A HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE, 175 BC-70 AD

CHAPTER III

JOHN HYRCANUS AND POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE(135-105 BC)

The tragedy which brought John Hyrcanus to the high-priesthood was prolonged during the first months of his reign. For when he attempted to besiege Ptolemy in Dok, near Jericho, he was repeatedly hindered in his attack by the sight of his mother being tortured death on the walls of the fortress. The siege dragged along until a sabbatical year, when it was abandoned, and Ptolemy escaped after having murdered his heroic prisoner.

Other difficulties came upon the State. Antiochus VII, who, after the severe defeat administered by John and Judas to Kendebaus, had allowed the Jews to remain in peace, now took advantage of the death of Simon and invaded Judea in the first year of Hyrcanus. One of the last of strong Syrian monarchs, his forces were more than a match for those of the Jews, and he soon shut John up in Jerusalem and besieged him vigorously. The city was& surrounded with a trench and earthworks, and on its north side were erected a hundred towers three stories in height. Then followed a time, certainly a year in length, in which the Jews within the walls were reduced to the last extremities. The men useless for war were forced to leave the city, but, since Antiochus would not receive them, wandered between the lines, dying miserably of hunger, until the defenders, at the Feast of Tabernacles, readmitted the wretched survivors. But just as Antiochus was about to reduce the city, he raised the siege upon the conditions that the Jews should deliver up their arms, pay tribute for Joppa and the other cities which they had gained, give hostages, break down the city walls, and pay 500 talents of silver (three hundred down) in lieu of admitting a new Syrian garrison into the city.

This sudden leniency on the part of an ambitious king who had victory almost within his grasp was undoubtedly due to some interference of Rome rather than to the fact that “he was religious to the Deity”, as Josephus piously remarks. We have thus a victory of the Maccabean policy rather than of Maccabean arms. In fact, the brilliant career of Antiochus demonstrated that the only hope of the Jews’ maintaining the position reached by Simon lay either in disturbed Syrian politics or in Roman interference. The little state was too weak to withstand by itself the full strength of Syria. From this time forward dependence upon Rome as an ally and superior becomes increasingly prominent as a feature in the traditional policy of the Asmonean house.

The subsequent relations of Hyrcanus with Antiochus VII were those of friendship. After having thus accepted a vassal’s position he supplied his suzerain with military supplies and accompanied him in his expedition against the Parthians. On his part, Antiochus seems to have been considerate of the Jews’ religious peculiarities, and on this expedition against the Parthians halted for a couple of days that the Jews need not be forced to march upon Pentecost and the Sabbath.

But Hyrcanus was freed from the strong hand of Antiochus VII by the defeat and death of that monarch among the Parthians, between whom and the Romans Syria was so surely being ground to powder, and in Demetrius II, who was now reinstated on his throne by his captors, Hyrcanus saw if not a friend at least a satisfactorily weak ruler. The inefficiency of Syria was increased, also, by the war between Demetrius II and Alexander Zabinas. Under these favoring circumstances John took up the development of Judea at the point where it had been checked by Antiochus VII, and throughout his long reign was able almost at will to conquer new territory. Medaba fell after a siege of six months, and the fall of Samega, a town probably near Lake Huleh, with its surrounding region followed. Shechem (Xablus) and its dependencies were reduced, the Samaritan temple on Gerizim destroyed. Idumea was thoroughly conquered, and its inhabitants were forced to submit to circumcision under penalty of expulsion, and some of them were colonized in the three Samaritan toparchies given Judea by Demetrius II. So far from being able to oppose such conquests, Demetrius was himself in desperate straits and at last was killed by Alexander Zabinas, who was quite ready to make any treaty Hyrcanus might propose. Even when after a few years Alexander was defeated (122-121 BC) and executed by Antiochus VIII (Grypos), Hyrcanus was not disturbed, for the new king was barely able to maintain himself during the first eight years of his reign, and then was deposed by his half-brother, Antiochus Cyzicenus.

The struggle between the two rivals lasted for years, and throughout it all Hyrcanus lived in peace. Indeed, since the death of Antiochus Sidetes, he no longer paid the Syrians the least regard, either as their subject or their friend. Thus secure because of Syria’s weakness, he again turned upon the ancient enemy of the Jews, “the foolish people who dwelt at Shechem”. When the Jews returned to Judea from Babylon they found the land occupied by a people, Jewish in stock, but mixed with the older inhabitants of the land and with the colonists who had been brought by the Assyrians from the Mesopotamian cities,—Cutha, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim. For awhile the newcomers mingled with this mixed people, and even the high priest was not averse to seeing the Jewish stock corrupted by intermarriage. Ezra and Nehemiah, however, enforced the separation of the “holy seed” from the mixed race and began the erection of a distinctly Jewish state. The Samaritans, who were the most influential of the old people, at first despised and then opposed the reform. But to no purpose. The new Jerusalem was built, the new citizens were separated, and the seeds of lasting enmity were sown. Throughout the centuries that followed each city did its best to injure the other. Each alike honored Moses, but neither would yield to the religious supremacy of the other. If the temple was in Jerusalem, the Samaritans obtained from Darius Nothus, and again from Alexander, permission to build another upon their holy Mount Gerizim, over which a descendant of Aaron presided. By 170 BC the new temple had become a serious rival to that of Jerusalem, and Jews and Samaritans were involved in fierce disputes concerning the relative importance of their two versions of the Law, and the true place of worship. The very fact that the Samaritans were sectaries rather than heathen doubtless deepened the hatred between the two people, and when the Samaritans sided with Syria, war was unavoidable.

Hyrcanus had already destroyed Shechem and the temple upon Gerizim, and now he appeared before the capital city, Samaria, to punish it for the recent injuries done, at the instigation of Syria, to Idumeans he had established as colonists in the three Samaritan toparchies.Despite the aid of Antiochus, the city fell after a siege of a year, and Hyrcanus razed it to the ground, cut canals through it, and made a lake of its site.

With the fall of its ancient rival, Judea reached its greatest prosperity. Like so many other city-states during the decay of the Syrian Empire, it had become independent, and, thanks to its arms and its alliance with Rome, was growing in influence.

But the reign of John Hyrcanus was to do more for Judaism than to give it political independence. It was under him that the two tendencies in the state already mentioned first crystallized into parties with distinctive names, — Pharisee and Sadducee.

The Pharisees constituted the more efficient of two fraternities that grew out of the Chasidim, the Essenes being the second. Their chief inheritance was the legalism of Ezra and Nehemiah, and their central principle was the avoidance of impurity of all sorts. It was this that gave them their name—the Separated.

Throughout the entire revival of Mosaism under the Asmoneans, under the impulse for purity there had been growing up by the side of the Law a rapidly increasing mass of unwritten but authoritative comments and interpretations,—the “ancestral tradition” of Paul and the Mishna of the rabbis. Nothing nobler could be asked than the motive from which this “oral law” sprang, and it was its passion for righteousness through obedience to the oral as well as the written law and for purity through separation from everything defiling that made Pharisaism the great influence it became.

So far as their theological and philosophical opinions are concerned, Josephus, who was one of their number, in his formal comparison of their views with those of the Sadducees, declares that the Pharisees held to the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, at least in the case of the righteous—a belief that at times runs close to some form of reincarnation or migration of the soul, and is characteristic of most later Jewish religious faith. He also somewhat too sharply describes their position as to free will as a mean between the determinism of the Essenes and the absolute liberty of the Sadducees. The Pharisees he represents as holding that fate co­operates with man in every act, and again states as their opinion that some things are not dependent upon fate, but upon human will. Of their further belief in angels and spirits, Josephus makes no mention, but it is altogether in keeping with their general teaching and the spirit of later Jewish literature in general.

But such matters are secondary. The indispensable element of Pharisaism is its insistence upon righteousness through obedience to Jehovah’s law, and upon the withdrawal from everything that might defile. In personal life it led to isolation from the common people, to repeated washings of the hands, person, dishes, and utensils. In thought it led to infinite devotion to details and preternaturally refined distinctions and warnings. In religion it led to the formation of a fraternity, a church within a church, composed of “Neighbors” who were exclusively scribes, and who were admitted by the laying on of hands. In politics it led to a determination to make Judea complete in itself—an isolated religious commonwealth, as far as possible removed from the contamination of heathen life. The Pharisees, like the Chasidim, at bottom a religious sect, were forced by circumstances into political struggles. But when once they had become the party of the government they looked with apprehension upon foreign alliances, and desired nothing more than an insularity in which they could train up a true Israel—their own fraternity (Chaberim, Neighbors). They were, in fact, by no means a popular party. At the greatest they probably never numbered more than six thousand, each of whom had joined the fraternity in some formal way. Their great political influence was therefore due to the regard in which they were held by the people, both on account of their recognised religious superiority and knowledge of the Law and also because of their hostility to the aristocratic party of the Sadducees.

