Hasmonean Kingdom

A family with no claim

formationDrafted from Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013)

Judaea in the second century BC had two hereditary titles that mattered and the Hasmoneans held neither.

Kingship belonged to the house of David, and there had not been a king in Jerusalem since the Babylonians took it in 587, and the consequences of that were still running four hundred and fifty years later. The high priesthood belonged to the line of Zadok, which the Seleucids had been selling to the highest bidder for a generation, but which was at least a line.

The Hasmoneans were a priestly family from Modein, of the course of Jehoiarib, with no connection to either. What they had was that they had won.

Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

The decree

In 140 BC an assembly described as a great gathering of priests, people, rulers of the nation and elders of the country made Simon leader and high priest — the Greek word is ethnarch — and commander of the army, and decreed that the offices should be his and his sons' after him. It forbade anyone, priest or layman, to contest the arrangement or to convene an assembly without him. It was engraved on bronze tablets and set up in the Temple precinct, and the text is quoted in the fourteenth chapter of 1 Maccabees.

One clause in it is doing a great deal of work: Simon holds the offices until a trustworthy prophet shall arise. That is the assembly conceding that it does not have the authority to settle the question permanently and settling it anyway.

A written constitution

Very few ancient states left a document setting out how their ruler was to be chosen. The ones that did — the Hittites with Telipinu's edict, the Assyrians with Esarhaddon's succession oath — generally wrote it after being badly hurt by not having one: Telipinu legislated after a century of murdered kings, Esarhaddon after a civil war caused by his father's assassination.

The Hasmoneans wrote theirs at the outset, before anything had gone wrong, because they had no lineage and a document was the only thing they could put in its place. A state can legislate a succession out of injury or out of illegitimacy, and this is the second kind.

What the decree does not do is name an order. It says the office is Simon's and his sons' until a trustworthy prophet should arise, and it says nothing about which son. The century that followed ran son, son, brother, widow, and then a civil war between two brothers that handed the country to Rome.

What they built instead

Regev's argument is that the Hasmoneans knew exactly what they were missing and spent a hundred years compensating for it.

The coinage is legible in that light: paleo-Hebrew letters revived from a script five centuries out of use, no human image, the legend naming the high priest and the hever — the assembly — of the Jews, in a deliberate archaism that looks past the Seleucids to something older. The palaces at Jericho are Hellenistic buildings with ritual baths in them. Hanukkah, as a festival, is a Hasmonean institution about the Temple they had recovered.

Cabinet des médailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

Israel Antiquities Authority · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Shai Halevi, Israel Antiquities Authority · CC BY-SA 4.0

A dynasty that has to keep explaining why it rules is a dynasty that leaves an unusual amount of evidence about what it thought ruling was.

Tulul Abu al-Alayiq, Jericho · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Ezrazo · CC BY-SA 4.0

The diadem

expansionDrafted from Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013)

John Hyrcanus succeeded his father Simon in 135 and ruled thirty-one years, in which the Seleucid empire, coming apart in exactly this period, stopped being able to interfere. He took Samaria and destroyed the temple on Mount Gerizim. He took Idumaea. His son Aristobulus I took Ituraea in the north. His son Alexander Jannaeus took the coastal cities and most of the Transjordan.

Mount Gerizim · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Deror avi · CC BY-SA 3.0

In a little over forty years a temple-state around one city became a territorial kingdom running from the Golan to the Egyptian frontier, larger than anything ruled from Jerusalem since Solomon.

Sebastia, West Bank · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Mujaddara · CC BY-SA 3.0

104, and a word

Aristobulus I put on a diadem. Josephus says he was the first of the family to do it, and the significance is not vanity: a diadem in the Hellenistic east is a specific claim to a specific kind of office, and it made the high priest of the Temple simultaneously a Greek-style monarch with a Greek regnal name.

Regev's case is that this was not simple Hellenisation. The Hasmonean state, on his reading, is a national monarchy rather than a conventional Hellenistic one — closer in type to Macedon than to the Seleucids, ruling a people rather than a collection of cities, and using Greek royal forms to say something that was not Greek. The coins keep the Hebrew and add the Greek. The palaces have the baths.

What is not in doubt is that combining the two offices in one person created the central quarrel of the next century. Josephus has the Pharisees ask Hyrcanus to give up the high priesthood and keep the civil rule. He refused, and his son went further and took a crown as well, and by Jannaeus's reign the argument was a civil war in which the king crucified eight hundred of his own subjects while dining with his concubines, having imported Pisidian and Cilician mercenaries to fight Judaeans.

