Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (5 page)

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.

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.

In the following year, Judas, now with ten thousand at his side and invoking the great name of David,
Jerusalem’s beloved warrior-king, defeated a Greek force that was more than six times the size of the Jewish army. Then, keeping the army of the Acra at bay, he entered Jerusalem to undo the blasphemy. The sanctuary of the Temple was deserted, the altar horribly desecrated, the gates burned down, the courts as filled with vegetation “as it might in a wood or on some mountain.” The Jews “prostrated themselves on the ground, and when the trumpets gave the signal they cried aloud to Heaven.” Priests who were “blameless and zealous for the Law” removed the “stones of the Pollution” to a cesspool. The Jews pulled down the profaned altar of burnt offering and “deposited the stones in a suitable place … to await the appearance of a prophet”—sadly, there was none—“who should give a ruling about them.” They made a new altar from unhewn stones, restored the
Holy of Holies, forged new sacred vessels, lit the lamps of the great menorah, and made an eight-day celebration, singing psalms and playing music “with rejoicing and with gladness.” This is the Feast of
Hanukkah (or [Re]Dedication), to which the pleasant legend later attached that there was found in the Temple a cruse of oil sufficient for only one night’s illumination, but the miraculous oil burned for eight nights, inspiring the Jewish domestic custom of lighting lamps during the eight nights of the commemoration.

This festival marks an extraordinary moment in the history
of the ancient world, a triumph over the prevailing religious indifferentism and over the tyrant’s assumed right to regulate the heart as well as the realm. What is most inspiring about Hanukkah is that it memorializes the first clear victory in history for freedom of worship, a celebration that, as contemporary rabbis point out, belongs to all religious people.

T
HE
STORY
OF
THE
M
ACCABEES
(Judas’s nickname was eventually used of his whole family) has more to impart to us than a simple tale of victory over tyranny. The chronicler’s exacting Greek method of approaching his material shows how far alien techniques and ideas had penetrated Jewish society by the end of the second century
B.C.
and that, no matter the vigilance of any ethnarchy, it cannot withstand the siren song of the larger society that encompasses it. Even the most faithful Jews were now part of the Greek world; and, like it or not, by adopting its techniques, they were adopting at least some of its values.

Judas, though he created a new balance between believing Jews and their Greek overlords, did not succeed in wresting the Acra from the Greeks and could not, given his limited resources, overcome Greek power permanently or establish a new political order. His later campaigns, however, which broadened the territory under direct Jewish control, grew more savage, taking up the Alexander principle of putting whole cities to the sword and dealing mercilessly with whoever dared defy him. The militancy of the
Maccabees not only divided Jewish society but led to the rise of the
Zealots, the armed revolutionaries who would at last draw upon
Judah the unwonted attentions of an empire far more powerful than
even the Greeks could have imagined, an empire that would in
A.D.
70 crush
Jerusalem like a gnat, leaving “not a stone upon a stone.” The leveled city would not again know Jewish ownership till our day, when the
Maccabees were “rediscovered” by Israeli
Zionists, who made them culture heroes once again and gave them new legitimacy.

Ironically, however, the later Maccabees would hardly join the revolution their ancestors inspired. Instead, they became the disappointing
Hasmoneans, a dynastic family whose prede-cessors sprang from an unimportant line that had made no mark on Jewish history prior to the Maccabees. Thus, they had no legitimate claim to the offices they came to occupy—of local ruler and high priest, both offices at times devolving on one man—because they descended neither from the seed of Aaron, Moses’s brother and the first high priest, nor from the seed of
David, the champion who had once united the
Twelve Tribes of Israel into one great kingdom. The “legitimacy” of the Maccabee-Hasmoneans rested rather on their complicity with the monarch of the moment. Judas had taught the king a lesson that subsequent Greek and Roman leaders did not forget. Future rulers would normally come to the sensible conclusion that it is better not to stir the pot of Judah unnecessarily but to put a Jew in charge, especially one as accommodating—and enthusiastic about imperial taxation—as the Hasmoneans gradually became. The majority of Jews came to view these Jewish overlords as oppressors. The last and least distinguished of the line are well known to us: the Herods.

This sorry state of affairs poisoned even the atmosphere of the holy Temple, held hostage to a gang of priest-pretenders who, like so many Renaissance cardinals, had little interest in God or prayer, whose interest in wealth and ignorance of religion
led them to take rigidly conservative positions, and whose piety was not so much suspect as nonexistent. But a people so absorbed with God cannot be left so spiritually poor. In reaction to the Hasmonean
dilution of Judaism, countermovements developed.

The members of one of these movements abandoned the Temple and took to the desert. They were called
Essenes,
³
and we knew little about them before 1947, when the
Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy who, idly throwing stones into a dark cave near Qumran, south of Jericho, heard an unexpected clunk—the sound of his stone fracturing an ancient urn, which turned out to be one of scores of such urns filled with hundreds of scrolls. Almost all scholars now agree that these scrolls (and fragments) of papyrus and leather are the remains of an extensive Essene library, squirreled away for safekeeping in eleven separate caves during a time of civil unrest (perhaps in Jerusalem’s last hour) and successfully hidden from view for nineteen hundred years. The scrolls, containing biblical books in versions far more ancient than anything we previously possessed, have also yielded documents unknown till now, giving rich evidence of the elusive community that preserved them.

To all intents and purposes, the Essenes were celibate Jewish monks, permanently severed from a society that had grown degenerate, and they were a
shocking development within a religion that had come close to worshiping generativity and worldly involvement.
Abraham had been promised progeny; and all the promises God had made to the Jews revolved around the ultimate success of “their seed” within the confines of this world. How, then, could a movement of pious Jews forsake the obligation (and concomitant pleasure) of sexual reproduction and the joys of material life? If this strikes one as grotesque, almost as remarkable is the evidence, contained in the scroll entitled
The Manual of Discipline
, that in addition to chastity, the
Essenes were effectively vowed to poverty (or the community of goods) and obedience, submitting to near-military control by the Essene leaders.