Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 30 June 2006

Jerusalem

In the ninth century BC, Shalmaneser III of Assyria took tribute from the king of Israel, “Yeho, son of Omri”. In the second half of the eighth century BC, Tiglath-pileser III subjected most of the region, deposed Peqar, the king of Israel, and placed Hosea (Saviour) on the throne. Sargon II eventually annexed Israel and, following a well established imperial policy, transported the leading citizens. Some of the farms were abandoned for a while and reverted to brush but then the deportees were replaced by people from Elam, Syria and Arabia. The newcomers were absorbed, the economy recovered and the culture and practice of the state continued. Contrary to the bible, the whole of the population was not removed and the state destroyed, though it became a colony of Assyria.

The population of Lachish were not so fortunate in 701 BC. The Assyrians did murder and deport them all, but they did not destroy the city—the Babylonians and later the Persians did. In the next 50 years Jerusalem grew five-fold to a population of 25,000 people by about 650 BC. Conceivably a temple was built in this period of prosperity but there is no scientific evidence it was. All the evidence points to the first temple being the second temple! The idea that the temple was preceded by a first temple seems to be biblical mythology.

Jerusalem’s initial spell of prosperity did not last long. In 597 BC then in 586 BC it was attacked by the Babylonians. As in the previous cases, the Babylonians pursued the policy of transporting the leading lights and artisans of a population and Judah was left leaderless and impoverished. Jerusalem was not destroyed as Lachish had been but it fell into disrepair from neglect over the next 50 years.

Summarising, Thomas L Thompson writes that ‘in the historical developments of Palestine between 1250 and 586, all of the traditional answers given for the origins and development of “Israel” have had to be discarded:

• The patriarchs of Genesis were not historical.
• The assertion that “Israel” was already a people before entering Palestine whether in these stories or those of Joshua has no historical foundation.
• No masive military campaign of invading nomadic “Israelites” ever conquered Palestine.
• There was never an ethnically distinct “Canaanite” populatiuon whom “Israelites” displaced.
• There was no “period of the Judges” in history.
• No empire ever ruled a “united monarchy” from Jerusalem.
• No ethnically coherent “Israelite” nation ever existed at all.
• No political, ethnic or historical bond existed between the state that was called Israel or the “House of Omri” and the town of Jerusalem and the state of Judah.
• In history, neither Jerusalem nor Judah ever shared an identity with Israel before the rule of the Hasmonaeans in the Hellenistic period.

Babylonian Deportation

The population of Judah did not cease to exist in 586 BC and Jerusalem and its region were not entirely depopulated after the Babylonian army took the city. Those who may have been taken to Babylon in one of the many deportations from Palestine to Mesopotamia during the first millennium BC cannot be assumed to have been ethnically or religiously related to any of the several groups who identified with a self-understanding of Hezekiah’s remnant Jerusalem, but as a returning remnant, with “exile” as their self-defining literary paradigm.

The unskilled population left behind struggled on in poverty again shepherding their flocks until the king of Persia, Cyrus, issued an edict that Jerusalem should be “restored” as a vassal state of the Persian Empire. The “Jews” were to be “restored” to their rightful kingdom and their god “restored” to his temple. Cyrus sent bodies of people to carry out his edict and the poor people who had been left behind on their own hillsides for fifty years wanted to participate in the wonderful project. Their pleas were ever rejected and they were villified by the newcomers who had “returned” from “exile” as Samaritans and Am ha Eretz.

The quizzical marks in the previous paragraph highlight a fact of the “exile” that scholars do not tell the punters. The Assyrians from about 850 BC had a policy of transporting the leading classes of a conquered country to some distant part of the empire. The idea was plain. The leaderless people remaining were not likely to cause trouble and the deported people would be too insecure and busy establishing themselves elsewhere to bother about revolution. Even minor kings had the same policy. Mesha of Moab, on the Moabite Stone, says he attacked the city of Ataroth, built by the King of Israel, and slaughtered “all of the people of the town to satisfy Chemosh… settling in the city the men of Sharon… and Maharith”.

Even the Jewish scriptures admit it, and tell us of deportations unknown otherwise in history, if they are not excuses. In Ezra 4:2, the biblical author makes out that the natives of Judah, who want to help the Persian colonists to build the temple, were put there by Esarhaddon king of Assyria (680-669 BC). These people said, “we seek your God, as you”, and that they used to worship him as new deportees in the days of Esarhaddon. So, they had been sent in by Esarhaddon and made to worship Yehouah! If this is true then it is an Assyrian deportation unconfirmed elsewhere. It is not the only one that this author reveals. He also mentions, in Ezra 4:10, “the rest of the nations whom the great and noble Asnappar exiled and set in the cities of Samaria, and the rest of the province ‘Beyond the River’ ”. This king is Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC) who received the submission of twenty-two kings of the west, and, having exiled captives from Kirbit to Egypt, he was obviously deporting people. Together, they seem to be excuses to ignore the Samarians and the Am Ha Eretz as not genuine worshippers of Yehouah.

