Jerusalem: The Biography (14 page)

Jerusalem had become a theocracy – the very word was invented by the historian Josephus to describe this statelet with its ‘entire sovereignty and all authority in the hands of God’. Harsh rules regulated every detail of life, for there was no distinction between politics and religion. In Jerusalem there were no statues nor graven images. The observance of the Sabbath was an obsession. All crimes against religion were punished with death. There were four forms of execution – stoning, burning, beheading and strangling. Adulterers were stoned, a punishment inflicted by the whole community (though the condemned were first thrown down a cliff so that they were usually unconscious by the time of the stoning). A son who struck his father was garrotted. A man who fornicated with both a mother and her daughter was burned.

The Temple was the centre of Jewish life: the high priest and his council, the Sanhedrin, met there. Every morning, the trumpets announced the first prayer, like the muezzin of Islam. Four times a day, the blaring of the seven silver trumpets called the worshippers to prostrate themselves in the Temple. The two daily sacrifices of a male sheep, cow or dove without blemish at the Temple altar, morning and evening, always accompanied by an offering of incense on the altar of perfumes, were the chief rituals of Jewish worship. The word ‘holocaust’, derived from the Hebrew
olah
meaning to ‘go up’, refers to the burning of the whole animal whose smoke ‘goes up’ to God. The city must have smelt of the Temple altar, the censers with their delicious cinnamon and cassia mixing with the reek of burning flesh. Small wonder the people wore much myrrh, nard and balm as perfumes.

Pilgrims poured into Jerusalem for the festivals. At the Sheep Gate to the north of the Temple, sheep and cattle were herded and wrangled, ready for sacrifice. At Passover, 200,000 lambs were slaughtered. But Tabernacles was the holiest and most exuberant week of the Jerusalem year, when men and girls in white costumes danced in the Temple courtyards, singing, waving lighted torches and feasting. They gathered palms and branches to build huts on the rooftops of their houses or in the Temple courts.
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Yet even under the pure Simon, there were many worldly Jews who probably looked like rich Greeks, living in their new Grecian palaces on the western hillside known as the Upper City. What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, these cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided. Two ways of life existed in the closest proximity with the intimate loathing of a family feud. Now the city – and the very existence of the Jews – was threatened by the most infamous monster since Nebuchadnezzar.
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ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES: THE MAD GOD

Jerusalem’s benefactor, Antiochus the Great, could not rest: he now turned to the conquest of Asia Minor and Greece. But the over-confident King of Asia underestimated the rising power of the Republic of Rome, which had just defeated Hannibal and Carthage to dominate the western Mediterranean. Rome repelled Antiochus’ bid for Greece, forcing the Great King to surrender his fleet and elephant corps and send his son to Rome as a hostage. Antiochus headed east to replenish his treasury but, while looting a Persian temple, he was assassinated.

Jews, from Babylon to Alexandria, now paid an annual tithe to the Temple, and Jerusalem was so rich that her treasures intensified power struggles among the Jewish leaders and started to attract the cash-strapped Macedonian kings. The new king of Asia, named Antiochus like his father, rushed to the capital at Antioch and seized the throne, killing any other family claimants. Brought up in Rome and Athens, Antiochus IV inherited the irrepressible, glittering talents of his father but his cackling menace and manic flamboyance more resembled the demented exhibitionism of Caligula or Nero.

As the son of a Great King laid low, he had too much to prove. As beautiful as he was unhinged, Antiochus relished the pageantry of court ritual yet was bored by its constraints, priding himself on his absolute right to surprise. In Antioch, the young king got drunk in the main square and bathed and was massaged in public with expensive unguents, befriending grooms and porters in the baths. When a spectator complained about his extravagant use of myrrh, Antiochus ordered the pot smashed over the man’s head, causing a riot as the mob tried to salvage this priceless lotion while the king just laughed hysterically. He enjoyed dressing up, appearing in the streets in a crown of roses with a golden cloak, but when his subjects stared he threw stones at them. At night, he plunged in disguise into the stews of Antioch’s backstreets. Spontaneously friendly to strangers, his caresses were panther-like for he could suddenly turn nasty, as pitiless as he was genial.