The Sadducees were not opposed by the Pharisees because of theological differences, although Josephus artificially distinguishes the two parties on such grounds. The ground of opposition lay in the struggles between the latitudinarian aristocrats and the Chasidim. The Pharisees were by origin a body of religionists forced into politics; the Sadducees, a body of aristocrats opposed to the oral law and the later developments of Judaism. Indifferent to religion except as a profession open to priests, disbelievers in immortality of the soul, believers in absolute free will, the Sadducees had been the party of the opposition while Judea had been struggling for liberty; but now that the Asmoneans looked toward national life on a larger scale, they suddenly found themselves brought into new political importance.

From the days of Mattathias, the Asmonean house had been most successful when supported by the Chasidim and their successors. Hyrcanus, no more than his father, desired to break with so virile a following and had been himself counted a Pharisee, yet he was forced to transfer his friendship to the Sadducees.

The occasion for such a revolution in policy as given by Josephus contains too much of the conventional legendary element to be trustworthy, but none the less it may represent some actual occurrence. He represents Hyrcanus as complacently asking his Pharisaic friends at a banquet to point out to him the most certain road to righteousness. All declare him entirely virtuous until the question reaches one Eleazar. This uncompromising servant of the Law declared that if Hyrcanus really would be righteous, he must lay down the high-priesthood and content himself with the civil government. On being pressed for the reason for such an opinion, he declared that it was known that the mother of Hyrcanus had been a captive in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes—the implication being that Hyrcanus was not the legitimate son of Simon. Incensed at the insult, Hyrcanus followed the advice of a Sadducee who wished to involve all his opponents in disfavor, and asked the Pharisees to pronounce judgment upon Eleazar. They declared him deserving only of stripes and imprisonment. Hyrcanus, under the insinuations of the Sadducee Jonathan, believed all Pharisees his enemies, and therefore broke with them.

While this story may preserve for us an evidence of the Pharisees’ hatred of a warrior high priest, the real reason for the action of Hyrcanus lies deep in the inner life of Judaism. On the one hand the Pharisees must have been deeply disappointed that what had been a holy war should have produced no “kingdom of the saints”—some thoroughly impossible theocracy administered by scribes. They must also have opposed the policy of international treaties, so repugnant to their separatist spirit. The Sadducees, on the other hand, were in sympathy with a broad international policy and looked with favor upon a government of any high priest whatever. It was, therefore, to be expected that they should have been judged to be more serviceable by so thoroughly statesmanlike a man as Hyrcanus. Prom this time the Sadducees are the party of monarchical nationalism and the Pharisees that of a self-centered, provincial aristocracy.

The new status of the Gerousia. Development of Judaism.

The break with the “little Judea” party was marked by an undoing of some of their legislation, but even more by expansion in the life of the state. Judea was probably more prosperous than at any time since the reign of Solomon. It is true that its limits were subsequently to be enlarged; but at no time was it to be freer from internecine struggles or more truly independent of foreign powers. Almost for the first time in its history, commerce began to be of importance. Now that Joppa was safely a Jewish port, the grain, oil, and salt of Judea were exchanged for the luxuries of Egypt and other foreign countries. Already the wealth of the new family was great, while Rome was everywhere enforcing respect for the scattered subjects of its confederate state. Constitutionally, Judea progressed along the lines ordinarily followed by Oriental states, and had lost much of even the half-aristocratic character which it had possessed under Simon. This appears not alone in the fact that, first of all the later Jewish rulers, John Hyrcanus employed mercenaries; the coins of the period furnish some striking evidence of this constitutional change. Some of these bear the inscription, “John the high priest and the congregation of the Jews”, but others are inscribed, “John the high priest, head of the congregation of the Jews”—a change full of suggestion as to his position as head Incipient of the Jewish state. These facts, coupled with the transference of his sympathies from the Pharisees to the Sadducees, argue strongly that as national independence had succeeded religious liberty, a monarchy disguised as a theocracy was now displacing the city-state. It is in accordance with this general tendency that the Gerousia grows less prominent. A century later it was still the highest court in certain cases, and the very fact that John felt the need of relying upon something corresponding to a modern party, argues that in his day it was possessed of some legislative functions as well. Yet it is not mentioned in the scanty records of the time, and the inference is unavoidable that the Gerousia lost political importance before the rising monarchy. It is, therefore, probably at this time that there began the more academic era in its life which was to reach such development later in the Sanhedrin. Judea had thus all but become a small Oriental monarchy, none the less absolute because its ruler bore the name and exercised the functions of high priest.

Along with these constitutional and political changes, the reign of John Hyrcanus was marked by other important developments within the inner life of Judaism. The Gerousia attacked mixed marriages, classing heathen women with slaves, and, in order to fix more firmly the religious significance of the history in which they had played so large a part, the rabbis drew up a calendar of feast days, commemorating such events as the taking of Akra and Bethzur. During this period probably still further steps were taken in the completion of the third group of canonical books, the “Sacred Writings”. Already the great rabbis had begun to appear—the Zugoth, or “couples”,— and in the time of Hyrcanus lived the second “couple”, Joshua ben Perachia and Nitai of Arbela, the former of whom taught “Procure a companion for study, and judge all men according to the favorable side”.

Alexandria, dazzled by the success of the new dynasty, began to hope for the end of Syrian and Roman supremacy, and, in the alleged words of the heathen Sibyl, could look forward to the time when the “nation of the mighty God should once again be strong, and become to all people the guide of life”; and when an end should be put to all distress, and “from the rising sun, God should send a king who should make all the earth to cease from cruel war, killing some and making faithful treaties with others”. Then would “he who formerly gave the Law to the pious, take the kingdom forever over all men”.

But this hope for a triumphant Israel was fiercer in the breasts of the Pharisees of Judea, to whom the Asmonean house seemed less of God. If, according to the seer of Alexandria, the nations, seeing how God loved all men, were to throw away their idols and worship in his temple; to the mind of the unknown Pharisee who, in the name of Enoch, burst out in Pharisaic apocalyptic imagery and personification half inspired, forebodings half grotesque, the success of the heathen kingdoms and the dominance of the Sadducees, with their “unrighteousness and sin and blasphemy and violence,” their “apostasy and transgression and uncleanness”, were to bring a merited punishment from the holy Lord, who would execute vengeance upon heathen and apostates in an eternal judgment. Woe was to be theirs who built houses with sin, who acquired gold and silver, who set at naught the words of the righteous, and transgressed the eternal law. Even on the earth they were to suffer, and in the world to come they would confront the record of their evil deeds and go down into a hell of darkness and flame forever; while the righteous should be raised, pure spirits, the joy of angels, to shine as the stars of heaven.

The Essenes.

Still another evidence of a rapidly completing Judaism and of differentiating parties is to be seen in one of the enigmas of Jewish history, the esoteric brotherhood of the Essenes, or, more properly, the Essees. Like the fraternity of the Pharisees, it was a descendant of the Chasidim, whose very name, in fact, it still bore. Its genealogical relations with Pharisaism are thus clear. Neither is the offshoot of the other, but both brotherhoods sprang from the same anti-Hellenistic Judaism which it had been the mission of the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes to consolidate and energies. The continuity of Jewish development is here unbroken. However much Pharisee and Essene might differ as regards important details, each was profoundly devoted to the Thorah, the Sabbath, and to the maintenance of ceremonial purity. Each fraternity, however, had a different future. The Pharisees were swept out into politics; the Essenes were increasingly removing from politics toward the loneliness of the wilderness and the Dead Sea.

Just when the passion for immaculate purity found its first formally organized expression it is impossible to say, but by the time of Hyrcanus, or at least that of his son Aristobulus, it appears to have been complete. Despising wealth and scholastic virtue, the Essene brothers chose a life of celibacy and communism, of devotion to extravagant laws of purity, agriculture, and meditation. Though by no means shunning towns, they kept themselves from all contaminating influences, repudiating animal sacrifices and slavery. Many of their monastic communities lived in solitudes like Engedi, while others lived in monasteries in the midst of cities, where all who wore the white robe of the fraternity were always welcome.

