WHEN ALEXANDER OF MACEDON defeated Darius III, King of Persia, beside the River Issus in October 333 BCE, the Jews of Jerusalem were shocked, because they had been loyal vassals of Persia for over two hundred years. Josephus Flavius, the first-century Jewish historian, tells us that the high priest refused at first to submit to Alexander because he had taken a vow to remain loyal to the last Persian king but, as a result of a dream, capitulated when Alexander promised that throughout his empire the Jews would continue to be governed according to their own Law.1 In fact, it is most unlikely that Alexander ever visited Jerusalem. At first the Macedonian conquest made very little difference to the lives of the people of Judah. The Torah continued to be the official law of the province, and the administration which had operated under the Persians probably remained in place. Yet the legend of Alexander’s dealings with the high priest was significant, because it illustrated the complexity of the Jewish response to Hellenism. Some Jews instinctively recoiled from the culture of the Greeks and wanted to cling to the old dispensation; others found Hellenism congenial and saw it as profoundly sympathetic to their own traditions. The struggle between these opposing factions would dominate the history of Jerusalem for nearly three hundred years.
Hellenism had been gradually penetrating the Near East for decades before the triumph of Alexander. The old cultures of the region were beginning to crumble and would all be indelibly affected by the Greek spirit. But the Jews of Jerusalem had probably had little direct contact with the Greeks: such elements of Hellenistic culture as did come their way had usually been mediated through the coastal cities of Phoenicia, which could translate it into a more familiar idiom. Jerusalem was once more off the beaten track and had become rather a backwater. It was not on any of the main trade routes. The caravans that stopped at the nearby cities of Petra and Gaza had no reason to go to Jerusalem, which was a poor city, lacking the raw materials to develop an industry. Introverted, its life revolving around the Temple and its supposedly ancient Torah, Jerusalem paid little heed to international politics and seemed more in tune with the past than with the modernity infiltrating the region from the west.
All that changed when Alexander the Great died in Babylon on 13 June 323. The only possible heir was a minor, and almost immediately fighting broke out among the leading generals for control of the empire. For the next two decades the lands conquered by Alexander were convulsed by the battles of these six diadochoi (“successors”). As a crucial transit region, Judaea was continuously invaded by armies on the march from Asia Minor or Syria to Egypt, with their baggage, equipment, families, and slaves. Jerusalem was conquered no fewer than six times during these years, and its inhabitants became painfully aware that the long period of peaceful isolation was over. The Jews of Jerusalem first experienced Hellenism as destructive, violent, and militaristic. The Macedoniandiadochoi had erupted into the country as arrogant conquerors who took little notice of the native population except insofar as it could serve their interests. Greek art, philosophy, democracy, and literature, which have played such an important role in the development of Western culture, would not have impressed the inhabitants of Jerusalem in these terrible years. They would probably have agreed with the Sanskrit writer who described the Greeks as “powerful and wicked.”
In 301, Judaea, Samerina, Phoenicia, and the whole of the coastal plain were captured by the forces of Ptolemy I Soter, the “successor” who had recently established a power base for himself in Egypt. For the next hundred years, Jerusalem remained under the control of the Ptolemies, who needed the province of Syria as a military buffer against attack from the north.
Like most ancient rulers, the Ptolemies did not interfere overmuch in local affairs, though they introduced a more streamlined and efficient type of administration that was flexible enough to treat the different regions of their Kingdom differently. Some parts of the province were crown lands that were ruled directly by royal officials; so were the new ports founded by the Ptolemies at Joppa and Strato’s Tower and the new military colonies at Beth Shan, Philotera and Pella. The rest of the country had more freedom to manage its own affairs. The Phoenician cities of Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, and Byblos were allowed significant freedoms and privileges. Greek colonists arrived in Syria and established poleis, modeled on the democratic Greek republics, in such towns as Gaza, Shechem, Marissa, and Amman, which were virtually self-governing. Greek soldiers, merchants, and entrepreneurs swarmed into these settlements to take advantage of the new opportunities in the east, and the local people who learned to speak and write in Greek became “Hellenes” themselves and were allowed to enter the lower ranks of the army and administration.
The polis was alien to many of the most deeply rooted traditions of the region. Hellenistic culture was secular. It depended upon an intelligentsia that was independent of both palace and temple. Instead of being ruled by a divinely appointed ruler or by a priestly elite, the polis kept government separate from religion. Gymnasia also appeared in these new Greek cities, where the young men were trained according to the Hellenistic ideal. They studied Greek literature and underwent a rigorous physical and military training, developing mind and body simultaneously. The gymnasion was the institution that bound the Greeks together in their far-flung empire. It had its own religious ethos. Like the Olympic Games, the athletic competitions of the young men were religious celebrations in honor of Hermes and Heracles, the patrons of the gymnasia. Usually the native people were not allowed to enter the gymnasion; it was a privilege reserved for the Greeks. But the Ptolemies did permit foreigners to be admitted. That was how the Jews of Alexandria came to be trained in the gymnasion there and were able to achieve a unique fusion of Greek and Jewish culture. The Greeks were materialistic and sometimes shocking, but many of the local people found this new culture seductive. For some it was as irresistible as Western culture is to many people today in the developing world. It attracted and repelled; it broke taboos, but for that very reason many found it profoundly liberating.