The potentates of the Hellenic age usually claimed descent from Hercules and other gods, but Antiochus took it a step further. He called himself Epiphanes – the God-manifest – though his subjects nicknamed him Epumanes – the Madman. But there was method in his madness for he hoped to bind his empire together around the worship of one king, one religion. He fully expected his subjects to worship their local gods and merge them into the Greek pantheon and his own cult. But it was different for the Jews, who had a love–hate relationship with Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle, using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolators, whose nude athletics disgusted them.

The first instinct of the Jewish grandees was to race each other to Antioch to bid for power in Jerusalem. The crisis started with a family feud about money and influence. When High Priest Onias III made his bid to the king, his brother Jason offered an extra eighty talents and returned as high priest with a programme to rebrand Jerusalem as a Greek
polis
: he renamed her Antioch-Hierosolyma (Antioch-in-Jerusalem) in honour of the king, downgraded the Torah and built a Greek gymnasium probably on the western hill facing the Temple. Jason’s reforms were quite popular. Young Jews were painfully keen to appear fashionable at the gymnasium, where they exercised naked except for a Greek hat. Somehow they managed to reverse their circumcisions, the mark of the covenant with God, giving the appearance of restoring their foreskins, surely a triumph of fashion over comfort. But Jason himself was outbid for Jerusalem: he sent his henchman Menelaos to Antioch to deliver his tribute. But instead the thuggish Menelaos stole the Temple funds, outbid Jason and bought the high priesthood, even though he lacked the required Zadokite lineage. Menelaos seized Jerusalem. When the Jerusalemites sent delegates to the king to protest, he executed them, and he even allowed Menelaos to arrange the murder of the ex-High Priest Onias.

Antiochus was most concerned to raise funds to reconquer his empire – and he was about to pull off an astonishing coup: the uniting of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. In 170
BC
Antiochus conquered Egypt, but the Jerusalemites undermined his triumph, rebelling under the deposed Jason. The Madman marched back across Sinai, and stormed Jerusalem deporting 10,000 Jews.
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Accompanied by his henchman Menelaos, he entered the Holy of Holies, an unforgivable sacrilege, and stole its priceless artefacts – the golden altar, the candlestick of light and the shewbread table. Worse, Antiochus ordered the Jews to sacrifice to him as God-manifest, testing the loyalty of the many Jews who were probably attracted to Greek culture – and then, his coffers filled with Temple gold, he rushed back to Egypt to crush any resistance.

Antiochus liked to play the Roman, sporting a toga and holding mock elections in Antioch, while he secretly rebuilt his banned fleet and elephant corps. But Rome, determined to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, would not tolerate Antiochus’ new empire. When the Roman envoy Popillius Laenas met the king in Alexandria, he brashly drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus, demanding he agree to withdraw from Egypt before stepping out of it – the origin of the phrase ‘draw a line in the sand’. Antiochus, ‘groaning and in bitterness of heart’, bowed before Roman power.

Meanwhile the Jews refused to sacrifice to Antiochus the God. To ensure that Jerusalem would not rebel a third time, the Madman decided to eradicate the Jewish religion itself.

ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES:
ANOTHER ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

In 167, Antiochus captured Jerusalem by a ruse on the Sabbath, slaughtered thousands, destroyed her walls and built a new citadel, the Acra. He handed the city over to a Greek governor and the collaborator Menelaos.

Then Antiochus forbade any sacrifices or services in the Temple, banned the Sabbath, the Law and circumcision on pain of death, and ordered the Temple to be soiled with pigs’ flesh. On 6 December, the Temple was consecrated as a shrine to the state god, Olympian Zeus – the very abomination of desolation. A sacrifice was made to Antiochus the God-King, probably in his presence, at the altar outside the Holy of Holies. ‘The Temple was filled with riot and revelling by Gentiles who dallied with harlots,’ fornicating ‘in the holy places’. Menelaos acquiesced in this, people processed through the Temple wearing ivy crowns, and, after prayers, even many of the priests descended to watch the naked games at the gymnasium.

