The Hasmonean Period

One of the most famous episodes of ancient Jewish history is the Maccabean revolt. Many scholars have seen it as a civil war between priestly elites. On the one hand were those priests who wanted full integration into the Hellenistic world, even at the cost of certain elements of Judaism, like worship of God alone, the distinctive food and purity laws, and the avoidance of marriage and other ties to foreigners—in sum, of the Torah. On the other hand were priestly elites who were, in broad terms, traditionalists. As the story goes, when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV intervened on behalf of the Hellenists, the traditionalists led an armed resistance. This story was a reaction to an older view, based on the account in 1 Maccabees, according to which the Hellenizing initiatives came from the king. In this view, the king’s Jewish collaborators were a small group of quislings with no popular support, and Judah Maccabee and his family were true leaders of the Jewish people. A revisionist version—first proposed in 1937 by Elias Bickerman in his book The God of the Maccabees—imagined that Hellenization had made deep inroads in Judea by about 200 BCE. Having already acquired a high level of Greek culture, the leaders of the reformist party—the priests Jason and Menelaus and their followers—aspired to be proper Greek kalokagathoi (cultured, wellborn gentlemen). 

Over eighty years later, historians have arrived at a grittier and less high-minded understanding of what Hellenization usually entailed outside the great urban centers. Classical texts were not necessarily popular. Settlements—either non-Greek cities making a switch, or nonurban Greek settlements looking to improve their status—lobbying for Greek constitutions might have been very modest places; some needed advice from royal officials on how the inhabitants of a newly constituted Greek city ought to behave. 

As for Jewish support for the Hellenizing reforms, 2 Maccabees makes it clear that it was substantial among the elites and even beyond. A first wave of these reforms took place around 175 BCE, and another—more radical still and this time royally sponsored—was enacted a few years later, in 168 BCE. The high priest Jason (the Greek form of the name Joshua) took a few initial steps toward establishing a Greek city at Jerusalem but did nothing to alter the cult of the Jerusalem Temple, placing his priestly supporters in a strange position; they regarded themselves as partly free of the laws of the Torah yet found themselves still administering the central institution where those laws were preserved, followed, and interpreted. 

Second Maccabees next tells a poignant story: Jason and the “Antiochenes,” that is, the members of the Greek faction in Jerusalem, wished to pay their respects to the city of Tyre, which was then hosting Panhellenic games on the model of the Olympic games. Jason sent envoys with offerings to the city’s patron god, Herakles, but when the envoys, probably all Jerusalem priests, arrived at Tyre, they could not bring themselves to commit so great a sin. 

The royal decrees that followed were brutally simple. The Torah was abrogated, its laws were declared illegal on pain of death, and the Temple was rededicated to Zeus Olympios. The high priest was to be Menelaus, an adaptable scoundrel who had offered Antiochus IV a large bribe to be allowed to replace Jason. It seems certain that these decrees were less popular than Jason’s reforms, and there is no special reason to think they were initiated by Jason or Menelaus or any other Jewish authority. Yet even now the king had Jewish supporters, and the majority of Judeans submitted to the decrees, however unhappily. Whatever the Jews’ attitude may have been to the Torah, these royal decrees constituted an unusual and harsh intervention in local practice. 

A small armed resistance developed, led by a family, the Hasmoneans—popularly but wrongly called the Maccabees—of obscure background. Ancient sources and later traditions have declared them to be priests, but it should be noted that their family seat in Modi’in was quite remote from Jerusalem. Their patriarch, a Mattathias, was a village strongman, and their concerns, in the end, had much more to do with their own political advancement than with preservation of tradition. 

Nevertheless, the Hasmoneans were traditionalists and soon formed a coalition of pro-tradition backers, initially very small. The king paid them little notice, but the rebels, now led by Mattathias’ son Judah, nicknamed Maccabee (the meaning of the word is unknown), enjoyed a few victories. Meanwhile, Menelaus, sensing the turning of the tide, alerted Antiochus to his strategic error in issuing such unpopular decrees, and they were gradually revoked. 

