IT WAS NOT a way of life that everyone welcomed. Like orthodox Muslims of our own time, many of the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean viewed the innovating intromission of foreign values into their society as an infection that might prove fatal. They resented mightily what they took to be these dangerous, exotic fashions that their less thoughtful countrymen were adopting with such gusto. They remembered their own unique history—their forebear Abraham whom their God had called by name to become the father of a great nation, a nation with a salvific role for all humanity; their incomparable leader Moses, who had led them out of cruel slavery in pagan Egypt and given them the Torah, their Law and Way of Life; David, their rocklike poet-king, who had given them the thrilling words of his psalms and, by conquering all their neighbors, had made them safe in the Holy Land that God had said was theirs.
It had been a long time, though, since the Jews had been safe. The happy Davidic kingdom had been torn in two in the generations after David, so long ago that it now seemed a myth. The larger portion to the north—Israel—had then been chewed up by Sargon II of Assyria, who had deported its inhabitants, the Ten Lost Tribes, into slavery and replaced them with his own settlers; the southern portion—Judah—had been wrecked by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who had burned to the ground the wonderful Temple that David’s son Solomon had built and where their God had resided invisible above the Tablets of his Law. Like Sargon before him, Nebuchadnezzar had deported much of the population, who languished in Babylon for two generations, till the great Persian king Cyrus, illustrious predecessor of the unfortunate Darius, overcame the Babylonians in the late sixth century and allowed the Jews to return to their devastated homeland. Not that their own prophets hadn’t warned them that they faced just such disasters if they didn’t amend their evil ways—that is, if they didn’t live in the light of God’s demanding justice, if they didn’t stop worshiping other gods and return to the worship of the God of the Unspeakable Name, the only god who was real.
So now, now that they finally had come to understand the message of the prophets, were they to abandon the living God and run after the dead gods of bronze and wood that these foreigners were setting up? Their God would surely take revenge, a revenge more horrible even than the earlier deportations and destructions. If the Jews forsook the Way of God and once again adorned themselves in the cultural trinkets of the gentiles, the catastrophes of the past would pale before the coming one, the complete catastrophe. And surely such a catastrophe was at hand. As these foreign novelties pressed down upon them and all but a remnant abandoned the ancient ways, how could any sane observer doubt that he was witnessing the steps leading to Apocalypse, the dreadful Day of the Lord?
What the Jews were thinking was of small consequence beyond the borders of their fragment of a kingdom. It is a mark of how unimportant they had become that Plutarch, Alexander’s biographer, doesn’t even bother to relate that the Macedonian conquered the Jews. He must have, because we know that he marched his army from Tyre to Gaza, and he could not have done so without encountering the Jews, who were certainly in no position to stop him. Perhaps they were relieved to be rid of the Persians, their previous overlords. More likely by this point, one conqueror seemed neither better nor worse than another. In a world that worshiped military might and ever larger spheres of influence, the Jews could not expect to live in freedom, save by a miracle. And a miracle, whether of exaltation or destruction, is just what a people whose day is past, who have been unceremoniously pushed into a confined space at the margins of history, are wont to hope for.
Even if, his sights on bigger game, Alexander immediately forgot the Jews, he did not rule them long. Soon after his untimely death, his son by Roxane was put to the sword, as were Roxane herself, Alexander’s half-witted brother, Philip, and at last that skillful survivor, the dowager empress Olympias. No blood relative of Alexander’s was left alive. The army, which would have none of them on the throne of Macedon, was taking no chances. Many of Alexander’s closest companions-in-arms, those who had survived so many campaigns, were already dead or dying; the others were assassinated. The greatest empire the world had ever seen was broken up among conspiring officers of the second rank: Antigonus II, son of Philip’s legendary general Antigonus the One-Eyed, mounted the throne to control both Macedon and Greece; Ptolemy took Egypt, and the Ptolemaic line would last there in its glorious capital of Alexandria, the bones of Alexander interred in the great mausoleum beside the library, till the last of the line, Cleopatra, would end her own life with an asp at her breast; Seleucus took up rule at Antioch in Syria and from there the Seleucids ruled the arc of Asia from the Aegean to the Indus. The Levant, which lay between Syria and Egypt, was at first in vassalage to Egypt. But in 200 B.C., the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III won the Levant from the Ptolemies in battle, after which the Seleucids from their capital of Antioch ruled the entire eastern Mediterranean, including the negligible patch called Judah.
However highly the world may have regarded Alexander and mourned his passing, those perennial outsiders the Jews had a more jaundiced view, which is summed up nicely in the opening paragraph of the First Book of Maccabees:
Alexander of Macedon son of Philip … defeated Darius king of the Persians and Medes, whom he succeeded as ruler.… He undertook many campaigns, gained possession of many fortresses, and put the local kings to death. So he advanced to the ends of the earth, plundering nation after nation; the earth grew silent before him and his ambitious heart swelled with pride. He assembled very powerful forces and subdued provinces, nations, and princes, and they became his tributaries.… Alexander had reigned twelve years when he died. Each of his officers established himself in his own region. All assumed crowns after his death, they and their heirs after them for many years, bringing increasing evils on the world.
