Judaism
The Jews in the Intertestament Years 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Friday, 20 April 2007
Abstract
The “Restoration”
Is it not suspicious that the whole of the period when the bible began to be written and when the Old Testament was mainly completed is, in the words of the Christian scholar, Edwyn Bevan, “an interval of shadows between the sunlit regions of the Old Testament and the New”. In particular, the quarter millennium from Ezra-Nehemiah to the author of Daniel is devoid of any historical account in the bible, the very time when it was being written and compiled. It is the period of Persian and Hellenic occupation of Judah, when the law was introduced by the Persians, and the main themes of the bible set. Thereafter, the semimythical and the mythical histories were added. From it, then sprang Christianity with its New Testament. At the beginning of this period in the mid to late fifth century, the whole region was ruled by the Shahs of Persia from Babylon, or their palaces as Susa and Ecbatana. Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Persia, and what is now Afghanistan constituted the Persian empire, then the biggest and most powerful ever. Nominally, the localities ruled themselves under the oversight of a hierarchy of governors whose main aim was to ensure the flow of taxes, bakshish, to the chancellery, and who therefore had to keep order to allow it to flow unhindered.
The bible says the great Persian king Cyrus (Koresh) brought the empire of Babylon to an end, and gave Jewish exiles leave to seek their fatherland once more. It was the year 538 BC. This permission was not noticeably made use of, despite Jewish and Christian enthusiasm to see flocks of God’s Chosen returning home. Immediately, the biblicists’ timetable gets all wrong, the return being compressed into twenty years when it did not properly begin for nigh on another century. The Persian governor, Zerubabel, under the control of the satrap of Abarnahara, was in charge of the land, concerned with works and the collection of revenue. Zerubabel is an example of a mystery. Nothing is known about him but he is supposed to have been a descendent of king David. His name, however, if anything, seems to mean “Seed of Babylon”, not “Seed of David”. Perhaps the author of the bible—God, if it is Him—is trying to say something important. Zeru is the same word as Ezra, so conceivably, here is the same man appearing twice, or a man of the same position if the word is a title and not a proper name. The national chief and community representative was Joshua, the High Priest. The name Joshua was forever to have an eschatological significance in Judaism. His peers were the Levites, the word used in Judaism that matched Magoi, among the Persian priests, a caste or tribe of priestly families. Under the Greeks, the Levites were downgraded, and the Sadducees took over the higher ranks of the priesthood, claiming a lineage into mythical antiquity.
After an Egyptian uprising around 450 BC, Nehemiah was sent as governor to supervise the rebuilding of the city walls which had either been in ruins for 170 years, or had been ruined anew by the Persians punishing the Jews for allying with the Egyptian rebels. Under Nehemiah, the temple and the city were rebuilt and a large band of people were deported into Yehud as colonists instructed to restore the worship of Yehouah. Before the Persian period, the Assyrians had moved strangers into Samaria (Israel) to restore the worship of Yehouah. The Jewish scriptures rightly note those transported into Samaria as “colonists” and that they had to restore the cultus of Yehouah. It was standard imperial policy, but always ignored as such in the case of the so-called “return”, when the Persians did the same in the much lesser populated Yehud where colonists were likely to have been a greater proportion of the population. At any rate, the Jews considered themselves different people from the Samarians. Chronicles considered Samaria a heathen kingdom, and recognised Judah alone as Israel, but really Judah only took up the history of Israel after the fall of Samaria.
Jews have been a dispersed people, yet maintain a longing for their land surrounding the city of Jerusalem in Palestine, even though they only ever lived in the land they claim as theirs temporarily. If the “return” from “exile” is seen properly in history as the Persian colonization it was, Jews actually moved into their “eretz” only a decade or so before 400 BC. Since they were finally dispersed by the Romans in the second century AD, they only lived in Palestine for 500 years, and only ever ruled themselves for about 100 years of that. When the New Testament begins to relate some Jewish history at the beginning of the present era, Judah, called by the Romans Judaea, was a tiny kingdom ruled by a petty king and Roman puppet, Herod the Great, near the end of his reign. When he died in 4 BC, his kingdom was split up into even smaller kingdoms, one of which, Judaea itself, became a Roman province in 6 AD. It was the last time that the Jews were nominally independent before modern times.
The bible itself is proof that the Jews had to evict native people to take a land that was not their own. Even accepting the biblical myths of Moses and Abraham, the Jews were never native to the Palestine Hills. An almighty God could have arranged for them to have been natives and saved a lot of subsequent trouble. Joshua, in his myth, is shown cruelly destroying any of the native people that resisted. It was the habit of the great empires of the ANE in the years BC, culminating in the Persians, Alexander and finally the Romans, but the then insignificant Jews are shown as acting like a conquering nation. Though they have proved to have a great culture, particularly strong in its loyalty to each other, Jews have never had a great nation, and show no signs of ever growing one, if modern Israel is the sprout.
The restoration of Judaism was not to Canaanite religion which the biblical prophets attacked. Though transported into Canaan, the colonists were not Canaanites. The “exiled Judahites” before they “returned” were a people who knew nothing about the worship of Yehouah, euphemistically expressed as that Yehouah had rejected them! They knew of no covenant because none had yet been written. They could observe only rites that had no connexion with the holy land, because, in fact, they had never been there and knew nothing about it. For the same reason, they could not celebrate any sacrifice or keep any feast. The observance of the sabbath, however, was discovered here in exile! So too did the habit of hearing sermons about the purpose and providence of God. Everything characteristically Jewish was learnt here in exile and taken into Yehud with the “Return” or “Restoration”, the Persian colonization. Isaiah 40-66 is the pro-Persian Isaiah, and urges, in Wellhausen’s paraphrase:
Away with sorrow. Deliverance is at the door! Is it a humiliating thing that Israel should owe its freedom to a Persian? Nay, is it not rather a proof of the world-wide sway of the God of Jacob that He should thus summon His instruments from the ends of the earth? Who else than Yehouah could have thus sent Cyrus? Surely not the false gods which he has destroyed? Yehouah alone it was who foretold and foreknew the things which are now coming to pass,—because long ago He had prearranged and predetermined them, and they are now being executed in accordance with his plan. Rejoice therefore in the prospect of your near deliverance. Prepare yourselves for the new era. Gird yourselves for the return to your homes.
Of course, even Wellhausen did not know how profound the deception was. The biblicist reading of the bible, with its masses of retrohistory, fools believers. Judaism, introduced only now by the Persian colonists was written backwards in time, ultimately to Moses and even Abraham, making it seem to the believer’s gullible eye that it was always thus.