At first, Jerusalem was not affected by these new ideas. It was not a polis and therefore had no gymnasion. Most of the inhabitants would have been horrified by the idea of Hermes being honored in Yahweh’s city and appalled to see youths exercising in the nude. Judaea was of no great interest to the Ptolemies. The Jews there constituted a distinct eth-nos (“nation”), which was ruled by the gerousia, a council of elders which was based in Jerusalem. The Torah continued as the official law of the ethnos, which thus remained what it had been under the Persians: a temple state governed by its priests. The Ptolemies may have appointed a local agent (oikonomos) to keep an eye on Judaean affairs, and, at least in time of war, they would have installed a garrison in the city. But for the most part, the Jews were left to their own devices. Their chief link with the Egyptian government was the tribute of twenty talents that they were obliged to pay each year.
But it was inevitable that Jerusalem would eventually be dragged into the Greek world, which was transforming the rest of the country. During the reign of Ptolemy II (282–46), a Jerusalemite called Joseph managed to secure the job of collecting the taxes of the whole province of Syria. For over twenty years he was one of the most powerful men in the country. Joseph belonged to the Tobiad clan and may have been a descendant of the Tobiah who had caused Nehemiah such trouble. If so, the Tobiads refused to allow their lives to be circumscribed by the Torah; they still liked to make contact with foreigners and would not submit to the more exclusive ethos of the Jerusalem establishment. The Tobiad estate at Ammantis in Transjordan had become one of the Ptolemaic military colonies. Joseph was obviously at home in the Greek world, and he was able to introduce the high finance of the Hellenes into Jerusalem, becoming the first Jewish banker. Many of his fellow Jews were proud of Joseph’s success: a novella quoted by Josephus, which tells the story of his career, clearly delights in his cleverness, chicanery, and skills as an entrepreneur.2 The author praises Joseph for rescuing his people from poverty and enabling them to share in the economic boom that the Ptolemies had brought to the region.
The Tobiads became the pioneers of Hellenism in Jerusalem. They wanted their city to discard the old traditions, which they found inhibiting and parochial. They were not alone in this. Many people in the Greek empire experienced a similar desire to shake off ancestral customs that suddenly seemed oppressive. Instead of seeing their world as an enclave, in which it was essential that limits, borderlines, and frontiers be clearly drawn and defined, many people were looking for larger horizons. The polis was a closed world, but many Greeks now considered themselves cosmopolitans: citizens of the whole cosmos. Instead of regarding their homeland as the most sacred value, since it gave them their unique place in the world, Greeks became colonialists and world travelers. The conquests of Alexander had opened up the globe and made the polis seem petty and inadequate. The very boundlessness that had seemed chaotic and threatening to their ancestors now seemed exciting and liberating. Jews in the Greek world also shared this rootlessness and wanted to become citizens of humanity rather than members of a chosen people, hampered by a law that had become constricting. By the end of the third century, some Jews had begun to acquire the rudiments of a Greek education and were giving their children Greek names.
Others found all this extremely threatening. They clung to the old traditions centered on the Temple. In particular, the lower classes, who were not able to share in the new prosperity, tended to turn more fervently than ever to the Law, which ensured that each thing had its place and that order could prevail in society only if people and objects were confined to the category to which they belonged. The conservative Jews naturally gravitated toward the priests, the guardians of Torah and Temple. Their leaders were the Oniads, a priestly family of Zadokite descent whose members had for some time been the chief priests of Jerusalem. The Oniads themselves were attracted to the Greek ideal, and some of them had Greek names. But they were determined to maintain the old laws and traditions on which their power and privileges depended.
Toward the end of the century, it became clear that the Ptolemies might lose Syria to the Seleucid dynasty, which ruled the Greek kingdom of Mesopotamia. In 219 the young, ambitious Seleucid king Anti-ochus III invaded Samaria and the Phoenician coastline, and he was able to hold his own in these territories for four years. Even though he was eventually driven back by Ptolemy IV Philopater, it seemed likely that he would be back. Because the Tobiads had been closely associated with the Ptolemies since Joseph had become their chief tax collector, the more conservative Jews of Jerusalem supported the Seleucids and hoped that they would gain control of the country. Since the Tobiads became embroiled in an internal family dispute, the energetic high priest Simon II of the Oniad family achieved considerable influence in the city and supported the Seleucid cause. After Antiochus had invaded the country again in 203, his Jewish supporters helped him to conquer the citadel of Jerusalem in 201, though his troops were thrown out of the city the following year by the Ptolemies. In 200, Jerusalem was subjected to a long siege and suffered severe damage before Antiochus was able to take it back again.
