Jews, from Babylon to Alexandria, now paid an annual tithe to the Temple, and Jerusalem was so rich that her treasures intensified power struggles among the Jewish leaders and started to attract the cash-strapped Macedonian kings. The new king of Asia, named Antiochus like his father, rushed to the capital at Antioch and seized the throne, killing any other family claimants. Brought up in Rome and Athens, Antiochus IV inherited the irrepressible, glittering talents of his father but his cackling menace and manic flamboyance more resembled the demented exhibitionism of Caligula or Nero.
As the son of a Great King laid low, he had too much to prove. As beautiful as he was unhinged, Antiochus relished the pageantry of court ritual yet was bored by its constraints, priding himself on his absolute right to surprise. In Antioch, the young king got drunk in the main square and bathed and was massaged in public with expensive unguents, befriending grooms and porters in the baths. When a spectator complained about his extravagant use of myrrh, Antiochus ordered the pot smashed over the man’s head, causing a riot as the mob tried to salvage this priceless lotion while the king just laughed hysterically. He enjoyed dressing up, appearing in the streets in a crown of roses with a golden cloak, but when his subjects stared he threw stones at them. At night, he plunged in disguise into the stews of Antioch’s backstreets. Spontaneously friendly to strangers, his caresses were panther-like for he could suddenly turn nasty, as pitiless as he was genial.
The potentates of the Hellenic age usually claimed descent from Hercules and other gods, but Antiochus took it a step further. He called himself Epiphanes—the God-manifest—though his subjects nicknamed him Epumanes—the Madman. But there was method in his madness for he hoped to bind his empire together around the worship of one king, one religion. He fully expected his subjects to worship their local gods and merge them into the Greek pantheon and his own cult. But it was different for the Jews, who had a love-hate relationship with Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle, using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolators, whose nude athletics disgusted them.
The first instinct of the Jewish grandees was to race each other to Antioch to bid for power in Jerusalem. The crisis started with a family feud about money and influence. When High Priest Onias III made his bid to the king, his brother Jason offered an extra eighty talents and returned as high priest with a programme to rebrand Jerusalem as a Greek polis: he renamed her Antioch-Hierosolyma (Antioch-in-Jerusalem) in honour of the king, downgraded the Torah and built a Greek gymnasium probably on the western hill facing the Temple. Jason’s reforms were quite popular. Young Jews were painfully keen to appear fashionable at the gymnasium, where they exercised naked except for a Greek hat. Somehow they managed to reverse their circumcisions, the mark of the covenant with God, giving the appearance of restoring their foreskins, surely a triumph of fashion over comfort. But Jason himself was outbid for Jerusalem: he sent his henchman Menelaos to Antioch to deliver his tribute. But instead the thuggish Menelaos stole the Temple funds, outbid Jason and bought the high priesthood, even though he lacked the required Zadokite lineage. Menelaos seized Jerusalem. When the Jerusalemites sent delegates to the king to protest, he executed them, and he even allowed Menelaos to arrange the murder of the ex-High Priest Onias.
Antiochus was most concerned to raise funds to reconquer his empire—and he was about to pull off an astonishing coup: the uniting of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. In 170 BC Antiochus conquered Egypt, but the Jerusalemites undermined his triumph, rebelling under the deposed Jason. The Madman marched back across Sinai, and stormed Jerusalem deporting 10,000 Jews.h Accompanied by his henchman Menelaos, he entered the Holy of Holies, an unforgivable sacrilege, and stole its priceless artefacts—the golden altar, the candlestick of light and the shewbread table. Worse, Antiochus ordered the Jews to sacrifice to him as God-manifest, testing the loyalty of the many Jews who were probably attracted to Greek culture—and then, his coffers filled with Temple gold, he rushed back to Egypt to crush any resistance.
Antiochus liked to play the Roman, sporting a toga and holding mock elections in Antioch, while he secretly rebuilt his banned fleet and elephant corps. But Rome, determined to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, would not tolerate Antiochus’ new empire. When the Roman envoy Popillius Laenas met the king in Alexandria, he brashly drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, demanding he agree to withdraw from Egypt before stepping out of it—the origin of the phrase “draw a line in the sand.” Antiochus, “groaning and in bitterness of heart,” bowed before Roman power.
