I. The Story
My childhood memories of Chanukah* are suffused with feelings of warmth and certainty, as my brother and sister, our parents, and I would gather around the Chanukiah (the Chanukah menorah) to light the festive lights for eight nights. We would chant the blessing over the candles (“… v’tsivanu l’hadlik ner shel Chanukah”) as we passed the shamash (the helper candle) from one wick to the next.
We would sing “Ma’oz Tzur” together, and then sit down to a meal of fried delights built around my mother’s spectacular latkes with sour cream and homemade applesauce. Afterward, as we enjoyed a dessert of sufganiyot and the chocolate-coated halvah that my father bought at the Kosher Quality Bakery, he would tell us the story of Chanukah:.†
In 167 BCE, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the ruler of the Greek Seleucid Empire, the vast successor state to Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic realm that stretched from the Levant to the Hindu Kush, marched his troops into the Jewish homeland in what was then Ceole Syria. Demanding that his Jewish subjects worship him as a god (the epithet Epiphanes means “god made manifest”), he pillaged the Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to himself with the sacrifice of a pig, defiling the altar.
Antiochus Epiphanes outlawed circumcision, a practice central to Jewish belief and law as the mark of God’s covenant with his people, on pain of death, and sent his troops into the countryside to enforce compliance with public rituals in every town and village. When a Greek official demanded that a Kohen (a Temple priest) named Matitiyahu ben Yohanan make a sacrifice to the god Antiochus Epiphanes in Modi’in, a village about 20 miles outside of Jerusalem, the kohen drew his sword and dispatched him.
Matitiyahu and his sons Judah, Eleazar, Simon, Yohanan, and Jonathan escaped into the Judean hills where they would lead a resistance movement. Judah’s epithet was “The Hammer” – ha-Makabi in Hebrew – and collectively, they became known as the Maccabees. They were soon joined by others, as the entire Jewish community rose up as one against Antiochus and his allies among Hellenistic Jews seduced by Greek culture and willing to play fast-and-loose with the traditions of their faith.
The turning point came less than three years later at the Battle of Beth Zur, where the Maccabees won a decisive victory over Antiochus Epiphanes’ army, marched into Jerusalem, cleansed and rededicated the Temple. However, they found only one jar of sealed, pure oil – only enough to keep the eternal flame of the Temple menorah lit for a single day. Yet, miraculously, the oil burned for eight days: long enough to keep the menorah alight until a new supply of holy oil could be acquired.
“And that,” my father said to us as we listened raptly, “is why we light the Chanukah menorah for eight nights.”
I never tired of the story, no matter how many times that my father told it – and he told it in the same way every year. It was a story of courage, in which my people stood up to a venal oppressor to defend their way of life and their traditions and, in the process, secure their independence. I was a small, bespectacled, bookish child; we were one of the only Jewish families in our town west of Montreal, and I was repeatedly taunted and bullied at my school, which was then part of a Protestant schoolboard. I remember being called out for my difference, and once even beaten-up around Easter-time for being a “Christ-killer.”
The story of the heroic Maccabees who fought one of the greatest empires in the world and won gave me hope and, more importantly, made me proud to be a Jew at a time of year flooded with Christmas trees, angels, and carols about the birth of “Christ our savior.” It made being different, the only Jew adrift in a Christian sea, a little bit more bearable. I listened to the story of the Maccabees through the filter of my own experience as an outsider, and that gave it a special meaning for me.
That is part of the reason why a minor festival with no scriptural sanction has assumed such great importance for Jews almost 2,200 years later: we have come to see the Maccabee myth through the lens of our subsequent history and collective experience. The narrative of the Jewish people since 70 CE has been one of almost continuous oppression and calamity, running though the brutal oppression that followed the second Judean Rebellion in 135 CE, the dispersion into and ghettos of Europe and humiliation at the hands of our Christian neighbors, the expulsion from Spain, and unremitting antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust.
For almost two millennia, we have viewed the events of the mid-second century BCE through that lens and narrated the Chanukah myth as the story of an oppressed people denied their independence by a brutal, antisemitic power, who stood united and fought valiantly to throw off the yoke of tyranny. The problem is that it is a myth. While the traditional story has provided us with comfort and a sense of unity for generations, it vastly simplifies and elides the complexity of our history – a richness which, on closer look, can offer new and productive ways to narrate Jewishness in the 21st century.