The Persian colonization meant the reformation of Canaanite religion in Yehud. The meaning of the festivals and of the sacrifices was redefined according to the restored worship. The cultus was to be mainly an exercise of obedience to the law. Judaism was gathered from scattered elements, and it was up to the individual to make himself a Jew—the secret of the persistence of Judaism, even in the diaspora, the significance of circumcision, the observance of laws of purity and of regulations guarding against sin. Holiness was to avoid sin, and sin was breaking the law. By sin and trespass offerings, and the Day of Atonement, temple worship meant a steady income into the treasury. The whole of life was directed in a definite sacred path, every moment there was a divine command to fulfil, and this preoccupation kept people from thinking too much about treason and sedition.
The society was obviously a caste system, but no one knows what the castes were, although rulers, princes, nobles and elders are all mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah. All of the colonists will have been of privileged classes, whereas the locals were mainly simple peasants. Judah was a “nation of priests” implying that everyone in the original temple state were considered as priests, and a good reason why the Samarians and the Am ha Eretz could not be allowed to join, but when the Persian empire came to an end they had to allow citizenship to the Am ha Eretz, immigrant Jews and the forcibly converted. So, priests and Levites were always the topmost castes, the ruling priestly families being the nobility. The High Priest locally had the place of the king. The other priests, though his brothers or his sons, were subordinate to him, as bishops to the pope. They, again, are distinguished from the Levites not only by their office but also by their noble blood, though the Levites belong by descent to the clergy, of which they form the lowest grade. Later the castes of the Jews were Priests, Levites, Israelites and Proselytes. Proselytes were converts, and so were the lowest class, people accepted as Jews from among the Am ha Eretz, and those who were forcibly converted. Presumably, in the next or a later generation they became Israelites. The material basis of the hierarchical pyramid was furnished by the contributions of the laity, which are required on a scale which became extortionate. Later, the Greeks introduced a “Gerusia”, a Senate, presided over by the High Priest, and this probably became the Synhedrion, or Ruling Council, which the Aramaic speaking Jews heard as Sanhedrin.
Of course, there was nothing unusual in those days in religion being an important state function. The culture of an ethnos was primarily its religion, and all states used religion politically. Whether religion or secular matters were uppermost to a people was a question of fashion (whether piety was faddishly popular), necessity (some threat), or tyranny (the king demanded it), but religion was always important, and state officials had routine religious duties. What made Judah different was that the Persians set it up as a Church. They invented it as a theocracy, so what was routine religious ceremony for, say, Greeks and Romans, was really important to God for the Jews. In subsequent centuries, Greek kings in Egypt and Mesopotamia tried to expunge any memory of the role the Persians had by inventing a bogus history going back long before the Persians ever came on the scene, in which God—Yehouah—really had set up the religion, not the Persians, heaven forbid! Far too many people have believed this incredible myth ever since.
Cyrus was declared the Jewish messiah, though they had never previously had a messiah—it is a Persian concept—the Saoshyant—and the colonists were sold the idea that they were helping to build towards a messianic age. The truth is that the original Persian colonists were fed propaganda, including some meant to attach them to what was not their land. It became the bible.
Bringing the Law
It was 458 BC, according to the scriptures but apparently really about forty years later, that Ezra set out from Babylon to Palestine with the colonists, a Persian scribe with the law of his God in his hand, and with authority from the Persian king to proceed upon the basis of this law with a reformation of the community. The colonials settled chiefly in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Ezra did not set about introducing the new law immediately on his arrival in Judaea. First, he strictly separated the colonists, the Bene ha Gola or Sons of Exile, from the Canaanite Am ha Eretz and Samarians. The Am ha Eretz and particularly the Samarians were friendly towards the Bene ha Gola. The latter were not returning from exile, but were being exiled—sent into a strange land. Not the natives of Judah, but only colonists, those who nominally came from exile in Babylon, belonged to their community. The locals were ignored, and resented it. The people who had not been deported from Judah by the Babylonians were simple Canaanite peasants, and they had continued with their worship of Yehouah, a Canaanite Baal. Now they wanted to participate in the new Persian project, but were not allowed to, because the restored Yehouah was not to be the Canaanitie Yehouah, but was the Persian one, a type of Ahuramazda, a benign universal god.
The business of introducing the new law-book was next proceeded with. In this, Ezra and Nehemiah acted in concert. The dates in Ezra and Nehemiah again have been confused by time, and doubtless the scattering of the papers in the Maccabaean war. Suffice it to say that Nehemiah was the main local supervisor of the project, and Ezra entered to impose the law itself, and the apparent age between these events in the scriptures is a confusion of Persian kings.
The law of the new theocracy was Deuteronomy, not a law found by Josiah but the law that the Persians had Ezra handing out, then set back in time to justify it. Why did Babylon continue to be the home of the Torah when the Jews had left? The Persians were issuing the Torah, the law, under suitable names to other religious groups besides these Jews, and eventually when Judaea was an independent state under the Maccabees and Herod, all of these Juddin looked to Yehud as their spiritual home. Judaism began already dispersed!
Ezra made sure everyone knew the law by having it read out to them. On the first of Tisri, in a year not given, the promulgation of the law began at a great gathering in Jerusalem. The year can be deduced with reasonable assumptions and the available evidence to have been 417 BC, in the seventh year of Darius II Nochus. Ezra, supported by the Levites, was present. As the people could not understand what Ezra was saying, doubtless he spoke in Old Persian, translators made it known to the people, who wept. Not only was the law read then but thereafter it was to be repeatedly read out in the temple services. Towards the end of the month, the concluding act took place. The community was solemnly bound by the contents of the law, which the priests had to imprint on the minds of the people, and fill their lives with. The reward of the priests for fulfilling their duties was their role as nobility, and a share of the revenue, and special prominence was given to those provisions related to the dues payable by the laity to the priests.
No doubt their material rewards under the Persians was not massive, but, within a century, the Persians were gone and the ruling priesthood could take as much of the revenue as they wanted. It was substantial. Though there is no certainty that passages have not been moved or edited, the provisions in Deuteronomy will have been the original ones, and those in Numbers and Leviticus, later books, will have been added after the Jews had become independent of Persia. Every meal offering, sin offering and trespass offering went to them (Num 16:19). They had a share of every animal sacrificed (Lev 7:30-34). They took the first fruits of all produce, corn, vines, figs, pomergranates, olives, honey (Dt 26:1f). Then the serious taxing began! The men of the land had to allocate the best of the oil, the best of the vintage and the best of the corn to the priests (Num 18:12). These “heave offerings” were to be a sixtieth to a fortieth of the yield. Now the allocation of the Levites was apportioned. It was a tenth of what remained, but a tenth of that had to be given by the Levites as their own tax to the priests (Num 18:20). Then one loaf in every 25 made had to be given to the priesthood (Num 15:17). The first born of every beast was the priests’ too, or money in lieu of it. The same applied to anyone’s own son! Every first born son had to be redeemed by the payment of five shekels. The priests had the shoulder of every animal butchered, and some of the offal (Dt 18:13). A proportion of all wool sheared from sheep was the priests’ too. Then, whenever a pious man wanted to seek God’s favour in a crisis by dedicating an ox, an ass, or a male or female slave, or even himself to God, yes indeed, it was the priests who benefitted (Num 18:14). And if anyone had stolen or defrauded, and felt guilty but had forgotten whom they had robbed, they could return the object of the felony to God in His temple where the priests would keep it for themselves, together with a ram of atonement (Num 5:8)! By Hellenistic times, the law had been successfully impressed, and the high-born priests stood at the head of the theocracy, bothered chiefly for their own riches and supremacy. Can anyone read this and maintain with any conviction that religion is anything other than a scam?