Meanwhile the Jews refused to sacrifice to Antiochus the God. To ensure that Jerusalem would not rebel a third time, the Madman decided to eradicate the Jewish religion itself.
ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES:
ANOTHER ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION
In 167, Antiochus captured Jerusalem by a ruse on the Sabbath, slaughtered thousands, destroyed her walls and built a new citadel, the Acra. He handed the city over to a Greek governor and the collaborator Menelaos.
Then Antiochus forbade any sacrifices or services in the Temple, banned the Sabbath, the Law and circumcision on pain of death, and ordered the Temple to be soiled with pigs’ flesh. On 6 December, the Temple was consecrated as a shrine to the state god, Olympian Zeus—the very abomination of desolation. A sacrifice was made to Antiochus the God-King, probably in his presence, at the altar outside the Holy of Holies. “The Temple was filled with riot and revelling by Gentiles who dallied with harlots,” fornicating “in the holy places.” Menelaos acquiesced in this, people processed through the Temple wearing ivy crowns, and, after prayers, even many of the priests descended to watch the naked games at the gymnasium.
Those practising the Sabbath were burned alive or suffered a gruesome Greek import: crucifixion. An old man perished rather than eat pork; women who circumcised their children were thrown with their babies off the walls of Jerusalem. The Torah was torn to shreds and burned publicly: everyone found with a copy was put to death. Yet the Torah, like the Temple, was worth more than life. These deaths created a new cult of martyrdom and stimulated expectation of the Apocalypse. “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and come to everlasting life” in Jerusalem, evil would fail, and goodness triumph with the arrival of a Messiah—and a Son of Man, invested with eternal glory.i
Antiochus progressed back to Antioch, where he celebrated his flawed victories with a festival. Gold-armoured Scythian horsemen, Indian elephants, gladiators and Nisaean horses with gold bridles paraded through the capital, followed by young athletes with gilded crowns, a thousand oxen for sacrifice, floats bearing statues, and women spraying perfume onto the crowds. Gladiators fought in the circuses and fountains ran red with wine while the king entertained a thousand guests at his palace. The Madman supervised everything, riding up and down the procession, ushering in guests, joking with his comedians. At the end of the banquet, the comedians carried in a figure swaddled in cloth. They laid it on the ground where, at the first notes of a symphonia, it suddenly threw off its coverings and out burst the king naked and dancing.
Far to the south of this delirious debauch, Antiochus’ generals were enforcing his persecutions. In the village of Modin, near Jerusalem, an old priest called Mattathias, father of five sons, was ordered to make the sacrifice to Antiochus to prove he was no longer a Jew, but he replied: “If all the nations of the King’s dominion hearken unto him yet will I and my sons walk in the Covenant of our fathers.” When another Jew stepped forward to make the sacrifice, Mattathias’ “zeal was kindled, his veins trembled,” and, drawing his sword, he killed first the traitor, then Antiochus’ general, and pulled down the altar. “Whoever maintaineth the Covenant,” he said, “let him come forth after me.” The old man and his five sons fled
into the mountains, joined by extremely pious Jews known as the Righteous—Hasidim. Initially they were so pious that they observed the Sabbath even (disastrously) in battle: the Greeks presumably tried to fight all their battles on Saturdays.
Mattathias died soon afterwards, but his third son Judah, assuming command in the hills around Jerusalem, defeated three Syrian armies in a row. Antiochus initially did not take the Jewish revolt seriously for he marched east to conquer Iraq and Persia, ordering his viceroy Lysias to crush the rebels. But Judah defeated him too.
Even Antiochus, campaigning in faraway Persia, realized that Judah’s victories threatened his empire, and cancelled the terror. The Jews, he wrote to the pro-Greek members of the Sanhedrin, could “use their own proper meats and observe their own laws.” But he was too late, and soon afterwards Antiochus Epiphanes suffered an epileptic fit and fell dead from his chariot.30 Judah had already earned the heroic moniker that would give its name to a dynasty: the Hammer.
a The Samaritans were already developing their separate semi-Jewish cult, based on a Judaism formed before the introduction of the new Babylonian rules. Under the Persians, Samaria was ruled by Sanballat’s dynasty of governors. Their exclusion from Jerusalem encouraged them to set up their own temple at Mount Gerizim and they embarked on a feud with the Jews and Jerusalem. Like all family rivalries, it was based on the hatred of tiny differences. The Samaritans became second-class citizens, despised by the Jews as heathens, hence Jesus’ surprising revelation that there was such a thing as a “good Samaritan.” Around a thousand Samaritans still live in Israel: long after the destruction of the end of the Jewish cult of sacrifice, the Samaritans in the twenty-first century still annually sacrifice the Passover lamb on Mount Gerizim.