By this time the Seleucids had conquered the whole country, which they called the province of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia. Different administrative arrangements were once again made for the various political units: the Greek and Phoenician cities, the military colonies, and the crown lands. With the help of Jewish scribes, Antiochus drew up a special charter for the ethnos of Judaea and rewarded his supporters in Jerusalem. Simon II was made head of the ethnos, which meant that the priestly conservative party had gained ascendancy over the Hellenizing Tobiads. The Torah continued to be the law of the land, and the Jewish senate (gerousia) remained the governing body. The charter made special arrangements for the Temple which reflected the sacred geography of the Jews but introduced even more exclusive measures than had Nehemiah and Ezra. To preserve the purity of the shrine, the city of Jerusalem had to be free of all impurity. A proclamation on the city gates now forbade the breeding or slaughter of “unclean” animals in Jerusalem. Male Jews were not permitted to enter the inner court of the Temple, where the sacrifices were performed, unless they went through the same ritual ablutions as the priests. Gentiles were also forbidden to enter the inner court. This was an innovation that had no basis in the Torah but reflected the hostility of the more conservative Jews of Jerusalem toward the gentile world. It would have made a strong impression on Greek visitors to the city. They would have found it natural that the laity were excluded from the Temple buildings: in almost any temple of antiquity, priests were the only people to enter the inner sanctum. But in Greece, anybody was allowed to go into the temple courts, provided that he performed the usual rites of purification. Now Greek visitors to Jerusalem found that they were relegated to the outer court, with the women and the Jews who were in a state of ritual impurity. Because they did not observe the Torah, foreigners were declared “unclean.” They must keep to their place, beyond the pale of holiness.
But for Jews who were within the ambit of the sacred, the Temple cult yielded an experience of the divine that brought a new clarity and sense of life’s richness. Ben Sirah, a scribe who was writing in Jerusalem during the early Seleucid period, gives us some idea of the impact of the Temple liturgy on the faithful when he describes Simon performing the ceremonies of Yom Kippur. This was the one day in the year that the high priest was permitted to enter the Devir on behalf of the faithful. When he emerged, he brought its great sanctity with him out to the people. The sacred aura that seemed to surround Simon is compared to the sun shining on the golden roof of the Temple, to a rainbow amid brilliant clouds, to an olive tree laden with fruit and a cypress soaring toward the heavens.3Reality became heightened and was experienced more intensely: the sacred brought out its full potential. In Simon’s day, the office of high priest had achieved an entirely new status. It became a symbol of the integrity of Judaism and played an increasingly important role in the politics of Jerusalem. Ben Sirah believed that the high priest alone had the authority to give a definitive interpretation of the Torah.4 He was a symbol of continuity: the kingship of the House of David had lasted only a few generations, but the priesthood of Aaron would last forever.5 By this date, Yahweh had become so exalted and transcendent in the minds of his people that it was dangerous to utter his name. When they came across the Hebrew consonants YHWH in the text of the Torah, Jews would now substitute such a synonym as “Adonai” (“Lord”) or “El Elyon” (“Most High”). Only the high priest could pronounce the divine name, and then only once a year on Yom Kippur. Ben Sirah also praised Simon for his building work in Jerusalem. He repaired the city walls and Temple porches which had been damaged in the siege of 200. He also excavated a large reservoir—“as huge as the sea”—north of the Temple Mount, which became known as the Pool of Beth-Hesda (Aramaic: “House of Mercy”). Traditionally, building had always been considered a task for a king, but Antiochus had not agreed to pay for these repairs: he had simply exempted the cost of the building from the city’s tax. So Simon had stepped into the breach, acting, as it were, as king and priest of Jerusalem.6
Ben Sirah was a conservative. He deplored the materialism that had crept into the city now that so many people had been infected by the mercenary ways of the Greeks. The Greeks liked to blame the Levantines for their venality, but in fact this was a vice that they themselves had brought into the region from the West. In the old days, the Zion cult had insisted that Jerusalem be a refuge for the poor; but now, Ben Sirah complained, Jerusalemites considered poverty a disgrace and the poor were pushed callously to one side in the stampede for wealth.7 And yet, however much Ben Sirah distrusted those Jews who flirted with Greek culture, he was not himself immune to the lure of Hellenism. Why should the young Jews of Jerusalem not study the works of Moses as the young Greeks studied the works of Homer in the gymnasia? This was a revolutionary suggestion. Hitherto laymen might learn extracts from the Torah by heart, but they were not expected to read it themselves: the Law was expounded to them by the priests. But Ben Sirah was no priest; he was a Jewish intellectual who believed that the Torah could become the basis of a liberal education for all male Jews. Fifty years later, Ben Sirah’s grandson, who translated his book into Greek, took this type of study for granted.8 Throughout the Near East, the old religions which opposed the Hellenistic challenge were themselves being subtly changed by their contact with the Greek world. Judaism was no exception. Jews like Ben Sirah had already begun to adapt the Greek educational ideal to their own traditions and thus laid the foundation of rabbinic Judaism. Even the discipline of question and answer, later developed by the rabbis, would show the influence of the Socratic method.
But other Jews wanted to go further: they were hoping to receive a wholly Greek education and did not believe that this would be incompatible with Judaism. Soon they would clash with the conservatives in Jerusalem. The first sign of the rift occurred in about 180, when the high priest Onias III, the son of Simon II, was accused of hoarding a large sum of money in the Temple treasury. King Seleucus IV immediately dispatched his vizier Heliodorus from Antioch to Jerusalem to recover the money, which, he believed, was owed to the Seleucid state. By this date, enthusiasm for the Seleucids had waned in the city. In 192, Antiochus III had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the advancing Roman army, which had annexed Greece and much of Anatolia. He was allowed to keep his throne only on condition that he paid an extremely heavy indemnity and annual tribute. His successors were, therefore, always chronically short of money. Seleucus IV probably assumed that since the charter obliged him to pay all the expenses of the Jerusalem cult out of his own revenues, he had the right to control the Temple finances. But he had reckoned without Jewish sensitivity about the Temple, which now surfaced for the first time. When Heliodorus arrived in Jerusalem and insisted on confiscating the money in the Temple coffers, the people were overcome with horror. Onias became deathly pale and trembled convulsively; women ran through the streets, clad in sackcloth, and young girls leaned out of their windows calling on heaven for aid. The integrity of the Temple was saved by a miracle. As he approached the treasury, Heliodorus was struck to the ground in a paralytic fit. Afterward he testified that he had seen the Jewish god with his own eyes.
