For most of that century the Ptolemies generally kept the upper hand, but the constant fighting within the country took its toll on the people and their lifestyle. The Seleucids took over control of Judea. Antiochus III didn't change much. The Seleucid king confirmed the existing regime in Judea and even gave its inhabitants additional privileges: the Judean population was exempted from all taxation for three years and thereafter granted a reduction of a third in its taxes.
The priests, the freedmen, and the members of the Gerousia were given complete exemption from taxes. Similar relations continued also under Antiochus' son, Seleucus IV This made the Greek-oriented Jewish community very happy. With Seleucid encouragement, some Jews even challenged the need to keep the dietary laws and Shabbat.
There was some intermarriage. Many of the wealthy Jews viewed Greek culture as being more sophisticated than traditional Hebrew life. This view was sometimes held by the High Priest himself. Some Jews refused to have their children circumcised. There was a small group of nationalists who struggled to keep the people within the religion of their ancestors, but they were a minority and not very popular..
Jews would have become even more assimilated if it had not been for the reign of Antiochus IV, the king in the Chanukah story. Chanukah celebrates an historical event. In B. Although the holiday focuses on the specific victory against King Antiochus's army, the story of Chanukah begins long before that specific event.
He didn't force anyone to participate in that culture, but he lowered the taxes for any group willing to accept this way of life. When Alexander died, his Middle Eastern kingdom divided into two groups: the eastern kingdom including modern-day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon was called the Seleucid kingdom; the western kingdom including Egypt was the Ptolemaic kingdom.
These two groups fought one another for political control, and Judea was caught between them. The Jews of Judea didn't care which group ruled them. They had their Temple, their sacrifices, and their High Priest, who governed the country. It didn't matter to whom they had to pay vassal taxes; the taxes were always too high anyway. The major political center of Greek life was the polis, the city, and the wealthier Jews succeeded in having Jerusalem recognized as a polis.
They changed their dress, their names, and their life-style to those of the Greeks. He lost. Word got back to Jerusalem that Antiochus was dead. A former High Priest, Jason, saw this as an opportunity to wrench the priesthood from Antiochus's lackey, Menelaus.
He set up a revolution in Jerusalem. Antiochus, of course, was still alive. Furious, he slaughtered a large number of Jews, declared martial law, and banned certain practices of Judaism as capital crimes, specifically Shabbat and circumcision. In addition, he profaned the Temple by introducing foreign worship. Antiochus was supported by some Jews. The prohibitions established by King Antiohcus were intolerable to a group of Jews called the Hasidim not related to the modern-day Chasidim. They fought against these decrees, but they needed leadership.
They found this leadership in a priestly family, the Hasmoneans. The head of the Hasmonean clam was Mattathias. We don't know much about him personally. The First Book of Maccabees reveals that he was a priest who moved from Jerusalem more than thirty miles to Modi'in.
Therefore, he probably was not part of the big-power priesthood. When a Seleucid ordered Mattathias to participate in a foreign sacrifice in Modi'in, he refused and slew a Jew who cam forward to obey the command. After slaying a Greek officer as well, Mattathias and his followers fled to the hills, and thus began the Hasmonean revolt. He successfully united the people under his authority. Judah, called Maccabee, the Hammer, was one of Mattathias's five sons.
There is a tradition stating that Judah inscribed on his shield the Hebrew letters mem chaf bet yod, which are the first letters of the words, "Who is like you among the gods, Adonai.
Antiochus sent down an army to wipe out the revolt. Judah and his revolutionaries defeated that army in the mountains surrounding Jerusalem by using guerrilla tactics. Antiochus sent another, larger army under the famous general Nicanor, but Judah and the revolutionaries defeated his army as well and entered Jerusalem. After defeating Antiochus's army, the Jews systematically cleaned the defiled Temple in Jerusalem; it apparently took almost a year.
Judah declared a great holiday to celebrate the fact that the Temple was again in Jewish hands. In order to make this dedication a big event, the Hasmoneans declared that the ceremony should serve as a reminder of Sukkot, which lasts eight days. The Jews had been unable to celebrate Sukkot for three years because of their guerrilla fighting, so they celebrated Sukkot at the time of the Temple dedication. The dedication of the Temple took place on the 25th of Kislev and, like Sukkot, lasted for eight days.
The Hebrew word for dedication is Chanukah. Neither the Seleucids the Greek power in Damascus nor many Jews accepted the Hasmonean family as the governing priesthood. As a matter of fact, civil war continued in Judea for twenty years after the first Chanukah. Judah's family was finally victorious. Simeon, Judah's brother, was made High Priest, and Chanukah became a yearly celebration of the Hasmonean victory. The Hasmonean family ruled for a hundred years. During that time, there was a great deal of tension between the Hasmoneans and the sages.
As a result, the sages were not particularly interested in maintaining a holiday that commemorated the dedication declared by the Hasmonean family. We find evidence of this power struggle in the traditional legend concerning the eight days of Chanukah. We find in the Talmud, compiled years after the event, a legend which explained the eight-day holiday as a time when the Temple had been desecrated and there was no sacred oil. Only one small jar marked with the High Priest's seal was found.