Those practising the Sabbath were burned alive or suffered a gruesome Greek import: crucifixion. An old man perished rather than eat pork; women who circumcised their children were thrown with their babies off the walls of Jerusalem. The Torah was torn to shreds and burned publicly: everyone found with a copy was put to death. Yet the Torah, like the Temple, was worth more than life. These deaths created a new cult of martyrdom and stimulated expectation of the Apocalypse. ‘Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake and come to everlasting life’ in Jerusalem, evil would fail, and goodness triumph with the arrival of a Messiah – and a Son of Man, invested with eternal glory.
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Antiochus progressed back to Antioch, where he celebrated his flawed victories with a festival. Gold-armoured Scythian horsemen, Indian elephants, gladiators and Nisaean horses with gold bridles paraded through the capital, followed by young athletes with gilded crowns, a thousand oxen for sacrifice, floats bearing statues, and women spraying perfume on to the crowds. Gladiators fought in the circuses and fountains ran red with wine while the king entertained a thousand guests at his palace. The Madman supervised everything, riding up and down the procession, ushering in guests, joking with his comedians. At the end of the banquet, the comedians carried in a figure swaddled in cloth. They laid it on the ground where, at the first notes of a symphonia, it suddenly threw off its coverings and out burst the king naked and dancing.

Far to the south of this delirious debauch, Antiochus’ generals were enforcing his persecutions. In the village of Modin, near Jerusalem, an old priest called Mattathias, father of five sons, was ordered to make the sacrifice to Antiochus to prove he was no longer a Jew, but he replied: ‘If all the nations of the King’s dominion hearken unto him yet will I and my sons walk in the Covenant of our fathers.’ When another Jew stepped forward to make the sacrifice, Mattathias’ ‘zeal was kindled, his veins trembled’, and, drawing his sword, he killed first the traitor, then Antiochus’ general, and pulled down the altar. ‘Whoever maintaineth the Covenant,’ he said, ‘let him come forth after me.’ The old man and his five sons fled into the mountains, joined by extremely pious Jews known as the Righteous – Hasidim. Initially they were so pious that they observed the Sabbath even (disastrously) in battle: the Greeks presumably tried to fight all their battles on Saturdays.

Mattathias died soon afterwards, but his third son Judah, assuming command in the hills around Jerusalem, defeated three Syrian armies in a row. Antiochus initially did not take the Jewish revolt seriously for he marched east to conquer Iraq and Persia, ordering his viceroy Lysias to crush the rebels. But Judah defeated him too.

Even Antiochus, campaigning in faraway Persia, realized that Judah’s victories threatened his empire, and cancelled the terror. The Jews, he wrote to the pro-Greek members of the Sanhedrin, could ‘use their own proper meats and observe their own laws’. But he was too late, and soon afterwards Antiochus Epiphanes suffered an epileptic fit and fell dead from his chariot.
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Judah had already earned the heroic moniker that would give its name to a dynasty: the Hammer.

THE MACCABEES

164–66
BC

JUDAH THE HAMMER

In the winter of 164
BC
, Judah the Hammer conquered all of Judaea and Jerusalem apart from Antiochus’ newly built Acra Fortress. When Judah saw the Temple overgrown and deserted, he lamented. He burned incense, rededicated the Holy of Holies, and on 14 December presided as sacrifices resumed. In the ravaged city, there was a shortage of oil to light the candelabra in the Temple, but somehow the candles never went out. The liberation and resanctification of the Temple are still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah – the Dedication.

The Hammer – Maccabeus
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in Latin – campaigned across the Jordan and sent his brother Simon to rescue the Jews in Galilee. In Judah’s absence, the Jews were defeated. The Maccabee struck back, captured Hebron and Edom and smashed the pagan shrine in Ashdod before besieging the Acra in Jerusalem. But the Seleucid regent defeated the Maccabees at Beth-Zacharia, south of Bethlehem, then besieged Jerusalem, until he had to withdraw to face a revolt in Antioch. He therefore granted the Jews the right to live ‘after their own laws’ and worship in their Temple. Four centuries after Nebuchadnezzar, Jewish independence was restored.