b Tanakh was a Hebrew acronym for Law, Prophets and Writings, the books which the Christians later called The Old Testament.
c Joseph’s family were Jews of mixed origin, perhaps descendants of a Tobiah the Ammonite who had opposed Nehemiah. His father Tobiah was a magnate close to Ptolemy II—the papyrus archive of a royal official named Zenon shows him trading with the king—and ruled huge estates in Amnon (today’s Jordan).
d Antiochus was the heir of the other great dynasty descended from the generals who carved up Alexander the Great’s empire. When Ptolemy I secured his own kingdom in Egypt, he backed Antiochus’ ancestor Seleucos, one of Alexander’s officers, in his bid to seize Babylon. As gifted as Ptolemy, Seleucos reconquered most of Alexander’s Asian territories—hence the Seleucid title King of Asia. Seleucos ruled from Greece to the Indus—only to be assassinated at his apogee. The family had been promised Coele-Syria, but Ptolemy had refused to hand it over: the result was a century of Syrian wars.
e This was the age of the war elephant. Ever since Alexander had returned from his Indian campaign with a corps of elephants, these armoured pachyderms had become the most prestigious (and expensive) weapons for any self-respecting Macedonian king—though they often trampled their own infantry instead of the enemy’s. Meanwhile in the West, the Carthaginians, descendants of Phoenicians from Tyre, and the Romans were fighting for mastery of the Mediterranean. Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general, invaded Italy, having marched his elephants over the Alps. Antiochus deployed Indian elephants, the Ptolemies had African elephants and Hannibal used the smaller, now extinct species from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
f Some historians believe Simon actually ruled under Ptolemy I. The sources are contradictory but he was, most likely, Antiochus the Great’s contemporary Simon II, who rebuilt the fortifications, repaired the Temple and added a giant cistern on the Temple Mount. His tomb stands north of the Old City in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. During the Ottoman centuries, a “Jewish picnic” was held there annually which was celebrated by Muslims, Jews and Christians together, one of the festivals shared by all sects in the days before nationalism. Today, the tomb is a Jewish shrine at the centre of Israeli plans to build a nearby settlement. Yet the tomb, like so many sites in Jerusalem, is itself a myth: it is neither Jewish nor the resting-place of Simon the Just. Built 500 years later, it was the tomb of a Roman lady, Julia Sabina.
g The chief Jewish festivals—Passover, Weeks and Tabernacles—were still developing. Passover was the spring festival that now combined the two old feasts of the Unleavened Bread and the story of the Exodus. Gradually Passover replaced Tabernacles as the main Jewish festival in Jerusalem. Tabernacles survives today as Sukkot, when Jewish children still build a harvest hut decorated with fruit. Temple duties were divided by rota between the Levites, descendants of the tribe of Levi, and the priests (descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, themselves a subgroup of the Levites).
h Jason fled again, taking refuge with his backer, Hyrcanus the Tobiad prince. Hyrcanus had ruled much of Jordan for forty years, remaining an ally of the Ptolemies even when they lost Jerusalem. He fought campaigns against the Arabians and built a luxurious fortress at Araq e-Emir with beautiful carvings and ornamental gardens. When Antiochus conquered Egypt and retook Jerusalem, Hyrcanus ran out of options: the last of the Tobiads committed suicide. The ruins of his palace are now a tourist site in Jordan.
i The Book of Daniel is a collection of stories, some from the Babylonian Exile, others from the persecutions of Antiochus: the fiery furnace may describe his tortures. Daniel’s new vision of an enigmatic “Son of Man” inspired Jesus. The cult of martyrdom would be replayed in the early centuries of Christianity.
CHAPTER 8
The Maccabees
164–66 BC
JUDAH THE HAMMER
In the winter of 164 BC, Judah the Hammer conquered all of Judaea and Jerusalem apart from Antiochus’ newly built Acra Fortress. When Judah saw the Temple overgrown and deserted, he lamented. He burned incense, rededicated the Holy of Holies, and on 14 December presided as sacrifices resumed. In the ravaged city, there was a shortage of oil to light the candelabra in the Temple, but somehow the candles never went out. The liberation and resanctification of the Temple are still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah—the Dedication.
