Palestine was already a diverse land with substantial Gentile and Samaritan populations, but even the Jews of the era were by no means a simple category. Most, certainly, were the descendants of ancient tribes, but there were also newer converts. When Hasmonean rulers conquered neighboring lands like Idumea, they demanded conversion, insisting that conquered peoples accept circumcision and Jewish law. Enforcing a far-reaching act of conquest scarcely seems credible for the limited military resources available at the time. However, Idumeans and other local peoples found religious conformity a reasonable sacrifice to make in exchange for political protection and an alliance against their Greek-leaning neighbors. Whatever the roots of the religious change, there is no sign that occupied peoples abandoned their new identity when Hasmonean power collapsed. Judaism in this era was an expansionist and highly fluid religion.16

Although the Hasmonean state ceased to exist in the mid-first century BCE, their lost empire demarcated the Jewish and near-Jewish world of the later Second Temple era, the world known to Herod the Great and to Jesus’s first followers. When New Testament figures, like Jesus’s apostles themselves, speak of “restoring the kingdom to Israel,” it was the Hasmonean era they had in mind. The problem was that this potent kingdom represented an unsustainable historical freak. The geography of Palestine meant that the land was at the pivot of major empires elsewhere in the region. It could escape their power only when those other states had their attention distracted elsewhere, or when dueling empires faced a delicate balance of power, making it convenient to permit an independent Jewish kingdom, however temporarily.

THE DEFEAT OF the radical Hellenizers meant that the holy city never became Antioch-in-Jerusalem, yet that salvation brought neither peace nor stability to the Jewish polity. Even when the Hasmoneans had secured themselves against foreign threats by the 140s, they presided over a deeply divided nation that was desperately riven between political/religious parties and factions. The causes of dissent were many. The Hasmoneans were controversial for their departure from traditional ideas of kingship and also for their adoption of Greek names and imperial styles. They combined in themselves the authority of worldly kings and religious high priests. So were they Jewish kings or Greek emperors? And could those roles be reconciled? Most damning for critics was the creation of a kingdom without Davidic credentials or any legitimacy beyond naked force. Critics also challenged their high-priestly authority and their displacement of the Aaronic succession.

So extreme were the conflicts of these years that modern observers would speak in terms of a revolutionary dictatorship dissolving into a failed state. Like any small post-Hellenistic state, the Hasmonean realm was riddled with elite feuds that made the country all but ungovernable. Royal families were large, and a king with several sons would likely face insurrection from at least one of the brood. When John Hyrcanus died in 104, he left five sons. His immediate successors were his two sons Aristoboulos and Antigonus, who jailed their younger brothers. Aristoboulos also imprisoned his mother and allowed her to starve to death before assassinating Antigonus—allegedly, at the instigation of his wife, Salome. Aristoboulos himself died shortly afterward, to be succeeded by his brother Jannaeus, who duly married Salome. Jannaeus’s own father had hated him from the day of his birth and could never bear to have him in his company, all of which presumably contributed to the son’s lifetime of notoriously heavy drinking. Vicious interfamily tensions constantly ran the risk of sparking civil wars and foreign interventions. At such times, each side sought support from one or another of the religious sects, which now became critical to political developments.17

It was around 150 BCE that three famous names were first recorded among the Jews. In his Jewish War, Josephus introduces us to three sects with very different opinions about the roots of human behavior, namely, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, of whom he had more to say in the Jewish Antiquities. Josephus frames his description in terms of the groups’ varying attitudes toward fate, determinism, and free will, but they had many other divisions, about theology, about the afterlife, about angels and the spiritual hierarchy. (Fortune, Tyche, was a dominant religious concept in Hellenistic culture at this time, usually imagined in terms of arbitrary chance.) The Pharisees held that Fate determined some actions, but not all, so that at least some actions remained open to free will. The Essenes held that Fate was absolute and shaped all human deeds. The Sadducees denied Fate altogether, so that all actions were subject to free will and human beings alone were responsible for whatever good or evil befell them.¹⁸

Josephus’s philosophically focused description of the sects and their ideas sounds like excellent fodder for an academic seminar. We can question, though, whether those issues were actually their main concerns in the period he is describing rather than in the more recent era in which he had known them personally. In reality, the earlier movements were deeply and militantly political and activist. Pharisees were deeply committed to defending the Law as they understood it and to maintaining Jewish freedom and integrity. That did not extend to supporting the Hasmonean dynastic project, especially when royal actions seemed to threaten religious interests. Not only were these different sects immersed in public affairs—especially the Pharisees and Sadducees—but they also acted like quite recognizable political parties and were involved in protests and paramilitary activities over centuries. (In Chapter 7 we will look more closely at the Essenes, who played nothing like as active a role in factional politics.)