Entrance to the order was possible only after a novitiate of three years, and this in turn led to further years of instruction in the mysteries of the faith. So far was the principle of purity carried that even among the brothers themselves a higher grade was defiled by contact with a lower. Industrious, modest, profoundly moral and religious, living temperately that they might practice charity, eating their eucharistic meals in solemnity and under the eyes of one whom they had elected their priest, obedient to their president and council, prophets revered by people and kings alike, working their simple cures by magical formulas, herbs, and sacred stones, the Essenes were the admiration of all classes. If it be true that at one time their numbers nearly equaled those of the Pharisees, the fact shows again the respect with which they were held by their fellow-countrymen for their regard for the Law and the Sabbath, as well as the purity of their life. That they had little influence upon national life, that the Pharisees disliked them, that they objected to bloody sacrifices, that they were shut out from the courts of the temple, does not argue the foreign origin sometimes assigned them. Indeed, although they may possibly have originated in Egypt, and although certain of their rites suggest Persian influences, the Essenes were essentially Jewish. They were, in fact, simply carrying to its inevitable conclusion the programme of the Chasidim, and if their belief in angels and heavenly intermediaries, their mysticism and esoteric teachings, find expression, as some believe, in apocalyptic literature like Enoch, it would be only what would be expected.

Thus, in the days of Hyrcanus, the history of the rise and fall of the Jewish state becomes clearly the history of the rise of the party of the Thorah—of the Essenes in their protest against form and defilement, and, above all, of the Pharisees in their struggle against Sadduceeism and monarchy.

THE STRUGGLE OF THE PHARISEES WITH THE ASMONEANS AND SADDUCEES  

(105-69 BC)

John Hyrcanus, by his will, made his widow his successor as the political head of the state, and appointed his eldest son, Aristobulus, to the high-priesthood. The arrangement was not only novel; it was fatal to all parties concerned. Aristobulus was not content to share the state with his mother, but shut her up in prison, where she starved to death. With her he imprisoned three of his brothers, thus in genuine Oriental fashion removing all possible claimants to the throne. Strangely enough, however, probably because of some deep attachment, he did not include in the fate of his family his brother Antigonus, with whom he had long been associated in war, but shared his throne with him. This arrangement resulted in the inevitable conspiracy and death that attend divided despotisms. Aristobulus was led to mistrust Antigonus, and by a trick of his queen and his courtiers became the unwitting cause of his death. He died soon after of a loathsome disease and remorse, having reigned but one year.

The reign of Aristobulus, however, though brief (105-104 BC), was by no means unimportant. Josephus speaks of him as a friend of the Greeks, although at the same time he is ready to admit that Aristobulus served his country by extending its boundaries. Like his father, Aristobulus endeavored to build his state upon a common religion. As Hyrcanus had forced circumcision upon the Idumeans, so Aristobulus forced it upon the Itureans of Northern Galilee, and thus completed the Judaising of that region.

But even more important was the constitutional step taken by Aristobulus. Hitherto the Asmonean rulers had laid no claim to the title or insignia of royalty, but Aristobulus broke with the precedents of his house, and marked his entrance into power by assuming a diadem and doubtless the title of king. There is no evidence or, in fact, probability, that the Gerousia regained any of its prestige during his short reign. On the contrary, it probably lost even more of its administrative functions, and became even more judicial or theologically academic. The Jewish theocratic monarchy, in the third generation of the new high-priestly dynasty, crossed the threshold of an absolutism no longer limited by tradition or inherited institutions.

So brief was the reign of this first king of the Jews that no time was given for the Pharisees to organize any strong opposition against his innovation, but opportunity enough was given during the reign of the third son of Hyrcanus, Alexander Jonathan, or, as the word is in Greek, Jannaeus (104-78 BC). He, with his brothers, had been imprisoned by Aristobulus, but had been released, married, and raised to the throne by his brother's widow, Queen Salome or Alexandra. The high-priesthood was his, also, by virtue of his kingship, and his abuse of this office, coupled with hatred of the monarchy and its aims, was sufficient to arouse all Pharisees to desperate opposition. A war that had begun for the preservation of the Jewish religion had called to the leadership of the state a family which, after accomplishing religious liberty, had relegated the ancient Gerousia together with the scribes to political insignificance, and turned toward international alliances, foreign conquests, monarchy, and all but declared imperialism. Three toparchies of Samaria, Gazara, and Joppa, as well as other cities, had been added to Judea by Jonathan and Simon, but the ambition of the family of Hyrcanus had been farther reaching. Medaba and Samega, with other cities to the east of Jordan, Shechem, Samaria, Idumea, Bethshean, and Lower Galilee had been conquered and in part made Jewish by the father, and now with the conquest of Upper Galilee by Aristobulus, the ambition of the Asmonean house to found a great kingdom was brought into sharpest contrast with the Pharisees’ policy of exclusion and separation.

His conquests

Alexander set about completing the conquests of his father and brother with all the strength of a reckless nature. With the highlands on the west of Jordan from Lebanon to the desert already his, he turned upon the cities and petty kingdoms to the east of Jordan, and upon the cities of the coast,—Ptolemais, Gaza, Strato’s Tower, and Dora. While Antiochus Cyzicenus was engaged with Antiochus Philometor, Alexander attacked Ptolemais, beat back its army, and besieged the city. He was not able to take it, however, because of the coming of Ptolemy Lathyrus from Cyprus. Unable to cope with so formidable an antagonist, Alexander raised the siege and tried treachery. Making a treaty with Ptolemy, he also summoned Cleopatra, the mother of Ptolemy, who had but recently driven her son out from Egypt. Ptolemy learned of his ally’s unfaithfulness, and immediately marched with most of his force to conquer Judea. He captured and sacked Asochis in Galilee on a Sabbath, attacked Sepphoris unsuccessfully, and then advanced against Alexander. The battle was fought at Asophon, an unidentified spot on the eastern side of the Jordan valley, and, thanks to Alexander’s lack of generalship, the tactics of Ptolemy’s general, Philostephanus, and the discipline of his mercenaries, resulted in a complete defeat for the Jews. Thereupon Ptolemy took Ptolemais, which, like Alexander, had proved untrue to him, and ravaged Judea; according to Josephus, boiling and eating women and children. In the meantime Cleopatra had come up from Egypt in pursuit of her son, and proceeded to besiege Ptolemais. Ptolemy, seizing this opportunity, invaded Egypt, but only to be defeated. Thus, by a strange turn of fortune Judea was again about to be subject to Egypt. In fact, nothing prevented such a misfortune except the advice of Ananias, one of Cleopatra’s generals, himself a Jew, who foretold a revolt of the Egyptian Jews if such a step were taken. Cleopatra, therefore, renewed her treaty with Alexander, and returned to Egypt.

Alexander was thus left once more free to pursue his policy of expansion. He took Gadara after siege of ten months, and Amathus, but having lost his baggage and a large number of his men in a sudden attack by Zeno, the local sovereign, he crossed again to the coast. There he captured and sacked Raphia and Anthedon. Gaza was betrayed into his hands after a year’s siege, and was plundered and burned, its Council of Five Hundred perishing in the burning temple of Apollo (96 BC). He then made a fresh attack upon the region east of Jordan, and succeeded in overcoming the cities and tribes in Moab and Gilead. Amathus, which had revolted, he again took and utterly destroyed. The campaign ended in misfortune, however, as the Arabian Obedas, whose kingdom, or, at least, suzerainty, embraced much of the region between Petra and Hermon, drew the Jews into a narrow ravine near Gadara, and then drove troops of camels down upon them, completely destroying the army. Barely escaping with his life, Alexander fled to Jerusalem, only to find his people in open rebellion.

Revolt of the Jews

The explanation of this first revolt against the Maccabean house is not difficult to discover. Alexander had already drawn down upon himself the hatred of the Pharisees and their sympathizers by his disregard of his priestly office. On one occasion, as he had been officiating at the altar during the Feast of Tabernacles, the crowds of worshippers had pelted him with citrons they had brought to the temple, shouting insults to his mother. As a punishment, he had sent his mercenaries against the crowd, and six thousand of the Jews had been killed. Thereafter, Alexander had officiated behind a wooden fence he had built within the Court of the Priests.