II. The Sources
Part of the issue is a problem of sources. We really don’t know much about the details of Maccabean War apart from the accounts the First and Second Books of Maccabees, and Josephus’ The Wars of the Jews and The Antiquities of the Jews. Virtually all of the Chanukah narrative comes from these sources and they parallel each other very closely. The author of 2 Maccabees claims that his book is a summary of a much longer work in Greek by the late-second century Hellenistic Jewish historian Jason of Cyrene, but that work is lost.
None of these sources are contemporary with the events they describe; it is highly unlikely that First and Second Maccabees were written much less than 40 years after the events, and Josephus’s Wars and Antiquities date to more than two centuries later. Moreover, there are good reasons to be skeptical about 1 Maccabees, which appears to have been the principal source for the other works. Almost certainly written sometime between the end of the reign of John Hyrcanus – the son and successor of the Maccabean hero Simon Thassi – and the reigns of the first kings of the Hasmonean dynasty (Judah Aristobulus and Alexander Jannaeus) most historians regard it as propaganda meant to shore-up the legitimacy of the Hasmonean regime.
“The dynastic inclination of I Maccabees is clear,” the distinguished biblical scholar Uriel Rappaport notes in The Oxford Bible Commentary. “It wholeheartedly supports the Hasmoneans, and especially Simon’s branch. Former rebels are not mentioned and martyrs are appreciated, but their example was not followed up.”
This does not mean that the account in 1 Maccabees is necessarily inaccurate or factually wrong, but it was composed with an explicit, polemical intent at a time when writing history typically had more to do with celebrating and legitimizing authority than objectively documenting the past, and that makes historians cautious. This was the “official” Hasmonean story, subsequently reinforced in its repetition in the later sources. We don’t know what additional details Jason of Cyrene might have added in his much more expansive, though lost work, but the narrative of 2 Maccabees cleaves so closely to 1 Maccabees that it is clear that Jason followed the same model, or at least employed the same sources.
It would help if there were other contemporary sources from outside of the Hasmonean state and the broader Jewish community that could shed some light on the Maccabean War, but these do not really exist. Writing at about the same time as the events described in 1 Maccabees, the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-118 BCE), does refer to Antiochus Epiphanes’ attack on the Temple, but offers no details about his policy with regard to his Jewish subjects, or about the Maccabean resistance.
Virtually every subsequent mention of the events surrounding Maccabean War either cites Polybius, or repeats the narrative of 1 Maccabees. For example, the Roman historian Tacitus (56-120 CE) references the Seleucid Emperor’s anti-Jewish program in his Historia, but only in passing. Moreover, he was undoubtedly familiar with Josephus’ Antiquities, and incorporated that narrative (based on 1 Maccabees) in his own work. Writing in the wake of the First Judean Rebellion of 66-73 CE, and a supporter of Emperor Titus, the Roman general who crushed the rebellion, Tacitus approved of the Seleucid policies: “King Antiochus endeavored to abolish Jewish superstition and to introduce Greek civilization; the war with the Parthians, however, prevented his improving this basest of peoples…” (Historiae 5.8)
Both Livy (c. 64 BCE – 17 CE) and Appian (95-165 CE) devote a fair amount of space to Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid Empire, and its relations and conflicts with Egypt and Parthia, but they are both silent about his dealings with the Jews in Ceole Syria. Like Tacitus, both were Roman historians and privileged Roman interests, but they were both writing at a time when Judea was central to Roman interests – Livy in the late 1st century BCE, when Judea was a central player in the Civil Wars, and Appian was writing in the immediate aftermath of the brutal Second Judean War. His silence, in particular, speaks volumes.
Indeed, the silence of the non-Jewish sources is significant; if the Maccabees had taken on the Seleucid Empire and won, as the traditional narrative insists, then one might expect it to have been headline news throughout the Mediterranean world. It beggars the imagination that a superpower’s humiliating defeat at the hands of a tiny, subject people would pass without comment, especially considering how unfavorably most classical historians regard Antiochus Epiphanes.
