against Hellenized Jews, the “lawless and godless men” of the patriotic accounts (1 Macc. 7:5). Guerrilla forces attacked loyalist villages, forcibly circumcised boys, and destroyed pagan altars. Throughout the wars, the Seleucids could usually count on the support of at least some Jewish factions, whom surviving records denounce as simple traitors motivated by the cynical lust for gain. Menelaus retained the high priesthood, theoretically, until 162 BCE, when the Seleucids may have executed him for his role in sparking the rebellion. His successor was Alcimus, a descendant of Aaron, who was mortally opposed to the Maccabees. (He died in the Temple in 159, allegedly while undertaking the symbolically potent act of tearing down the wall that separated the court of the Gentiles from that of the Israelites.) Jewish Hellenists still appeared as a faction through the 140s. Besides these internal Jewish conflicts, Jewish rebels were at war with the Gentile inhabitants of the land as much as against royal forces. The war devastated the country, with frequent acts of massacre and ethnic cleansing.⁵

Despite these complexities, partisan texts like 1 Maccabees depict the struggle in heroic and religious terms, as a straightforward campaign of Jews against Gentile oppressors. Maccabean leaders regularly cited biblical precedent for their holy warfare, harking back to such ancient figures as Moses and Phinehas, the ancient hero lauded for his violent vigilantism against those who betrayed the Law (1 Macc. 2:54). Early in the insurrection, the brothers allied with the Hasideans, described as mighty warriors devoted to the Law and possibly the ancestors of the more famous later sects (see 1 Macc. 2:42–48, 7:5–25). That religious interpretation focused on the purging and restoration of the Jerusalem Temple in 164, which is celebrated in the feast of Hanukah. (The story of the lamps miraculously burning is found only centuries later, in Talmudic sources.) Reading such accounts, we have to recall the agendas of the writers and their patrons. Commonly, those patrons were Hasmonean princes and lords, descendants of the Maccabean founders, and they were often themselves locked in political and sometimes military battle with ultrareligious dissidents. It greatly behooved later writers to write the history of the revolt in pious terms, to show that those Maccabee ancestors had indeed been fighting a holy war rather than merely seizing power in a putsch.6

That chronology raises the question of just how the rebels could have succeeded against such a vast empire, particularly when Jews were themselves so bitterly divided. Fortunately, the Seleucids themselves faced severe problems that prevented them from focusing their power on suppressing Palestine for sustained periods. Outside forces pressed heavily against the empire. This included the long-standing rivalry with the Ptolemaic realm, but the Romans also intervened regularly to ensure that the Seleucids were observing their arms-control agreements. The Maccabees naturally sought support from these outside foes, and in 161 Judah reputedly made a treaty with Rome. Still more threatening was the rising power of eastern nations who sought to conquer the extensive eastern portions of the empire, the Parthians being the most effective. The first great Parthian ruler to operate largely free of Seleucid interference was Phraates I, in the 170s. Over the next thirty years, his brother Mithridates conquered much of the lands that had made up the old Persian Empire destroyed by Alexander, ranging from Afghanistan into Mesopotamia.7

The Parthian Empire persisted into the third century CE, and it often posed a deadly threat to Rome. That looming Parthian power would frequently influence the politics of Palestine and the Jewish people. We usually tell the Jewish story in terms of the growing power of great Mediterranean powers, especially that of Rome. Repeatedly, though, Jewish elites looked east as well as west and sought to use Parthian imperial power as a counterbalance to Rome.

Moreover, the Seleucids themselves faced deadly internal conflicts and civil wars. After Antiochus IV died in 164, he was followed by a series of weak kings and regents, with pretenders seeking to build a power base. These crises came together in 153 when the legitimate Seleucid emperor, Demetrius I, faced a simultaneous challenge from the kings of Egypt and Pergamon, who supported Alexander Balas, a pretender who claimed to be the son of Antiochus IV. Both emperor and pretender engaged in a bidding war for the support of Maccabean leader Jonathan Apphus. Ultimately, the imperial forces of Demetrius withdrew from most of Palestine, and Alexander appointed Jonathan as high priest. Jonathan’s accession meant taking control of the institutional power of the Temple and its wealth, over and above its spiritual prestige; the title remained in his family until 37 BCE. The overthrow of the older high-priestly establishment echoed through the religion and its writings for decades to come.8

Only a series of critical events between 142 and 139 brought the Jews true independence. Jonathan’s successor, Simon, in his turn, was a player in imperial politics, a valued royal ally during the rule of an unpopular boy king, Demetrius II, and a foe of new dissidents and pretenders. By 142 a grateful Demetrius remitted imperial taxes for the Jews and granted the right to mint coinage, effectively granting them full independence. Simon became governor, hegoumenon, and military commander, so that he alone would be entitled to wear the purple and gold ornaments. He also took control of the powerful citadel that was the heart of Seleucid power in Jerusalem, the Akra, and either occupied it himself or else destroyed it. With Demetrius’s blessing, he also became high priest. Given his non-Zadokite status, he buttressed his position through a kind of public acclamation, in major assembly “of the priests and the people and of the elders of the land.” He held his power under the (generous) condition that it would endure “forever, until a faithful prophet should arise” (1 Macc. 14:41). Simon presumably never lost a sleepless night worrying that the arrival of such an individual was at all imminent.⁹

Simon benefited from external circumstances. In 141 the Parthian king, Mithridates, conquered the imperial capital of Seleucia, in one of the epochal transitions of power in the Middle East. From that point, Seleucid attention would be directed eastward, leaving Palestine in decent obscurity. In 139 the Roman Senate acknowledged Simon’s regime.