What is especially impressive about this terse, dry-eyed epitome is its sympathy for the world of fellow sufferers, far beyond the borders of Judah and known to the writer of this chronicle only by report. The growing silence of the earth as nation after nation is plundered and laid low by Alexander, the increasing evils brought on the world by generation after generation of such predatory activity: these are extraordinary images to come upon in ancient records, which seldom waste space on the sufferings of losers. But, then, it is seldom people at the invigorating center of events—the ones who normally write the first drafts of history—who see clearly what has happened, especially the “increasing evils” wrought by those who blindly pursue their own wealth and power. Rather, it is the dispossessed, the ones who have been relegated to the margins, whose eyes are open and who know what wounds they bear.
A decade or so before the end of the sixth century B.C., the Jews had completed the rebuilding of their Temple, ever after called the Second Temple. But the Holy of Holies was empty. According to the Talmud, several important things were missing, most notably the Ark of the Covenant—which had contained the Ten Commandments, the very heart of the Law of Moses—and the Spirit of God, who had fled with the destruction of the Ark. Without God’s living presence, prophecy, which depended on the Spirit, must necessarily dwindle; and by the time the First Book of Maccabees was written (at the end of the second century B.C.), its author had reason to lament that there were no longer any prophets about that one could count on to settle difficult matters definitively and give the sort of advice one might act on with confidence.
The First Book of Maccabees lives in a kind of canonical limbo: considered an inspired book of the Bible by most Christians but, since we no longer have the Hebrew original, only a Greek translation, never accepted by the rabbis into the canon of the Hebrew Bible and relegated to an appendix of “apocrypha” by Martin Luther and subsequent Protestants. It certainly reads nothing like the Torah, the normative Five Books of Moses, to which Judaism gives its deepest reverence. Nor is there anything of prophetic ecstasy and terror in it. It isn’t even much like the Bible’s primitive “historical” books, which chronicle in saga-like form th
e exploits of such outsized figures as David and Solomon. It is, even if the original was written in Hebrew, a species of Greek history. For, though it takes a sober view of Alexander and all his ilk, it reads very like Plutarch’s and all the other histories that were churned out regularly by authors throughout the Greek world. Just as Plutarch depended largely on the correspondence contained in Alexander’s archive and on diaries of eyewitnesses, the author of First Maccabees has reviewed the correspondence in the royal archive of the Seleucids and eyewitness accounts kept in the Temple at Jerusalem. Like Plutarch, he is interested in phenomena, like dreams and visions, to which a modern historian would be unlikely to devote so much attention; and, like historians in every age, he is looking for a meaning beneath the chaotic surface of events. But he understands that he is bound by rules of evidence, research, and fact checking: he is a scholar, using the Greek methods of scholarship that were current in his day.
But if he borrows Greek form, the content of his story is decidedly Jewish. Its hero is Judas Maccabeus, known to the world not only for his appearance here but because Dante in the Divine Comedy discovers him in Paradise, because he is the title character of Handel’s stirring oratorio, and because the story of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights celebrated each December, is largely a celebration of Judas himself.
The Seleucids were engaged, like all successful successors to Alexander, in actively Hellenizing their conquests. After all, uniformity of culture and standardization of its procedures made governing so much simpler. When toward the end of the third century B.C. the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes proposed a gymnasion for Jerusalem, all too many Jews were eager to imitate their betters by taking out gym memberships and running around naked (a practice alien to the modest Judeans, among whom public nudity, so prevalent in the ancient world—at least among males—was quite unknown). Because the perfect male body was for the Greeks a kind of physical expression of spirit—the harder the pecs and the tighter the buns the more spiritual you were—any deformity or deviation from the norms of perfection (ideally expressed in the work of sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles) was viewed with repugnance. If a missing ear or toe rendered one an object of derision, imagine what circumcision did. So the Jews who were especially eager to be Greek began to “disguise their circumcision,” as First Maccabees puts it discreetly—that is, they underwent epispasm, a painful (and often unsuccessful) exercise in ancient plastic surgery.
But circumcision was not for the Jews an arbitrary or optional practice: it was the sign of the Covenant between them and their God, the seal that told that God had chosen them from among the nations. It was the very thing that separated them from all the others—the confirmation of their Jewish identity. Without it, they were no longer a people.
By giving his encouragement to the Hellenizing party among the Jews, Antiochus was merely laying the groundwork for more appalling schemes. Empires need cash, and Antiochus’s was no exception. What he really needed to get his hands on was the Temple treasury. He occupied Jerusalem and built there a typical Greek Acra (or citadel of military administration), which towered over the Temple, a message for all to see and understand. As First Maccabees tells it, the Greeks “installed there a brood of sinners [the occupying Greeks], of renegades [the Hellenized Jews], who fortified themselves inside it, storing arms and provisions, and depositing there the loot they had collected from Jerusalem. They were,” as First Maccabees puts it mildly, “to prove a great trouble.”