This much the scholars admit, but the real point is that the Assyrians presented the move to the people being deported as a salvation from their oppression by their rulers in the land in which they lived because they had previously been deported there! Not all the people being thus deported were fools but they were in a dodgy situation and the Assyrians softened the blow by giving them every assistance in their new colony—land, status and the protection of the empire against the natives.

They were led genuinely to believe that they were being helped by their deporters and they were helped by being granted privileges as long as they did as the king decreed. It seemed this could only be if the story was true, and, of course, if they chose not to believe it, protection could be withdrawn and they could be left to be massacred by the native populations. It paid to co-operate! They were led to think of themselves as pioneers in what was supposedly their own land, restoring the forgotten traditions of their ancestors. Their wealth and power was gone but they were clever and skilled people who were able to make a success of rebuilding. Ultimately, the policy was meant to melt the divers populations of the empire together into a coherent amalgam.

Nabonidus, the Babylonian king, mistakenly called Nebuchadnezzar in the scriptures, followed this policy in restoring Harran. He assured a mixed group of people they were “returning from exile” to their rightful home in Harran and that they could set up and worship their own gods there. However, the true and original god of Harran was the god, Sin, the Lord of Heaven, and the empire would be sponsoring a grand temple to the original god restored to his rightful glory. Nabonidus presented himself as a restorer of gods and a saviour of peoples.

Needless to say, though some of the “returners” will have set up shrines to the gods they brought with them, before long the grand temple of the original god, Sin attracted all the customers and the shrines quickly closed. If this should sound familiar, so it should. Cyrus, Xerxes, Darius and Artaxerxes all published documents expressing the same policy as Nabonidus and declaring themselves as restorers of gods and saviours of people. It is precisely what Cyrus and his successors did in Judah.

Cyrus the Persian

Cyrus allowed some people to return to the hill country of Judah and restore the rightful god of the land, Yehouah, but the cult of this god turned out not to be the one worshipped by the Samarians, the native people of Israel. The scriptures mention this Persian king 19 times and tell us about his edicts no less than eight times (2 Chr 36:22,23; Ezra 1:1,2; 4:3; 5:13,17; 6:3,14; Isa 44:28). Isaiah (Isa 45:1) also declares that Cyrus was God’s anointed—the messiah or saviour of the Jews, and God’s shepherd.

It is unlikely if many, if any, of the the Jews who were returned from exile were previously natives of Judah or descendants of them, though later, when movement was freer, some will have been. The bible is clear that the people who “returned” wanted nothing to do with the people who had remained behind. Josephus (c 38-100 BC), the Roman-Jewish historian, writing in his apology for Judaism, Contra Apionem (1:13), could not be clearer:

Chaldaeans… since our original leaders and ancestors were derived from them, and they do mention us Jews in their records because of the kindred there is between us.

Here the Chaldaeans are the Babylonians and Josephus is plainly saying that Jews descended from Babylonians and not Jewish exiles. Astonishing confirmation from a different direction comes from Mrs E S Drower who, in Mandeans, tells us:

Both Jews and Chaldaeans are called Yahudai in Mandean scripts, showing that they were considered one nation by the Mandeans… Nebuchadnezzar is called a Yahudai.

However, Chaldaeans specifically means Babylonian Magi, and the colonists sent by the Persian king were probably Babylonian priests. Chaldaeans is the same word as Chasidim, which means “The Holy Men” in Hebrew, and were a well-known sect in Hasmonean Judah, and precursors of the Essenes!

The accounts of the “return” in Ezra and Nehemiah suggest a long period in which the task of restoration was unaccomplished. The narrative obscures that there were four separate “returns” under the four kings of Persia, Cyrus, Darius, Artaxerxes I and Artaxerxes II. Ezra 6:14, records edicts of Darius and Artaxerxes as if to illustrate that the policy was a continuing one of near eastern monarchs.

Assyrian records indicate deportations from Hazor and Galilee in 733, Samaritans were deported in 722 (2 Kg 17) and people from Hamath and Babylon were moved in. The king of Gaza and the citizens of Rapha were deported by Sargon to Assyria after the seige in 720 BC. People were deported from Jerusalem and Judah in 701. People were carried off by Babylonians from Jerusalem (2 Kg) in 597 BC and 586 BC. Persians deported people into Judah in 538 BC and on three subsequent occasions. Samarians were deported to Alexandria under Alexander. Alexander also settled Macedonians in Sebaste. Ptolemy Soter (Saviour) of Egypt deported a great number of Jews to Egypt as soldiers in 320, and in 312 transported another large number to Cyrene and Libya. Seleucus did the same when he built Antioch. Ptolemy Philadelphus moved more Jews into Egypt and supposedly translated the Jewish scriptures into Greek. Antiochus the Great moved 2000 Jewish familes from Babylon to Phrygia and Lydia where their Hellenized descendants were the basis of Paul’s mission.