The Hammer—Maqqabaha in Aramaic—campaigned across the Jordan and sent his brother Simon to rescue the Jews in Galilee. In Judah’s absence, the Jews were defeated. The Maccabee struck back, captured Hebron and Edom and smashed the pagan shrine in Ashdod before besieging the Acra in Jerusalem. But the Seleucid regent defeated the Maccabees at Beth-Zacharia, south of Bethlehem, then besieged Jerusalem, until he had to withdraw to face a revolt in Antioch. He therefore granted the Jews the right to live “after their own laws” and worship in their Temple. Four centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, Jewish independence was restored.
But the Jews were not yet safe. The Seleucids, beset by civil wars, diminished but still formidable, were determined to crush the Jews and retain Palestine. This vicious, complicated war lasted twenty years. There is no need to recount every detail, with its many similarly named Seleucid pretenders, but there were moments when the Maccabees were close to annihilation. Yet this endlessly resourceful, gifted family always managed to recover and strike back.
The Acra Fortress, overlooking the Temple, remained to torment the divided Jerusalem. As the trumpets blew and the priests again performed the sacrifices, Acra’s pagan mercenaries and renegade Jews sometimes “rushed out suddenly,” says Josephus, “and destroyed those going up to the Temple.” The Jerusalemites executed the high priest, Menelaos, “the cause of all evils,” and elected a new one.b But the Seleucids rallied again. Their general Nicanor recaptured Jerusalem. Pointing at the altar, the Greek issued a threat: “unless Judah and his host be now delivered in my hands, I will burn up this House.”
Judah, fighting for his life, appealed to Rome, that enemy of the Greek kingdoms, and Rome effectively recognized Jewish sovereignty. In 161, the Hammer routed Nicanor, ordering his head and his arm to be cut off and brought to Jerusalem. At the Temple, he presented these ghoulish trophies—the hand and the excised tongue that had threatened t
he Temple were shredded and hung out for the birds while the head lolled atop the fortress. Jerusalemites celebrated Nicanor Day as a festival of deliverance. The Seleucids then defeated and killed the Maccabee himself; Jerusalem fell. Judah was buried in Modin. All seemed lost. But he was survived by his brothers.31
SIMON THE GREAT: TRIUMPH OF THE MACCABEES
After two years on the run, Jonathan, Judah’s brother, emerged from the deserts to rout the Seleucids again, setting up his court at Michmas, north of Greek-held Jerusalem. Jonathan, known as the Diplomat, played off the rival kings of Syria and Egypt to regain Jerusalem. He then restored the walls, resanctified the Temple and, in 153, persuaded the Seleucid king to appoint him to the gold-clasped rank of “king’s friend”—and High Priest. The Maccabee was anointed with the oil and bedecked with the royal flower and the priestly robes at the most raucous of festivals, Tabernacles. Yet Jonathan was descended from a provincial priest with no connection to Zadok. At least one Jewish sect saw him as the “Wicked Priest.”
First Jonathan was backed by the Egyptian king Ptolemy VI Philometer, who marched up the coast to Joppa (Jerusalem’s nearest port, Jaffa), to meet Jonathan, in their respective pharaonic and priestly magnificence. At Ptolemais (now Acre), Philometer achieved the dream of every Greek king since Alexander the Great: he was crowned king of Egypt and Asia. But at the very moment of his triumph, his horse reared at the sight of the Seleucid elephants, and he was killed.c
As rival Seleucids fought for power, Jonathan the Diplomat repeatedly switched sides. One of the Seleucid pretenders, besieged in his Antioch palace, appealed for Jonathan’s help in return for full Jewish independence. Jonathan marched his 2,000 men all the way from Jerusalem, through what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria, to Antioch. The Jewish soldiers, firing arrows from the palace then leaping from roof to roof across the burning city, rescued and restored the king. Returning to Judaea, Jonathan conquered Ashkelon, Gaza, and Beth-Zur—and started to besiege the Acra Fortress in Jerusalem. But he was lured to Ptolemais without his bodyguards to meet his latest Greek ally who seized him and marched on Jerusalem.
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