The incident was a milestone: henceforth any attack on the Temple was likely to provoke a riot in Jerusalem. Over the years, the Temple had come to express the essence of Judaism; it had been placed in the center of the emotional map of the Jews, constituting the heart of their beleaguered identity. It was regarded as the core of the nation, the source of its life, creativity, and survival. The Temple still exerted a centripetal pull on the hearts and minds of those Jews who carried out the directives of the Torah. Even in the diaspora, Jews now turned toward Jerusalem when they prayed and had begun to make the long pilgrimage to the holy city to celebrate the great festivals in the Temple. The psalms, prayers, and sacred writings all encouraged them to see the Temple as paradise on earth, an objective correlative for God himself. As Jews struggled to preserve a distinct identity in the midst of a world that urged them to assimilate, the Temple and its city had become an embattled enclave. Gentiles were not allowed anywhere near the Temple buildings, and any attempt to violate that holy separateness was experienced collectively by the people as a rape. This was not a rational position: it was a gut reaction, instinctive and immediate.
But the crisis of 180 did not end with Heliodorus’s stroke. There were insinuations that Onias had somehow been responsible for his illness and he felt bound to go to the Seleucid court to clear his name. But he had played into the hands of his enemies. While he was at Antioch, his ambitious brother Joshua—or Jason, as he preferred to be called—curried favor with King Seleucus and offered him a hefty bribe in return for the high priesthood. Seleucus was only too happy to agree, and Onias was forced to flee the court and was later murdered. But high priest Jason was not a conservative like his brother. The Torah had become meaningless to him, and he wanted his people to enjoy the freedoms of a wider world by adopting the Greek lifestyle. Soon after he had taken office, King Seleucus was also murdered, by his brother Antiochus Epiphanes, and Jason offered the new king a further sum of money, asking in return that the old charter of 200 be revoked. He did not want Judah to continue to be an old-fashioned temple state based on the Torah. Instead, he hoped that Jerusalem would become a polis known as Antioch after its royal patron. Ever in need of cash, Antiochus accepted the money and agreed to Jason’s program, which, he hoped, would consolidate his authority in Judah.
But Jerusalem could not become apolis overnight. A significant number of the citizens had to be sufficiently versed in Greek culture to become Hellenes before the democratic ideal could be imposed on the city. As an interim measure, Jason probably had leave to establish a society of “Antiochenes,” who were committed to the Hellenizing project. A gymnasion was established in Jerusalem, provocatively close to the Temple, where the young Jews had the opportunity to study Homer, Greek philosophy, and music; they competed naked in the sporting events. But until Jerusalem was a full-fledged polis, the Torah was still the law of the land, and it is therefore unlikely that Hermes and Herakles were honored in the Jerusalem gymnasion. Jason’s plans received a good deal of popular support during this first phase. We hear of no opposition to the gymnasion in the biblical sources. As soon as the gong sounded for the athletic exercises, the priests used to hurry down from the Temple Mount to take part. Priests, landowners, merchants, and craftsmen were all attracted to the challenge of Hellenism and probably hoped that a more open society would improve Jerusalem’s economy. There had always been opposition to the segregationalist policies of Nehemiah and Ezra, and many of the Jews of Jerusalem were attracted by the Greek ideal of world citizenship. They did not feel that Judaism was necessarily incompatible with the Hellenic world. Perhaps Moses could be compared to a lawgiver such as Lycurgus? The Torah was not necessarily a sacrosanct value: Abraham had not obeyed the mitzvoth, for example. Had he not eaten milk and meat together when he entertained Yahweh at Mamre? There was no need for Jews to separate themselves so fanatically from the goyim. By making friends with their neighbors and enjoying cultural and economic exchange with them, Jews could return to the primal unity that had prevailed before the human race had been split up into different tribes and religions after the building of the Tower of Babel. When King Antiochus Epiphanes visited Jerusalem in 173, he was given an enthusiastic welcome. Jason led the people through the streets in a torchlight procession in honor of their new patron. It may have been on this occasion that Jerusalem formally became apolis—a development which most of the population applauded.
But then the Hellenizers went too far. In 172, Jason sent a priest called Menelaus to Antioch with the money he had promised to Antio-chus. Menelaus treacherously abused this trust by offering the king yet another bribe in order to secure the high priesthood for himself. Yet again, Antiochus needed the money and Menelaus returned to Jerusalem as high priest. Jason was deposed and fled for his life. He found a refuge on the Tobiad estate near Amman, on the other side of the Jordan. But the people could not accept Menelaus as high priest: although a member of a priestly family, he was not a descendant of Zadok and was, therefore, ineligible for this office. Menelaus compounded his mistake by plundering the Temple treasury in order to find the money he had undertaken to pay to Antiochus. Disillusioned, most of the people of Jerusalem abandoned the society of “Antiochenes,” who now became a small minority group, wholly dependent upon the Seleucid king.