The Samarians apparently also experienced another “return” (Ezek 36; Jer 21). Yet another “return” is mentioned in the Damascus Rule where the Righteous Teacher and a remnant returned from exile. The final dispersion of the Jews—effectively the same programme of pacification continued now by the Romans—was the diasporas of 63 BC, 70 AD and 135 AD when the markets were said to be full of Jewish slaves who later became freedmen in various parts of the empire, their freedom often bought by already free Jews. The implication of the name of the Synagogue of the Libertines (Acts 6:9) is that it was for freed Jews.

Note that in the biblical accounts in 2 Kings, “all” the people were carried off twice and yet some were left to escape later to Egypt. None of these dispersions and deportations were total, that is mere biblical hype. The northern state was said to have been totally carried off because the Jews who wrote the scriptures wanted an excuse for not liking their northern neighbours in Samaria who had an independent cult of Yehouah. So they pretended that Samaria was not Israel.

No deportation can be certainly linked to the same people or their descendants returning. It was the “return” of somebody officially sponsored by the Persian administration that created Judaism. There was a temple in Jerusalem by about 400 BC we know from a documentary source, a letter from Elephantine on the Nile to the High Priest in Jerusalem.

In each place that an old god was restored, he was restored with the title, “king of heaven”. The rulers wanted everyone to worship the same god and their idea was that eventually, everyone would worship a “king of heaven” with broadly the same characteristics and merely having different names. The Great King of the empire could then be shown to have the same role on earth as the universal king of heaven, and the various kings of heaven could be shown to be different versions of Ahuramazda, unifying everyone. The effects of this universal mixing of peoples was that:

• Aramaic became the language of the whole area.
• “Jews” accepted that they had “returned” but they never accepted the natives of the hill country as being Jews.
• The “Jews” that had “returned” used some Samarian legends but rejected the rest of the cult and devised a new religious “tradition”.
• The people that had remained in Judah never accepted those who returned.
• The people who had remained in Judah did not accept the “restored” religion.

The historicity of the deportations is shown by the West Semitic names that appear in the city rolls of various Assyrian cities and military rolls at this time. But, though this mass movement of people under Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans was a continuous imperial policy, the bible never declares it as such and, rather the opposite, gives the impression it happened only to Jews.

The Persian name for the statelet that supported Jerusalem was Judah, but how significant a state was it? Herodotus wrote his famous histories in the middle of the fifth century, about the time that we think Nehemiah was sent as governor to Jerusalem but about thirty years before Ezra really imposed Persian policy. Herodotus notes the towns and peoples of the Levant but mentions no people called Jews or even Israelites! People of these names cannot have existed then or were insignificant. Admittedly, a whole section of the Histories, the part describing Assyria, has gone missing! It is the very part of the book that might be expected to mention the statelets of Judah and Israel and throw light on the formation of Judaism. Its disappearnce suggests that Christians did not find in it what they wanted to read and suppressed it.

The Greeks

Alexander the Great defeated Darius and conquered the mighty empire of Persia, briefly creating the greatest empire the west had ever known. Alexander saw the sense of winning over the Jews, who had remained loyal to the Persians who had founded them and favoured them as a loyal outpost of the Persian belief in the universal God of Heaven, and therefore of the Almighty’s king of kings on earth, the Persian king. The Jews of the Jerusalem temple had yielded peacefully to Alexander who then worshipped before the Jewish God. Later, the Jews of Babylon surrendered immediately to the conqueror, and other Babylonian Jews submitted too. Shortly, Alexander had a Jewish contingent in his Babylonian army.

Alexander aimed at unification by promoting cultural assimilation and set up Greek cities, administered in the Greek way and operating Greek schools, religions, gymnasia and theatres. The Jews adopted the Greek way of doing most things and incorporated them in their sacred writings. In the Hellenistic period the Jews adopted the Greek habit of teaching in schools in which they imparted the skills taught in Greek schools, poetry, philosophy, reading and copying, and began the habit of commentating on texts. When they came to writing a history of themselves they used many of these Greek arts and also the Persian concept of linear history.

Alexander had no thoughts of changing the Persian and Assyrian policy of pacification and continued to deport people. Thompson describes Judaism as “Asiatic Hellenism”. Jews were central to the life of Alexander’s new empire and many of his cities like Alexandria, Antioch and Babylon had large Jewish populations whether by deportation or by voluntary mercantilism. The Samaritans, on the other hand, rebelled against the Greeks and Alexander massacred whole sections of the population. Other Samaritans he moved into his new city, Alexandria, in Egypt and replaced them with Macedonians from his own country, organized as a military colony at the heart of Palestine.

But Alexander’s empire split into two main divisions after his death, a northern, Seleucid, branch and a southern, Ptolemaic, branch. Palestine initially was under the Egyptian kings, the Ptolemies, but later the Syrian Greeks, the Seleucids, took over. Samaria (Israel) tended to look to the Seleucids and Judah toward the Ptolemies, accentuating the differences between the two statelets.