For pious Jews, the strange duties which the law imposed came not to be felt too heavy a burden. Precepts which were plain and had to do with something outward could be kept. Though hard at first, they became easier through habit. They were doing what was prescribed, it was God’s will, and so they did not ask what use it was. The law gave the Jewish religion its peculiar character, but there was a reward for obedience to it. The Jews had no genuine history, and painted the old time according to their imaginations, and the time to come according to their hopes. They stood in no living relation with either the past or the future. They had no national and historical existence, but hoped for it as a reward of faithfully keeping the law. They dreamed of a universal world monarchy at Jerusalem over the gentiles. They were in the right, had a destiny, and waited for it to be fulfilled. Whenever there were setbacks, their sins were the cause—a great discovery for religious mindsuckers—and post-Deuteronomic legislation was not addressed to the people, but to the congregation, its chief concern being the imposition of fines for collection by the priests, together with some suitable fatuous ceremony to acknowledge the due. It mostly stems from after the fall of Persia when the priests ran the temple as a private profitable enterprise. Hierocracy was taken for granted as the constitution of the congregation.
Judaism is utterly different from the religion of ancient Israel—Canaan. It is not even similar, except in one of the names of the God. Monotheism is the basis of a universalism, and at the same time is narrowly selfish. The creator of heaven and earth becomes the manager of a law which thrusts itself everywhere. The ideal is a negative one, to keep one’s self from sin, not a positive one, to do good upon the earth. It scarcely requires for its exercise the existence of fellow-beings.
The Samaritans
The people of Samaria when the city was founded were Canaanites, and then, the people of the Judaean hills were also. All spoke the same language, albeit with differences of dialect—the language that biblicists call Hebrew, but traditional historians call Phœnician. It was Canaanite, and that is what they themselves called it. After the colonists had been mixed into Yehud, the language of the country was the Persian norm, Aramaic, but the Jews adopted a dialect of ancient Canaanite as their religious language early in the Hellenistic era.
Although the Samarians accepted a type of Judaism, the two came to distinguish each other as different sects. Only the Persian colonists could run the Persian administrative district of Yehud and its temple. Samarians were excluded though they were Jews in accepting the law, and in paying their tithes. The other nations of Abarnahara were probably no different, but were not so immediate, and so had no claim to run the temple, accepting it as simply a Persian chancellery device for collecting revenue. It was their treatment as second class that offended the Samarians when they were on hand to help, and were willing, so they refused to accept the Jewish temple. Later, in the time of Alexander, according to Josephus, they built a temple of their own, formalizing the split between Jews and Samaritans.
To judge from the accounts of Ezra and Nehemiah, the people of Jerusalem were close kin of the people of Samaria, the noble houses of both being intermarried. Nehemiah was against any marriage of Jews with Gentiles, but the bible makes out that all of them were Israelites. The Assyrians had taken the leaders of the Samarians (Israelites) into captivity, and imposed the rule of a foreign ruling class, but they had been instructed to teach the worship of Yehouah, and indeed the Samarians and the later sect of Samaritans did worship Yehouah. They even finished up with the same law books as the Jews. So, the Samarians and the Jews must have been given the same law, even though Nehemiah, the bible says, considered them as Gentiles.
Nehemiah had expelled a priest from Jerusalem who had refused to give up his Samarian wife. He was the son of Joiada the Jerusalem High Priest, and the woman was a daughter of Sanballat, a name which either is that of a Samarian noble dynasty or is a Samarian title—it keeps popping up in different generations. The errant priest took Judaism to Samaria and set up a rival temple there at Gerizim. Josephus puts it at the time of the last king of Persia, the Darius defeated by Alexander, Darius III Codomanus, but Nehemiah’s activity seems to have culminated in the reading of the law by Ezra in Yehud in the reign of Darius II, the best part of a century earlier. If the law was introduced in Samaria at the same time as it was in Yehud, later the two events have been separated to give the introduction in Yehud precedence. It was the rival temple opened at Gerizim that was new, not the law, and the three Dariuses in Persian history were easily confused by historians who were not sure of the number of them, or often that there was more than just the Great Darius—most of the important parts of Jewish history have been crammed into the time of Darius the Great.
Anyway, Josephus calls the priest who takes Judaism to the Samaritans, Manasseh, but Manasseh is used elsewhere in Judaism as a shameful form of Moses. In other words, the priest’s name was Moses but because of his shameful act of marrying out and taking Judaism to the Samaritans, this Moses was renamed Manasseh. It means that Moses set up the religion of the Samaritans just as he did in Jewish legend! And Moses is not, of course, an imaginary leader of the Jewish exodus, but the name of the Persian god, Ahura Mazda. Both the religions of the Jews and of the Samaritans were founded by the Persian God—in his name by the Persians whose God he was. The Persian God could not have been admitted as the founder of Judaism or Samaritanism because these people worshipped Yehouah, and so the Jews brought the Persian god down to earth as their mythical hero, and a Samaritan villain. Ezra was the real Jewish Moses, the man who brought their law, and he was most likely the same man who brought the law to the Samaritans.
Since the Samaritan religion as we know it is based upon the Pentateuch and has the Pentateuch for its acknowledged scriptures, it is not improbable that it was Manasseh who carried to Shechem the Law-Book whose authority Nehemiah had enforced in Jerusalem.E Bevan, Jerusalem Under the High Priests
But Nehemiah had the authority of the Persian Shah. What authority did this Manasseh have? The Samarians can have had no respect for Nehemiah, a man who had openly rebuffed them, but, in this story, they were only too ready to copy him. Since Samarians disliked Jews, it seems unlikely that they should have been so ready to copy them. It is not unlikely, though, that the Persians were introducing the law to their co-operative subjects generally in their empire. The plan seems to have been succeeding before the empire collapsed, and it had created a large body of Juddin—a ready made diaspora—who, with the demise of the imperium, looked to Jerusalem for their identity, just as later the Christians looked to Rome when the Jerusalem Church was disbanded. The Samarians were the exception, being too close to those who had rebuffed them. Even so, it was possibly the arrogance and exclusiveness of the Jerusalem elite that caused the final split which came after the countries had been taken over by the Seleucids, because the Samarians seem to have accepted the revisions of the Torah made by the Ptolemies.