It suggests that there is both less and more to the Chanukah story than we have thought. What we don’t know about the Maccabean War and the events leading up to it is a vast narrative void into which later generations have imputed their aspirations, myths, and more than a little wishful thinking. What we can know of the real story must be teased from the history around the myth.
III. Hellenization
At the core of the Chanukah narrative is the idea that the Jews of Ceole Syria rose up en-masse to defeat Greek power and resist the pernicious influence of “Hellenism” that threatened to overwhelm Jewish traditions and beliefs. The Maccabean War was, Solomon Zeitlin wrote in the introduction to Sidney Tedesche’s translation of 1 Maccabees, nothing less than a question of “cultural survival.” In this thinking, the meeting between the Jews and the Greek world that began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Levant in 332 BCE was an existential conflict from the start. “It was not the ordinary meeting of two peoples, or of two kinds of civilization,” the historian Simon Dubnow wrote in 1893. “It was a clash between two theories of life that stood abruptly opposed to each other, were, indeed, mutually exclusive.”
In the traditional narrative, Antiochus Epiphanes is the agent of Hellenism and of the process of Hellenization. “Then the king ordered all in his kingdom to become one people, and that everyone should forsake his own laws… Even many from Israel consented to his worship and sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.” The king ordered the Jews “to build high places, and sacred groves and idols, to sacrifice swine’s flesh and unclean cattle, to leave their sons uncircumcised, and to defile themselves with every kind of uncleanliness and profanation so that they might forget the Law and change all the ordinances.” (1 Maccabees 1:41-49)
The evil king, according to the narrative, initiated a campaign of forced assimilation, with non-compliance punished by death. The Maccabees rose up to defend their faith and culture from the violent imposition of Hellenism, a “theory of life” utterly incompatible with Judaism. At least that’s the story. But even if Antiochus Epiphanes was the kind of mad king who might do something like this – that is, in fact, the portrait that emerges from contemporary Greek sources – it drastically misrepresents what Hellenism was, and how we know Hellenization occurred.
The historian Lester Grabbe notes that, far from being an innovation imposed on the Jews by a tyrant in the mid-second century BCE, Hellenization was a long and complex process of cultural borrowing and exchange that had already been underway for 170 years by the time Antiochus Epiphanes was basileus of the Seleucid empire. Following Alexander’s conquests, the Greek language became the language of government as far east as Bactria, and the new rulers in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic successor states created institutions on the Greek model wherever they founded a new city called Alexandria, Philadelphia, or Antioch.
The new imperial authorities were essentially the old authorities – Persian in the Seleucid Empire, Egyptian in the Ptolemaic Empire – dressed in Greek clothes and speaking Greek with a Macedonian accent, superimposed on top of the old administrative divisions and practices. So, the new empires retained the Persian and Egyptian practices of delegating power to regional leaders, now calling them ethnarchs rather than satraps, and local government was centered on the Greek administrative unit of the polis.
The political process inevitably had a cultural expression. “As an analogy,” Grabbe writes, “one might consider the Anglicization of India in the nineteenth century or the Westernization of Japan in the post-World War II era.” A person might thus have been culturally Hellenized in the same way that someone in postwar Europe might have been Americanized by wearing blue jeans, drinking Coca-Cola, and listening to rock n roll.
Hellenistic culture thus had enormous social cachet, particularly among the ruling classes left largely in place following the Alexandrine conquest. Proficiency in the Greek language and the ability to interact with Greek-speaking officials was a prerequisite for political office, and that invariably came along with at least some Greek education. By the mid-second century BCE, virtually anyone in a position of authority or prestige in the Mediterranean world – even Jews – was to some extent Hellenized.
None of this was new to the Jews; we had, after all been here before. In the post-exilic period under Persian rule (516-332 BCE), Jewish culture and beliefs had come under Persian influence in a process that could be called “Persification.” Jews in the Persian province of Yehud Medinata (from which they acquired the name “Yehudi”) adopted Aramaic, the Achaemenid empire’s lingua franca, as their own, incorporated Persian imagery into their iconography, and Zoroastrian religious ideas like Ahriman – the force of darkness, the “adversary” or ha-satan – in religious scriptures like the Book of Job.