When Ptolemy seized Jerusalem against little opposition because it was the Sabbath day in 320 BC, he took many prisoners from Samaria as well as Judaea and settled them in Egypt. A few years later in 312 BC, Ptolemy was again campaigning in Palestine and razed several large towns to the ground, again forcing many people to emigrate to Egypt, a favourite place being the new city of Alexandria and another being Ptolemy’s Jewish colony in Cyrene. Besides the enforced moves of Jews to the new city, Ptolemy welcomed voluntary pioneers from Palestine. All of this movement from Palestine meant that, even as early as the reign of the first Ptolemy in Egypt, there were probably more Jews in Egypt than in Judaea.

The scriptural book of Jeremiah tells of a Jewish diaspora in Egypt (Jer 24:8; 26:22), and during the Persian period many Jews had settled in Egypt with the encouragement of the Persians, to act as military colonies. They did not therefore mix with the native population and preserved their Jewish character. The Egyptians resented the Jews as enemies or agents of their enemies the Persians but Josephus preferred to see it as envy:

The Egyptians were the first to cast reproach on us—when they saw us approved by many, they were moved with envy.

Against Apion

A large district in the region of Heliopolis (On) became exclusively Jewish, a fact reflected in the romance of Joseph and Aseneth. Another large Jewish colony existed at Memphis. Documents related to the imposition of the royal taxation, from Thebes proves that a surprisingly large number of the government’s taxation officials were Jewish. The city of Alexandria was divided into different quarters, with the Greeks in the centre, the Egyptians in the west and the Jews to the north-east. So Judaism flourished in Alexandria, but it was of a peculiarly Hellenistic type.

Greek was the language of worship and the scriptures had to be translated into Greek, if the faithful were to be able to read them—they soon knew no Hebrew. Philo of Alexandria’s explanation of the divine names proves that he did not understand Hebrew. When Ecclesiasticus was translated into Greek, the translator’s preface proves that the Egyptian Jews used only the Greek bible. The considerable Greek additions to some of the, particularly later, books of the scriptures like Job, Proverbs, Esther and Daniel show that these Greek works had become partially independent of the Hebrew versions that were later taken by the Rabbis as canonical. The Wisdom of Solomon never had a Hebrew original, having been composed in Greek.

The Greek additions to Esther were written by a priest called Lysimmachus in excellent classical Greek. He supposedly wrote originally in Jerusalem but sent his script to Alexandria in the hands of a Levite called Ptolemy! The story suggests much about the writing of the Jewish scriptures generally, not merely Esther. The scripts were sent to Alexandria for Ptolemy’s library, and the latest additions were actually written in Greek. Cleopatra might have been taking manuscripts for her restoration of the library until near her death in 30 BC. In the first century BC, Simeaon Ben Shetah altered the Jewish Ketubah or wedding contract to make divorce more difficult, basing his revision on a third century BC Ptolemaic model.

In Palestine, the century of Egyptian Greek rule was mild so long as the requisite tribute was paid. Indeed, the Jews were allowed to rule themselves, or rather be ruled by a Jew—the High Priest.

The northern Greek empire began under Seleucus Nicator (312-281 BC) who had his capital at Babylon. The western edge of his empire, abutting the Mediterranean at Antioch and stretching to the northern Euphrates, became known as Syria, a lazy pronunciation of Assyria. In 198 BC, the king of the northern Greeks, Antiochus the Great (223-187 BC), drove off the southern Greeks and took Phoenicia and Judaea. The Ptolemies were never to regain it, but again many Jews deserted Judah for Egypt. Antiochus settled Jews from Babylon into Lydia and Phrygia where three centuries later Christianity was to take root.

The Ptolemies were always preferred by the leading Jews in Jerusalem to the Seleucids even though the Seleucids granted Jews full civil rights in all of their great cities and foundations (Josephus Antiquities 12:3). But the Ptolemies plotted and intrigued with the Jews against their Syrian rivals—later with the connivance of the advancing Romans. Josephus in Contra Apionem makes no attempt to disguise his preference for the Ptolemies, and they did generally treat the Jews well, Jonathan Maccabee being honoured by them in 1 Maccabees 10:57-60.

Hellenization in Judaea

Throughout the period from before 300 BC to the Maccabaean revolt, the Jews were under the domination of the Greeks and the spread of Greek culture and institutions profoundly influenced the tiny theocracy. The theatre, schools and gymnasia were introduced. New political institutions like a senate (gerusia) presided over by the High Priest but set up on Greek lines required a senate house. It was in this period that the Sanhedrin (Greek: synhedrion, a council) was created—about 190 BC, perhaps evolved from the senate, as a council of “rulers”. Greek social life required places to walk and talk and meditate, the Stoas, cool, cloister-like galleries for lounging and discussion (from which the word Stoic comes) and soon to be realized in the porticoes of Herod’s temple.