The Hellenizers resorted to some very dubious tactics, but it would be a mistake to see them as cynics who simply wanted the good life and the fleshpots of Greece. Most of them were probably quite sincere in their desire for a less exclusive Judaism. In our own day, Jews have tried to reform their traditions in order to embrace modernity and have attracted a wide following. One of the chief failings of these Hellenizing reformers was that they did not keep Antiochus fully informed about the change of heart in Jerusalem, and so he may not have realized how unpopular their project had become. Menelaus pressed on with the conversion of the city to a polis. He renamed Jerusalem “Antioch in Judaea” and continued to encourage the gymnasion, the ephebate (an organization which trained young men in military, athletic, and cultural pursuits), and the Hellenistic games. But the reform suffered a severe setback in 170 when, following a report that Antiochus had been killed in an encounter with the Romans in Egypt, Jason attempted a coup. He marched into the city and forced Menelaus and the other Antiochenes into the citadel. Antiochus was still very much alive, however, and he descended upon the city in fury, putting Jason once again to flight. Construing the coup as a rebellion against his authority, he plundered the Temple treasury and stormed into the Temple buildings, removing the golden incense altar, the lamp-stand, the Veil of the Devir, and all the vessels and censers he could lay hands on. His violation of these most sacred precincts was never forgotten, and in future Antiochus would be seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jewish people. Jerusalem was now reduced from a polis in the making to a mere military colony, ruled by Menelaus with the support of a Syrian garrison. But this was not sufficient to secure law and order in the city. The following year Antiochus had to send another regiment, which invaded Jerusalem on the Sabbath and tore down part of the city walls. The Syrians then built a new fortress overlooking the Temple enclosure called the Akra, which became the Seleucid headquarters in Jerusalem. In effect the Akra became a separate district, inhabited by pagan troops and Hellenist Jews, where the Greek gods were worshipped.
At the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Jews dedicate a new Torah scroll for their synagogue. After the persecution by Antiochus Epiphanes, there was a new passion for the Law in Judaea.
But this was not all. Possibly at the behest of Menelaus and his Antiochenes, Antiochus issued an edict which left an indelible impression on the Jewish spirit and made it emotionally impossible for many Jews to accommodate the gentile world. This decree revoked the charter of 200 and outlawed the practice of the Jewish faith in Judah. This was the first religious persecution in history. The Temple liturgy was forbidden, as was the Sabbath rest, circumcision, and the observance of the purity laws. Anybody who disobeyed the edict was put to death. Women who circumcised their sons were paraded around the city and flung with their babies from the walls to the valleys below. A mother watched all seven of her sons die; in her zeal for the Law, she cheered each of her sons to their deaths, before being executed herself. A ninety-year-old man called Eliezar went to his death rather than swallow a morsel of pork. Once people had started to die for the Torah, it became sacred to Jews in an entirely new way.
As a result of this edict, the Temple Mount was transformed. Antiochus broke down the gates and walls that had separated the sacred space from the rest of the city and, deliberately defying the proscriptions of the Torah, planted trees that transformed the sanctuary into a sacred grove, Greek-style. The Temple buildings, which had been plundered by Antiochus two years earlier, remained empty and desolate. On 25 Kislev (December) 167, conservative Jews were horrified to hear that an “abomination”—probably amatzevah, a standing stone—had been set up next to the altar of sacrifice. With its trees and open altar, the sanctuary now resembled an old bamah; indeed, there were still shrines like this at Mamre and on Mount Carmel. The Temple was now dedicated to Zeus Olym-pios, but this did not necessarily mean that the Jews were being forced to worship the Greek deity. Olympios was simply a synonym for “heaven” at this date: the area had thus been dedicated to the God of Heaven, a title that could apply to Yahweh as to any other high god.9
The Hellenizers probably believed that they were returning to the simpler religion of Abraham, who had worshipped their god at similar shrines before Moses had introduced the complexities of the Torah.10 We shall see in future chapters that other monotheists had similar plans to restore this primordial religion in Jerusalem. In their worship of the God of Heaven they seem to have been attempting to create a rationalized cult that would appeal to all men of goodwill—to the Greeks in the Akra as well as to the Antiochene Jews. Their program was not dissimilar to the deism of the French philosophes of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. But these ideas were utterly abhorrent to the majority of Jews. For the first time an apocalyptic piety entered Judaism which looked forward to a final victory of the righteous at the End of History. Subsequently this type of faith would appear in all three of the monotheistic traditions when a cherished way of life came under attack, as in Jerusalem under Antiochus Epiphanes. Instead of adopting the rationalized, secular ethos of the Greeks, the apocalyptic writers defiantly reasserted the values of the old mythology. When the present looked hopeless, many Jews found comfort in the visions of a triumphant future. To give these “revelations” authority, they were often attributed to such august figures of the past as the prophet Daniel or to Enoch, the patriarch who was said to have been taken up to heaven at the end of his life.
