The Story of the Jews Page 16

  Heady with unexpected – though not invariable – success against far bigger Greek armies, pragmatically exploiting a tactical alliance with the Romans and the continuing feuding of rival Seleucids, the Hasmoneans quickly discovered a muscular confidence that made the Jewish state more territorially ambitious and more aggressively proselytising than any of the Israelite kingdoms it claimed to restore. Moving out of the Judaean hill-country heartland where the rebellion had started, their armies – including sizeable detachments of foreign mercenaries – pushed through Samaria into Galilee, to the Greek coastal city of Ptolemais and up into the foothills of Mount Hermon to the plateau now called Golan, and even into south-western Syria, then across the Jordan into the mountains of Moab and the Ammonite valleys, and south into the Negev Desert, taking ancient port cities like Jaffa, Gaza and Askelon that had anciently been Philistine and Phoenician. And as they conquered, they converted, sometimes forcibly, a less physically painful process than sometimes imagined since some of the local populations would, in any case, have been practising circumcision.23

  This mini-empire, Torah triumphant, was, literally, new-minted. John Hyrcanus was the first Jewish ruler ever to issue coinage, albeit the prutot of small denominations and tiny size. While one face often bore images of horns of plenty (from classic sources) and pomegranates (from Jewish ones), the other was self-consciously inscribed in the proto-Hebraic lettering that had already mostly been abandoned in favour of the square-form Assyrian-Aramaic in which Hebrew is written to this day. Instead of using the king’s familiar Greek name, Hyrcanus, the inscription describes him as ‘Yochanan Cohen Gadol, Rosh Hever Hayehudim’, ‘Jonathan, high priest and leader of the Council of the Jews’.

  In the same fashion, 1 Maccabees, originally written in Hebrew but known only in its Greek version, presents itself as the foundation epic of the reborn Judaic kingdom and is close in narrative style to the history books of the canonical Hebrew Bible. 2 Maccabees, on the other hand, is richer in mythic extravagance and poetic invention, all of which suggest an authorship in Hellenised Egypt where that kind of Graeco-Judaic literary confection, like the Joseph and Asenath story, was in demand. It is also distinctive in presenting, self-consciously, the voice of the author-historian, claiming to abridge an earlier five-volume work by one Jason of Cyrene.

  2 Maccabees begins with a letter (ostensibly in a Jerusalemite voice) to the Jews of Egypt, including the story of the miraculously preserved sacrificial fire, the implication being that whatever happens to worldly powers, the spark of Judaism could be carried from place to place. Conscious, like the writer of the ‘Passover papyrus’ addressed to the Elephantine Jews three centuries earlier, that Egyptian Jews needed to be brought under the authority of Jerusalem through the ritual calendar of observance, it is careful to specify the date – the 25th of Kislev, the day of Temple rededication – on which the new official Hasmonean liberation festival of Hanukkah is to be celebrated. In fact, the writers of the Maccabees, as if instructed by the new Hasmonean priest-kings, make it clear they wish Hanukkah to be observed not just for the same eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles, explicitly cited as a model of rejoicing, but with the same holiness status as the three pilgrim festivals of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. Whether or not this ever came about, rabbinical teaching would reject this just as it kept the Books of the Maccabees out of the biblical canon. It was almost as if the rabbis decided, in retrospect, that there was something suspiciously worldly about the Hasmonean invention. For all the efforts of both Maccabean writers to represent the liberation as the equivalent – and vindication – of the formative Exodus, the analogy never quite took.

  But whoever the author of 2 Maccabees was (and however closely or freely he worked from ‘Jason of Cyrene’), he certainly knew how to write an epic in the classical, post-Homeric style, a tale packed with the kind of wonders, curses and marvellous improbabilities that would appeal to a literate, Hellenised readership: a Greek style pitched against Greek triumphalism. In 1 Maccabees, the crazed and chastened Antiochus IV dies off in Asia Minor ‘through great grief in a strange land’, regretting the persecution that had caused him so much trouble with the Jews. In 2 Maccabees, on the other hand, his last days are described graphically, expiring in the reeking, unstoppable, spasms of diarrhoea that God had inflicted on him. ‘And the man that thought a little beforehand that he could reach to the stars of heaven, no man could now endure to carry for his intolerable stink.’24 In the foulness of his agony the tormented king goes as far as wanting to be converted to Judaism, and should he recover, to wander the world preaching the Torah.