Whole areas were thoroughly Hellenized at this time. Not just Decapolis but apparently the whole of the east bank of the Jordan was Greek. Many cities on the west side, especially on the coast of the Mediterranean were entirely Greek in style and organization. Samaria and Panias had been settled by Alexander’s Macedonians from the outset, and were thoroughly Graecized. 1 Maccabees makes it quite explicit.

A new class of educated Jews spoke Greek and became the administrative and priestly class of “scribes”. “Scribe” in Hebrew is “Soferim” and properly means “bookmen” because they taught out of the Book of the Law, provided by Ezra—their tradition came down from the time of the Persian administrators. The law they taught was oral and not subject to exegesis, though they seem to have made their own modifications as needed. Apart from people interested specifically in religion like some priests, Pharisees, scribes and Essenes, the common people will have known no Hebrew. They spoke mainly Aramaic and some knew sufficient Greek to get by. Further east, the Babylonian Jews spoke a different dialect of Aramaic but no Greek.

Jerusalem and its immediate surrounding population of loyal Jews—since the edicts of Cyrus, those within a day’s march, say 25 miles of the temple—seemed an island among the Greek provinces. Polybius, at the beginning of the second century BC speaks of the Jews as “those who lie about the sanctuary called Jerusalem”. The city was little more than the temple and what was needed to service it, and later the Maccabees found Hebron, twenty miles south, a hostile Idumaean town. the Nabataean Arabs pressing north from the south of the Dead Sea had pushed the Idumaeans before them, squeezing places the Jews liked to think of as their own. To the east, the Jewish sphere extended to the Jewish town of Jericho.

Abomination

The Seleucid ruler Antiochis III took over Jerusalem in about 200 BC, granting privileges to the Jews of the city. Since the Jews were privileged from Persian times, the new administration will perhaps have been restating traditional privileges, more than granting new ones, as priests and temple functionaries.

In 173 BC, a group of Jews called the Tobiads, who had apparently not been recognized as Jews by the founders of the religion under the Persian administrators, opposed the priesthood and the High Priest, Onias III, and invited Antiochus to depose him. Onias was probably murdered and his son Onias IV fled in 170 BC with a large body of Jews to set up an alternative temple at Leontopolis in Egypt that lasted until the Roman dispersion of the Jews in 73 AD. Its closure by the Romans shows that it was regarded as a legitimate Jewish temple! The Falashas, the Jews of Abyssinia, had the 24 books of the scriptures but knew nothing of the Talmud and did not observe the Feasts of Purim and Hanukkah, suggesting that they had split from mainstream Judaism before the victory of the Maccabees. Yet, their scriptures are based on the Septuagint, so perhaps these Jews descended from those who were founded by Onias at Leontopolis.

In 175 BC, Antiochus IV Epiphanes was short of tribute money for his tribute to Rome, and accepted a proposal from an extremely wealthy Jew, a brother of Onias III called Jason, to buy the high priesthood. Jason was Hellenized and aimed to convert Jerusalem into a Greek polis with its standard institutions such as a gymnasium—effectively a Greek high school—theatre and so on. Jason was appointed and the ruling classes of Jerusalem took to wholesale Graecization. Antiochus visited the new polis, about 173 BC, and was greeted with an official torchlight procession, and the acclamation of large crowds. Soon after, Jason was soon succeeded by a rival, Menelaus, who made a bigger bid for the priesthood, bought the office for a large sum of money then raised it from the population via the temple making him unpopular. Mob violence broke out between the rival factions, and Antiochus had to suppress the Jason faction with bloodshed, and damage to the city and the temple. Antiochus had to build a fortress and man it with soldiers from Syria to keep order. It only created more tension.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes defeated the Ptolemies again in 170 as 1 Maccabees 1:18-20 describes, and would have gained control of Egypt if the Romans had not given him the hard word and obliged him to withdraw. By the time he returned from Egypt, the dislike between the Jews and Antiochus was fully developed.

Jewish propaganda is that Antiochus enforced Hellenization, but many scholars find this unlikely or even incredible. The truth is that, frustrated in his ambitions, seeing Judaism as an obstinate and prejudiced nuisance, riven with internecine strife, and annoyed by the scheming of the Jews against his plans against Egypt, Antiochus decided with the priests to present the Jewish religion to a variety of Zeus worship. He supposedly robbed the temple of its treasures and reinstated Menelaus, who had been deposed. In addition, Antiochus banned circumcision, imposed Pagan rites and, most notably, he burnt the sacred scriptures! You might wonder then what we have before us in the bible.

He removed the two cherubs of the Ark from the Holy Place, where supposedly there were no images, and set up an image of Zeus Olympiakos in the heart of the temple on the table of burnt offerings—“the Abomination of Desolation”. Since Olympiakos means “heaven,” Zeus was simply the Greek version of the God of Heaven, a Greek Yehouah. It cannot have seemed such a big deal to anyone.