Modern scholars differ over the degree of power and influence that each of these movements had at any given time, and it would be wrong to suggest that their activities closely affected the mass of ordinary people. Most Jews of the time followed a standard core of beliefs and practices that is often called Common Judaism, which included practicing circumcision and observing dietary laws and the Sabbath, while following the usual round of ritual observances. Most did not formally adhere to sects or share their particular views. That said, each group had a solid power base of sympathizers in the community at large. The Pharisees were very much the popular party, with sizable influence over the masses. Meanwhile, the Sadducees drew their support from the rich, the aristocratic, and the priestly elites.19 With their respective constituencies, Pharisees and Sadducees were key factions in the perennial civil wars that divided the Jewish kingdom.

KINGS SIDED WITH one of these factions or another, and when they shifted their allegiance, it was a major political event. One such transition occurred around 115, when John Hyrcanus defected to the Sadducees after previously following the Pharisees. According to Josephus, this shift supposedly resulted from an embarrassing clash at a social gathering, when one tactless or provocative Pharisee raised the lethally sensitive issue of John’s supposed low birth. If in fact the Hasmoneans were descended from a captive woman, then she had likely been raped, making her offspring illegitimate and non-Jewish and invalidating the family’s claims to exercise royal power. The enmity of the now out-of-favor Pharisees reverberated through the kingdom’s politics for decades to come.20

During the ensuing struggles, the Hasmoneans were quite as likely to massacre or crucify their enemies as had Antiochus IV before them or Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate afterward. On occasion, they out-Heroded Herod. Especially under Jannaeus, Hasmonean rule was characterized by pathological violence. Like his father, Jannaeus himself favored the Sadducees; the Pharisees were his deadly enemies.

The country during his reign was in a near-permanent state of internecine war. After one defeat, Jannaeus tried to take refuge in Jerusalem, only to find the city in arms against him. A bloody six-year war followed, and relations between the two sides were venomous. When Jannaeus asked his Pharisee-led enemies what he could do to make peace, the best solution they could offer was that he should kill himself immediately. Those rebel subjects called for help from the Seleucid king Demetrius Eucaerus, who duly invaded. Jannaeus eventually regained control of the country and took reprisals that shocked even the hardened Josephus. With his concubines, the king held a public feast, at which the entertainment was the crucifixion of eight hundred Pharisee rebels. While those rebels were still living, their wives and children had their throats cut before the eyes of the men undergoing torment on crosses. In response to this atrocity, the king’s enemies labeled him Thrakidas, a Thracian or wild barbarian, and, again, definitely a stranger to the house of Israel. But terror worked: thousands of his other opponents fled and remained in exile for the rest of his reign. It says much about our general ignorance of this period that such a gruesome career has not ended up more prominently in popular history.²¹

The rift between the Pharisees and the ruling dynasty was not healed until the 70s. Before his death, Jannaeus reportedly told his wife to make diplomatic overtures to the Pharisees, who were to organize his funeral. The queen, Salome Alexandra, not only accommodated the Pharisees but actually reigned through them, rewarding them with state patronage. According to later legend, the Pharisee leader at the time was noted scholar Simeon ben Shetach, who subsequently purged Sadducees from the council, the Sanhedrin, and replaced them with members of his own party, who were recalled from their exile in Alexandria. Salome drew the line at allowing the restored Pharisees to kill Jannaeus’s servants, who had carried out some notorious massacres, although some of the most egregious offenders suffered vigilante reprisals. So successful was the queen’s sectarian shift that she managed to rule the nation in reasonable peace for another decade—no small achievement given its chaotic recent history. In modern terms, it sounds like a state suffering a series of coups and countercoups, with the victims of one regime demanding retaliation against the killers and torturers of the previous government.22

Contemplating the succession of regimes from the Hasmoneans through the Herodians and the Romans, it seems that the region never knew anything vaguely like good government, as opposed to one capricious despotism after another. Given that long history of political disasters and the sectarian response, it is not difficult to appreciate the very negative perception of worldly governments in the New Testament or the desperate hope for divine rule that might offer justice—or at least ensure that violence was inflicted on our enemies rather than ourselves.

TO ILLUSTRATE THE headlong pace of change in this era, we might look at the long life of one individual, namely, Queen Salome Alexandra herself, who lived from 143 through 67 BCE. When Salome Alexandra was born, Palestine was operating within the Seleucid Empire, which still controlled Babylon. Her life span included the rise of the Hasmonean state as well as its glory days and its sharp decline. In her last years, the main political question was just how long Jewish independence could be preserved and which of the various successor states might absorb it, whether Armenia, Pontus, Parthia, or Rome. Born under the Seleucids, she came close to dying under the Romans.

Hardly less than the political world, the religious universe had also changed dramatically during her lifetime, perhaps unrecognizably. The era of revolution and civil wars was marked by new religious concepts and schools of thought, fresh movements, and innovative genres of writing. The queen lived through one of the great tectonic shifts in religious history. In the following chapters, we will trace aspects of this transformation, which completely remade ideas of spiritual good and evil.23