So the army was two armies: a citizen levy for the wars everyone approved of, and hired foreigners for the ones they did not. The second half is the grievance.

Idumaea

The conquest with the longest consequences is the smallest of them.

Hyrcanus took Idumaea, the country south of Judaea, and — Josephus says — required its inhabitants to be circumcised and to live under Jewish law or leave. Modern readings soften that in various ways and the coercion is genuinely argued about. What nobody disputes is the result. Idumaea was Jewish afterwards, and stayed Jewish.

It is worth saying plainly that the instrument was an army. Judaism spread into Idumaea and stayed there, and it did so behind a conquering force rather than a mission. Both count as propagation, and describing only the second kind would give a tidier and less honest account of how religions actually move.

The consequence is the record that follows this one. Herod's family were Idumaean and were Jews because of this campaign, and the objection his opponents made to him for fifty years — that he was a half-Jew, that his Judaism did not count — is an objection to what Hyrcanus did in 112.

The dynasty's single entry on the influence axis is the reason the dynasty that destroyed it existed.

Beit Guvrin-Maresha National Park · Regev, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (2013) · Photograph: Talmoryair · CC BY 3.0

Until there should arise a faithful prophet

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Anonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (1888)

In 140 BC an assembly at Jerusalem passed a decree making Simon high priest, commander and ethnarch, and had it cut on bronze tablets and set up in the sanctuary. The text is quoted in full in 1 Maccabees, and it is the founding constitutional document of the Hasmonean state — which is why the single qualifying clause in it matters so much.

The decree recites the family's services and then makes the grant. The Jews and the priests were well pleased that Simon should be their governor and high priest for ever, until there should arise a faithful prophet. He was to be their commander; to have charge of the sanctuary; to appoint officers over the works, the country, the armour and the fortresses; to be obeyed by every man; to have all documents in the country drawn in his name; and to be clothed in purple and wear gold. Nobody among the people or the priests was to annul any of it or contradict him, or convene an assembly in the country without him, on pain of punishment. The assembly commanded that the writing be put on tablets of bronze and set up in a conspicuous place within the sanctuary precinct, and that copies be deposited in the treasury, so that Simon and his sons might have them.

Musée gallo-romain de Fourvière, Lyon · Anonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (1888) · Photograph: Ruthven · CC0

Four things are worth taking out of it.

The first is that this is an elective monarchy in all but name, and knows it. The Hasmoneans were priests of an undistinguished course, not of the high-priestly line and certainly not of the house of David. They had no claim of the kind the office required. So the office was conferred, by a decree, by the people and the priests — and the decree says so, at length, with the reasons.

The second is and his sons. The copies go to the treasury for Simon and his sons to hold; the decree opens by asking what thanks shall be given to Simon and his sons. A hereditary succession is being established in a document whose whole argument is that the man deserved it personally.

The third is the bronze. The Romans had made bronze tablets familiar — 1 Maccabees itself describes the Roman treaty being written on them — and the Jerusalem assembly now used the same medium for its own constitution. The Hasmoneans had sent embassies to Rome and been received as friends and confederates, and the decree cites that recognition as one of the grounds for the grant. They were building a Hellenistic monarchy out of a revolt against Hellenisation, and even the metal was borrowed.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Anonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (1888) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

The fourth is the clause. Until there should arise a faithful prophet. It is not a formality; the same phrase occurs earlier in the book, at the point where the defiled altar stones are stored away because nobody knows what to do with them and the decision is deferred to a prophet who has not come. Here it is doing constitutional work. The grant is permanent and revocable at once — valid until somebody with genuine authority turns up to say otherwise.

That sentence is the Hasmonean state's own statement of what was wrong with it, inscribed on bronze at its foundation and set where everyone could read it. Every later quarrel in the dynasty's history — the Pharisees' objection to Jannaeus holding the priesthood, the two brothers taking their claims to a Roman general — is an argument about a title that had been issued with an expiry condition and no expiry date.

Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid · Anonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (1888) · Photograph: Luis García · CC BY-SA 3.0

The Thracian

peakDrafted from Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)

The Hasmonean kingdom reached its largest extent under Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned twenty-seven years, took most of the coast and much of the country east of the Jordan, and spent six of those years at war with his own subjects.

Jordan valley, West Bank · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Mohammad Alyan Jamil · CC BY-SA 4.0

Josephus, himself of Hasmonean descent and not a hostile witness, tells the story of how that ended.