Such a punishment of orthodox Jews, the first on the part of any Asmonean, was, in itself, enough to excite the stricter classes, who had already been embittered by the reorganization of the Gerousia, which, since the last years of Hyrcanus, had been composed wholly of Sadducees, unless we make an exception of the redoubtable Simon ben Shetach, brother of the queen. But more potent than all must have been the deep-seated opposition of the Pharisees to the undisguised usurpations of the high priest. The scandalous stories told of him by Josephus must be in some degree charged to the historian’s bias, but the hatred of the Pharisees was intense, and when, after eight years of endurance, it once seemed possible to crush the fugitive king and restore the old constitution, they and their followers rose as a man.

For six years the religious and civil war raged, and fifty thousand Jews are said to have fallen. Then, with one of the untactful attempts at compromise which are to be seen throughout his life, even in the midst of Pharisaic libels, Alexander attempted to treat with his subjects. But their only condition of submission was that he should kill himself, and in a rage of hate they turned for aid to the Syrian king, Demetrius Eucaerus. Such a course was desperate but characteristic of the Pharisees, who now, as later, preferred a foreign ruler and a Gerousia which they might control, to independence and an irresponsible monarch. Demetrius came to the aid of the rebels with a large army, in which were many Jews. Alexander, also with an army of mercenaries and Jews, met him near Shechem. For a while each army endeavored to cause the defection of their kinsmen from the ranks of the other, but to no purpose, and a battle was finally fought in which Alexander was utterly and hopelessly beaten. Judea was again at the mercy of the Syrians, while the Arabians were kept from invasion only by Alexander’s ceding them his conquests in Moab and Gilead.

But the very misfortune of Alexander was to prove his salvation. Six thousand of the Jews who had fought under Demetrius, seeing the dangers to which their land had been exposed by their victory, suddenly deserted Demetrius and joined themselves to their wretched king. Immediately the entire scene changed. Demetrius retired. Alexander, with his new army, repeatedly defeated the rebels, and at last shut up their leaders in the unidentified town of Bethome. The city fell into his hands, and he crucified eight hundred of his prisoners at Jerusalem, after having had their wives and children massacred before their eyes.

With this fearful vengeance the civil war came to an end. Eight thousand of the rebels fled from the land, and for the rest of his reign Alexander—known now as the Thracian—kept the peace from his castles of Alexandrium and Machaerus with equal severity and success.

Freed from the opposition of the Pharisees, Alexander could again take up the extension of his kingdom. For a moment, it is true, it seemed possible that the dying Syrian Empire might be revitalized by the energetic Antiochus Dionysius, who would not be kept back by Alexander’s ditch and wooden wall across the plain from Antipatris; but Antiochus was defeated and killed by Aretas, king of Arabia, who then came into possession of Coele-Syria and Damascus. Again the fortunes of Alexander looked dark, for Aretas defeated him at Adida. But the two kings arranged some sort of conditions of peace, and Alexander was again unhampered for foreign war. In this he was brilliantly successful. Within three years Dium, Essa, with the treasures of Alexander’s old enemy Zeno, Gaulana, and Gamala, cities on the east of Jordan, together with Seleucia near Lake Huleh, fell into his hands, and doubtless, in accordance with his general relentless policy, were forced to conform to Jewish practices. He returned to Jerusalem, where he was received with great rejoicings. And with reason, for at last the ambition of his house and the pride of the un-Pharisaic portion of his people were in some way satisfied. Thanks to the indomitable warrior, careless as high priest though he may have been, the boundaries of Judea were now approximately those of the best days of David. From the desert to the sea, and from Lebanon to the River of Egypt, there were but few cities which had not accepted Jewish sovereignty and Jewish rites, or, like Pella, been laid in ruins because of their refusal to yield such obedience. Even Damascus seems to have been a subject, or at least under the protection of Alexander. Ascalon on the plain, Ragaba and Philadelphia, on the east of Jordan, alone maintained their independence, and Ragaba fell just as Alexander died.

Death of Alexander

Yet it would be a mistake to think of the new kingdom as unified. Despite the strenuous efforts of the king, it is clear that the land remained broken up into little regions centring about cities, and also that the heathen were still in the land. These subject cities it was, undoubtedly, that paid the taxes which supported the Jewish state, but they were also liable at any time to fall into the hands of some princeling, like Zeno, and then throw off the Jewish yoke, perhaps, indeed, to rise into actual rivalry with Judea. In fact, they never were thoroughly assimilated, and remained to the end centers of deepening anti-Semitism in the midst of the Jewish territory.

After a reign of twenty-seven years Alexander died, worn out by hardship and dissipation. But he died as he had lived, a warrior. Through these years of failing health he carried on his wars, and at last was overcome by death at the siege of Ragaba, though telling his wife to conceal the fact until the city had fallen.

Alexander’s death was to work important changes in Judea. He had never been a friend of the Greeks, and his very wars had been in part for religion. His struggle with the Pharisees had grown from political, rather than religious causes, and it is not improbable that his last years had been marked by something like attempts at reconciliation. At all events, when he found death upon him, he advised Alexandra, who was to succeed him, to depend upon the Pharisees once more. That he was not altogether abandoned by the party of the Law appears in almost the only literary survival of Sadduceeism, the book of 1 Maccabees — the work of some sincere but unknown friend of the Asmonean family. Full of devotion to the Law and of hatred of the Hellenizing priests and people of the early days, the book breathes the spirit of un-Pharisaic Judaism. Silent as to the oral law, and deeply religious though it is, it never mentions the name of God. It is something more than the work of a pamphleteer, and in its simple, direct style it tells how the deliverance from Syria resulted, not from the miraculous interposition of Jehovah or the patriotism of the Jews as a people, but from the work of the Maccabees, by whose hand alone was deliverance given unto Israel.

But it was Pharisaism that most found expression during Alexander’s reign. Without venturing upon Maccabees, unqualified statements, it may have been at this time that another unknown writer epitomized such portions of an historical work of Jason of Cyrene as told of the early days of the Maccabean house, entitling it the second book of Maccabees. In many particulars it retells more elaborately the story of 1 Maccabees, but its divergences are sufficient to prove its independence of that work. It is, in fact, a Pharisaic reply to 1 Maccabees, avowedly written to show “the manifestation made from heaven in behalf of those who were zealous to believe manfully in defence of Judaism”. So full is it of legendary material introduced with this motive, that its chief value (outside its account of certain of the doings of Antiochus IV) lies in its expression of the interpretation put by the Pharisees upon history.

A much more important element of the Pharisaic spirit is seen in those portions of the Book of Enoch which may be with safety referred to the reign of Alexander. The oppressions of Alexander called for vengeance from heaven, and for the establishment of the Messianic kingdom. This latter hope was, it is true nothing new. It is hard to find a period in the history of the Jews when the more trustful hearts had not been sustained by hope of the coming of some specially empowered person who should cause righteousness and justice to go hand in hand with Jewish victories. But now the misery of those who made God’s law their especial delight intensified faith and imagination. They had hoped that the Messiah would appear in some member of the Maccabean house—in Judas or John Hyrcanus. But they had been bitterly disappointed. The ‘kingdom of the saints’, which had risen triumphant over the ruins of Syria, had turned out to be but another vulgar monarchy, and the royal high priest only a very earthly ruler, more interested in foreign alliances and in conquered cities than in the Law. And at last a Maccabee had turned his arms against the righteous! With one accord Pharisaism looked to its Bible for encouragement. In the house of David there was some hope, but in the visions of Daniel more. The Son of Man, whom the prophet saw, would certainly once more be seen. He would come to judge the world, to champion and avenge the oppressed, to bring to life all those in Sheol, and give the righteous the earth for an inheritance. A new kingdom would be founded in the place of the Maccabean, composed exclusively of the righteous, forever prosperous and resplendent because of the immediate presence of the Lord of Spirits, Jehovah Himself.

Alexandra the Queen.