Even so, the Jewish state was still not wholly safe. Rarely receiving the historical attention it deserves was a new crisis in 135, when the emperor Antiochus VII besieged Jerusalem under its new ruler, Simon’s son John Hyrcanus. Although at first sight this looks like just another episode in the endless cycle of wars and betrayals, its extreme seriousness is revealed by the desperate measures that John took to save the city, as he bought off the invaders with three thousand talents of treasure looted from King David’s tomb. Greek historians report that Antiochus’s advisers were pressing him to exterminate the Jews altogether as obnoxious enemies of humanity or at least to abolish their laws and customs. Antiochus VII resisted such calls, earning the gratitude of Jewish writers, but his reasons are uncertain. Perhaps he was a tolerant man by nature, but it is also possible that the Jewish polity by this point simply had no Hellenizers of the sort who had been so common a generation before, leaving the king no chance of building up a loyalist party. Hellenists had been suppressed in various forms, whether they were killed, exiled, converted, or simply terrified into silence. But the whole affair points to the existential dangers facing Jews thirty years after the depths of the Maccabean crisis. Even at this late stage, the Jewish kingdom endured a further few years as tributaries of the Seleucids, as John supplied contingents for a Seleucid war against the Parthians. That defeat, in 129, effectively ended Seleucid ambitions east of Syria.10

BY SIMON’S TIME, the Hasmoneans held enormous power in Palestine as both princes and priests. They knew nothing of any separation between secular and spiritual authority, if indeed they could have grasped the modern concept of a “secular” sphere. Even with all this accumulated power, the Hasmoneans were slow to claim the title of king openly. For multiple reasons, they wanted to avoid provocative acts in a dangerous political environment, especially if that would stir Seleucid anger. Just how risky that environment was is suggested by the fate of the eight or so high priests who served between 185 and 135 BCE. (As we will see, the exact number of incumbents is uncertain.) All but one either died violently, by execution or assassination, or died in exile. The one exception was Alcimus, who died following a stroke in 159. Simon, accordingly, was never officially king, nor was his son John Hyrcanus, who ruled from 134 through 104. John in turn was followed by his son Aristoboulos, who in 104 finally did take the Greek title of king, basileus, complete with the royal diadem, and that was in addition to his high priesthood. Aristoboulos did not long remain in office, but his brother Alexander Jannaeus made the Jewish state a significant regional power (see Table 5.1).¹¹

The family owed its power to a revolt against Hellenization, but it adopted both Greek names and Greek ambitions. The princely sons of John (Yohanan) adopted the names of Alexander (Yannai), Aristoboulos (Judah), and Antigonus (Mattathias). John himself minted coins with the inscription “High Priest, Council of the Jews.” As king, though, Jannaeus’s coins looked very Greek, with an eight-point sunburst within a diadem and an anchor symbol, a significant borrowing. The anchor had originally been used by the first Seleucus himself and subsequently became the logo of his dynasty.¹²

The Seleucid realm itself dissolved to the point of becoming merely a local Syrian statelet, so that a grandly named ruler of the 80s BCE like Antiochus XII Dionysus exercised little power beyond Damascus. The empire’s fragmentation created a multipolar political scene. By this point, most of the eastern territories were under Parthian sway, but several other parvenu states also grew and flourished. Briefly triumphant was Pontus, which under King Mithridates (120–63 BCE) ruled most of Asia Minor and became a lethally dangerous enemy of Rome. Under King Tigranes the Great (95–55 BCE), a reunited Armenia became a forceful player. At its height, this Armenian empire stretched from the Caucasus across most of eastern Asia Minor and northern Mesopotamia and incorporated Syria and Phoenicia. When Tigranes seized the city of Ptolemais, he seemed on the verge of annexing Palestine itself. It was the contests with these local empires—of Mithridates and Tigranes and then the Parthians—that brought the Romans ever deeper into the Middle East and to the gates of Jerusalem itself.¹³

TABLE 5.1. HASMONEAN GENEALOGY

It is in the context of these insurgent states that we should see Jewish rulers like John Hyrcanus. Under John the Hasmoneans launched their own wide-ranging campaigns of conquest and annexation, so large in fact as to recall the (likely mythical) dominion that the Bible attributes to David and Solomon centuries before. Although John began his rule with only Judea and the land of Perea, immediately across the Jordan, he more than doubled the size of his state by conquering Samaria and Idumea (Edom).14

That campaign meant the eclipse of the independent Samaritan cult, which for three centuries had maintained a parallel existence to the official Temple on Mount Zion. As a worthy king of his age, John was pledged to imperial expansion, but as high priest he also faced the biblical injunction to centralize the worship of the Hebrew people. In a campaign in 111, Hasmonean forces destroyed the Samaritan Temple at Mount Gerizim, sacked and enslaved the city of Samaria, and reduced Shechem to a village. Samaritans, moreover, were forbidden from restoring their Temple. These ruthless actions stirred furious resentment and contributed to the loathing that Jews and Samaritans felt for each other in New Testament times. The fact that Jerusalem’s Temple now truly became the sole cult center in Palestine made it a national and international institution in a way it had not been since before the Exile. That epochal victory in turn added still further to the odds at stake in the control of Jerusalem.¹⁵

John’s successor, Jannaeus, faced an even more encouraging political situation with the evaporation of Seleucid rivalry. He not only held on to John’s conquests but also won major possessions across the Jordan, including Moab, Gilead, and Iturea. He also gained victories on the Mediterranean coast around Gaza and the ancient Philistine regions. In modern terms, he gained large portions of the nation of Jordan, and his power stretched deep into Syria.

Chapter 5

TYRANTS FOLLOW TYRANTS

A Century of National Agony