It was at this point, after the king had canceled the persecutory decrees, that the events memorialized in the Hanukkah story took place—the seizure and purification of the Temple by Judah Maccabee (not the miracle of the oil, which was a much later invention). While the Temple did not remain in Judah’s hands—the repentant Menelaus resumed his high priesthood—Judah grew in influence and continued to challenge the royal forces. Antiochus IV died, and as Judah likely understood at the time, a succession crisis made it difficult for the Seleucids to commit large forces in Judea. 

Nevertheless, Judah’s military activity, now aimed primarily at his own advancement, made the Seleucid leadership uneasy. They began to send armies against him. The first major force, commanded by Nicanor, was defeated, but the next one, under Bacchides, crushed Judah and his faction in 160 BCE. The survivors fled across the Jordan and for the next eight years seem to have survived by robbing caravans in the Syrian desert while trying to reestablish a foothold in Judea. 

Judah was essentially a military figure or guerrilla fighter, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon were adept at Hellenistic court politics and indeed proved happy to embrace Hellenism, provided it stopped short of outright idolatry and abrogation of the Torah. As courtiers in the unraveling Seleucid state, they, like other prominent local families, slalomed skillfully through the Seleucid civil wars. The flow of new claimants to the throne and their constant need for manpower opened multifarious opportunities for such people, provided they were not paralyzed by ideology. The Hasmoneans, while traditionalists, were not paralyzed; on the contrary, they were creative and adaptive. While they were certainly not members of the traditional high priestly family, if they were priests at all, they won the high priesthood as a concession from a pretender to the throne. More important, they retained it by compromising effectively and, in fact, by not hesitating to violate Jewish laws and traditions. They embraced what modern scholars call hybridity, as did many similar local dynasts during the collapse of the Seleucid dynasty, emphasizing local loyalties but also participating in the world of late Hellenistic politics. For example, the Hasmonean rulers eventually bore two dynastic names, one reflecting their Hasmonean/Jewish heritage and one connecting them with the prestige of Alexander the Great and his generals. Thus, rulers had names like Judah Aristobulus (reigned 104/3 BCE; a great-nephew of Judah Maccabee, who was named after a companion of Alexander the Great), Jonathan (Yannai) Alexander (reigned 103–76 BCE; Judah’s brother), and Mattathias Antigonos (reigned 40–37 BCE; Yannai’s grandson, named after Alexander’s greatest general, Antigonos Monophthalmos). 

Beginning in 110 BCE, the Hasmonean rulers conquered almost all of the territory west of the Jordan River, a factor that eventually contributed to the complexity of Palestinian Jewish life under Roman rule. In some places, the inhabitants had traditional connections with the Judeans. Idumeans claimed descent from Edom/Esau, twin of the biblical patriarch Jacob; Samaritans were Israelites though not Jews; and while Galileans may have regarded themselves as descendants of Israelites and their rulers, the Itureans could claim descent from Abraham through Ishmael. To the inhabitants of these conquered areas, the Hasmoneans offered the choice between adopting Jewish laws and becoming Jews, or leaving the country. These were the first historical episodes of conversion, not forced, to Judaism, and they notably fail to fit later models. Kinship with Israelites was a prerequisite, and the “change of mind/heart” we sometimes think of as essential to conversion was not required, though it is attested in contemporaneous literary portrayals of conversion. This was closer to adoption into a family, and yet there were powerful social and religious consequences as well. Local temples were closed, priesthoods were disbanded, and the people were expected to be loyal to the Jerusalem Temple and to obey Jewish law. 

The Hasmoneans did not achieve this goal by force alone. The Hasmoneans offered the leading families of the conquered districts friendship and protection in a world that was quickly unraveling, as well as a chance to share power and wealth. Leading families relied on their retainers and clients for crucial labor, so the dependent classes also had an opportunity to benefit. It is perhaps not too surprising that forced conversion took hold in both Idumea and Galilee. In contrast, Samaritans, who already regarded themselves as Israelites, opposed the closing of their Yahwistic temple on Mount Gerizim and eventually ended up in a state of resentful separation. It is uncertain whether the coastal Greek cities were converted to Judaism too, but if they were, the move was unpopular and soon overturned.