It was this intense Pharisaism, as full of revenge as of faith, that came into power in the person of Alexander’s widow, Alexandra (78-69 BC). She must have been no ordinary woman who now, after having made her husband king and high priest, established her son Hyrcanus in the high-priesthood, reversed the family policy, and abandoned the Sadducees. Josephus himself, misogynist though he is, pauses to admit that notwithstanding all her faults “she showed no sign of the weakness of her sex”, and that “she preserved the nation in peace”. In large measure, probably, this success was due to her reliance upon the Pharisees, who had great influence over the people. But, notwithstanding the increased power of the Gerousia, Alexandra was no puppet, and was, as she appears on her coins, a queen.

Secure in the favor of this energetic ruler, the Pharisaic Pharisees began at once the reorganization of the state. First of all they released those of their number who had been imprisoned, and recalled those who had been banished. But their desire for revenge did not allow them to stop at such beginnings. There began a systematic assassination of Sadducean leaders, which especially sought to cut off the officers of Alexandra, who had had a share in the crucifixion of the eight hundred. So extensive did this mafia become that the old generals of Alexander requested Alexandra to allow them to leave Jerusalem and find safety in control of the frontier fortresses—a request that when granted put into the hands of Sadducean sympathizers all the strongholds except Hyrcanium, Machaerus, and Alexandrium. It is doubtful when this request was granted, and whether it was a part of a widespread plot to gain the kingdom for Aristobulus; but it was to prove serviceable when such a plot came to be formed, toward the end of Alexandra’s reign. But peace prevailed throughout the nine years of Alexandra's reign—thanks to her connection with the Pharisees, and her mercenaries. Unlike those of her husband, however, these troops were used but little except for preserving the peace, for Alexandra was as sagacious in foreign relations as Alexander had been headstrong.

Once only does she seem to have undertaken a war. Then she sent her younger son, Aristobulus, who possessed many of his father’s characteristics, to aid Damascus in a struggle with a petty tyrant, Ptolemy Mennaeus. The invasion of Tigranes (70-69 BC) for a moment threatened real danger, but Alexandra won his friendship by rich presents, and the interference of the Romans soon made her doubly secure.

That, however, which made the reign of Alexandra most significance, was the new stage in the development of Judaism consequent upon the ascendancy of the Pharisees. To the two classes of which the Gerousia had been composed, hereditary nobles of the Sadducean party and hereditary priests, there now was added—or probably more accurately recognised as belonging—a third class, that of the rabbis. From this time forth we can trace the judicial influence of rabbinical Pharisaism. As members of a judicial body, the Pharisees sent their old enemies into banishment, and made the oral tradition, which had grown up within the circle of literati, the law of the land. Over this body the young Hyrcanus presided as high priest, but so utterly lacking was he in energy that Simon ben Shetach, the queen’s brother, was its real, though unofficial, head. Associated with him in his reforms was Judah ben Tabbai, who had been induced to come to Jerusalem from Alexandria for this purpose. Under their influence the Gerousia expunged the severe laws of the Sadducees; ordered more care to be given the examination of witnesses; and made divorce more difficult by the provision that the husband must give the wife he put away some portion of his property. Every feast was better celebrated as a potent reminder of the Pharisees’ triumph over their opponents, and that of the Wood Gathering in August as a new impulse to matrimony and patriotism. The support of the national worship in the temple was made secure by the levying of the “half-shekel” upon all Jews above the age of twenty, whether in Palestine or the Dispersion, and what was perhaps most important of all, the foundations of later scribism were laid by the establishment of public schools, which a century later were to be universal in Palestine. It was, in truth, a golden age in the eyes of the scribes—a time when all things prospered and Jehovah was so propitious that the scribes preserved the grains of wheat, each as large as a kidney, to show later generations how righteousness exalts a nation, and how sin curses the ground.

But the inevitable reaction came. Oppressed and persecuted in their turn, the Sadducees yet held possession of most of the fortresses of the land, and at the first evidence of the old queen’s illness, hastened to prepare a revolt that should prevent the permanent ascendancy of the Gerousia. Hyrcanus II was too weak and too subservient to Simon for their purposes, and they turned to his younger brother Aristobulus, whose hostility to the Pharisees was already open. With the death of Alexandra the struggle between the two parties burst forth as fiercely as during the days of Alexander Jannaeus, and under the leadership of the two brothers Judea plunged anew into a civil war that once more established foreign rule.

THE STRUGGLE OF THE PHARISEES WITH THE ASMONEANS AND SADDUCEES  

(105-69 BC)

John Hyrcanus, by his will, made his widow his successor as the political head of the state, and appointed his eldest son, Aristobulus, to the high-priesthood. The arrangement was not only novel; it was fatal to all parties concerned. Aristobulus was not content to share the state with his mother, but shut her up in prison, where she starved to death. Withher he imprisoned three of his brothers, thus in genuine Oriental fashion removing all possible claimants to the throne. Strangely enough, however, probably because of some deep attachment, he did not include in the fate of his family his brother Antigonus, with whom he had long been associated in war, but shared his throne with him. This arrangement resulted in the inevitable conspiracy and death that attend divided despotisms. Aristobulus was led to mistrust Antigonus, and by a trick of his queen and his courtiers became the unwitting cause of his death. He died soon after of a loathsome disease and remorse, having reigned but one year.

The reign of Aristobulus, however, though brief (105-104 BC), was by no means unimportant. Josephus speaks of him as a friend of the Greeks, although at the same time he is ready to admit that Aristobulus served his country by extending its boundaries. Like his father, Aristobulus endeavored to build his state upon a common religion. As Hyrcanus had forced circumcision upon the Idumeans, so Aristobulus forced it upon the Itureans of Northern Galilee, and thus completed the Judaising of that region.

But even more important was the constitutional step taken by Aristobulus. Hitherto the Asmonean rulers had laid no claim to the title or insignia of royalty, but Aristobulus broke with the precedents of his house, and marked his entrance into power by assuming a diadem and doubtless the title of king. There is no evidence or, in fact, probability, that the Gerousia regained any of its prestige during his short reign. On the contrary, it probably lost even more of its administrative functions, and became even more judicial or theologically academic. The Jewish theocratic monarchy, in the third generation of the new high-priestly dynasty, crossed the threshold of an absolutism no longer limited by tradition or inherited institutions.

So brief was the reign of this first king of the Jews that no time was given for the Pharisees to organize any strong opposition against his innovation, but opportunity enough was given during the reign of the third son of Hyrcanus, Alexander Jonathan, or, as the word is in Greek, Jannaeus (104-78 BC). He, with his brothers, had been imprisoned by Aristobulus, but had been released, married, and raised to the throne by his brother's widow, Queen Salome or Alexandra. The high-priesthood was his, also, by virtue of his kingship, and his abuse of this office, coupled with hatred of the monarchy and its aims, was sufficient to arouse all Pharisees to desperate opposition. A war that had begun for the preservation of the Jewish religion had called to the leadership of the state a family which, after accomplishing religious liberty, had relegated the ancient Gerousia together with the scribes to political insignificance, and turned toward international alliances, foreign conquests, monarchy, and all but declared imperialism. Three toparchies of Samaria, Gazara, and Joppa, as well as other cities, had been added to Judea by Jonathan and Simon, but the ambition of the family of Hyrcanus had been farther reaching. Medaba and Samega, with other cities to the east of Jordan, Shechem, Samaria, Idumea, Bethshean, and Lower Galilee had been conquered and in part made Jewish by the father, and now with the conquest of Upper Galilee by Aristobulus, the ambition of the Asmonean house to found a great kingdom was brought into sharpest contrast with the Pharisees’ policy of exclusion and separation.