Hellenization was the policy of the already Hellenized priests, and many, if not most, of the population concurred. Some Jews, though, favoured the Ptolemies and the Romans, rather than the Seleucids and the defence of the established religion was a good reason to cause trouble for the northern Greeks. Mattathias and his five sons, claiming to be religious purists, rebelled.

Doubtless as many Hellenizing Jews welcomed the move as traditionalists, called the Hasidim or Pious Ones, who preferred the religion as it had come down to them from the Persians, not the Greek innovations, but the latter were outraged. This was in 168 BC. A civil war broke out in which the Maccabees led the rebellion against the Seleucid kings for 25 years. They were supported as terrorists in this enterprise by the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Romans, who used both to weaken the northern Greeks before annexing them into the empire.

So, the outcome was the opposite of Antiochus’s intentions, if they were to promote peace and Greek culture. The immediate fashion for Hellenization evaporated and a reaction set in. The traditionalists rebelled and the country was rent with civil war. Eventually, the temple was rededicated in 165 BC and then the Jews had independence for the first time in history when Simon Maccabaeus, last of the five brothers Maccabee, finally settled with the Seleucids after a quarter of a century of struggle.

Jewish Parties

With Simon the Just, the surname “Just” appears for the first time associated with the Tobiads. Later it seemed to be particularly Essene and this might be when the precursors of the Essenes, the Hasidim, first entered the stage too. As conservatives attached to the traditional Persian forms of Judaism, they would have opposed the modernisation of the Greeks, but since the ruling class hitherto had favoured the Ptolemies, Simon and his allies favoured their enemies, the Seleucids, who also had the advantage of being in touch with their spiritual home, Babylon. Later, the Hasids came to regard any alliance with the heathen world as an affront to Yehouah.

Perhaps, Simon was the last of the traditional priesthood following Persian ways. His successor Onias III was deposed, but had meanwhile compromized and, thereafter, the priesthood were Hellenized. The Hellenized priests, the Sadducees, could follow the old law insofar as it insisted on temple worship and was a religious law of Judaism, and they were glad to use the power of Deuteronomy 17:12 to allow themselves the right to change the law if needed, but otherwise they were happy to follow Greek civil law.

The Hasidim would have none of this. The law would stand as it is—the “law of the fathers”. Only that law was of any consequence, but the later prophetic books were elaborated by parties like the Hasidim and the Essenes to protest, pseudepigraphically, against the modernisation of the Greek priesthood, and later their authors began to accept them as equal to the law. It seems the Sadducees were forced to concur that the law was fixed and they left administrative law then to the Pharisees. But they were unconcerned as long as they had the control of the temple. In Jerusalem that was the source of the wealth.

Later the Hasidim themselves split on the issue of the law. They realized that the law of Ezra was inadequate in changing circumstances and yet had decided that it alone had authority. They had to find a way of connecting everyday practical decisions to the law, and so used clever exegesis to extend it. The split was because the Pharisees began to develop an extensive oral law (that was nonetheless written down) to allow for modern circumstances, while the Essenes, though themselves using exegesis, refused to accept oral law and instead devised methods of their own. Pharisees became a body of lay teachers resisting Hellenization by exposition of Torah in public places. The ordinary Jew was indebted for his knowledge and justice to the Pharisees, while the Essenes looked to eschatology as the solution to all problems.

The Maccabees revolted against the Seleucids in 167 BC and eventually won independence from the weakening Greeks in 142 BC. The books of the Maccabees present the victory as a just war against oppression but really it was the result of Roman provocation to weaken the Seleucids who they had already defeated in 190 BC. Rome’s ally was Egypt to whom the southern Palestine hill people looked. The uprising is unlikely to have succeeded without external support, enfeebled though the Greeks were. So, cutting through the noble gloss put on it by the apocryphal books, the Maccabees were terrorists sponsored by the state’s enemies.

The Hasmonaeans, better known by their nickname, the Maccabees or Hammers, personal ambitions were veiled by their adoption of an apparent puritanism which gained the support of purist groups like the Hasidim. The pureness was for the Persian form of the religion rather than the Graecized form that was being introduced. Thus they took a strong view of idolatry, destroyed Pagan images, and evicted Pagan people, or forced them to convert and be circumcized to prove it. The people of Pella in the Transjordan were given the choice of circumcision or death. The reaction to all of this Hasmonaean “anti-Paganism” was the first recorded cases of “anti-Semitism” by non-Jews. Nor were the divisions in the country solved. In the late second century, under John Hyrcanus, the Sadduccees were formed, and the Pharisees, who may have been traditionalists were forced into joining the militant opposition.

Pharisees were persecuted, exiled and eventually 800 were executed by crucifixion—a possible origin of a myth that became the Jesus myth. The crucifixion of the Pharisees was probably chosen as a Persian punishment because they were the purist faction that supported the Persian stamp of the religion. The opposition invited the Seleucid king Demetrius III to depose the Hasmonaeans, and a curious war ensued with Jews and Pagans on both sides.