  Likewise, although both books narrate a martyrology of Jews rejecting the Antiochene laws, the high-pitched author of 2 Maccabees delivers a Greek-style drama of much more elaborate cruelty and family tragedy. The ninety-year-old scribe Eleazar, ‘a man of wellfavoured countenance’, has his jaws prised open and stuffed with pork but ‘choosing rather to die gloriously than live stained with such an abomination, [spat] it forth and came of his own accord to the torment’. Collaborators who take pity suggest he might smuggle kosher meat in and eat it as though it were pork but Eleazar says ‘it becometh not our age . . . in any wise to dissemble’. A mother of seven sons watches as cauldrons are prepared to cook her children. The first to speak has his tongue cut out and member hacked off and then fried in a pan, with his brothers watching, resolving to stay true. In turn they are subjected to excruciating ends – scalping and much worse – but all remain steadfast. Frustrated, the wily Antiochus spares the seventh and asks the grieving mother to persuade the lone survivor to accept his will and repudiate Judaism, for which conversion he would be loaded with riches and royal favours. Instead, of course, the mother asks her son ‘to have pity on me that bore thee nine months in my womb, gave thee suck three years and nourished thee . . . take thy death that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren’. The son replies that he will defy the commandment of the king but obey ‘the commandment of the law that was given by Moses to our fathers’. Irked, Antiochus orders the young man’s treatment to be even worse than that of his brothers, though given the exhaustive repertoire of prior torture and mutilation it’s hard to imagine what that could have been.

  Since Hasmonean legitimacy is tied to dynastic heroism, both books have at their heart a series of family romances. The austerity of the provincial setting where the rebellion begins is the rough and rustic opposite of silky Hellenised ways. The father, Mattathias, in his town of Modi’in, has his own way of reacting to a Jew wanting to go through a sacrificial ritual the way Antiochus IV prescribed, and that way was to run the party through with his broadsword. By way of precedent, 1 Maccabees invokes ‘Phineas’, or Pinehas, who, in the Book of Numbers, impales, with one skewering, an Israelite man and a Midianite woman who are in the throes of copulation inside the sacred tent of the Israelites. Such, the text implies, are the wages of pagan promiscuousness, an unnatural union in contrast to the orthodox union of the Jewish family clan.25

  ‘Whosoever is zealous of the law and maintaineth the covenant let him follow me,’ declares Mattathias, taking his five sons with him into the fastness of the hills from which they wage guerrilla war against their enemies. Families, including women and children, flocks and herds, driven from the corrupted towns and cities come to the Hasmonean encampment and from that free natural citadel they launch a purifying war, demolishing pagan altars. ‘What children they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised [the only area with Philistine-Phoenician traditions where that might have been true] they circumcised valiantly.’ So the reference to remaking the original blood-covenant of Abraham and Moses is taken very literally in the Maccabean campaign of fleshly purification.

  Before he dies, Mattathias gathers his sons and delivers a speech connecting his own fatherhood with Jewish patriarchs and prophets from Abraham to Daniel, conferring special authority of generalship on Judas Maccabeus and the next oldest brother Simon, ‘a man of counsel’ who would
in his own turn ‘be a father unto you’. It is in the same spirit of benevolent patriarchy that Judas, appointing ‘captains’ from the people for his rebel army, sends home all those who are already committed to a family life: ‘those who were betrothed, those who were building a house or planting a vineyard’.26 His own family makes sacrifices so that an explicitly Jewish state, grounded in Torah observance, can be established. One after the other, the brothers fall in pursuit of that mission. Judas prevails over a series of massive armies and arrogant generals sent against him. One of the most implacable, Nicanor, has his head and the arm that had been outstretched towards Judas cut off and displayed as trophies. His fame is such, claims 1 Maccabees, ‘that all nations talked of the battles of Judas’. In fact, between 164 and 160 BCE Judas and his forces suffer a series of setbacks and defeats. 1 Maccabees has him perish through underhand ambush, though not before both Rome and Sparta have recognised the liberated commonwealth as an ally.