His conquests

Alexander set about completing the conquests of his father and brother with all the strength of a reckless nature. With the highlands on the west of Jordan from Lebanon to the desert already his, he turned upon the cities and petty kingdoms to the east of Jordan, and upon the cities of the coast,—Ptolemais, Gaza, Strato’s Tower, and Dora. While Antiochus Cyzicenus was engaged with Antiochus Philometor, Alexander attacked Ptolemais, beat back its army, and besieged the city. He was not able to take it, however, because of the coming of Ptolemy Lathyrus from Cyprus. Unable to cope with so formidable an antagonist, Alexander raised the siege and tried treachery. Making a treaty with Ptolemy, he also summoned Cleopatra, the mother of Ptolemy, who had but recently driven her son out from Egypt. Ptolemy learned of his ally’s unfaithfulness, and immediately marched with most of his force to conquer Judea. He captured and sacked Asochis in Galilee on a Sabbath, attacked Sepphoris unsuccessfully, and then advanced against Alexander. The battle was fought at Asophon, an unidentified spot on the eastern side of the Jordan valley, and, thanks to Alexander’s lack of generalship, the tactics of Ptolemy’s general, Philostephanus, and the discipline of his mercenaries, resulted in a complete defeat for the Jews. Thereupon Ptolemy took Ptolemais, which, like Alexander, had proved untrue to him, and ravaged Judea; according to Josephus, boiling and eating women and children. In the meantime Cleopatra had come up from Egypt in pursuit of her son, and proceeded to besiege Ptolemais. Ptolemy, seizing this opportunity, invaded Egypt, but only to be defeated. Thus, by a strange turn of fortune Judea was again about to be subject to Egypt. In fact, nothing prevented such a misfortune except the advice of Ananias, one of Cleopatra’s generals, himself a Jew, who foretold a revolt of the Egyptian Jews if such a step were taken. Cleopatra, therefore, renewed her treaty with Alexander, and returned to Egypt.

Alexander was thus left once more free to pursue his policy of expansion. He took Gadara after siege of ten months, and Amathus, but having lost his baggage and a large number of his men in a sudden attack by Zeno, the local sovereign, he crossed again to the coast. There he captured and sacked Raphia and Anthedon. Gaza was betrayed into his hands after a year’s siege, and was plundered and burned, its Council of Five Hundred perishing in the burning temple of Apollo (96 BC). He then made a fresh attack upon the region east of Jordan, and succeeded in overcoming the cities and tribes in Moab and Gilead. Amathus, which had revolted, he again took and utterly destroyed. The campaign ended in misfortune, however, as the Arabian Obedas, whose kingdom, or, at least, suzerainty, embraced much of the region between Petra and Hermon, drew the Jews into a narrow ravine near Gadara, and then drove troops of camels down upon them, completely destroying the army. Barely escaping with his life, Alexander fled to Jerusalem, only to find his people in open rebellion.

Revolt of the Jews

The explanation of this first revolt against the Maccabean house is not difficult to discover. Alexander had already drawn down upon himself the hatred of the Pharisees and their sympathizers by his disregard of his priestly office. On one occasion, as he had been officiating at the altar during the Feast of Tabernacles, the crowds of worshippers had pelted him with citrons they had brought to the temple, shouting insults to his mother. As a punishment, he had sent his mercenaries against the crowd, and six thousand of the Jews had been killed. Thereafter, Alexander had officiated behind a wooden fence he had built within the Court of the Priests.

Such a punishment of orthodox Jews, the first on the part of any Asmonean, was, in itself, enough to excite the stricter classes, who had already been embittered by the reorganization of the Gerousia, which, since the last years of Hyrcanus, had been composed wholly of Sadducees, unless we make an exception of the redoubtable Simon ben Shetach, brother of the queen. But more potent than all must have been the deep-seated opposition of the Pharisees to the undisguised usurpations of the high priest. The scandalous stories told of him by Josephus must be in some degree charged to the historian’s bias, but the hatred of the Pharisees was intense, and when, after eight years of endurance, it once seemed possible to crush the fugitive king and restore the old constitution, they and their followers rose as a man.

For six years the religious and civil war raged, and fifty thousand Jews are said to have fallen. Then, with one of the untactful attempts at compromise which are to be seen throughout his life, even in the midst of Pharisaic libels, Alexander attempted to treat with his subjects. But their only condition of submission was that he should kill himself, and in a rage of hate they turned for aid to the Syrian king, Demetrius Eucaerus. Such a course was desperate but characteristic of the Pharisees, who now, as later, preferred a foreign ruler and a Gerousia which they might control, to independence and an irresponsible monarch. Demetrius came to the aid of the rebels with a large army, in which were many Jews. Alexander, also with an army of mercenaries and Jews, met him near Shechem. For a while each army endeavored to cause the defection of their kinsmen from the ranks of the other, but to no purpose, and a battle was finally fought in which Alexander was utterly and hopelessly beaten. Judea was again at the mercy of the Syrians, while the Arabians were kept from invasion only by Alexander’s ceding them his conquests in Moab and Gilead.

But the very misfortune of Alexander was to prove his salvation. Six thousand of the Jews who had fought under Demetrius, seeing the dangers to which their land had been exposed by their victory, suddenly deserted Demetrius and joined themselves to their wretched king. Immediately the entire scene changed. Demetrius retired. Alexander, with his new army, repeatedly defeated the rebels, and at last shut up their leaders in the unidentified town of Bethome. The city fell into his hands, and he crucified eight hundred of his prisoners at Jerusalem, after having had their wives and children massacred before their eyes.

With this fearful vengeance the civil war came to an end. Eight thousand of the rebels fled from the land, and for the rest of his reign Alexander—known now as the Thracian—kept the peace from his castles of Alexandrium and Machaerus with equal severity and success.

Freed from the opposition of the Pharisees, Alexander could again take up the extension of his kingdom. For a moment, it is true, it seemed possible that the dying Syrian Empire might be revitalized by the energetic Antiochus Dionysius, who would not be kept back by Alexander’s ditch and wooden wall across the plain from Antipatris; but Antiochus was defeated and killed by Aretas, king of Arabia, who then came into possession of Coele-Syria and Damascus. Again the fortunes of Alexander looked dark, for Aretas defeated him at Adida. But the two kings arranged some sort of conditions of peace, and Alexander was again unhampered for foreign war. In this he was brilliantly successful. Within three years Dium, Essa, with the treasures of Alexander’s old enemy Zeno, Gaulana, and Gamala, cities on the east of Jordan, together with Seleucia near Lake Huleh, fell into his hands, and doubtless, in accordance with his general relentless policy, were forced to conform to Jewish practices. He returned to Jerusalem, where he was received with great rejoicings. And with reason, for at last the ambition of his house and the pride of the un-Pharisaic portion of his people were in some way satisfied. Thanks to the indomitable warrior, careless as high priest though he may have been, the boundaries of Judea were now approximately those of the best days of David. From the desert to the sea, and from Lebanon to the River of Egypt, there were but few cities which had not accepted Jewish sovereignty and Jewish rites, or, like Pella, been laid in ruins because of their refusal to yield such obedience. Even Damascus seems to have been a subject, or at least under the protection of Alexander. Ascalon on the plain, Ragaba and Philadelphia, on the east of Jordan, alone maintained their independence, and Ragaba fell just as Alexander died.

Death of Alexander

Yet it would be a mistake to think of the new kingdom as unified. Despite the strenuous efforts of the king, it is clear that the land remained broken up into little regions centring about cities, and also that the heathen were still in the land. These subject cities it was, undoubtedly, that paid the taxes which supported the Jewish state, but they were also liable at any time to fall into the hands of some princeling, like Zeno, and then throw off the Jewish yoke, perhaps, indeed, to rise into actual rivalry with Judea. In fact, they never were thoroughly assimilated, and remained to the end centers of deepening anti-Semitism in the midst of the Jewish territory.

After a reign of twenty-seven years Alexander died, worn out by hardship and dissipation. But he died as he had lived, a warrior. Through these years of failing health he carried on his wars, and at last was overcome by death at the siege of Ragaba, though telling his wife to conceal the fact until the city had fallen.

Alexander’s death was to work important changes in Judea. He had never been a friend of the Greeks, and his very wars had been in part for religion. His struggle with the Pharisees had grown from political, rather than religious causes, and it is not improbable that his last years had been marked by something like attempts at reconciliation. At all events, when he found death upon him, he advised Alexandra, who was to succeed him, to depend upon the Pharisees once more. That he was not altogether abandoned by the party of the Law appears in almost the only literary survival of Sadduceeism, the book of 1 Maccabees — the work of some sincere but unknown friend of the Asmonean family. Full of devotion to the Law and of hatred of the Hellenizing priests and people of the early days, the book breathes the spirit of un-Pharisaic Judaism. Silent as to the oral law, and deeply religious though it is, it never mentions the name of God. It is something more than the work of a pamphleteer, and in its simple, direct style it tells how the deliverance from Syria resulted, not from the miraculous interposition of Jehovah or the patriotism of the Jews as a people, but from the work of the Maccabees, by whose hand alone was deliverance given unto Israel.