The scenario of the Last Days as conceived by these seers always followed a similar pattern. God would gather the twelve tribes of Israel together from all the lands of their dispersion and bring them to Jerusalem. Then he would lead them to victory in terrible battles, reminiscent of the divine struggles at the beginning of time: now the people of Israel would eliminate all their enemies, who incarnated the evils of chaos and destruction, and create a better world. Some, however, looked forward to the conversion of the Goyim to the religion of Yahweh. The setting for this final act of redemption was always Jerusalem. Now that Mount Zion had been desecrated by pagans and Jewish renegades, the apocalyptic authors of the books of Daniel, Jubilees, and Enoch looked forward to a future era when the city would be purified and God would build a new Temple. At a time when there were no native kings in the Greek empire, people imagined a Jewish Messiah who would lead them to their final triumph. These visions were a defiant assertion of Jewish identity at a moment when it seemed particularly imperiled. It was an attempt to keep faith in hopeless circumstances and was not confined to a small minority. Apocalyptic piety would permeate most religious movements during the second and first centuries and could inspire sober intellectuals—such as Ben Sirah—as well as revolutionaries. Nor were the Jews alone in their new visionary fervor. The Greeks had been much impressed by the mystical feats of the priests of Egypt, the magi of Persia, and the Brahmans of India, who seemed far more spiritual than their own sages. This gave the subject peoples of the East a much-needed infusion of self-esteem. The Greeks might be very clever, but their elaborate discourse was merely “arrogant” and “impotent.” They could devise “empty concepts” and had a facility for marshaling effective arguments, claimed a hermetic text of the time, “but in reality the philosophy of the Greeks is just the sound of words.” This assertion of their own native traditions was an attempt to put the sophisticated conquerors in their place.11
Some of these visionaries imagined themselves flying through the air to the highest heaven. The idea of God living in a temple was beginning to lose its compelling power in many parts of the Near East. In Egypt and Persia, visionaries of the second and first centuries had begun to bypass the earthly symbol and travel directly to the celestial world of the gods. These mystical journeys reflected the new rootlessness of the age: spirituality was no longer earthed in a particular place. Some people—though by no means all—were seeking a freedom that was not of this world and a different kind of spiritual expression. Jewish mystics also began to make these imaginary flights. The word “apocalypse” means “unveiling”: like the prophets, these visionaries claimed to have seen what lay behind the Veil of the Devir. Like that of Amos, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, their vision of God was deeply conditioned by the Jerusalem cult. The Devir had once held the Ark, God’s Throne on earth. Now, in the second century, visionaries imagined ascending directly to God’s heavenly palace and approaching his celestial Throne. One of these early visions is recounted in the First Book of Enoch (c. 150 BCE). Instead of going into the Jerusalem Temple to have his vision, he imagined himself flying through the air, propelled by the winds, to God’s great marble house in heaven, which was surrounded by “tongues of fire” and “fiery cherubim.” These were not whimsical flights of fancy. Later we read of Jewish mystics preparing themselves for this mystical ascent by special disciplines, similar to those evolved by yogis and contemplatives all over the world. The Jewish visionary would fast, place his head between his knees, and murmur certain praises of God to himself as a mantra. As a result of these spiritual exercises, the mystic “will gaze into the innermost recesses of his heart and it will seem as if he saw the seven halls [of the divine Palace] with his own eyes, moving from hall to hall.”12 Like all true meditation, this was an “ascent inward.”
Even though the visionary felt that he could bypass the earthly replica of God’s palace, the Temple still dominated the way he approached his God, and this shows that its architecture had been experienced as a spiritual reality by the people. It had embodied their inner world and would continue to do so long after the Jerusalem Temple had ceased to exist. Just as the worshipper could approach God by walking through the zones of holiness in Jerusalem, so Enoch must approach God in carefully graded stages in the heavenly world. First he had to leave the profane world and enter the divine sphere, just as the pilgrim to Jerusalem would enter the Temple courts. Most would have to stop there, but Enoch imagined himself as a spiritual high priest. First he was taken into a house which, like the Hekhal, was filled with cherubim. Finally he was ushered into a second, greater palace, the heavenly equivalent of the Devir, where he saw the Throne and the “Great Glory sitting on it,” amid streams of living fire.13 There Enoch was entrusted with a message for his people, and, like the high priest on Yom Kippur, he left the Throne Room and returned to bring its holiness to his fellow Jews. This type of mysticism would continue to inspire Jewish contemplatives until it was absorbed into the disciplines of Kabbalah during the Middle Ages.
Some Jews opposed the Greeks with visions, others resorted to arms. After the Seleucid troops had taken up residence in the Akra and desecrated the Temple Mount, many of the more devout Jews felt that they could no longer live in Jerusalem. Among these émigrés was the Hasmonean family, the aged priest Mattathias and his five sons. They took up residence in the village of Modein, but when the royal officials arrived to establish the new rationalized cult of the God of Heaven, Mattathias and his sons fled to the hills. They were followed by other pious Jews, who left all their possessions behind and “lived like wild animals in the hills, eating nothing but wild plants to avoid contracting defilement.”14 They also conducted a campaign against those Jews who had submitted to Antiochus’s edict, overturning the new Greek altars and forcibly circumcising the baby boys. When Mattathias died in 166, his son Judas, nicknamed Maccabeus (“Hammer-Headed”), took control of the movement and began to lead attacks against the Greek and Syrian troops. Since the Seleucids were busily occupied in Mesopotamia, where the Parthians were trying to drive them from their holding, Judas’s campaign achieved an unexpected success.15 By 164, Antiochus was forced to rescind his infamous edict and Judas gained control of Jerusalem, though he could not dislodge the Greeks and Antiochene Jews from the Akra.