As regards the subsequent history of the Jewish community under the Persian domination, we have almost no information. The High Priest in Nehemiah’s time was Eliashib, son of Joiakim and grandson of Joshua, alleged to have “returned” from Babylon. He was succeeded in the direct line by Joiada, Johanan, and Jaddua (Nehemiah 12:10;11:22), who was in office at the time of Alexander the Great (Josephus, Antiquities 11:8).
Some Curiosities
Western historians have never noticed or acknowledged the debt owed to the Persians by the two tiny nations of antiquity accepted as having a seminal role in the rise of western civilization. The Greeks gave us reason, democracy and beautiful art and architecture, while the Jews gave us monotheism, God and religion. The Hellenes, minnows to a shark, saved the world from the east in battle, while the Jews had such a powerful religion that it emerged intact and unaltered from any and every trial. Curious, is it not? that at the back of both of these peoples were the mighty Persians with their own unique religion and world dominance for two hundred years, yet they made negligible cultural impact at all.
It is myth, ignorance and prejudice. Nations and civilizations need their myths, and, as we can see with our own religious myths, they are difficult to cast aside. The Hellenes were hugely influenced by Egyptian and Akkadian culture even before the Persians arrived on the scene, as their religious myths show clearly enough, but it was the novel ideas brought by the Persians that really set them thinking. The Persians loomed on the doorstep of the Greeks with their immense power and utterly original cosmogony. They could not fail to influence a race like the Greeks, and influence them they did, not religiously because the Greeks did not do religion in the eastern pious way, but they thought about the peculiar Persian religious ideas, examining them from ever angle and thus invented philosophy and science. The Jews had no special religon before the Persians invented it as a pacification and unification policy. Had the Persian empire lasted another century or so, the Jews might have succeeeded in some of the aims suggested in their scriptures—they might have ruled the world. As it was the Persians left them with an indelible culture.
Edwyn Bevan notes that, in Greece, “a kind of mental activity, hitherto unique among men, had been going on for the last few centuries before Alexander, and the result was a body of ideas, a way of thinking and feeling about the world”. That is the bald fact but what caused this “unique mental activity”? Alexander began his career in 334 BC, essentially simply taking over a ready made empire from the enfeebled Achaemenids. Two hundred years earlier, in 550 BC, Cyrus the Persian had built that empire and had pushed it to the edge of the Aegean Sea and Europe. The “last few centuries before Alexander” that Bevan speaks of as being the fount of Greek invention were exactly the years when the Persians appeared from the east. For a hundred years before Cyrus, the Iranian tribe of the Medes had been influential, taking over the Assyrian empire. There is no avoiding the inference that Greek thought owed its stimulus to the new Iranian ideas that had replaced the myths of Ashur and Babylon, whence came the Greek myths, and were flooding westward with tales of this vigorous eastern people.
There are several interesting things about the period between Nehemiah and Jesus of Nazareth. The first is that the people who lived in Yehud, the Persian name of Judah, were not mainly Jews when Nehemiah arrived, even according to the Jewish scriptures. Herodotus, describing the Persian empire for his Histories, had never heard of them. Nehemiah had to show them what to do to be Jews, and then Ezra had to read them the law, even though the scriptures we now have tell us the Jews had had a God given law for a thousand years before that. The people who already lived in Yehud were happy to join in the building of the temple to their local God, Yehouah, but Nehemiah and Ezra wanted nothing to do with the locals. Only the people they brought with them counted as being Jews, at least initially. So here was the time when the Jews took over the country of Yehud.
About 40,000 people are represented as having been brought in to the Persian colony, apparently more people than were there already, but the figures are probably an accumulative sum, over subsequent years too, of people and their families accepted as Jewish when the account was written many years later. The local population were disparaged as “people of the land” and Samarians, the people who lived to the north of Jerusalem. Their offers to help in reconstruction were refused, beginning an hostility that has lasted ever since. The same was true of the people just south of Jerusalem, the Edomites. The Edomites, later Idumaeans, who had held land from the Negeb up to Jerusalem, were thrown out of territory allocated to the colonists, on the pretext that they had occupied it illegally, and had to move further south to poorer land in the Negeb desert. They too remained resentful, and the hostility between them and the Jews has also continued since.
Yet another curiosity is that a lot of Jews lived in the wider Persian empire even though few lived in Yehud initially. The biblicists explain that these are the descendents of the few thousand who were deported by Nebuchadrezzar. The Jews in the bible were remarkable breeders, evidently taking the commandment to multiply seriously. Thus, the descendants of Jacob, a single family bred so fast in Egypt that they became a multitude of several million in three or four generations. The few thousand deported by Nebuchadrezzar, again in about three generations became the millions of Jews in Persia, when no Jews to speak of lived in Yehud, and before long they were all over the Roman empire too.
Babylon was a famous ancient city, the center of an ancient civilization going back to the beginning of written history, which was taken over by the Persian kings as their capital city. Persian kings, except for the first few, were “Babylonized”, spending at least part of their time there, so that Babylon could be called the capital city of Persia. Nowadays, Britain is London, the USA is Washington, France is Paris, and so on—countries are called by their capitals—but in the days of great cities, countries were the capital in a real sense. When Persian kings operated out of Babylon, the peripheral countries taking the orders still called it Babylon! So, Persian Jews are called Babylonian Jews because:
- the bible does not properly distinguish Babylon and Persia, and the confusion between whether “Babylon” meant Persian Babylon or Chaldaean Babylon has always suited the peddlars of biblical myths
- the eastern Jews were later associated with Babylon when the Persian Sassanid kings ruled there and favoured the Jews
- these eastern Jews wrote commentaries on the Torah, superior to those of Jerusalem, dubbed the Babylonian Talmud, and again associated in the popular mind with the Babylonian exile and not correctly with Persia.
Babylonian Jews were the Jews of the Persian empire, not Nebuchadrezzar’s Babylon, and there always seemed to be a lot of them. The most curious thing of all, then, is that the Jewish diaspora existed before the Jews had a home of their own in Yehud. The Jewish scriptures invented the myth of the “exile” to explain the “return”, though we have no reason to doubt Nebuchadrezzar exiled some leading Judahites. What is certain is that those exiled, could not have become millions only a few decades later, were not Jews in any religious sense when they went into exile, but were simply inhabitants of a tiny region of Palestine called Judah, and could never have wanted to return to penury in those poor dry hills once they had tasted success and civilization in the heart of a great empire, if that is what they actually did.