But it was Pharisaism that most found expression during Alexander’s reign. Without venturing upon Maccabees, unqualified statements, it may have been at this time that another unknown writer epitomized such portions of an historical work of Jason of Cyrene as told of the early days of the Maccabean house, entitling it the second book of Maccabees. In many particulars it retells more elaborately the story of 1 Maccabees, but its divergences are sufficient to prove its independence of that work. It is, in fact, a Pharisaic reply to 1 Maccabees, avowedly written to show “the manifestation made from heaven in behalf of those who were zealous to believe manfully in defence of Judaism”. So full is it of legendary material introduced with this motive, that its chief value (outside its account of certain of the doings of Antiochus IV) lies in its expression of the interpretation put by the Pharisees upon history.

A much more important element of the Pharisaic spirit is seen in those portions of the Book of Enoch which may be with safety referred to the reign of Alexander. The oppressions of Alexander called for vengeance from heaven, and for the establishment of the Messianic kingdom. This latter hope was, it is true nothing new. It is hard to find a period in the history of the Jews when the more trustful hearts had not been sustained by hope of the coming of some specially empowered person who should cause righteousness and justice to go hand in hand with Jewish victories. But now the misery of those who made God’s law their especial delight intensified faith and imagination. They had hoped that the Messiah would appear in some member of the Maccabean house—in Judas or John Hyrcanus. But they had been bitterly disappointed. The ‘kingdom of the saints’, which had risen triumphant over the ruins of Syria, had turned out to be but another vulgar monarchy, and the royal high priest only a very earthly ruler, more interested in foreign alliances and in conquered cities than in the Law. And at last a Maccabee had turned his arms against the righteous! With one accord Pharisaism looked to its Bible for encouragement. In the house of David there was some hope, but in the visions of Daniel more. The Son of Man, whom the prophet saw, would certainly once more be seen. He would come to judge the world, to champion and avenge the oppressed, to bring to life all those in Sheol, and give the righteous the earth for an inheritance. A new kingdom would be founded in the place of the Maccabean, composed exclusively of the righteous, forever prosperous and resplendent because of the immediate presence of the Lord of Spirits, Jehovah Himself.

Alexandra the Queen.

It was this intense Pharisaism, as full of revenge as of faith, that came into power in the person of Alexander’s widow, Alexandra (78-69 BC). She must have been no ordinary woman who now, after having made her husband king and high priest, established her son Hyrcanus in the high-priesthood, reversed the family policy, and abandoned the Sadducees. Josephus himself, misogynist though he is, pauses to admit that notwithstanding all her faults “she showed no sign of the weakness of her sex”, and that “she preserved the nation in peace”. In large measure, probably, this success was due to her reliance upon the Pharisees, who had great influence over the people. But, notwithstanding the increased power of the Gerousia, Alexandra was no puppet, and was, as she appears on her coins, a queen.

Secure in the favor of this energetic ruler, the Pharisaic Pharisees began at once the reorganization of the state. First of all they released those of their number who had been imprisoned, and recalled those who had been banished. But their desire for revenge did not allow them to stop at such beginnings. There began a systematic assassination of Sadducean leaders, which especially sought to cut off the officers of Alexandra, who had had a share in the crucifixion of the eight hundred. So extensive did this mafia become that the old generals of Alexander requested Alexandra to allow them to leave Jerusalem and find safety in control of the frontier fortresses—a request that when granted put into the hands of Sadducean sympathizers all the strongholds except Hyrcanium, Machaerus, and Alexandrium. It is doubtful when this request was granted, and whether it was a part of a widespread plot to gain the kingdom for Aristobulus; but it was to prove serviceable when such a plot came to be formed, toward the end of Alexandra’s reign. But peace prevailed throughout the nine years of Alexandra's reign—thanks to her connection with the Pharisees, and her mercenaries. Unlike those of her husband, however, these troops were used but little except for preserving the peace, for Alexandra was as sagacious in foreign relations as Alexander had been headstrong.

Once only does she seem to have undertaken a war. Then she sent her younger son, Aristobulus, who possessed many of his father’s characteristics, to aid Damascus in a struggle with a petty tyrant, Ptolemy Mennaeus. The invasion of Tigranes (70-69 BC) for a moment threatened real danger, but Alexandra won his friendship by rich presents, and the interference of the Romans soon made her doubly secure.

That, however, which made the reign of Alexandra most significance, was the new stage in the development of Judaism consequent upon the ascendancy of the Pharisees. To the two classes of which the Gerousia had been composed, hereditary nobles of the Sadducean party and hereditary priests, there now was added—or probably more accurately recognised as belonging—a third class, that of the rabbis. From this time forth we can trace the judicial influence of rabbinical Pharisaism. As members of a judicial body, the Pharisees sent their old enemies into banishment, and made the oral tradition, which had grown up within the circle of literati, the law of the land. Over this body the young Hyrcanus presided as high priest, but so utterly lacking was he in energy that Simon ben Shetach, the queen’s brother, was its real, though unofficial, head. Associated with him in his reforms was Judah ben Tabbai, who had been induced to come to Jerusalem from Alexandria for this purpose. Under their influence the Gerousia expunged the severe laws of the Sadducees; ordered more care to be given the examination of witnesses; and made divorce more difficult by the provision that the husband must give the wife he put away some portion of his property. Every feast was better celebrated as a potent reminder of the Pharisees’ triumph over their opponents, and that of the Wood Gathering in August as a new impulse to matrimony and patriotism. The support of the national worship in the temple was made secure by the levying of the “half-shekel” upon all Jews above the age of twenty, whether in Palestine or the Dispersion, and what was perhaps most important of all, the foundations of later scribism were laid by the establishment of public schools, which a century later were to be universal in Palestine. It was, in truth, a golden age in the eyes of the scribes—a time when all things prospered and Jehovah was so propitious that the scribes preserved the grains of wheat, each as large as a kidney, to show later generations how righteousness exalts a nation, and how sin curses the ground.

But the inevitable reaction came. Oppressed and persecuted in their turn, the Sadducees yet held possession of most of the fortresses of the land, and at the first evidence of the old queen’s illness, hastened to prepare a revolt that should prevent the permanent ascendancy of the Gerousia. Hyrcanus II was too weak and too subservient to Simon for their purposes, and they turned to his younger brother Aristobulus, whose hostility to the Pharisees was already open. With the death of Alexandra the struggle between the two parties burst forth as fiercely as during the days of Alexander Jannaeus, and under the leadership of the two brothers Judea plunged anew into a civil war that once more established foreign rule.

THE ROMAN CONQUEST OF JUDEA

However legitimate a successor of his mother the young high priest, Hyrcanus, may have been, it is clear that the sympathies of his troops were with their old commanders, for when he and Aristobulus met in battle at Jericho, many of his soldiers deserted to the enemy, and Hyrcanus himself was forced to flee to Jerusalem. There he gained possession of the temple area and of the citadel in which the wife and children of Aristobulus had been imprisoned by Alexandra. Probably because of these circumstances Aristobulus was not eager to push his advantage, and within three months from the death of their mother the two brothers came to an amicable agreement. The kingdom and high-priesthood were taken by Aristobulus, and the weak Hyrcanus, reduced to a mere private citizen, was left to the enjoyment of his fortune.

And thus affairs might have remained but for the appearance of an extraordinary man, Antipater, an Idumean, whose father had been governor of Idumea under Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra. For some reason, perhaps from suspicion of Aristobulus II, he attached himself to Hyrcanus, and endeavored to rouse him into something like self-respect, if not revolt. At first his efforts were unavailing, but at last he persuaded Hyrcanus that his brother threatened his life, and induced him to flee to Aretas, king of Arabia. Once secure in the friendly court at Petra, Antipater found no difficulty in persuading Hyrcanus to ask aid from Aretas against Aristobulus. The king consented, but demanded the return of the territory and the twelve cities Alexander had taken. These terms once granted, Aretas, Antipater, and Hyrcanus, at the head of fifty thousand men, marched against Aristobulus, defeated him, and drove him into the temple and citadel of Jerusalem. There they besieged him, Jerusalem itself being divided, the people favoring Hyrcanus, but the priests, Aristobulus. The struggle was carried on with great bitterness—the first war for succession in the history of the Maccabean house. The principal Jews deserted the city and went to Egypt; but neither party would yield. Cruelty and bad faith increased the madness, while a furious storm—due, as the priests believed, to the impiety of the besiegers— brought a famine upon the entire land.