When Judas and his companions saw the burned temple gates and the sacred grove on Mount Zion, they rent their garments and prostrated themselves in grief. They then set about purifying the site, refurbishing the Temple buildings and, finally, lighting the lamps on the seven-branched candlestick in the Hekhal. On 25 Kislev, the day on which the Seleucids had desecrated the sanctuary three years earlier, the Temple was rededicated.16 The partisans processed through the Temple courts carrying palms and leafy branches as they did on Sukkoth. Finally they decreed that this festival of Chanukah (“Dedication”) should be celebrated annually by the whole Jewish people.
The rebellion of the Maccabees was able to succeed because of the internal power struggles in the Seleucid camp. By playing one pretender to the throne off against another, Judas and his successors managed to consolidate their position. In 161, Judas made an alliance with Rome, which doubtless strengthened his hand.17 Finally in about 152 BCE, the Hasmonean movement received official recognition when one of the Seleucid pretenders made Jonathan, Judas’s brother and successor, governor of the ethnos. Not to be outdone, his rival appointed Jonathan high priest. On the festival of Sukkoth 152, Jonathan donned the sacred vestments for the first time, and the people were awestruck by this astonishing reversal.18 Jonathan held his own until 143, when he was kidnapped and killed by yet another pretender to the Seleucid throne. His brother Simon was able to reassert Hasmonean ascendancy and got himself appointed ruler of the ethnos and high priest by the new Seleucid king, Demetrius II. Judah became independent of the Greek empire, and for the first time in centuries, Judaeans were free of pagan control. The following year, the Greeks and the Antiochene Jews who were still occupying the Akra surrendered to Simon and the citadel was razed to the ground—a task which, according to Josephus, took three years. The anniversary of its conquest was celebrated as a national festival.19
The Hasmonean revolution began as a popular rebellion, passionately opposed to the Greek culture of the imperial power. But the state that came into being under Simon and his successors soon had many of the features that had offended the rebels in the first place. When Menelaus had secured the high priesthood, devout Jews had been shocked because he was not a Zadokite. Now the Hasmonean rulers had become high priests, but though they were a priestly family, they were not descended from Zadok either. There also seemed little to choose between this Jewish regime and the pagan dynasties. The Hasmoneans were good soldiers and clever diplomats but no paragons. Simon was actually murdered by his own sons. Yet after centuries of obscurity and humiliation, most Judaeans felt extremely proud of the Hasmoneans’ achievements. When Simon’s son John Hyrcanus (134–104) began to conquer some of the neighboring territory, it must have seemed as though the glorious days of King David had returned. By about 125, the Seleucids had been so weakened by their internal power struggles and wars against the Parthi-ans that it was not difficult for Hyrcanus to take control of Samaria. His first act was to destroy the temple which the Samaritans had built to YHWH on Mount Gerizim, near Shechem. John also extended his borders to the south into Idumea, forcing the inhabitants to convert to Judaism and accept circumcision. As in so many revolutions, the rebel regime had become almost indistinguishable from the power it had replaced. Like the Seleucids, the Hasmoneans had become imperialists who were insensitive to the religious traditions of their subjects.
Further, the ethnos was, ironically, becoming a thoroughly Hellenized state. Under John Hyrcanus, Jerusalem had once again expanded onto the Western Hill overlooking the Temple Mount. This became the home of the wealthier aristocratic and priestly families, who could enjoy cooler breezes and healthier air than the poorer inhabitants of the old ’Ir David below. This western district became more and more like a Greek city. Very few remains of the Hasmonean period have been found, but it almost certainly had a marketplace (agora) surrounded by colonnades on the highest point of the Western Hill. The Hasmoneans had closed Jason’s gymnasion, of course, but there was a xystos in the western part of the city, a square which in a normal polis was used for athletic competitions but which in Jerusalem probably functioned simply as a public meeting place. One of the Hasmonean monuments that has survived is the tomb of the priestly family of Bene Hezir in the Kidron Valley, which shows an interesting fusion of Greek and Oriental style. Finally, on the eastern slope of the Western Hill, the Hasmoneans built a palace for themselves with a splendid view of the Temple;20 it was linked to the old city and the Temple Mount by a bridge that spanned the Tyropoeon Valley.