The Jews did not all return from Babylon! Why should they? They never had anything to do with Judah anyway. The truth seems to be that the Persians invented Judaism as a model religion for conquered people (Juddin) who were not Zoroastrians. Juddin were spread around the Persian empire, communities of people who had cooperated with the Persians rather than opposed them. The Persians had restored their religion, whatever it had been, to one that approximated to Mazdayasnaism, the religion of the Persian ruling class. Yehud was set up as a focal point for this religion, serving simultaneously to control Egypt, a geopolitical problem, and serving too as a taxation center for the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara, whose constituents were often meant by “The Nations” of the Jewish scriptures. With the setting up of the temple state in Jerusalem, these diverse people focused on the new politic. They had been loyal to the ruling Persians and tended to be loyal in nature as long as they were treated favourably. Indeed, loyal Jews were planted in places where the natives were restless to pacify them and to teach them Persian manners. The break up of the Persian empire at the hands of Alexander and the subsequent chaos, left the artificial state of Yehud as the center of world Jewry, most of whom had never had anything at all to do with Jerusalem, yet it provided a mass of displaced and wandering people with a ready identity. When Persia died, all the Jews of Persia looked to Jerusalem, and the politico-economic act of the Persians had started a great religion.
Jews Appear in History
Palestine fell into Alexander’s possession in 332 BC. What was important in Palestine to the warring generals of Alexander? Militarily, it was the route between Africa, the extremely rich country of Egypt in fact, and Asia, where most of the rest of the civilized world was. Egyptian kings saw it as essential for their hopes of expansion, while Asian kings saw it as essential for containing the potentially dangerous Egypt. But it was also economically important for controlling trade with the eastern countries of Arabia and India, the trade in spices, scents and other exotic goods. Moreover, Lebanon was important to Egypt as a source of timber, which Egypt lacked, and timber was especially important for shipbuilding and so for seapower. The Phœnician states provided seapower for Asian powers to be influential in the Mediterranean, and naturally Egyptians liked to keep them on side too, but also wanted to ensure their own naval independence.
Ptolemy was one of Alexander’s generals, and was shrewd enough to get himself appointed as governor of Egypt, which was therefore his base when Alexander died, leaving him in the most favoured position in the subsequent wars. The Ptolemies were naturally safe in Egypt, as long as they could keep invaders restricted to Palestine. In 315 BC, he had to give way before a resurgent Antigonus. In an attempt to keep the empire intact, Antigonus had taken control of the western empire, Asia Minor and Syria, but he found himself up against the others, notably an alliance of Ptolemy and Seleucus, who had grabbed the eastern empire as far as far west as Babylon.
The natural boundary of Egypt and Africa is the narrow isthmus across which the Suez canel now cuts. Palestine is on the Asian side of it and ought to have been Seleucid, but Ptolemy I in Egypt saw the advantages of it, and, in 320 BC, seized it from Antigonus. Josephus says he took Jerusalem on the sabbath day, perhaps the first such legend. Antigonus was unable to sustain his position, and fell to the allies in 301 BC. Even before the battle of Ipsus, Ptolemy had recovered possession of Palestine once more, Seleucus had grabbed Syria, and for a century thereafter Southern Syria continued to belong to the Egyptian crown and northern Syria to the Seleucidae, who also sought every chance to wrench away Palestine. The two old chums did not challenge each other while they lived, but the rivalry had started and was continued by their descendents.
The first references we have in Greek to the Jews come from the writers of the third century BC, in the early days of Macedonian rule.E Bevan
These Jews were called a race of “philosophers”, the phrase referring to their lifestyle not their interests. The Greek philosophical schools were organized as brotherhoods like the first of them, the Pythagoreans, who adopted their own rules of cleanliness and diet, again under Persian influence. So, the Greek writers considered Jews to be like Pythagoreans. Yet the Jews whom we know were like the Pythagoreans in being a brotherhood as well as having peculiar rules of their own were the Essenes. It suggests that Essenism was closer to original Judaism, the Pharisees and Sadduccees having adapted in varying degrees to Hellenism.
Diodorus quotes Hecataeus of Abdera as writing in the first half of the third century BC:
In recent times, under the foreign rule of the Persians, and then of the Macedonians by whom the Persian empire was overthrown, intercourse with other races has led to many of the traditional Jewish ordinances losing their hold.
In fact, the Persians had founded Judaism 150 years before but had pretended it was Josiah another 200 years earlier, but there is no doubt that the ordinances they founded began to change under the Macedonians. Indeed, this statement by Hecataeus is typical of the religious “restorers” who make just such a claim of lost traditions as a pretext for “restoring” them—that is changing existing tradition! It is just what the Persians did to institute Judaism, and what Hecataeus might have been doing for the Ptolemies to change it.
Jews were already settled in considerable numbers in Asia Minor (eg Ephesus), in Syria (eg Antioch), in Persia (eg Babylon) and in Egypt where Alexander, so it is said, populated his new city of Alexandria with them. The successors of Alexander (diadochi) also saw the value of this international tribe of Jewry, and used it to bond their barbarian and Hellenic populations. Ptolemy settled many Jews and Samarians in Egypt. In Ptolemy’s campaign in Palestine in 312 BC, another large number of Jews are said to have entered Egypt. Bevan says there was no “diaspora” at this time, yet “the number of Jews resident in Egypt was considerable”, and an Hellenistic Judaism centred on Alexandria arose. According to Box (Judaism in the Greek Period), a large district of Heliopolis was exclusively Jewish, Memphis also had a self-contained Jewish colony, and there were as many Jews in Alexandria as there were in Palestine, if not more. Jews had their own quarter in the north east of Alexandria where they lived according to their own law, and were represented on the municipal council by their own leaders. Here, under Ptolemy I and II, the Torah was translated into Greek, and around this sprung up a Jewish-Greek literature which soon became extensive. The Ptolemies did it because they were anxious to keep the Jews of Jerusalem on their side, not least because there was a strong fifth column of them in the Babylon of the Seleucids, and so, after the initial conquest, they granted them every favour to keep them sweet.