Doubtless, sooner or later, Aristobulus must have yielded, if only from hunger; but before such an extremity was reached a new factor appeared in Jewish politics. For years the Romans had been closing in upon the Syrian and neighboring kingdoms, and at last the desperate struggles of Tigranes had led to the expedition of Pompey. Armed with unprecedented powers, Pompey had succeeded in reducing Asia to something like order, and in 65 BC sent his general, Scaurus, to secure Syria. Scaurus arrived at Damascus only to find himself anticipated by two of Pompey’s other generals, Lollius and Metellus. At once he started toward Judea, but before he could reach Jerusalem the two brothers heard of his approach, and, true to the traditional Roman policy of their family, each sent an embassy, promising a present of 400 talents for a favorable decision. Scaurus decided in favour of Aristobulus, as his seemed to be the more promising cause, ordered Aretas to return to Arabia, and himself returned to Damascus. Thereupon Aristobulus attacked the besieging force, and completely defeated it.

Neither party regarded the quarrel settled, however, for when Pompey himself arrived in Syria, in the winter of 64-63 BC, Aristobulus sent him ambassadors, and a wonderful golden vine worth 500 talents, and a little later other ambassadors came from Hyrcanus and Antipater. Postponing all decision, Pompey devoted himself to the reduction of the petty states of Coele-Syria, and in the spring arrived in Damascus. There the representatives of the two brothers again met him, and with them those of the Pharisees, who requested that neither brother be recognised as king, but that the state be allowed to enjoy its old government of the high priest and Gerousia.

Revolt of Aristobulus

The latter request Pompey seems to have ignored, and after condemning the violent proceedings of Aristobulus and ordering both brothers to keep the peace, he deferred his decision until he had made an expedition against the Nabateans and had then come into Judea. He then set out upon his campaign, probably taking Aristobulus and Hyrcanus with him. When they arrived at Dium, however, Aristobulus suddenly fled to the beautiful fortress of Alexandrium, just inside the borders of Judea. There in that castle which was later to contain the bodies of so many of the last unhappy Maccabees, he proposed to stand a siege. He was, however, forced to surrender all his fortresses to the Romans, and retired in a rage to Jerusalem to prepare for war.

Hearing of this revolution Pompey marched down to Jericho, then luxuriant with palms and balsams, and, after a single night’s rest, went up to Jerusalem. Again Aristobulus weakened, came out to meet Pompey, and promised to pay over a large sum of money and to surrender the city if only the Romans would leave the country in peace. With his customary willingness to avoid unnecessary injury to a dependent people, Pompey agreed to the proposals, and sent Gabinius to receive the money and the city. But when that general appeared at the gates of Jerusalem, he found the sympathies of its inhabitants divided. On the one hand, the great mass of the population was desirous of avoiding bloodshed and of receiving the Romans; but on the other, the soldiers of Aristobulus would listen to no proposition of surrender, closed the gates fast, and sent Gabinius back to Pompey empty-handed. Naturally enraged at this unfaithfulness, Pompey threw Aristobulus into chains, and proceeded against Jerusalem. Within the city, the party of Aristobulus seized the temple, but the other admitted Pompey’s army into the city proper. Then there began the siege of the temple, which was by no means successful until, taking advantage of the Jews’ unwillingness to engage in offensive operations on the Sabbath, Pompey was able to build a great bank opposite the north wall of the temple, on which to set his artillery. For three months the siege continued, but the wall was broken on the Day of Atonement (October, 63 BC), and the Romans rushed into the temple, butchering the priests at the altar. Twelve thousand Jews are said to have fallen. Pompey, with a few of his friends, entered the Holy of Holies; but left all the treasure of the temple, amounting to 2000 talents, untouched. The day after the capture, the worship of the temple began again at his command with Hyrcanus II as high priest. Aristobulus and his family graced Pompey’s triumph in Rome, and large numbers of captives were carried to the capital, where they raised the Jewish colony to great importance, even if they may not be said to have founded it.

Reorganization of Judea by Gabinius.

Thus almost exactly a hundred years from the triumphs of Judas Maccabaeus, and only eighty since its independence was fairly achieved, Judea once more and finally fell into the control of a foreign power. Before leaving the country, Pompey stripped it of most of the territory won since the days of Simon, and made the remainder, with the high priest, subject to his representative in Syria, Scaurus, who was left for two years in charge of the entire region between Egypt and the Euphrates, with full praetorian power.

Just how long Hyrcanus could have maintained this somewhat uncertain position, is a question; but after six years the revolt of Alexander, the son of Aristobulus, led to a thorough reorganization of the government under Gabinius, who at that time (57 BC) was in charge of the Roman affairs in Syria.

Hyrcanus was left in possession of the high-priesthood, but was deprived of all political power, which now, quite after the plans of the Pharisees, was vested in an aristocracy. Judea was divided into five districts, at the head of each of which was the council of its chief city,—Jerusalem, Gadara, Amathus, Jericho, Sepphoris.

These councils were primarily courts (sanhedrins), but in addition to their judicial functions probably had charge of the taxes and local affairs, and were subject to the proconsul of Syria.

The feelings with which a proud people thus saw a national future suddenly disappear, a dynasty removed, and a new master established, appear in part in the bitter comment of Josephus upon the Asmonean house, but even more in the Psalms of the Pharisees, or as they are better known, the Psalms of Solomon. In them appear alike the Pharisees’ contempt for the Asmonean house, righteous indignation at its disloyalty to its sacred office, sorrow for the miseries of the nation, and complete assurance that in the death of Pompey God was punishing the instrument of his wrath. Along with the political feeling there ran a passionate moral indignation. Divine punishment awaited the hypocrite and sinner, but justification and help the righteous. In addition, the new conditions so unfavorable to any political career made the study of the Thorah a matter of course. “Love work, hate authority, and do not press thyself upon the great”, was the advice of Shemaiah, the successor of Simon ben Shetach, and from this time begins a new succession of great teachers of scribisin, who were almost without exception, members of the Pharisaic society.

With this transformation there went of necessity the end of political struggles between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Neither could now hope for victory over the other and were at one in their hatred of the Romans. Yet each still pursued its own ends, and in the region of religion, at least, their old conflict. The Pharisee grew more intense in his search for righteousness in accordance with the oral law, the Sadducee grew more content to point out the weaknesses of his opponent, to annoy him by subtle questions, and to await stoically the decrees of Providence. To each alike God seemed to grow farther away. If the Sadducee introduced a mediatory Wisdom, the Pharisee saw his God only at the end of an interminable succession of duties, and represented on earth by his word (memra; bath qol). Righteousness became increasingly dependent upon rabbinical learning—a possession possible only to the aristocracy of the schools. God himself became a rabbi, read every Sabbath in the Bible, and became entangled in an all embracing scholasticism.

The Messiah of the Psalms of the Pharisees.

Yet, through this arid legalism bred of thought that could not deal with politics, there ran a genuinely spiritual hope. Sick at heart of all attempts to found a political kingdom, the faith of Pharisaism looked more eagerly for the coming of King Messiah. The misery of the days that stirred the indignation of the writer of the Psalms of the Pharisees, brought with it also the lesson that God’s kingdom must be something other than that of the Asmoneans. From this conviction there burst the splendid vision of a new kingdom of saints:  

“And a righteous king and taught of God is he that reigneth over them.

And there shall be no iniquity in his days in their midst; for all shall be holy and their king is the Lord Messiah.

For he shall not put his trust in horse and rider and bow; nor shall he multiply unto himself gold and silver for war; nor by ships shall he gather confidence for the day of battle.

The Lord himself is his king, and the hope of him that is strong in the hope of God.

And he shall have mercy upon all nations that come to him in fear.

He himself also is pure from sin, so that he may rule a mighty people, and rebuke princes and overthrow sinners, by the might of his word.

And who can stand up against him? He is mighty in his works and strong in the fear of God,

Tending the flocks of the Lord with faith and righteousness; and he shall suffer none to faint in their pasture”.

Henceforth the Messianic hope in the hearts of many Pharisees grew less political, and in its stead there is to be seen a desperate belief that the new and glorious kingdom must await the triumph of the Law and the resurrection of the dead. That this eschatological hope was not the hope of the people at large, goes without saying. That it could not steady a people under extreme provocation was, unfortunately, also to appear.

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF ANTIPATER

HISTORY OF THE JEWS