  Judas’ brother Eleazar dies when the war elephant whose underbelly he was stabbing from beneath falls on top of him. Their sibling Jonathan is the spiritual purifier, replacing as high priest the last of the Zadokite line, Alcimus, who after being prematurely acclaimed as the restorer of Torah observance, reveals himself to be just another self-serving Helleniser. But Jonathan’s priesthood is authorised not by an assembly of the Jews but by the Seleucid contender he has chosen to support, in return for the status quo that had existed before Antiochus IV. The result is that he too falls victim to the machinations of the Greek factions.

  Which leaves at the end the second brother, Simon. Given that the author of 1 Maccabees is writing during the reign of Simon’s son, John Hyrcanus, and possibly that of Simon’s grandson, Alexander Jannaeus, it’s not surprising that the most florid passage in the book is a vision of a Simoniad-Jewish idyll. The other brothers, especially Judas, had invoked the ancient patriarchs and nation-fathers from Moses through David. Simon becomes the heir of those ancestors as priest, prince, judge and general. It is he who finally succeeds in cleaning out the Jerusalem Akra citadel of foreign troops, ending its occupation and turning the subject status of the Jewish state into a true, independent kingdom. The moment (in the year 142 BCE) becomes a jubilant climax of the epic, celebrated with ‘thanksgiving and branches of palm trees and with harps and cymbals, viols and hymns and songs: because there was destroyed a great enemy out of Israel’.

  A golden age of peace and prosperity then comes to pass under Simon’s rule. The wars between Jews and Greeks – and indeed between Jews and Jews – are brought to an end. Hellenised cities like Scythopolis, which had refrained from harbouring enemy soldiers, are spared and, renamed as Beit She’an, become home to Jews and Greeks alike. The borders of the state expand. A grand new harbour is built at Jaffa; trade opens ‘to the isles of the sea’. Romans and Spartans are impressed, but not as much as the writer of 1 Maccabes who paints a scene of multi-generational harmony and benevolent quasi-despotism. The last books of the biblical canon and some of the Apocrypha were imagined to be authored by Solomon, and Simon appears in 1 Maccabees as his reincarnation, presiding over a Judaic paradise on earth:

  then did they till their ground in peace, and the earth gave her increase, and the trees of the field their fruit. The ancient men sat in the streets, communing together of good things, and the young men put on glorious and warlike apparel. He [Simon] provided victuals for the cities and set in them all manner of munition so that his honourable name was renowned to the end of the world. He made peace in the land and Israel rejoiced with great joy: for every man sat under his vine and his fig tree and there was none to fray them, neither was there any left in the land to fight them: yea the kings themselves were overthrown in those days. Moreover he strengthened all those of his people who were brought low: the law he searched out, and every contemner of the law and wicked person he took away. He beautified the sanctuary, and multiplied the vessels of the temple.27

  Simon and his line declare themselves enthroned in permanent rule, although the added proviso – ‘until a prophet [meaning a messiah or his herald] should appear’ – is truly momentous (and recurs in the Qumran scrolls being written at that time). However, even this Jewish basileus, the godlike monarch, is not invulnerable to betrayal. As the Hasmoneans begin to live and rule like local Hellenistic potentates, they also die like them. Ensnared in the family feuds that will eventually bring down their dynasty in fratricidal civil war (the legend of the good band of brothers degenerated into the plots of the bad brothers), Simon is assassinated by his own son-in-law while feasting and drinking at a banquet given in his honour – par for the course in pagan antiquity. But like his father Mattathias before him Simon has already summoned his sons, in particular the two eldest, to confer the priestly and regal succession, declaring that since he was old ‘be ye in my stead of me and my brother and go and fight for our nation and the help from heaven be with you’.28