While Grabbe notes that the life of the average Jew in Ceole Syria was “not strikingly affected by the coming of the Greeks,” and the “poor peasant continued to work the land, only noting that he had a new landlord or had to pay taxes to a new regime,” the upper classes and, above all, those Jews – probably the majority– who lived in the diaspora communities of Egypt, Cyrene (North Africa), Asia Minor, and even Greece itself, were immersed in a Hellenistic culture. They took Greek names, like Jason of Cyrene and the late-first century BCE philosopher Philo of Alexandria, and spoke Greek in their everyday lives. Indeed, the oldest extant manuscript of the Torah, the Septuagint, is in Greek, and not Hebrew or Aramaic, and was, according to Grabbe, “created for Jews whose home was the Hellenistic world and the Hellenistic language.”
The Jewish ruling class was deeply invested in Hellenistic government, initially under Ptolemaic and then Seleucid dominion after Epiphanes’ father Antiochus III the Great captured Ceole Syria at the beginning of the second century BCE. Aristocratic families like the Tobiads got rich as tax-farmers collecting payments from Jewish landowners and peasants, and skimming some off the top before sending the rest to their imperial masters, whether they were in Alexandria or Antioch. Day-to-day life was governed by the Temple priesthood, and the Kohen Gadol (high priest) was a functionary of the Hellenistic king.
Josephus reports that one of the Hellenistic offenses that precipitated the Maccabean uprising was the request made by the Kohen Gadol Menelaus, supported by the Tobiads, to Antiochus Epiphanes for permission to build a Greek-style gymnasium in Jerusalem. “And when he had given them leave, they also hid the circumcision of their genitals; that even when they were naked they might appear to be Greeks.” (Antiquities 12.5)
It is difficult to assess how controversial the gymnasium would have been at the time. There is no evidence that it was ever actually built, and there are strong indications that participation in the gymnasium, though perhaps uncommon, was not unknown among the Jews of the diaspora. Josephus reports that the first Seleucid basileus Seleucus I Nicator granted Jews full citizenship “in those cities which he built in Asia, and in the lower Syria, and in the metropolis itself, Antioch; and gave them privileges equal to those of the Macedonians and Greeks, who were the inhabitants: in so much that these prcivileges continue to this very day.” (Antiquities 12.3) Implicitly, those privileges would have come with participation in the gymnasium.
Jewish society in Ceole Syria in the second century was both extremely hierarchical and highly stratified. Most Jews were Aramaic speaking, illiterate tenant-farmers.‡ They had little contact with government, except when their landlords extracted taxes to pass on to the tax-farmers and, since Judaism was at the time a sacrificial temple cult located in Jerusalem, little more contact with religious authorities. Grabbe writes that the reality was that “visits to the temple were very infrequent and, for many of the Diaspora population, probably non-existent.”
Even if the Jewish ruling class, consisting of the aristocracy, the large landowners, and above all the Temple priesthood, were largely Hellenized by the second century BCE, it was a spectacle that few Jews would have seen or cared about, or even known that it might violate the Law which was written in a document that they couldn’t read in a language (Hebrew) that they did not speak. And it is hard to imagine why a powerful king like Antiochus Epiphanes would have allocated resources to forcing peasants in a tiny corner of his empire to comply with his Hellenization policies.
IV. Persecution
The ancient sources portray Antiochus Epiphanes as just the kind of tyrant who would try to force people to worship him. “Antiochus Epiphanes, nicknamed from his actions Epimanes (the Madman), would sometimes steal from the court, avoiding his attendants, and appear roaming wildly about in any chance part of the city with one or two companions,” Polybius wrote. (Polybius 26.1) Writing of the king’s encounter with the Roman consul Gaius Popillius Laenus in Egypt, where the latter drew the “line in the sand,” Appian says that Antiochus “was terrified and withdrew from the country, and robbed the temple of Venus Elymais; then died of a wasting disease, leaving a son nine years of age.” (The Syrian Wars 11.61) According to Polybius he sacked the Temple in Jerusalem on his hasty retreat from Egypt in order to meet the mounting costs of maintaining his empire.
