Jerusalem: The Biography

Antiochus progressed back to Antioch, where he celebrated his flawed victories with a festival. Gold-armoured Scythian horsemen, Indian elephants, gladiators and Nisaean horses with gold bridles paraded through the capital, followed by young athletes with gilded crowns, a thousand oxen for sacrifice, floats bearing statues, and women spraying perfume on to the crowds. Gladiators fought in the circuses and fountains ran red with wine while the king entertained a thousand guests at his palace. The Madman supervised everything, riding up and down the procession, ushering in guests, joking with his comedians. At the end of the banquet, the comedians carried in a figure swaddled in cloth. They laid it on the ground where, at the first notes of a symphonia, it suddenly threw off its coverings and out burst the king naked and dancing.

Far to the south of this delirious debauch, Antiochus’ generals were enforcing his persecutions. In the village of Modin, near Jerusalem, an old priest called Mattathias, father of five sons, was ordered to make the sacrifice to Antiochus to prove he was no longer a Jew, but he replied: ‘If all the nations of the King’s dominion hearken unto him yet will I and my sons walk in the Covenant of our fathers.’ When another Jew stepped forward to make the sacrifice, Mattathias’ ‘zeal was kindled, his veins trembled’, and, drawing his sword, he killed first the traitor, then Antiochus’ general, and pulled down the altar. ‘Whoever maintaineth the Covenant,’ he said, ‘let him come forth after me.’ The old man and his five sons fled into the mountains, joined by extremely pious Jews known as the Righteous – Hasidim. Initially they were so pious that they observed the Sabbath even (disastrously) in battle: the Greeks presumably tried to fight all their battles on Saturdays.

Mattathias died soon afterwards, but his third son Judah, assuming command in the hills around Jerusalem, defeated three Syrian armies in a row. Antiochus initially did not take the Jewish revolt seriously for he marched east to conquer Iraq and Persia, ordering his viceroy Lysias to crush the rebels. But Judah defeated him too.

Even Antiochus, campaigning in faraway Persia, realized that Judah’s victories threatened his empire, and cancelled the terror. The Jews, he wrote to the pro-Greek members of the Sanhedrin, could ‘use their own proper meats and observe their own laws’. But he was too late, and soon afterwards Antiochus Epiphanes suffered an epileptic fit and fell dead from his chariot.³⁰ Judah had already earned the heroic moniker that would give its name to a dynasty: the Hammer.

THE MACCABEES

164–66 BC

JUDAH THE HAMMER

In the winter of 164 BC, Judah the Hammer conquered all of Judaea and Jerusalem apart from Antiochus’ newly built Acra Fortress. When Judah saw the Temple overgrown and deserted, he lamented. He burned incense, rededicated the Holy of Holies, and on 14 December presided as sacrifices resumed. In the ravaged city, there was a shortage of oil to light the candelabra in the Temple, but somehow the candles never went out. The liberation and resanctification of the Temple are still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah – the Dedication.

The Hammer – Maccabeus^* in Latin – campaigned across the Jordan and sent his brother Simon to rescue the Jews in Galilee. In Judah’s absence, the Jews were defeated. The Maccabee struck back, captured Hebron and Edom and smashed the pagan shrine in Ashdod before besieging the Acra in Jerusalem. But the Seleucid regent defeated the Maccabees at Beth-Zacharia, south of Bethlehem, then besieged Jerusalem, until he had to withdraw to face a revolt in Antioch. He therefore granted the Jews the right to live ‘after their own laws’ and worship in their Temple. Four centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, Jewish independence was restored.

But the Jews were not yet safe. The Seleucids, beset by civil wars, diminished but still formidable, were determined to crush the Jews and retain Palestine. This vicious, complicated war lasted twenty years. There is no need to recount every detail, with its many similarly named Seleucid pretenders, but there were moments when the Maccabees were close to annihilation. Yet this endlessly resourceful, gifted family always managed to recover and strike back.

The Acra Fortress, overlooking the Temple, remained to torment the divided Jerusalem. As the trumpets blew and the priests again performed the sacrifices, Acra’s pagan mercenaries and renegade Jews sometimes ‘rushed out suddenly’, says Josephus, ‘and destroyed those going up to the Temple’. The Jerusalemites executed the high priest, Menelaos, ‘the cause of all evils’, and elected a new one.^* But the Seleucids rallied again. Their general Nicanor recaptured Jerusalem. Pointing at the altar, the Greek issued a threat: ‘unless Judah and his host be now delivered in my hands, I will burn upthis House.’