Yet despite these Hellenistic features, the Temple still dominated the city, physically, politically, and spiritually. The Temple especially impressed the author of a romance set in the time of King Ptolemy II which was written during the early Hasmonean period. Aristeas, as he calls himself, described the shrine on the crest of Mount Zion, with the houses and streets huddled beneath like seats in an amphitheater. He was fascinated by the sight of the huge curtain at the entrance of the Hekhal, “which resembled a door in every respect” except that “it was always in motion and undulated from the bottom to the top as the air passed along the pavement beneath.”21 He also admired the elaborate system of cisterns under the pavement of the Temple enclosure, which provided the water to wash away the blood of the sacrificial victims. He laid his ear to the ground and claimed that he could hear the water murmuring below. Above all, Aristeas was struck by the demeanor and skill of the priests, who worked ceaselessly, sacrificing one beast after another with total concentration. They needed their “surpassing bodily strength”22 as they lifted the carcasses and tossed the limbs high into the air, catching them in one hand. Most of their work was very unpleasant, but nobody had to be ordered back to work after the prescribed break. The whole operation was conducted without a sound. The stillness in the Temple courts was almost eerie. “So great is the silence everywhere that one would suppose that there was no one in the place,” Aristeas observed, “although the priests number seven hundred and they who bring the victims to the Temple are many; but everything is done with awe and reverence for its great sanctity.”23
But not all the Jews of Judaea shared this admiration. They were all passionately attached to the Temple, but a significant number of people felt that the Hasmoneans had damaged its integrity. These difficult years had led to the emergence of three sects in Judaea; they involved only a small percentage of the total population but were extremely influential. Their widely divergent views meant that in future it would be almost impossible for the Jews of Judaea to take a united stand against an external enemy, though, as we shall see in the following chapter, the one issue that could instantly bond them was any threat to the holiness of the Temple. The Saducees were the chief supporters of the Hasmoneans. The members of this sect came from the priestly and wealthier classes who lived in the Upper City on the Western Hill. They had become Hellenized and wanted good relations with their pagan neighbors, but were also committed to such ancient symbols of their nation as the king and the Temple and its liturgy. Like other nationalistic movements in the Near East at this time, their Judaism tended toward the archaic: fidelity to an idealized past was a way of rooting their new Greek enthusiasms with their own traditions. The Saducees would not accept any adaptation of the written Torah. They believed that the Has-moneans were like King David, who had also combined priesthood with monarchy. But other Jews were so horrified by the Hasmoneans that they withdrew completely from Jewish society to make a new exodus into the wilderness. Their leader, known as the Teacher of Righteousness, may have been the High Priest who had been forcibly retired when Jonathan was appointed to the post. Only a Zadokite could hold this high office, and Jonathan had therefore polluted the sanctity of the Temple. Some of his followers, who are known as the Essenes, lived in a monastic-style community at Qumran by the Dead Sea. Others were less extreme: they lived in the towns and cities of Judah and continued to worship in the Temple, even though they were convinced that it had been hopelessly contaminated. The Essenes nurtured fierce apocalyptic dreams of a final reckoning when God would redeem the Holy City and rebuild their Temple. During the reign of John Hyrcanus, their numbers swelled to about four thousand and an Essene community was founded in Jerusalem.
The most popular and influential of these three parties, however, was that of the Pharisees, who were committed to an exact and punctilious observance of the Torah. They were also convinced that the Hasmonean rulers should not hold the High Priesthood and came to believe that the people would be better off under foreign rule than under these bad Jews. The Pharisees may have been behind the revolt that broke out in Jerusalem at the beginning of John Hyrcanus’s reign, which the king put down mercilessly.24 They also opposed the rule of his son Alexander Jan-naeus (105–76) and could have been among the rebels who attacked the king in the Temple as he officiated at the ceremonies of Sukkoth, pelting him with the citrus fruits they were carrying in procession. Immediately afterward, Alexander executed six thousand people.25 On another occasion, after another revolt, Alexander had eight hundred rebels crucified in Jerusalem and butchered their wives and children before their eyes as they hung upon their crosses, while he himself looked on, feasting and carousing with his concubines.26 This horrific occasion seemed proof to many of the people that the monarchy, which had inspired such high hopes, had become just one more Hellenistic despotism.
Alexander had continued the conquest of new territory and ruled over a much-extended kingdom on both sides of the Jordan. When he seized new territory, the non-Jewish inhabitants were given the option of conversion to Judaism; those who refused were expelled from the country. He was aware that his rule was not universally popular, and on his deathbed he advised his wife, Salome, who was to succeed him, to give power to the Pharisees. He knew the extent of their influence and hoped that “they could dispose the nation favorably toward her.”27 This she did, but it did not save the dynasty. After her death in 67 BCE, her two sons—Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II—became involved in a murderous struggle for the kingship and high priesthood, with the help of various outside powers. The most important of these allies was Antipater, the Idumean who had served as governor of the region under Alexander and who now supported Hyrcanus. Both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus appealed to Pompey, the Roman general who arrived in Antioch in 64 BCE and deposed the last of the Seleucid kings. The Pharisees also sent a delegation to Pompey, asking him to abolish the monarchy in their country too, since it was alien to their religious traditions.
Jerusalem became the battleground of these warring factions. Aristobulus II and his supporters barricaded themselves in the Temple and burned the bridge over the Tyropoen Valley. Hyrcanus II and Antipater had possession of the Upper City, and they invited the Roman army in as their allies: a Roman garrison was installed in the Hasmonean palace, and Pompey pitched his camp north of the Temple Mount at the city’s most vulnerable spot. Aristobulus held out for three months. Jose-phus tells us that the Roman general was astonished by the devotion of the Temple priests, who carried on with their sacrifices without appearing to notice the missiles raining down upon the Temple courts. The priests did not even stop their work when the Roman troops finally breached the defenses and swarmed into the Temple courts in September 63 BCE, followed by Hyrcanus’s troops.28 Twelve thousand Jews were killed in the ensuing slaughter, and to the horror of the entire Jewish nation, Pompey entered the Temple buildings, walked through the Hekhal, and looked into the dark holiness of the Devir. Anxious to appease the people, he instantly withdrew and gave orders that the sanctuary be purified. But the Roman occupation of the country that they called Palestina29 had begun with a violation of the Temple, and the Jews watched their new masters warily lest this sacrilege be repeated.
The blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn, which this rabbi is performing at the Western Wall to usher in the Jewish New Year, is intended to instill feelings of awe. A call to repentance and a reminder of the Last Days, this ancient practice expresses the sobriety and solemnity of Second Temple ritual.