Deborah Maccoby Tutors Bar Mitzvah Boy Benny Shapiro on Jewish History
THE BEN SHAPIRO VERSION OF ANCIENT JEWISH HISTORY: 3: THE HASMONEAN DYNASTY
In support of his claim that “Israel is historically Jewish territory”, Ben Shapiro states: “The Hasmonean Dynasty was founded in 166 BC”.
It is puzzling that Mr Shapiro chooses this date, because 167/166 BCE is the date of the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt of Judaea against the Syrian Greek Empire, also known as the Seleucid Empire – a rebellion that provides the historical background to the Jewish festival of Chanukah (which started this year on the evening of Thursday, December 7). The Maccabean Revolt, led by Judas Maccabeus and his band of brothers, began in 167/166 BCE and lasted, through various phases, till 142 BCE, when Judaea gained its independence.
The Maccabees became war-leaders in 167/166 BCE; but it is generally agreed that the Hasmonean Dynasty (named after an ancestor called Hasmon) was founded in 141 BCE by Judas’s brother, Simon (Judas himself was killed in battle in 161 BCE). To quote the Jewish Encyclopedia:
The high-priestly and princely dignity of the Hasmoneans was founded by a resolution, adopted in Sept., 141 B. C., at a large assembly “of the priests and the people and of the elders of the land, to the effect that Simon should be their leader and high priest forever, until there should arise a faithful prophet” (I Macc. xiv. 41). Recognition of the new dynasty by the Romans was accorded by the Senate about 139 B. C. when the delegation of Simon was in Rome. Therefore, from a historic point of view, one can speak of a Hasmonean dynasty only as beginning with Simon.¹
So Mr Shapiro has once again got the date wrong. But I believe this is more than a simple error of fact. Mr Shapiro has deliberately mixed up the Maccabean Revolt with the Hasmonean Dynasty, to try to make out that the two are more or less the same thing. Of course, they are (literally) related; but the two are diametrically opposed.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE MACCABEAN REVOLT
To bring out the difference between the Maccabean Revolt and the Hasmonean Dynasty, we need first some very brief historical background.
In the early sixth century BCE, the Southern Kingdom of Judah was conquered and destroyed as a kingdom by the Babylonians, and part of the population of Judah was deported to Babylon. But during the sixth century BCE, the Babylonian Empire was defeated and taken over by the Persian Empire; and at the end of the sixth century BCE, Cyrus the Great, the King of Persia, allowed the Jews to return to Palestine.
Many Jews stayed in Babylon, where they had established a prosperous community with a flourishing culture – Babylon was the New York of its day. But a contingent of Jewish families went back. They settled in a very small area around Jerusalem known as Judaea; and here they rebuilt the Temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed. The Jews concentrated on their rich internal religious development – strongly influenced by the experience of having been in Babylon – and avoided participation in the political events of the time. Since the vast majority of the Kings of Israel and Judah had “done evil in the sight of the Lord”² (to which evil the Jews attributed the destructions of Israel and Judah), the Judaeans decided to do without Kings. Judaea was a republican theocracy governed by Priests and Scribes.
In the second century BCE, Palestine came under the rule of the Seleucid Empire. (Alexander the Great of Macedonia had, in his turn, defeated the Persian Empire; after his death in 323 BCE, his vast Macedonian-Greek Empire was split up; and Palestine came first under the mild and tolerant rule of the Ptolemies of Egypt, but later under the much harsher rule of the Seleucids.) One of the Seleucid rulers, the mad Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes, who identified himself with Zeus, was determined to convert the Jews to the Greek religion by force. Antiochus marched on Jerusalem with his army, desecrated the Temple, set up a shrine within it to Zeus (i.e., himself), on whose altar pigs were sacrificed, and issued decrees forcing the Jews to abandon Judaism. The outraged people rose in rebellion, led by Judas Maccabeus and his band of brothers.
THE HASMONEAN DYNASTY
In 104 BCE, Simon’s grandson, Aristobulus I, “put a diadem on his head”³ (in the words of the first century CE Jewish historian Josephus) and declared himself King of Judaea. But, just as the Kings of Israel and Judah had been challenged by the Prophets, so the Kings of Judaea were now challenged by the successors to the Prophets, the Rabbis, who had been slowly emerging as a group⁴ and had become the real authority among the people. As the Hasmoneans turned into a royal family, the Priests tended to side with the aristocracy and royal family, while the Rabbis had become the leaders of the people.⁵
The Rabbis had supported the Maccabean Revolt and the High Priesthood and Governorship of Simon, but they were bitterly opposed to the assumption of royalty by the Hasmoneans. It is forbidden in Jewish Law to combine the High Priesthood with the Monarchy.⁶ And in any case, the Rabbis didn’t like Kings. Relations between the Rabbis and people, on the one side, and the Hasmonean Dynasty, on the other, deteriorated, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, the brother and successor of Aristobulus I, to the point of civil war, during which many Jews went to fight for the Seleucid Empire. To quote the historian Simon Schama:
The indignation turned lethal, opening a murderous six-year Jewish civil war (not always sufficiently registered in popular histories of the Maccabean period), in which thousands of disaffected Jews joined the army of the Seleucid Demetrius (so recently the enemy), in the hopes of overthrowing the iniquitous Hasmoneans. Fifty thousand were slaughtered in the bloody conflict, the climax of which was the rout of Jannaeus by Demetrius and his Jewish auxiliaries. But his [i.e. Jannaeus’s] throne and state were saved by the usual sudden need of the Greek ruler to retreat abruptly back north and east, allowing Jannaeus to return to Judaea and inflict a horrifying retribution on the disloyal. His revenge culminated in a mass crucifixion of eight hundred of the Jews he judged most guilty in front of the king-priest while he was feasting “with his concubines”, looking on as the wives and children had their throats slit before their crucified husbands and fathers.⁷
This is the Hasmonean Dynasty that Mr Shapiro cites in support of his claim that “Israel is historically Jewish land”. It is true – and this is precisely why Mr Shapiro brings in the Hasmonean Dynasty – that the Hasmonean Kings greatly expanded the territory of Judaea. They never conquered the whole land, but took many neighbouring territories, including Iturea and Idumea, the inhabitants of which areas the Hasmoneans forced to convert to Judaism (including forced circumcisions for men).⁸ So, ironically, the Hasmonean Dynasty turned into the same kind of tyrannical regime against which Judas Maccabeus had fought. Still more ironically, from the Idumeans, who had been forcibly converted and circumcised, came the nemesis of the Hasmonean Dynasty: the Herodian Dynasty. The Romans conquered and occupied Jerusalem in 67 BCE and installed, as client-kings, the Herodian Dynasty – who were originally Idumeans -- in place of the Hasmoneans. Herod the Great had most of the Hasmoneans put to death (including his wife, the beautiful Hasmonean princess Mariamne, whom he suspected of unfaithfulness). The Hasmonean Dynasty had lasted just 75 years.