Jannaeus beat the rebels in the field, shut the most powerful of them up in the town of Bethome, besieged it, took it, and brought the men back to Jerusalem.

Then, while he was feasting with his concubines in a place where the whole city could see, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified. And while they were still living he had the throats of their wives and children cut in front of them.

Israel Museum, Jerusalem · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Gary Lee Todd · CC0

Josephus reports the provocation fairly — his subjects had brought foreigners into the country against him, and had reduced him to real danger of losing his life and his kingdom — and then says that the barbarity seems to have been without any necessity. The Jews, he adds, called him a Thracian.

What a peak looks like from inside

That is the largest the state ever was, and the same paragraph explains what it cost.

To stop the Nabataeans joining his enemies, Jannaeus had to hand back Moab and Gilead — territory he had conquered — to the king of Arabia. So the maximum extent of the kingdom was already being traded away to buy off one neighbour while its ruler fought a civil war against his own population.

Machaerus, Jordan · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

This is the Hasmonean problem in its finished form. The family had come to power by leading a religious revolt against a Hellenistic king who was interfering with the Temple. Four generations later its head was a Hellenistic king in everything but name, wearing a diadem, employing foreign mercenaries against Judaeans, holding the high priesthood, and crucifying Pharisees in batches while dining in public.

The obvious question

Josephus does not ask it directly, and the material asks it for him: at what point did the dynasty stop being the thing it was founded to be?

There is no single point. Each step was defensible and the sequence was not. Take the high priesthood because somebody has to hold it. Take the crown because your neighbours have crowns and a priest cannot command troops abroad. Hire mercenaries because a citizen levy will not campaign in Transjordan for years. Use the mercenaries against dissidents at home because they are the only troops who will. Execute the dissidents publicly because the alternative is being seen to be afraid of them.

The Hasmonean state at its greatest reach was a Hellenistic monarchy of the ordinary type — the type the family had risen against — and about eight hundred of the people who noticed were on crosses outside the palace.

Two brothers and a consul

contractionDrafted from Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976)

Alexander Jannaeus died in 76 and his widow Salome Alexandra ruled nine years, which the later rabbinic tradition remembers as the good period — she made peace with the Pharisees, and Josephus says the country prospered. She could not hold the high priesthood herself, so she gave it to her elder son Hyrcanus II and intended the kingship to follow. The army and the Sadducees preferred her younger son Aristobulus II.

When she died in 67 they fought. Aristobulus won, Hyrcanus abdicated, and then Antipater the Idumaean — Herod's father, a Hasmonean official governing the country his own people had been conquered into fifty years earlier — persuaded Hyrcanus to reopen it with Nabataean help.

That is the war the Nabataeans record from the other side: Aretas III besieging Jerusalem on behalf of one Jewish claimant, in the last year in which the affairs of Judaea were decided by anybody local.

Both of them wrote to Rome

Pompey was in Syria winding up the Seleucid empire. Both brothers appealed to him, and a third delegation came from Judaea asking for neither of them and for the restoration of the priestly constitution without a king.

Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Venice · Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Mark Landon · CC BY 4.0

Pompey heard all three, took his time, and then took Jerusalem for Hyrcanus in 63 after a three-month siege of the Temple mount. He entered the Holy of Holies — which is remembered — and took nothing from the treasury, which is also remembered and by a different set of people.

Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The settlement left Hyrcanus II as high priest and ethnarch of a much reduced Judaea, stripped of the coastal cities, the Greek cities of the Decapolis and most of what four generations had taken, and paying tribute. The title of king was gone. The dynasty lasted another twenty-six years and nothing in them was independent.

Jerusalem · Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Gadora81 · CC BY-SA 4.0

The rule, and the outcome

The Hasmoneans had a written rule of succession — the decree of 140, published on bronze — and the century it governed produced a son, a son, a brother, a widow, and this.

It is tempting to conclude that they had no rule at all. They did. What they had was an inadequate one, and the difference matters. A dynasty with no rule is one where the strongest claimant simply takes the throne and everybody expects it. A dynasty with a rule that says who may inherit and not in what order is one where two brothers can each be right, each know they are right, and each find people to say so.

That is what produced 63 BC. Not a coup, but a legal dispute that neither party could win and neither could abandon, referred at last to the only authority in the region big enough to settle it.