On the death of Alexander Jannaeus, his wife, Salome, came round to supporting the Pharisees, and reinstated them. They soon were taking their revenge against the Sadduccees. Another group, the Essenes, had been so disappointed by the Maccabees that they withdrew into the desert to avoid the impurities of the Jerusalem temple. Essenes and Pharisees seem likely to have been two varieties of the earlier puritans, the Hasidim. The reason for their disillusionment was that the Hasmonaeans, who claimed to be purists, actually were sponsored from abroad by Greeks and Romans and came to support Hellenization in practice, whether they began that way or not. If there was a difference, it was one of emphasis.

The earlier Hellenizers were happy to introduce Greek culture and practices, but the Hasmonaeans differed in wanting to introduce a Judaized variety of Hellenization, by keeping some characteristically Jewish features. Silver coins minted in Jerusalem for fifty years under the Ptolemies were not devoid of images, as the religion seemed to require. They carried pictures of Ptolemy I, his wife Berenice and an eagle. The Hasmonaeans also had no objection to having Pagan symbols on their coins, and only the last of them took to using the Jewish Menorah instead. The tombs of the priestly nobility were magnificently Greek in style, all except their lack of sculptured figures. This was apparently a puritanical fashion, or token, because figures, especially animals or legendary creatures, seemed not to have been proscribed so long as they were not God. The Jewish aversion to figures generally seemed to have been a puritanical fad of the civil war period of about 166-136 BC. The kings were not so fussy to judge by the coinage, but priests who seemed thoroughly acculturated to Hellenism, adhered to certain aspects of the purer Persian Judaism.

The Hasmonaeans set up a Jewish free state for the first time in history. Only then were they able to write a Jewish history, a mythical, fanciful and bowdlerized history that today is the word of God. The Beth Midrash, the Jewish Academy, was based on Greek philosophical schools in their type and organization, although not in their content. The relationship of student and teacher were similar, and so were methods of exegesis. The Greek model was the only possible one for these schools.

The discoveries in the Dead Sea caves show that the Essenes, at least, were still strongly influenced by Persian religion into New Testament times. Lee I A Levine persistently calls manifestly Iranian influences at Qumran, Hellenistic ones, and innocently writes that explaining these influences on the Essenes is “a formidable challenge,” especially as the Essenes had deliberately hidden themselves from all influences by living in the wilderness. Levine finds it all astounding. That in itself is astounding! It is astounding how blind “scholars” can be when they think they have to see for God!

The Hasmonmaean state was a product of Hellenism. It was, in the end, a typical Hegelian synthesis of Iranian Judaism and Greek culture, which sidelined the puritans—the Essenes—until they found fresh life as a gentile religion in the Roman empire.

Jerusalem was small from the Persian period until the Hasmonaeans, but with independence, it expanded rapidly from about 5,000 people to about 30,000. The citizens were Jews who were priests and attended the temple as various types of functionaries. With independence, they also became rulers, politicians and emissaries to Sparta, Rome and elsewhere. Josephus mentions the priests Hezekiah as leader in the time of Ptolemy I, Onias I, a priest who dealt with diplomacy with Sparta, Onias II who was an emissary to the Ptolemaic Greek court in Alexandria. Ben Sirach says that Simon the Just was a High Priest, and the Jason who bought the priesthood from Antiochus made sweeping changes in the city as its ruler.

Jason of Cyrene wrote a five volume acclamation of Hasmonaean victories about 150 BC. This was epitomized about 120 BC as 2 Maccabees. This period will be when the bible as we know it now was rewritten. It was the Hasmonaeans who gave the temple its pre-eminent importance, and it was the Hasmonaean family who sanctified it in 164 BC. This is a good time for speculating that the romances of David and Solomon were elaborated as they now are, giving a distant grand history to the Jewish state and temple that the Maccabees were restoring. No synagogues as a communal place or place of prayer are known as early as this, even though it is barely second century. The duties of the people included giving the first fruit of any produce, and of the flocks, to the temple, attending in Jerusalem for the three principal feativals, making offerings to the temple for several types of sin, vows, childbirth and purely voluntary reasons, as well as tithes. The Hasmonaeans also instituted the duty of paying a half shekel to the temple.

The Yehudim

The Maccabees ruled for only a century from 165 BC to 63 BC, but for the first time in Jewish history, the worshippers of Yehouah at Jerusalem had their own free state and Jewish propaganda made Jews self-conscious and hostile to non-Jews. Their main hatred was, however, reserved for the Samaritans, also Jews, but Jews who did not worship at Jerusalem but at their own temple on Mount Gerizim. The fact that the Samaritans were Israelites living in Israel was embarrassing. A myth was invented, or extended, to explain that Samaritans were not Jews, even though they worshipped the god of the Jews.

Jewishness was declared to be an ethnic description of a purely Semitic race rather than a religious description of a mixed race of people that have become more mixed still in the diaspora. It has fed many racist theories culminating in the absurd theories of the Nazis, but evidently cannot be abandoned by Zionists because it remains the basis of their own claims.