THE RABBIS AND CHANUKAH
Such was the animosity that the Rabbis felt against the Hasmonean Dynasty that they left out the two Books of Maccabees from the Hebrew Bible (these two books were preserved in the Apocrypha, which was compiled by Christians). In the liturgy for Chanukah composed by the Rabbis in the first centuries CE, the festival celebrates, not the victories achieved by the Maccabees, but a miracle that the Rabbis claimed took place during the re-dedication of the Temple.
According to this story (which is not mentioned in the two Books of Maccabees), the Seleucids had polluted all the flasks of holy olive oil that were used to light the Menorah, the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple – all except one small flask. It took eight days to prepare more holy olive oil; but, according to the legend, that small flask lasted eight days. In celebration of the miracle, the festival lasts eight days; and each family lights eight candles (preferably olive oil cups rather than wax candles) in a candlestick called a menorah; one candle the first night, two on the second, and so on.
In addition, the Rabbis downplayed the festival of Chanukah as much as they could without abolishing it; it could not be abolished because a) the historical memory of the Maccabean Revolt was still strong in the early centuries CE; b) Chanukah is based (like Christmas) on an ancient pagan winter solstice festival of lights, celebrating the birth of the new Sun; this answers to a basic human need. But Chanukah is essentially a very minor festival; in contrast to most other Jewish festivals, work is permitted on all the eight days (except the Sabbath). Chanukah has only become prominent as a Jewish alternative to Christmas.
To bring the rabbis’ anti-militaristic message home, the haftorah -- reading from the Prophets – in the synagogue service on the Sabbath during Chanukah is a passage from the sixth century BCE Prophet Zechariah (who prophesied at about the time the Jews returned from Babylon) about a vision in which an angel tells him: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts” [“Hosts” here means “hosts of angels”] (4: 6).
CONCLUSION
Mr Shapiro has once again got the date wrong. But, in my view, he did so deliberately, in order to associate the Hasmonean Dynasty with the heroism of the Maccabean Revolt. It is historically true that the Hasmonean Dynasty greatly expanded its territory; but, by bringing in the Hasmoneans to support his claim that “Israel” (by which he appears to mean the whole land even though – as pointed out in Part 1, the whole land has never been called Israel) “is historically Jewish territory”, Mr Shapiro implicitly condoned violent conquest and forced conversions and circumcisions. He also implicitly endorsed the corrupt and cruel Hasmonean Dynasty, which the Rabbis and the people hated and regarded as un-Jewish. The Maccabean Revolt was a genuine struggle of a people for political, cultural and religious freedom. The irony that Israel is destroying the political, cultural and religious identity of the Palestinians – indeed, going even further now by practising ethnic cleansing and genocide -- while celebrating Chanukah is obvious. The Hasmonean Dynasty betrayed not only the Maccabean Revolt, but the vision of a just society, without kings, nationalism, and militarism, that had inspired the Jews who returned from Babylon. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit” – a prophetic warning ignored both by the Hasmonean Dynasty and the modern State of Israel.
e. g. 1 Kings, 15: 26.
Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII.11.1.
See R. Travers Herford, The Pharisees (1924: Boston, 1962), pp. 28-46.
See Josephus, op. cit., XIII.10.2: Josephus writes that the Rabbis (known as Pharisees) “have the multitude on their side”, whereas their theological opponents, the Sadducees, who were mostly Priests, “are able to persuade none but the rich”. The Sadducees regarded the first five books of the Bible (known as the Torah) as closed and finished, but the Pharisees interpreted them according to an unwritten tradition known as the Oral Tradition: “The Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observations by succession from their fathers which are not written in the Laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them , and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. And concerning these things it is that great disputes and differences have arisen among them, while the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and have not the populace obsequious to them, but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side”.
According to Genesis 49: 10, a King can only come from the tribe of Judah. According to Numbers 3: 6-9, a High Priest can only come from the tribe of Levi.
Simon Schama, op. cit., pp. 126-127. See also Josephus, op. cit., XIII.14.2.
Ibid., XIII.9.1 and 11.3.
Judge says Mahmood Kahlid must be released. Just announced.