Jerusalem: The Biography

The first instinct of the Jewish grandees was to race each other to Antioch to bid for power in Jerusalem. The crisis started with a family feud about money and influence. When High Priest Onias III made his bid to the king, his brother Jason offered an extra eighty talents and returned as high priest with a programme to rebrand Jerusalem as a Greek polis: he renamed her Antioch-Hierosolyma (Antioch-in-Jerusalem) in honour of the king, downgraded the Torah and built a Greek gymnasium probably on the western hill facing the Temple. Jason’s reforms were quite popular. Young Jews were painfully keen to appear fashionable at the gymnasium, where they exercised naked except for a Greek hat. Somehow they managed to reverse their circumcisions, the mark of the covenant with God, giving the appearance of restoring their foreskins, surely a triumph of fashion over comfort. But Jason himself was outbid for Jerusalem: he sent his henchman Menelaos to Antioch to deliver his tribute. But instead the thuggish Menelaos stole the Temple funds, outbid Jason and bought the high priesthood, even though he lacked the required Zadokite lineage. Menelaos seized Jerusalem. When the Jerusalemites sent delegates to the king to protest, he executed them, and he even allowed Menelaos to arrange the murder of the ex-High Priest Onias.

Antiochus was most concerned to raise funds to reconquer his empire – and he was about to pull off an astonishing coup: the uniting of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. In 170 BC Antiochus conquered Egypt, but the Jerusalemites undermined his triumph, rebelling under the deposed Jason. The Madman marched back across Sinai, and stormed Jerusalem deporting 10,000 Jews.^* Accompanied by his henchman Menelaos, he entered the Holy of Holies, an unforgivable sacrilege, and stole its priceless artefacts – the golden altar, the candlestick of light and the shewbread table. Worse, Antiochus ordered the Jews to sacrifice to him as God-manifest, testing the loyalty of the many Jews who were probably attracted to Greek culture – and then, his coffers filled with Temple gold, he rushed back to Egypt to crush any resistance.

Antiochus liked to play the Roman, sporting a toga and holding mock elections in Antioch, while he secretly rebuilt his banned fleet and elephant corps. But Rome, determined to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, would not tolerate Antiochus’ new empire. When the Roman envoy Popillius Laenas met the king in Alexandria, he brashly drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, demanding he agree to withdraw from Egypt before stepping out of it – the origin of the phrase ‘draw a line in the sand’. Antiochus, ‘groaning and in bitterness of heart’, bowed before Roman power.

Meanwhile the Jews refused to sacrifice to Antiochus the God. To ensure that Jerusalem would not rebel a third time, the Madman decided to eradicate the Jewish religion itself.

ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES:

ANOTHER ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

In 167, Antiochus captured Jerusalem by a ruse on the Sabbath, slaughtered thousands, destroyed her walls and built a new citadel, the Acra. He handed the city over to a Greek governor and the collaborator Menelaos.

Then Antiochus forbade any sacrifices or services in the Temple, banned the Sabbath, the Law and circumcision on pain of death, and ordered the Temple to be soiled with pigs’ flesh. On 6 December, the Temple was consecrated as a shrine to the state god, Olympian Zeus – the very abomination of desolation. A sacrifice was made to Antiochus the God-King, probably in his presence, at the altar outside the Holy of Holies. ‘The Temple was filled with riot and revelling by Gentiles who dallied with harlots,’ fornicating ‘in the holy places’. Menelaos acquiesced in this, people processed through the Temple wearing ivy crowns, and, after prayers, even many of the priests descended to watch the naked games at the gymnasium.

Those practising the Sabbath were burned alive or suffered a gruesome Greek import: crucifixion. An old man perished rather than eat pork; women who circumcised their children were thrown with their babies off the walls of Jerusalem. The Torah was torn to shreds and burned publicly: everyone found with a copy was put to death. Yet the Torah, like the Temple, was worth more than life. These deaths created a new cult of martyrdom and stimulated expectation of the Apocalypse. ‘Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and come to everlasting life’ in Jerusalem, evil would fail, and goodness triumph with the arrival of a Messiah – and a Son of Man, invested with eternal glory.^*