Jews in Palestine came to regard the role of the Ptolemies with favourable eyes. The sentiment of the Jews in Egypt, especially in Alexandria, where they enjoyed many privileges, was favourable to the Ptolemaic dynasty, and doubtless helped to create a similar sentiment among the Jews of Palestine. Josephus (Contra Apionem 2:4-5) highly praises the kindness of the Ptolemies towards the Jews, and it seems to have been a cardinal principle of the leading circles of Jews in Jerusalem to depend on the Ptolemies in opposition to the Seleucidae.G H Box, Judaism in the Greek Period
At the Egyptian court, in government service, and in the army of the Ptolemies many Jews rose to prominent positions. Taxation officials whose names appear on revenue documents at Thebes had Jewish names. Everywhere they received preference over the indigenous population, and so everywhere they earned their hatred. Ptolemy set up a Jewish colony in Cyrene when he subdued north Africa. Yet, Judah is a tiny country, and had a small population not capable of supplying all of the Jews there were in Alexandria let alone the rest of Egypt. Judah was the only Jewish land and Jerusalem was its only city. Polybius of Megalopolis, cited by Josephus, says that Antiochus Epiphanes received representations from “those Jews that lived near the temple called Jerusalem”. “Those Jews” distinguishes them from all the Jews that lived elsewhere—millions of Jews lived in the rest of the east—so they are the Jews of Judah, and it proves that the Jewish homeland was but a tiny area. Box says that “this territory had since the days of Cyrus not exceeded a days march from Jerusalem on any of its sides”—about 20 miles.
So where did all these dispersed Jews come from? As Antiochus the Great transported 2000 Jewish families from Babylonia into Phrygia and Lydia, all of these colonizing Jews were not from Judah. Jews were not just the people from Judah, as explained above, but were already widespread in the remnants of the Persian empire, and since no Jews were noticed by Herodotus less than two centuries before, they must have been a product of the Persian state.
And what language did these Jews so proud of their own legacy actually speak? Ordinary Jews in Judah spoke Aramaic, and upper class Jews spoke Greek. Jews in the Greek kingdoms spoke Greek, and, in Persia, they spoke Aramaic. Hebrew is supposed to have been their language but no one had spoken it for hundreds of years, and it is doubtful that Jews ever did. Lections from the bible read in synagogue services at the time of Christ were read out in Hebrew and in Aramaic translation. The assumption of biblicists is that this became necessary as people lost their knowledge of Hebrew and began to speak Aramaic, but since the Jewish colonists spoke Aramaic from the outset, as everyone else did in Persia at the time, the habit of reading in Hebrew must have been a purist innovation at some stage, doubtless justified on the grounds that the people had forgotten how to understand Hebrew, when they never had done. Philo tells us (Vita Moysis):
Originally the laws were written in the Chaldaean language…
Well the Chaldaean language was, in fact, Aramaic not Hebrew, so the only justification for saying that Philo meant Hebrew is the modern assumption that he did. It makes more sense that the law was delivered in Aramaic and that the Ptolemies rewrote the Aramaic into Greek, and then into Hebrew for the Jerusalem priesthood. Josephus wrote a version of the Jewish War as a warning to the Jews living in Palestine, Syria and the east, but he did not write it in Hebrew. He wrote it in Aramaic. The Slavonic version is thought by some to be based on this Aramaic original, differing, as it does, significantly from the extant Greek version.
The preface to Ecclesiasticus shows that the Jews in Egypt, in the second century BC used Greek not only in their daily lives, but also in their services, and they read their scriptures in Greek. Books like Proverbs, Job, Esther, and Daniel, have additions to the Greek that are unknown in the Hebrew texts, showing that it is quite false to assume that these books were invariably written in Hebrew. Since Hebrew was a dead language, it seems certain that the writing was done in Greek first, then it was translated into the dead language. Since no one actually used Hebrew, except in liturgy, the Hebrew books were meant for use in the temple, where commentary and exhortation would be used to explain what was not obvious because no one except scholars knew what it meant. It was like medieval Latin being used in Catholic Church services.
The great Jewish scholar, Philo, obviously knew nothing about Hebrew because when he tries to explain divine names, he talks nonsense. Once the decision was made by the Ptolemies to put the law into Greek, then there would have been a readership among the literate members of synagogues in the Greek cities like Alexandria. They were presented as translations, but much of it was worked up and elaborated from the original Aramaic to suit the priests. Books like the Wisdom of Solomon were certainly written directly in Greek. Either way, Greek speakers had no idea whether the book was a translation or original, other than what they were told. What of the Prophets, books that purport ot be from the seventh or eighth centuries BC?
The writings of the Hebrew prophets were collected and redacted in the third century BC.Professor C C Torrey, 1925
The verb “redact” is deliberately used here misleadingly. Whatever original material the readacters had at their disposal, whatever emerged was far more than simply edited. They were rendered into the Greek style of literature, a style never before seen, and therefore much more than simply an edition. The Jewish scriptures are Greek literature.
The Hellenistic Period
What has to be realized about the Hellenization of the east is that it was a complete change in society. The Greeks were city dwellers. They were urbanites. Their cities had a civic structure with public facilities such as stoa, agora, stadia, hippodromes, gymnasia and theatres. Eastern cities had nothing like most of this. They had no similar communal life. The Easterners interacted personally but there were no communal facilities except religious ones. What is particularly relevant is that the Greeks introduced popular writing—writing to be read for enlightenment and entertainment. Undoubtedly there was a tradition of religious drama, and the Greeks had developed it into entertainment in the theatre. They developed writing into romances and history, science and philosophy. Until the Greeks spread it, writing was an economic and diplomatic skill not meant for ordinary people. People were told things, they did not read them, though matters of state were recorded tersely in archives and chronicles, and monuments reminded people of laws, duties and the exploits of their kings. Modern believers seem to think that everyone always had their bibles to read, but that is not so. Most people could not read, and books were as specialized as a Meteorological Office computer. The temple had “The Book”! It was to be read to the congregations, not read by them.
All this is well known and not disputed but nevertheless, the Pentateuch was supposedly written as a detailed and often personal set of memoirs and romances over a thousand years before the Greeks Hellenized the world. The unreality of it is all too obvious, though professional Jews and Christians will never comment on it.
As the mind of any man rose above the lower levels, the more potent and enduring part of Hellenism threw its spell over him… Greek culture, Greek literature, were thrown open to the people of nearer Asia… They had native literatures, but these in the new day light looked poor and unformed.E Bevan
Though he was a great Christian scholar, the glaring inference eluded Bevan, needless to say, unless he just ignored it! Reality points to the bible being a product of Hellenization:
Greek culture effaced all the literature of Syria and Phœnicia, except the Jewish.E Bevan
Bevan expresses no surprise again at what he is writing. One wonders whether he was delicately trying to suggest something. Plainly, Greek culture effaced all previous literature in the region, full stop. It follows that the bible is Greek literature! Certainly, it had in it the themes and traditions established by the Persians, and who can doubt that it has even older saws and sayings, but the literature of it is Greek literature, and it exemplifies the Greek literary style, albeit easternized as would be expected in the east. This was when the bible was allegedly translated from Hebrew into Greek, as biblicists put it. It is when it was written—in Greek and Hebrew! From the basis of the law imposed by the Persians, the outline propaganda of their prophets, and an outline retributive history, the Deuteronomic history based on Babylonian and Assyrian archives, the Ptolemies, then the Seleucids and Maccabees used Greek arts to produce the Jewish scriptures. The whole was written up in a form closer to that we now have over a period of 200 years. Indeed, the bible was still being written into the time of Jesus, as the Dead Sea Scrolls prove. To imagine we are reading the genuine words of Isaiah from the eighth century BC in his book, or the words of Moses from the fourteenth century BC in the Pentateuch is purely idiotic. There can be no Christian scholar who does not know it.