This oil, enough to burn one day, burned eight days. This miracle said the sages resulted in the eight-day celebration of Chanukah. Having achieved full peace for Judea by BCE, Judah the Maccabee had to establish a permanent government for the Jews in the new independent state. Although he was an excellent military commander, he wasn't a very good politician; fortunately for Judea, he died a year after he tried taking political office.
It became a tradition ie, it was enforced by the family that Mattethias' family would be the new line of High Priests and rulers. Thus, after Judah's death, his youngest brother Jonathan became High Priest.
At his death, his older brother Simeon became the High Priest. The people accepted both titles for him, and his reign marked the high point of this dynastic period. The family of Mattethias was called the "Hasmonean" family. The ongoing rule of this family was therefore known as the Hasmonean Period.
The major concern of Jonathan, Simeon, and Hyrcanus was stabilization and territorial conquest. They succeeded in annexing the northern territory of Judea called the Galilee and made it a strong Jewish center. They set up good trade relations with their neighbors and the Nabateans.
It looked as though Judea was getting set to become a solid political state. Once again, however, religious strife and corruption in the ruling class led to trouble. The generations after John Hyrcanus weren't made of the same firm moral fibre as the founding Hasmonean generation. Instead of seeing the job of High Priest-King as an opportunity to strengthen the international position of Judea, to create a strong stable government where the rights of every Jew would be cared for, and to bind the people together in their sacrificial worship to God, the new generation of Hasmoneans saw their post as an opportunity to get rich and have power.
A family struggle ensued for power. It was as corrupt as any other struggle for a throne, but it looked worse because all of the fighting was among brothers, sons, and mothers.
Mothers hired murderers to either kill or mutilate the children they didn't want to reach the throne. The High Priest had to be unmaimed, unblemished, to serve. Children had mothers killed to prevent this from happening. Brothers sliced, bribed, and fought their way to power. It was a messy business, and it continued for over a hundred years. While the Hasmoneans were busy establishing their independent kingdom in Judea and the Galilee, another kingdom developed to the east and south.
Although the Nabateans had very little influence on Jewish history and none on Jewish thought , they were a brilliant people who had great influence on the eventual borders of the modern state of Israel. The Nabateans were not a people even though everyone writes about them as though they were. They were a social class which established its own empire. The Nabateans were caravan drivers, and they were apparently industrious, ambitious, and ruthless.
During the period of Alexander and right after his death when everything was unorganized a group of caravan drivers set up a monopoly on the trade routes going from Syria to Egypt the two regions at war with one another.
This enabled them to establish an independent kingdom east of Israel with its capital at Petra. They became rich and, for obvious reasons, expanded their territory to include the Negev of Israel, thus militarily protecting their trade routes.
To protect their monopoly, the Nabateans set up a series of fortresses through the desert, thus also providing their caravan drivers with rest spots. They occupied Madaba. Each of these sites shows wonderful architecture and enormous labor. The treasury at Petra is one of the extraordinary buildings of the period. The decorations cut into the side of the cliff are exquisite. The three-tiered amphitheater is also special.
Jewish history was permanently altered by the destruction of the First Temple, and the exile that came afterwards. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you. Wood engraving after a painting by Eduard Bendemann Museum Kunstpalast. Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily. Sign Up. Discover More. This code of law was promulgated by Ezra in the early 4 th century BCE and it served as the legal ideal of a theocratic state ruled by priests rather than kings.
According to the later rabbis, the institution of the Torah as the basic law in addition to which there must have been oral law traditions of various kinds brought the earlier institution of prophecy to an end. Religious practices now included the keeping of the Sabbath as a strictly enforced day of rest on every seventh day roughly conforming to quarters of the lunar month but without real parallel in any other ancient culture. Persian influence is noticeable in Jewish apocalyptic literature symbolism of good vs.
The administrative language of Judah is now Aramaic, the language of the Persian empire, rather than Hebrew. Important new institution are the Levites as auxilliary priests cf. The emerging Jewish religion is not just the cult of a state in fact, it is no longer a state cult at all but a religion with a sacred center in Jerusalem practiced and adhered to by an extended diasporah.
This means, for example, that Jerusalem becomes the focus of elaborate pilgrimages and it is the recipient of lavish gifts and of taxes due to the sanctuary and its officials. It should be noted that when the returnees Armstrong: the "Golah" established this religion in Jerusalem, a Egyptian diaspora dating back presumably to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in practiced Yahwism at a temple of their own located on the island of Elephantine upper Nile.
In other words, "Judaism" was not a monolithic practice and the Babylonian diaspora was not the only form in which Judah- and Israel-related traditions were continued after the destruction of the states of Israel and Judah. Of the temple in Elephantine we know futher that it was destroyed in and rebuilt in It was the temple of a Jewish military colony near the southern border of Egypt the latter having lost independence to the Persians and it continued to function in Second Temple times.
The community of Elephantine was on friendly terms with the priestly establishment in Jerusalem despite the fact that it initially practiced syncretistic forms of worship very much like the practices in Jerusalem before the destruction of that were only gradually abandoned in consultation with the Second Temple priesthood in Jerusalem.
What little we know about the history of early Second Temple Judaism from other sources is augmented from fragments of letters written on papyrus found by modern archeologists at Elephantine excavated when the Assuan dam was built in the s.
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