There is little doubt that Antiochus Epiphanes, like most Greeks, had little sympathy or affection for the Jews. In the first century BCE, Diodorus of Sicily (c. 90-30 BCE) expressed the commonly-held Greek contempt for the Jews’ “misanthropic and lawless customs,” like circumcision and kashrut, and their “hatred directed against all mankind” because, despite the widespread adoption of Hellenism by Jewish elites, they resisted full assimilation. However, even if he promoted anti-Jewish policies in Ceole Syria, “and that everyone should forsake his own laws,” he was almost certainly never in a position to actually implement them.
The Seleucid empire was not a modern bureaucratic state with an administrative infrastructure that it could use to compel compliance; in fact, it had little infrastructure at all. Of the three successor kingdoms to Alexander’s empire, including Macedonian Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid empire had both the largest territory and the least-developed civil organization. On a day-to-day basis, the king’s power was delegated to ethnarchs, governors, and tax farmers, who maintained local discipline and kept wealth flowing to the palace in Antioch – at a tidy personal profit.
The king did respond personally with his direct authority to crises like border wars and rebellions, deploying a monopoly on violence exercised through a professional army on the Macedonian model. However, these military resources were extremely limited and inadequate for anything more than sporadic deployment to troubles spots.
Polybius reports that, in a grand review of his forces at the city of Daphne meant to impress the Romans, Antiochus Epiphanes mustered about 40,000 soldiers. The historian is not known for understatement but, even if this is a conservative estimate of the forces that the king had available, it would have been barely adequate to patrol and defend an empire of almost 10 million people in a territory of 400,000 square miles. Under pressure from the Parthians at his northeast frontier, frequently at war with Egypt in the south, and facing the threat of an aggressively expansionist Roman republic in the west, Antiochus Epiphanes’ resources and manpower were already spread dangerously thin. He simply did not have the means to compel the compliance of the whole Jewish population of Ceole Syria.
Moreover, there is no evidence that Antiochus Epiphanes persecuted the diaspora Jewish community elsewhere in his kingdom and there is considerable evidence that he did not. Indeed, apart from the incident at Modi’in where Matitiyahu killed the royal official, the Jewish sources report on a persecution campaign focused mostly on the Temple in Jerusalem and, presumably, its priesthood. Antiochus Epiphanes’ construction of the Acra in Jerusalem, a fortification built at a significant cost, strongly suggests that his principal interest was in keeping watch over the Temple.
That certainly would have been a wise strategy to suppress a temple cult, and it aligns with Polybius’s insistence, repeated by Josephus, that the king’s attack on Jerusalem on 25 Kislev 167 BCE was motivated, at least initially, by financial, rather than religious considerations: “That the raid of Antiochus [Epiphanes] on the temple was iniquitous, that it was impecuniosity which drove him to invade it, when he was not an open enemy, that he attacked us, his allies and friends, and that he found there nothing to deserve ridicule; these facts are attested by many sober historians. Polybius of Megalopolis, Strabo the Cappadocian, Nicolas of Damascus, Timagenes, Castor the chronicler, and Apollodorus all assert that it was impecuniosity which induced Antiochus, in violation of his treaties with the Jews, to plunder the temple with its stores of gold and silver.” (Against Apion, II)
In any event, the king himself soon departed, leaving behind, according to Josephus, a small force drawn from the pro-Seleucid faction in Jerusalem: “They put sinful people therein, men who were transgressors against the law; and they entrenched themselves in it.” (1 Maccabees 1:34) The Maccabees began an uprising against Seleucid power and, above all, other Jews: “They pursued the contemptuous ones, and the work prospered in their hands.” (1 Maccabees 2:47)
Most of the Maccabean battles reported in the Jewish sources are against Samaritans and other Jews. When Antiochus Epiphanes intervened with his army, it was for brief and inconsequential engagements with the Maccabees before quickly withdrawing due to a lack of resources, or to put out fires elsewhere in the empire. “He saw, however, that the money in his treasury had run short.” (1 Maccabees 3:29) Less than three years after the war began, the Maccabees captured Jerusalem on 25 Kislev 164 BCE, and rededicated the Temple. “No sooner was Jerusalem once more the Holy City than Antiochus died,” Josephus reports, “leaving as heir – both to his throne and to his hatred of the Jews – his son Antiochus.”