Who then are the “Yehudim,” the “Jews”? By the second century AD, when the rabbis had successfully salvaged what they could from the wreckage of the Jewish war and the insurrection of Bar Kosiba and had withdrawn from proselytising, the term applied to a religious group. Thompson warns:

The geographical spread of people referred to as Yehudim is so great, it would be rash to assume that this name applies to their place of origin.

The truth is that Yehudim meant a religious group from the outset—people who worship the god, Yehouah. The temple at Elephantine in Egypt, according to the letter already mentioned written in 407 BC, existed before the Persian period—before the “return” from exile and so before the so-called second temple of Jerusalem. Yet the author writes on behalf of the “Yehudim,” asking for help to rebuild their temple, a building of stone with bronze doors fitted with silver and gold, which had been pulled down by Egyptians annoyed that the Jews were sacrificing rams, an animal sacred to their god, Khnum. These people mixed and intermarried with the Egyptians, and so were not subject to the exclusivity taught by the Persian administrators, though they remained Yehudin as we can tell from their names. But the Jerusalem priesthood were certain that they were the only priests of Yehouah and it seems they ignored the letter. However the author had also sent the letter to the governor of Samaria. They were, apparently not writing as Jews to the capital of Judah but as Yehudim to the centres where Yehouah was worshipped besides Elephantine.

Could they in any case regard themselves as nationals of the statelet of Judah when their ancestors had been in Egypt for up to 200 years? And was the state of Judah sufficiently big to be thought of as a nation. This letter from Yehudim in Egypt denotes nationality as Aramaean, and it seems far more likely that by then the region as a whole would be considered as the home of Aramaeans. In private letters, people described as Yehudim are denoted as Aramaean.

The Yehudim of Egypt did not worship only Yehouah, confirming that they were not of the same religion as those who the Persians had “returned” to restore Yehouah to his rightful glory. Greetings sent on behalf of gods and goddesses(!) in the letter are from Ishambethel, Anathbethel, Sati, Bel, Nabu, Shamash, Nergal, and Khnub as well as Yehouah.

Israel as well as Yehudim is a name of the religious group of people that worship Yehouah. Israelites are those who worship Yehouah in the biblical narratives, though they are shown as a nation, but in the Damascus Rule, Israel denotes those who worship Yehouah and, in fact, the Essenes narrowed it down to those who worshipped Yehouah in righteousness, meaning according to the law. The expression “All Israel” was used to cover those who were less than strict in their practices. So for Essenes, Israel was those who followed the way of perfect righteousness in worshipping Yehouah—they and no others were the children of Israel. When the New Testament speaks of children, these are the children it means, not babies still in nappies. Judah and Israel were therefore not nations but names for worshippers of Yehouah.

And the reason is simple. People of small tribes did not see themselves as members of nations but as followers of a god or members of a sect. It has been difficult for Christians reading the New Testament to figure out what was happening with Samaritans, Galilaeans, Pharisees, Sadducees, and such like, all wandering around freely. The point is that they were not ethnic or national groups but religious sects. They all worshipped Yehouah and therefore were all Yehudim, irrespective of their national or ethnic origins, but distinguished each other on the basis of sectarian differences.

The Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul make it clear that Jews were happy to accept proselytes or converts of any nation as long as they met the criteria laid down by the law. So, there is no reason to think that a Galilaean was someone from Galilee or a Samaritan someone from Samaria. In Antiquities (12:1:1), Josephus tells of a deportation of people from the highlands of Judaea and Samaria to Egypt. They squabbled about where they should send their contributions, to Mount Gerizim or the Jerusalem temple but Josephus happily calls them all Jews. Later he amends his position and calls the Samaritans, Phoenicians, Medes and Persians, though still admitting they considered themselves as Jews. Josephus says the Samaritans assisted people persecuted for breaking the food taboos but makes it clear that the accusation was unjustified, so here the Samaritans were guardians of Jewish justice not breakers of the law.

Many soldiers of Cleopatra’s armies and some of her main generals were Jewish but were accepted because they were Egyptians by nationality. Josephus speaks proudly of Jews as model citizens widely spread in the world. But he speaks of them as “those that worship God, even of Asia and Europe” making it plain that the distinguishing factor of the Jew is that they worship God, their God, Yehouah, who is the universal God of heaven! Philo of Alexandria makes the same distinction, calling himself a Greek by culture but a Jew by religion, in contrast to the godlessness of the Egyptians.

The Yehudim were neither the people of a small hilly state nor the worshippers of Yehouah specifically at the temple of Jerusalem but were simply worshippers of Yehouah. Samaritans and Essenes, not to mention the Egyptian Jews and many others who did not worship at the temple of Jerusalem, and indeed had a great lack of regard for its priesthood, were nonetheless Yehudim. It was the Maccabees who established a state, and thus were able to promote the idea of Yehudim as a national identity and an ethnic group.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History