Biblical Hebrew, if it was ever a spoken language at all, is far too impoverished in grammar and vocabulary for elegant literature and deep thought. It is a language of simple exhortation, suitable for impressing solemn commandments. Its poetry is quaint and unsubtle, depending upon repeating ideas in different words, so that ideas are doubly emphasized in different ways. The assumption always is that the bible was translated into Greek from Hebrew, but, in fact, it was probably written first in Greek based on the Persian original. It was a co-operative process between the Ptolemies, who funded it, and the Jerusalem priesthood who stood to benefit. Elements of the procedure must have been on the following lines.
The Ptolemaic Egyptian priesthood devised suitable modifications of Deuteronomy, taking care not to change the Deuteronomic theme, but inventing the story of the Exodus to make Jews into a type of Egyptian. Then it was rendered into biblical Hebrew, a dead language, specially resurrected. The Jerusalem priesthood modified it to suit their own needs, adding tithes and taxes to keep the money rolling in. It was not a process that then stopped. Remember that ordinary people did not have access to the books, so, as long as the priests kept themes and characters constant, no one could complain. When the books were agreed, they were translated from Hebrew back into Greek for a copy to be placed in the library of Alexandria. It was the Pentateuch. The Jerusalem temple had a copy, apparently in a room called the Library of Nehemiah (2 Maccabees 2:13). The other books were in production, and the industry continued, for the Essenes were still doing it two centuries later.
When the Seleucidae succeeded from the Ptolemies, changes were necessitated, but quickly the country fell into civil war during which the books were damaged and scattered. Books were rare and could easily all be destroyed if someone with the power wanted to do it, just as Alexander did to the Zoroastrian scriptures in Persepolis. Biblicists accept what is said in the scriptures as being unequivocally true even though it makes no sense, and the bible (2 Maccabees 2:14) tells them that the earlier works were badly damaged in the civil war that raged in the second century BC. and had to be pieced back together from whatever remained and whatever could be remembered. The scattering of the holy books and the attempt to piece them together again can explain much of the curious repetition, doublets and obscure passages in the Old Testament. Yet some passages read almost perfectly, like a modern romance. The obvious explanation is that they were rewritten to fill lacunae left after the destruction. What could not be remembered was re-written! This rewriting will have been in Hebrew because the Hasmonaeans rejected Hellenization, at least publicly. The belief that the Masoretic texts of the Jewish scriptures were original has been shown—from careful comparison of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts—to be simplistic. In the biblicist view, we have to believe that the Holy Ghost ensured only whatever was important survived. Any God must despair that His servants prefer to be idiots and refuse to use the brains He gave them.
Bevan did emphasize that the great cities of the east, after the conquests of Alexander, were Greek. Posidonius, a Syrian Greek, had written in the first century BC that eastern city life in the Hellenistic period was “a continuous series of social festivities”. The people bathed and anointed themselves with scented oils in the gymnasia, they ate rich food and drank wine all day in restaurants, taking home what they did not finish. “They feast to the prevailing music of strings. The cities are filled from end to end with the sound of harp playing.” It sounds rather like modern American pop-culture, but just as Islamists do not like American culture, the Jewish zealots did not like Hellenism. So the Christian illustrations of Jesus—three hundred years after Alexander—dressed like an Arab, if true, must mean that the Nazarenes were deliberately trying not to be Greek. Certainly, they seemed to avoid the cities, seemed to speak the native Aramaic tongue not Greek, and rejected the Greco-Roman cultural imperialism of the time. It suggests Jesus was zealous for the native culture and the law. He was deliberately rebelling against western cultural norms. He was a militant zealot, and died as one.
In the priestly dynasty, during the period of the Ptolemies, Onias I ben Jaddua was succeeded by his son Simon I, after whom again came first his brothers Eleazar and Manasseh, and next his son Onias II; the last-named was in his turn followed by his son Simon II, praised by Ben Sira (or Ben Sirach 49:14-16). At the side of the High Priest stood the gerusia of the town of Jerusalem, as a council of state, including the higher ranks of the priesthood.
The wisdom literature of the Jewish scriptures has little relationship with the rest. It is based on the Greek fondness for aphorisms, and while it might record some native wisdom of the Levant, it is essentially a separate tradition from the rest of the bible. It is a catalogue of virtues and what they consist of in practice. Virtue is a Greek concept. Others had various types of good and evil, but it was a Greek habit to catalogue and classify them, beginning by recognizing them as abstractions. Ben Sira drew on what he experienced as a Jew but expressed it as a Greek. Nor is the monotheism of Ben Sira particularly significant for by this time no educated Greek believed in the Homeric myths, and even if they did, they saw them as illustrative of aspects of God, not as literal truths. Of course, common people could not be persuaded that the myths were only exemplary tales or warnings, any more than the ignorant today can be persuaded that they have understood Judaism or Christianity wrongly. If any final proof were needed, it is that Ben Sira had no inclination to believe in any life after death. His view was fully Greek, showing he had rejected Persian Judaism and was a Sadduccee. For Ben Sira there were no post mortem rewards. The good man left behind only his name, his virtues, his reputation, the good he had done in the world, to extend his natural life. That was his after-life!
Daniel 11 describes the rise of Seleucus and the truce when the daughter of Ptolemy II married the Seleucid king, Antiochus II, the invasion of Seleucia by Ptolemy III and the continuation of the war by Seleucid II. Antiochus III the Great settled the dispute after he became king in 223 BC. He won back Palestine in 218, lost it in 217. After the death of Ptolemy IV (205 BC), and a war lasting several years, Antiochus III, won the decisive battle in 198 BC at Panium, north of Galilee near a sanctuary to the god, Pan—whence the name, still recognizable as Banias. The pragmatic Jews, sensibly enough, took his side, welcomed Antiochus with a goodwill procession, and, with the same motivation as the Ptolemies, to secure their sincere goodwill, Antiochus confered on them and their temple special privileges (Josephus, Antiquities, 12:3:3). Indeed, Josephus says the Seleucids granted the Jews full civil rights in all the cities they founded in Asia Minor and in Syria, and they retained their privileges in Antioch until the time he was writing in the first century AD. When Antiochus the Great was killed in the east, he was succeeded in 187 BC by his son, Seleucus IV Philopater. The book 2 Maccabees was started in his reign.
