First Jonathan was backed by the Egyptian king Ptolemy VI Philometer, who marched up the coast to Joppa (Jerusalem’s nearest port, Jaffa), to meet Jonathan, in their respective pharaonic and priestly magnificence. At Ptolemais (now Acre), Philometer achieved the dream of every Greek king since Alexander the Great: he was crowned king of Egypt and Asia. But at the very moment of his triumph, his horse reared at the sight of the Seleucid elephants, and he was killed.*
As rival Seleucids fought for power, Jonathan the Diplomat repeatedly switched sides. One of the Seleucid pretenders, besieged in his Antioch palace, appealed for Jonathan’s help in return for full Jewish independence. Jonathan marched his 2,000 men all the way from Jerusalem, through what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria, to Antioch. The Jewish soldiers, firing arrows from the palace then leaping from roof to roof across the burning city, rescued and restored the king. Returning to Judaea, Jonathan conquered Ashkelon, Gaza, and Beth-Zur – and started to besiege the Acra Fortress in Jerusalem. But he was lured to Ptolemais without his bodyguards to meet his latest Greek ally who seized him and marched on Jerusalem.
The Maccabee family was not yet exhausted: there was still one more brother.32 This was Simon, who refortified Jerusalem and rallied his army. Along with a sudden snowstorm, this forced the Greek to retreat, but he had his revenge: he executed Simon’s captive brother, Jonathan. In spring 141, Simon stormed and demolished the Acra,† razing the very hill on which it stood before celebrating in Jerusalem ‘with praise, palm branches, harps, cymbals, viols and hymns.’ The ‘yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel’ and a Great Assembly hailed Simon as hereditary ruler, clothing him in royal purple buckled with gold, king in all but name. ‘The people began to write in their contracts: “In the first year of Simon the Great, High Priest, Commander-in-Chief and Leader of the Jews”.’
JOHN HYRCANUS: EMPIRE-BUILDER
Simon the Great was at the height of his popularity when, in 134 BC, he was invited to dinner by his son-in-law. There, the last of the first generation of Maccabees was assassinated, and the son-in-law then seized Simon’s wife and two of his sons. Assassins tried to catch his other son John – Yehohanan in Hebrew – but he made it to Jerusalem and held the city.
John faced disaster on every side. When he pursued the conspirators to their stronghold, his mother and brothers were torn to pieces before him. As the third son, John had not expected to reign but he possessed all the family talents to become the ideal Jewish ruler, with ‘charismatic-Messianic traits’. Indeed, wrote Josephus, God granted John ‘three of the greatest privileges – the rule of the nation, the office of High Priest and the gift of prophecy’.
The Seleucid king, Antiochus VII Sidetes, exploited this Jewish civil war to regain Palestine and besiege Jerusalem. The Jerusalemites were starting to starve, when King Sidetes signalled his willingness to negotiate by sending in ‘a magnificent sacrifice’ of bulls with gilded horns for the Feast of Tabernacles. John sued for peace, agreeing to surrender Maccabee conquests outside Judaea, to pay 500 silver talents and to demolish the walls.
John had to support his new master on campaign against the rising power in Iran and Iraq, the Parthians. The expedition proved a disaster for the Greeks but a blessing for the Jews. John may have secretly negotiated with the Parthian king, who had many Jewish subjects. The Greek king was killed and somehow John escaped from this quagmire, returning with his independence restored.*
The great powers were distracted by their own internecine intrigues, so John was free to embark on conquests on a scale unseen since David, who ironically helped fund his wars: John plundered his rich tomb, presumably in the old City of David. He conquered Madaba across the Jordan, forced the conversion of the Edomites (who became known as the Idumeans) to the south, and destroyed Samaria before taking Galilee. In Jerusalem, John built the so-called First Wall around the growing city.* His kingdom was a regional power, and its Temple was the centre of Jewish life, though the growing communities around the Mediterranean conducted their daily prayers in local synagogues. It was probably in this newly confident time that the twenty-four books became the agreed text of the Jewish Old Testament.
After John’s death, his son Aristobulos declared himself king of Judaea, the first monarch in Jerusalem since 586, and conquered Iturea in today’s northern Israel and southern Lebanon. But the Maccabeans were now almost as Greek as their enemies, using both Greek and Hebrew names. They started to behave with all the ferocity of Greek tyrants. Aristobulos threw his mother into jail and murdered his more popular brother, a crime that drove him mad with guilt. Yet as he died vomiting blood, he feared that his arrogant surviving brother, Alexander Jannaeus, was a monster who would destroy the Maccabees.33
ALEXANDER THE THRACIAN: THE FURIOUS YOUNG LION
As soon as he had secured Jerusalem, King Alexander (Jannaeus was the Greek version of his Hebrew name Yehonatan) married his brother’s widow and set about conquering a Jewish empire. Alexander was spoilt and heartless – soon the Jews loathed him for his debauched sadism. But Alexander enjoyed his freedom to wage war on his neighbours – the Greek kingdoms were collapsing, the Romans had not yet arrived. Alexander always managed to survive his frequent defeats thanks to the luck of the devil* and tenacious savagery: the Jews nicknamed him the Thracian for his barbarism and his army of Greek mercenaries.
Alexander conquered Gaza and Raphia on the borders of Egypt and the Gaulanitis (Golan) in the north. Ambushed by the Nabataean Arabs in Moab, Alexander fled back to Jerusalem. When he officiated as high priest at the Feast of Tabernacles, the people bombarded him with fruit. Encouraged by the more religious Pharisees (who followed oral traditions as well as the written Torah), they taunted him with the claim that, since his mother had been a prisoner, he was unfit to be high priest. Alexander responded by unleashing his Greek mercenaries, who massacred 6,000 people in the streets. The Seleucids exploited the rebellion to attack Judaea. Alexander fled to the hills.
He bided his time, planning his revenge. When the king re-entered Jerusalem, he slaughtered 50,000 of his own people. He celebrated his victory by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while he watched 800 rebels being crucified around the hills. The throats of their wives and children were slit before their eyes. ‘The furious young lion’, as his enemies called him, died of alcoholism, leaving his wife Salome Alexandra a Jewish empire that included parts of today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He advised her to conceal his death from the soldiers until she had secured Jerusalem, then to govern with the Pharisees.
The new queen was the first woman to rule Jerusalem since Jezebel’s daughter. But the genius of the dynasty was exhausted. Salome Alexandra (Salome being the Greek version of Shalomzion – Peace in Zion), shrewd widow of two kings, ruled her little empire into her sixties with the help of the Pharisees, but she struggled to control her two sons: the elder, the high priest John Hyrcanus II, was not energetic enough, while the younger Aristobulos was too energetic by far.