Despite this animosity, neither the new 9-year-old king Antiochus V Eupator or Demetrius I Soter, who succeeded him two years later, appear to have continued Antiochus Epiphanes’ persecution, even though the latter defeated and killed Judah Maccabee in 160 BCE. Indeed, Judah’s brother, successor as leader of the Maccabees, and Kohen Gadol Jonathan Apphus ultimately entered into an admittedly uneasy alliance with Soter’s son Demetrius II Nicator in his conflict with Egypt.
While the wars continued after the Maccabees’ capture of Jerusalem, the evidence of the Jewish sources is that they had much more of the character of a civil war or an ongoing power struggle between factions in the Jewish community in Ceole Syria and in the wider Seleucid empire than a war of national liberation. Indeed, Jonathan Apphus and later his brother Simon Thassi ruled Ceole Syria’s Jews as High Priests and ethnarchs under at least nominal Seleucid suzerainty.
V. The Power Struggle
Although Antiochus Epiphanes is the great villain in the Chanukah story, the Maccabean war has its roots in the internecine struggles among factions of the Temple priesthood that predated and, according to Josephus, motivated the king’s brief intervention. Conventionally narrated as a conflict between “Hellenizing” and “traditional” factions, with Menelaus and his allies among the aristocracy on one side, and the pious Matitiyahu and his brave sons on the other, the evidence strongly suggests that it was a power struggle between equally-Hellenized factions: one pro-Seleucid and one pro-Egyptian.
Ceole Syria had long been disputed ground. The Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt initially occupied the territory in the late-fourth century BCE, but never had it under firm control. Although it was not particularly productive land compared to Egypt’s Nile Valley and the Mesopotamian plain in the Seleucid Empire, it was of vital strategic importance because of the Via Maris, a trade route that passed through the coastal plain of the eastern Mediterranean linking the economies of Egypt and Mesopotamia to each other and to the rest of the world through the Phoenician port cities since the bronze age.
Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and now Egypt again and the Seleucid empire, had fought for control of the vital territory for millennia and the Jews, who had the misfortune of living next door in the Judean highlands, were invariably drawn into the battles. Things were fairly peaceful for two centuries following the reestablishment of a Jewish polity in Yehud Medinata under Persian dominion in the sixth century BCE, and the Jews were allowed by their imperial overlords to govern themselves under the Temple priesthood and a governor appointed from their community.
Alexander the Great’s conquest upset the balance, and the leaders of the Levantine Jewish community found themselves in a dicey situation. Initially, the Ptolemies took over the Persian hegemony and the political and cultural life in Jerusalem gravitated toward the Hellenistic regime in Alexandria. However, Egyptian control was never stable, particularly during its six wars with the Seleucid empire between 274 and 168 BCE. As elite Jewish life became increasingly Hellenized, two equally phil-Hellenist factions emerged – one preferring closer ties with Antioch, and the other favoring Alexandria.
When Antiochus the Great finally and decisively wrested control of Ceole Syria at the beginning of the second century BCE, the Jews had a new boss, and a new center of political gravity. The old Kohen Gadol Simon II died, and his son Onias III assumed the high priesthood in an orderly succession, but things had become unstable within the Temple precincts. Described in Second Book of Maccabees as a righteous man renowned for his piety and “his hatred of wickedness,” (2 Maccabees 3:1), Onias was not, however, politically astute.
According to Josephus, Onias expelled the pro-Seleucid Tobiads from Jerusalem, and was embroiled in a dispute with a Temple administrator named Simon, a member of the tribe of Benjamin and a Tobiad ally. Incensed, Simon went over the Kohen Gadol’s head to the Seleucid governor Appolonius of Tarsus “and reported to him that the treasury in Jerusalem was full of untold sums of money, so that the amount of the funds could not be reckoned, and that they did not belong to the account of the sacrifices, but that it was possible for them to fall under the control of the king.” (2 Maccabees 3:6)
Then, as now, money made the world go around, and when word of the Temple’s riches got back to Antiochus Epiphanes, the new ruler of a Seleucid empire impoverished from a century of constant war, Onias’s position, already shaky after alienating the Tobiads, suddenly became untenable. His younger brother Jason seized the opportunity to wrest religious and temporal power, and offered to pay the king a bribe to have himself declared ethnarch and Kohen Gadol. Jason sent his big brother packing, and the deposed “High Priest Onias fled to Ptolemy, from whom he obtained a site in the district of Heliopolis.” (Wars 1.1)
The supporters of the usurper Jason and the Tobiad family knew which side their bread was buttered and were thus pro-Seleucid, and the supporters of the Onias, the legitimist faction, were pro-Egyptian. Although he might have been a cynical opportunist, Jason was a legitimate member of the kohens, the priestly Levite family directly descended from Aaron, and he does not seem to have been willing to let the Tobiads get away with everything they wanted. Within three years, he found himself out of a job, just like his brother.