Antiochus was called “Great” for waging wars, but wars are expensive and Seleucus IV incurred an immense additional burden of debt in a war against Rome. His treasury was empty, and he had to raise funds. He taxed the people. The priests were not producing the goods. The High Priesthood, with few exceptions like Simon II, had become like medieval bishops—they were noblemen and princes, riven by petty jealousies. A noble family, the Tobiads, competed for power with the High Priest himself, and hoped to get the High Priesthood with the help of the king. Philopater then heard about the Jerusalem temple’s riches. A priest, Simon, told him of the temple treasure because he did not like the High Priest, Onias III, the son and successor of Simon II. The Prime Minister, Heliodorus, checked out the story, finding it to be so, but had the “heavenly vision” of being beaten by “angels” for his presumption.
About this time (175 BC), Heliodorus poisoned Seleucus IV Philopater anyway, putting an infant prince on the throne, allowing him to take the reigns of power unchallenged (176 BC). Unfortunately for the usurper, an older son was being schooled, doubtless in Athens, and he took time out of his schooling to raise an army in Pergamos. With some clever negotiations he established his own rights and displaced Heliodorus. He was Antiochus IV Epiphanes (“The Image of God”), popularly called Epimanes or “slightly mad”. Antiochus was particularly keen to spread Greek ways, and he had an ally in Jerusalem to do so called Joshua, Grecized to Jason, the brother and rival of Onias. Jason made an offer to rent the position of High Priest which Antiochus accepted, the kings still being short of money. Possibly the Tobiadae also had something to do with it. Selling the position of Head of State was a more subtle way of raising money than simply raiding the temple till, but it amounted to the same thing because Jason was going to have to raise the money by doing just that.
The greed and unorthodoxy of the Hellenized priests offended those who preferred the Persian tradition, the Hasidim. It means “The Holy Ones”, but is also variously translated according to circumstances. Applied to God, the adjective “Holy” seems superfluous to believers, and then they translate it as “gracious” or “merciful”. Applied to ordinary people, “Holy” is too strong, so it is rendered as “pious” or “godly”. False translation is an important part of religious fraud. Anyway, the best meaning of Hasidim in context is Zealots—they were zealous for their traditional beliefs and practices. They eschewed earthly riches and were mainly poor men who called themselves “The Righteous” or “The Just”. Josephus says their leader was Onias, son of Simon (Simeon) the Righteous. There was a flame on the altar, evidently a lagacy of the Persian tradition, which was considered to burn strongly under good priests like Simon the Righteous.
The upper and cultivated classes among the Jews, who mixed with the Greek ruling class, wanted to do all they could to minimize the social differences. The Hellenizing fashion is shown by the Grecizing of the Jewish names—Alcimus is Eliakim, Jason or Jesus is Joshua, Menelaus is Menahem. The Hasids resented Jason’s policies, were offended and protested, and they had support among the lower classes of society. Their apparently simple anti-Hellenism really meant a preference for the original Persian tradition, Judaism as the Persians had introduced it. The Hasid leader, Onias III, who had been High Priest, was exiled to Antioch to get him out of the way, and Jason, the new High Priest, went ahead blatantly Hellenizing Jerusalem by founding a gymnasium and an ephebeum. The Persians had been subtler.
But the scheming among the ruling elite continued. Menelaus who was taking the annual Jewish tribute to Antioch, offered a higher sum for the High Priesthood (171 BC). Though nominated and with the support of the Tobiadae, the people preferred Jason, who had to be forced out by the military. Menelaus arranged for Onias III, still living at Antioch, to be murdered, and having to pay the amount of tribute he had promised, he went boldly ahead and rifled the temple treasure. As further plunderings of the sacred treasure were being made, the people rebelled, but Menelaus got off with more bribery.
Antiochus meanwhile took advantage of Egypt being ruled by a minor, Ptolemy VII Philometer to launch an invasion about 169 BC. His campaign was a great success, but a Roman envoy arrived led by a man called Pompillius who insisted on seeing Antiochus. When the king appeared, a legate drew a circle around him and produced a decree from the Roman Senate demanding his withdrawal from Egypt. Pompillius told Antiochus that he wanted a reply before the king stepped out of the circle. Antiochus had to yield.
By now, most Jews had turned back in their loyalty to the Ptolemies rather than the Seleucids, and were ready for rebellion, though scared of the consequences of Antiochus having a large army handy. Then news came that he had been killed. Jason, who had been hiding across the Jordan river, saw his chance and returned with a gang to stage a coup d’etat. The news was false, perhaps a deliberate provocation, and an angry and frustrated Antiochus returned “in high dudgeon indeed and groaning in spirit” (Polybius), fortified Acra, and put in it a strong garrison preparatory to sending an army against Jerusalem to take it out on the Jews. He disarmed the inhabitants and demolished the walls, entered the Holy Place looking for treasure, and removed everything Jewish from the temple. He restored Menelaus, placing Syrian officials at his side, and ordered that the temple be made over to the worship of Zeus in the shape of Jupiter Capitolinus. The first offering made on 25 Kislev 168 BC. The Hasids fled into the countryside with Antiochus attempting to abolish the Mosaic cult. He prohibited sabbath observance and the rite of circumcision, and confiscated and burnt all copies of the Torah. In the country towns, heathen altars were erected, and the Jews compelled, on pain of death, publicly to adore the false gods and to eat swine’s flesh that had been sacrificed to idols. Jason fled and ultimately died in misery at Lacedaemon.
The Jewish nobles had said the people were ready for Hellenization, and Antiochus was too ready to believe them. A large body resisted. So Antiochus used force. Of course, there were plenty of Jews who were ready to reform, and Hellenize. The Syrian garrison of Acra had many such Jews in its ranks. The inhabitants of Jerusalem, which was already largely Hellenized, abandoned it and escaped to Egypt, or hid in deserts and caves. The Hasidim or Pious Ones and the scribes whose main job was the law held fast to tradition.
This is the background to Daniel, the history of Daniel 11 which describes the break up of Alexander’s empire and the rise of the Ptolemies, the kings of the South, and the Seleucids, the kings of the North. The center of the Seleucid empire was Babylon, and Daniel is simply a pseudepigraph in which Babylon is the oppressor, the author protecting himself by pretending he is writing history. The Babylon he represents is that of Nebuchadrezzar but really is that of Antiochus. The Jews were reassured by reference to the ordeals suffered by their supposed ancestors, and the rewards promised them in the coming apocalypse if they adopt a spirit of martyrdom. The history is recognizable, albeit highly allegorized, the “Abomination of Desolation” (Daniel 11:31ff) being the statue of Zeus Capitolina erected in the temple by Antiochus. The apostasy of many and the persecution of the faithful also are recorded (Daniel 7:25;8:11-14;9:27). The popularity of Judas Maccabee is described quite disparaingly (Daniel 11:43), evidence that it is a Hasid work.