  When he is murdered, Simon’s body, like that of Mattathias and his brothers, Judas and Jonathan, is ‘laid to rest in the tomb of his fathers’. That Hasmonean tomb is no longer a modest family grave site in their ancestral home town of Modi’in, if it ever had been. For the first time 1 Maccabees treats us to a detailed description of a lavish, heavily decorated edifice that is not the Temple. Simon has commissioned a pompous monumental structure, every bit as grandiose as the Hellenistic works to which the Hasmoneans were ostensibly (but unconvincingly) opposed. It features seven lofty towers, one for Simon’s father and one for his mother, and five for his brothers and himself, each roofed by a pyramid. The pilastered facade was made of dressed, polished stone, and between the pilasters were reliefs of suits of armour paying homage to the Maccabean warriors, and images of ships. This construction was indistinguishable from the kind of edifice classical rulers liked to build for themselves, and its most obvious prototype was the fourth-century BCE wonder of the ancient world, the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, a place where there was already a significant Jewish colony.29

  All of this seems not very Jewish; not in keeping with its disdain for the pretensions of stone pomp, compared with the imperishability of the word. And yet the point of the Hasmonean mausoleum was to impress foreigners with the message that the Jews had arrived as mighty players in the Hellenistic world. 1 Maccabees tells us that the seven-towered structure was set on a prominence high enough to be seen and marvelled at by ship-borne travellers arriving at the coast.

  Monumental conspicuousness had arrived in Judaea. It was, self-evidently, the point of the rock-cut tombs dating from the same period of the late second and first centuries BCE and which still survive in the Kidron Valley on the edge of Jerusalem. Instead of subterranean vaults or ancient caves with common receptacles, the so-called ‘Tomb of Absalom’ and that of ‘Zechariah’, as well as the tombs of Jason and the wonderful Bnei Hazir family tomb with its two-column loggia, are all expressly designed to face out in the world, to make a definite impression on Jews and Gentiles alike. And their message is classical elegance: families belonging to the priestly aristocracy (as these undoubtedly were) need not blush to boast tombs with Doric capitals and columns, internal stairs (as in the ‘Absalom’), frieze inscriptions and, sometimes, the mildly orientalised look of the pyramid-hat conical roof. Just as innovative, as the archaeologist Rachel Hachlili has noted, are kokhim – niches for individuals from the same clan – and the provision of stone ‘ossilegia’ caskets for the secondary inhumation of bones, a year after the original burial. By the first century BCE those ossilegia would become objects of extraordinary, almost worldly beauty: made of limestone in which floral and plant decoration was cut (especially complicated rosettes). In one extraordinary example, the ossilegium was made to look like a Hellenistic house, complete with pediment, portico, arched (blank) windows: the last word in elegant urban accommodation for the dead. How telling is it that the word nefesh (soul or immaterial spiritual essence) now also became used to describe the very material structures cons
tructed beside tombs?

  What was true of these Hasmonean grandees of the rebuilt and quadruply expanded Jerusalem, was also true of the ruling dynasty. The Maccabees had led the revolution against the cultural and physical annihilations of the crazed Antiochus IV, but it took barely more than a generation for them to morph from rebels to players in the Seleucid world. Although they were great forced-converters, idol-smashers and tearers-down of pagan altars (as well as the temple of the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim), their war had never been with Hellenism at large because they had no reason to believe it was fundamentally incompatible with Judaism. Jewish Alexandria, a seat of cultural glory, seemed the living demonstration of the very opposite. Symbolic of this compatibility, Alexander Jannaeus inscribed on his prutot coinage both his Judaic name, Yohanatan in archaic Hebrew, and his modern name in Greek. He could be faithful to the Second Commandment by not putting his face on the coinage, but this did not mean he avoided images altogether. Quite the reverse was the case with the Hasmoneans, and their choice of those images was revealingly hybrid. One face of the little pruta bore the classical image of a garlanded, double cornucopia (in keeping with the Hasmonean propaganda of prosperity) between which was set the more authentically Judaic and Temple-associated symbol of the pomegranate. The other face of the Jannaeus coin took the image of an eight-pointed star (sometimes read as an eight-spoked wheel) from a Macedonian prototype. But the star also alluded to the Moabite Balaam’s prophecy, recorded in Numbers 24:17, that ‘a star will rise from Jacob’ – one which, like Alexander’s mailed fist, would ‘smash the brow’ of Moab, Edom and other neighbouring nations.