Ptolemy lived into his eighties, and wrote a history of Alexander.26 Ptolemy II Philadelphos favoured the Jews, freeing 120,000 Jewish slaves and sending gold to embellish the Temple. He understood the power of pageantry and spectacle. In 275 he held a parade for a small number of special guests in the name of Dionysus, god of wine and abundance, in which a vast wineskin made of leopard pelts held 200,000 gallons of wine and a phallos 180 feet long and 9 feet wide was paraded along with elephants and subjects from every corner of his empire. He was also an avid book collector. When the high priest sent the twenty or so books of the Jewish Tanakh* to Alexandria, the king ordered it to be translated into Greek. He respected the scholarship of his Alexandrian Jews and invited them to a dinner to discuss the translation: ‘everything’, promised the king, ‘will be served in compliance with your habits and for me also.’ It was said that in seventy days the seventy scholars each produced an identical translation. The Septuagint Bible changed the history of Jerusalem and later made possible the spread of Christianity. Thanks to Alexander, Greek was the international language; now, for the first time, the Bible could be read by virtually everyone.27
JOSEPH THE TOBIAD
Jerusalem remained a semi-independent statelet within Ptolemy’s empire, and Judah issued its own coins, inscribed ‘Yehud’. She was not just a political entity but God’s own city ruled by the high priests. These scions of the Oniad family, claiming descent from the biblical priest Zadok, enjoyed the opportunity to amass fortunes and power, provided they paid tribute to the Ptolemies. In the 240s, High Priest Onias II tried to hold back the 20 silver talents he owed Ptolemy III Euergetes. This created an opportunity for a well-connected young Jew who decided to outbid the high priest not just for Jerusalem but for the entire land.
This adventurer was the high priest’s own nephew, Joseph,* who set off for Alexandria where the king was holding an auction: bidders promised the highest tribute in return for the power to rule and tax their territories. The Syrian grandees mocked young Joseph but he outplayed them with outrageous chutzpah. He managed to see the king first and charmed him. When Ptolemy III asked for offers, the bumptious Joseph outbid his rivals for all of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia, Judah and Samaria. The king asked Joseph for the usual hostages to guarantee his promised tribute. ‘I give you no other persons, O King,’ replied the cocky Jerusalemite, ‘than yourself and your wife.’ Joseph could have been executed for this impertinence but Ptolemy laughed and agreed.
Joseph returned to Jerusalem with 2,000 Egyptian infantry. He had much to prove. When Ashkelon refused to pay its taxes, he murdered its twenty leading citizens. Ashkelon paid.
Joseph, like his namesake in Genesis, had played at the highest level in Egypt and won. In Alexandria, where he hobnobbed with the king, he fell in love with an actress. When he set up the seduction, his brother replaced her with his own daughter. During the night, Joseph was too drunk to notice and when he was sober, he fell in love with his niece and their marriage strengthened the dynasty. However, their son Hyrcanus grew up to be as much of a rogue as Joseph himself. Living grandly, ruling severely and taxing exorbitantly, Joseph was nonetheless ‘a good man of great magnanimity’, according to Josephus, admired for his ‘gravity, wisdom and justice. He brought the Jews out of a state of poverty and meanness to one that was more splendid.’
Joseph the Tobiad was important to the kings of Egypt because they were now continuously fighting a rival Macedonian dynasty, the Seleucids, for control of the Middle East. In about 241, Ptolemy III showed his gratitude, after a victory over his enemies, by visiting Jerusalem and there sacrificing respectfully in the Temple, hosted no doubt by Joseph. When the king died, however, the Egyptians found themselves challenged by a teenaged Seleucid king of irrepressible ambition.
ANTIOCHUS THE GREAT: CLASH OF THE ELEPHANTS
The challenger was the Macedonian king of Asia, Antiochus III. In 223, this peripatetic eighteen-year-old inherited a grandiose title and a disintegrating empire,* but he possessed the gifts to reverse this decay. Antiochus regarded himself as the heir to Alexander and, like all the Macedonian kings, he associated himself with Apollo, Hercules, Achilles and, above all, Zeus. In a dizzying succession of campaigns, Antiochus reconquered Alexander’s eastern empire as far as India, earning the soubriquet ‘the Great’. He repeatedly attacked Palestine but the Ptolemies repelled his invasions and the ageing Joseph the Tobiad continued to rule Jerusalem. But his son Hyrcanus betrayed him and attacked the city. Shortly before his death, Joseph defeated his son, who went on to carve out his own principality in today’s Jordan.
In 201, Antiochus the Great, now in his forties, returned from his triumphs in the east. Jerusalem was ‘tossed like a ship in a storm between both sides’. Finally, Antiochus routed the Egyptians, and Jerusalem welcomed a new master. ‘The Jews, when we came into their city,’ declared Antiochus, ‘gave us a splendid reception and met us with their senate, and also helped us expel the Egyptian garrison.’ A Seleucid king and army were an impressive sight. Antiochus would have worn a diadem of royalty, laced boots of crimson embroidered with gold, a broad-brimmed hat and a dark-blue cloak spangled with gold stars, brooched at the throat in crimson. The Jerusalemites provisioned his multinational army that included Macedonian phalanxes bearing their sarissa lances, Cretan mountain fighters, Cilician light infantry, Thracian slingers, Mysian bowmen, Lydian javelineers, Persian bowmen, Kurdish infantry, Iranian heavy-armoured cataphracts on war horses and, most prestigious of all, elephants – probably a first for Jerusalem.†
Antiochus promised to repair the Temple and the walls, repopulate the city and confirmed the Jews’ right to rule themselves ‘in accordance with the laws of their fathers’. He even banned foreigners from entering the Temple or bringing ‘into the city the flesh of horses or mules or wild or tame asses or leopards, foxes or hares’. Simon, the high priest, had certainly backed the right side: never had Jerusalem enjoyed such an indulgent conqueror. Jerusalemites looked back at this time as a golden age ruled by the ideal high priest who, they said, resembled ‘the morning star in the midst of a cloud’.28
SIMON THE JUST: THE MORNING STAR
When Simon* emerged from the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest ‘was clothed in the perfection of glory, when he went up to the holy altar’. He was the paragon of the high priests who ruled Judah as anointed princes, a combination of monarch, pope and ayatollah: he wore gilded robes, a gleaming breastplate and a crown-like turban on which he sported the nezer, a golden flower, the symbol of life and salvation, a relic of the headdress of the kings of Judah. Jesus Ben Sira, the author of Ecclesiasticus and the first writer to capture the sacred drama of the flourishing city, described Simon as ‘a cypress tree which groweth up to the clouds’.
Jerusalem had become a theocracy – the very word was invented by the historian Josephus to describe this statelet with its ‘entire sovereignty and all authority in the hands of God’. Harsh rules regulated every detail of life, for there was no distinction between politics and religion. In Jerusalem there were no statues nor graven images. The observance of the Sabbath was an obsession. All crimes against religion were punished with death. There were four forms of execution – stoning, burning, beheading and strangling. Adulterers were stoned, a punishment inflicted by the whole community (though the condemned were first thrown down a cliff so that they were usually unconscious by the time of the stoning). A son who struck his father was garrotted. A man who fornicated with both a mother and her daughter was burned.