Jason had sent Menelaus, the brother of Simon the Benjaminite and a Tobiad ally, to Antiochus Epiphanes with the bribe he paid for the high priesthood, and Menelaus simply used the money to have himself declared Kohen Gadol. However, Menelaus was not a descendant of Aaron (or even a member of the Tribe of Levi), and thus not a legitimate hereditary kohen. He was a Benjaminite and, Antiochus Epiphanes’ power notwithstanding, ineligible for the priesthood. His usurpation of the high priesthood was thus not only illegitimate, it was a sacrilege.
The First Book of Maccabees makes it clear that Matitiyahu, the patriarch of the Maccabees, had been in the Temple right up until this point, but “moved away from Jerusalem and settled in Modin,” (1 Maccabees 2:1) in the wake of the succession crisis.§ A hereditary kohen, “the son of John, the son of Symeon, the son of Asamoneus: a priest of the order of Joarib,” (Antiquities 12.6) Matitiyahu had remained at his post throughout all the events leading up to Menelaus’s succession. What drove him from Jerusalem was not Hellenism, but political intrigue and, above all, the violation of the priesthood by a Benjaminite. As a kohen and Levite, this was the one blasphemy that he could not tolerate.
By now, there were at least two factions in the Temple hierarchy, pro-Seleucids and pro-Egyptians, and possibly a third faction of legitimists who might have been supporters of either Antiochus Epiphanes or Egypt’s Ptolemy VI Philometor, or neither, and the conflict had erupted into open war. With a civil war in Egypt between Philometor and Antiochus Epiphanes’ would-be puppet, Ptolemy VII Physcon, and the Romans threatening to advance through Anatolia, the Seleucid king could not let a Jewish civil war on the strategic Via Maris get out of control.
Whatever his feelings about his Jewish subjects – and they were certainly not sympathetic – Antiochus Epiphanes had much bigger fish to fry. In 167 BCE, cash-strapped and with an empire under pressure on three sides, he intervened in a Jewish civil war in the one strategic location that he could not let get out of control.
The history of the Maccabean War does not quite align with the conventional narrative, but history rarely aligns with myth. It is invariably complex, messy, and fails to provide the simplicity and certainty of the legends upon which we build our identities and community belonging. Yet, how the history of the Maccabees and the foundation of the Hasmonean monarchy that would briefly rule an autonomous Jewish kingdom became the myth is a key to who we are as Jews – and how we can rebuild and redefine our community in the 21st century.
***
* The Hebrew word חנכה can be rendered in English in a number of transliterations. I prefer “Chanukah” to Hanukkah and Hannukah because it renders the letter ח (“chet”) as a voiceless uvular fricative, as in the Scottish “loch.” This was also the most common transliteration of חנכה in English until the 1970s, and corresponds to “Chanukka” in German, and “Khanuke” in standard Yiddish transliteration.
† A sufganiya is a type of jelly donut, resembling a Polish paczki, and is a traditional Chanukah treat. The halvah had no direct connection to the holiday, except that it is a wonderful oily delicacy.
‡ The historian and rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan (after whom Israel’s Bar-Ilan University is named) estimated that, by the end of the Second Temple period, literacy reached 1.5-4 percent of the Judean Jewish population. Recent scholarship suggests that the number was somewhat higher, though still uncommon.
§ According to Grabbe, as a kohen, a member of the ruling class, and a man of considerable means, Matitiyahu would have had extensive estates in Modi’in.