The initial Hellenizing, promoted as a generous cultural outpouring on the part of Antiochus and anxiously received as such by many of Jerusalem’s citizens (“He built us the gymnasion and now the lovely Acra”), was but the first step. Having softened up the citizens and sown cultural confusion, Antiochus could now proceed as he liked. Wouldn’t it make sense, in the interests of unity, for all the king’s subjects to become “a single people,” giving up their peculiar ethnic customs, which only militate against harmony? Shouldn’t—oh, to take one example—the Temple of Jerusalem be open to all, as are all Greek temples in all the cities of the empire, open for all to worship whichever god they wish? Why should the city’s central house of worship be closed to all men of goodwill and open only to this odd little sect within a sect? Why, isn’t it plain that most of their compatriots long for an open Temple that allows complete freedom of worship, as do all proper temples through which the breeze of reason blows?
Within Hellenistic religious culture, there was always room for one more god. Athens was Athena’s city, but of course all the gods were welcome there—no point in narrowing one’s options; better to hedge one’s bets. In any case, no one but the simple took the gods en masse too seriously, and those who studied philosophy had come to understand that the pantheon of gods was but a metaphor for higher things. The real purpose of religion—at the popular level—was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let’s all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same steps, and wander through the same colonnades. Let the Jews have their god, by all means—who’s stopping them?—and let us all have ours. And no provincial exclusiveness, please.
From one perspective, it sounds so reasonable, not unlike the “patriotic associations” that China insists all churches be controlled by. To a party apparatchik, what could be wrong with patriotism, with insisting that Chinese churches be free of foreign interference? But if you believe that the Church is universal and cannot be confined within one country, such patriotism will “prove a great trouble.” Similarly—but even more fundamentally—for the core of Jewish believers, there was but one God, who could not be depicted in stone or set beside the dead gods of the pagans because he was the living God, the Creator-beyond-all-creation. To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters—which were not all that important, anyway—was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.
Then, “on the fifteenth day of Chislev in the year 145”—in the reckoning of the Seleucid dynasty (that is, in late December of 167 B.C.)—“the king set the Abomination of Desolation on the altar of holocausts,” according to the horrified chronicler of First Maccabees. This thing was a statue of Olympian Zeus, king of the Greek gods (also known in Asia Minor as Baal, for the Greeks were happy to have their gods take local names), now given pride of place in the Temple of the living God and defiling both the Temple and the Jewish people with unimaginable sacrilege. Whoever objected, whoever persisted in the old, exclusive ways, whoever had her children circumcised, whoever refused to perform his civic duty and make sacrifices in the customary manner to the pantheon of gods was put to the sword—mothers with their circumcised infants “hung round their necks.” The new order was publicized as the triumph of reason over backwardness and superstition. And the current Lord of Asia at last controlled the Temple treasury, as he did all other treasuries in his domains, as was his right.
But there are humiliations a proud people—even one oppressed for generations—cannot abide. Judas Maccabeus (“Hammer-like”) rose and, calling to himself all those who loved the Law, made war upon the gentiles. This man, one of five brothers inspired by their dying father, energized his outraged troops and won battle after battle. Judas understood that, even if they are outnumbered, those who fight for a cause can overcome those who, like many of the Greek troops, are mercenaries fighting only for a pay packet or hapless ordinary men drafted against their will. “It is easy,” cried Judas to his partisans, “for a great number to be defeated by a few.… They are coming against us in full-blown insolence and lawlessness to destroy us, our wives, and our children, and to plunder us; but we are fighting for our lives and our laws, and he will crush them before our eyes; do not be afraid of them.” By this point in Jewish history, the reverence accorded the Name of God was so great that all references were indirect. None of Judas’s troops required any instruction in who “he” was.
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Antiochus’s rage at this rebellion and his subsequent mustering of an overwhelming force made clear to the partisans that their defeat would spell the end not only of their lives and those of their families but of Judaism itself. They had no choice but victory. Judas’s army stealthily left its position at Mizpah, eight miles north of Jerusalem, while the Greek general, who bore the unfortunate name of Gorgias, intending a surprise attack, advanced by night upon the now-empty Jewish camp with a handpicked force of six thousand men. But the Jewish army, some three thousand in all and lacking “the armor and swords they would have wished,” moved simultaneously toward the royal base camp at Emmaus, closer to Jerusalem. When they beheld it, the Jews were astonished by the gentile encampment, fortified and surrounded by cavalry—“clearly people who understood warfare.” But the guerrillas had not forgotten the stirring words of their general, the Hammer of God.
Morning was just breaking and the Greek soldiers were still rubbing their eyes when the Jews fell on them, precipitating confusion, easy slaughter, and flight. The Jews set fire to the camp and pursued the Greeks across the plain, hacking all the way and severely compromising the opposing army, which lost as many men as Judas had been able to muster. Gorgias and his handpicked force, returning just in time to see the fires rising from their ruined camp, the backs of their companions in flight, the bodies of Greeks scattered across the plain, and Judas’s troops drawn up against them, fled to Philistine territory, beyond the reach of the Jews.