37

endDrafted from Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976)

Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, held Jerusalem for three years with Parthian backing. In 37 BC Herod took the city after a five-month siege with a Roman army under Sosius, and Mark Antony had Antigonus scourged and beheaded at Antioch.

Cabinet des médailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France · Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

Josephus, quoting Strabo, says this was the first time the Romans had executed a foreign king, and gives the reason: Antony judged that no other punishment would make the Jews accept Herod, because as long as Antigonus lived the Hasmonean would be the king and Herod would not.

Antakya, Turkey · Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Maarten Sepp · CC BY-SA 4.0

That judgement was correct and it did not work. Herod spent thirty-three years being the man who was not a Hasmonean.

Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

One succession in a region of dead ends

Herod overthrowing the Hasmoneans in 37 BC is a real succession between two local powers, and it is nearly the only one in this part of the world.

Look at what the neighbours did instead. Ptolemaic Egypt was partitioned out of Alexander's empire and ended against Rome. Palmyra ended against Rome. The Nabataeans were absorbed by Rome. The Jafnids were dismantled by Rome, and the Nasrids of al-Hira by Persia. Every one of those points out of the region, because the region's subject is powers that grew in the space between two empires, and a polity defined by that space is succeeded by one of the empires rather than by its neighbour.

Judaea is the exception because Judaea produced two of them in a row, and the second took the first by siege.

It is the one clean succession this stretch of the Levant's history actually offers: most of the neighbouring kingdoms of the period simply have no recorded link joining one to the next, which is the honest picture of how little continuity this region's small states shared rather than a gap in what has been written down.

What Herod married

He had been betrothed to Mariamme, granddaughter of both Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II and therefore the Hasmonean line doubled, before he took the city. He married her in the year he took it. He later made her seventeen-year-old brother high priest, had him drowned in a swimming pool at Jericho within the year, and eventually executed Mariamme, her mother, and the two sons he had by her.

Nobody ever claimed the Hasmoneans, and Herod is the reason that has to be argued rather than assumed. The marriage was real, the motive was obvious, and Josephus is explicit that Herod wanted what the connection conferred.

But he never once said so in public. His coins name him king and give no genealogy. His own account of himself, reconstructed from his court historian through Josephus, rests on the Roman grant and on nothing else. He married into the house and then destroyed it, which is a use of a connection rather than an assertion of a claim — and a man who kills everyone with a better title than his own is not invoking their legitimacy, he is removing it.

Smallwood, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (1976) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

Married, and extinguished

afterlifeDrafted from Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)

The Hasmoneans were not conquered out of existence. They were married into and then killed off, one at a time, over about thirty years, by a man who needed their name and could not afford their existence.

Herod married Mariamne, granddaughter of the high priest Hyrcanus II and the Hasmonean heiress. It was the whole basis of his standing in Judaea: he was an Idumaean whose father had been an administrator, and she was the last legitimate representative of the family that had ruled for a century.

Josephus records what happened to the rest of them.

The boy at the altar

Mariamne's brother Aristobulus was made high priest at the age of seventeen.

When he put on the holy vestments and came forward to the altar at a festival, the crowd — Josephus says the multitude, in great crowds — fell into tears at the sight of him.

That was the whole of his offence. The child was sent by night to Jericho, and there, at Herod's command, he was held under the water of a pool by Gauls until he drowned.

Tulul Abu al-Alayiq, Jericho · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Ben Drusai · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then the grandfather. Hyrcanus, old and long since mutilated out of the priesthood, had been living safely in exile in Parthia; Josephus is explicit that his friends warned him not to go over the Euphrates to Herod and that had he listened he would have survived. What tempted him back was his granddaughter's marriage. Herod's provocation, Josephus says, was not that Hyrcanus made any attempt on the throne, but that it was fitter for him to be king than for Herod.

Tulul Abu al-Alayiq, Jericho · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Bukvoed · CC BY 4.0

Mariamne

She knew all of it and said so. Josephus describes her reproaching Herod openly about her grandfather and her brother, in front of his sister and his mother, while he stood there unable to answer because of how much he loved her — and records, in the same passage, that her hatred of him was not less than his love for her, and that she had only too just a cause.

The women of the court then got up the charge that ruined her: that she had been unfaithful, and had sent her portrait into Egypt to Antony. It fell on Herod, Josephus says, like a thunderbolt.

He had her killed, and afterwards the two sons she had borne him, who were the last people alive with a claim by blood to the Hasmonean succession.

Herodium, West Bank · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Bukvoed · CC BY 4.0

What was left

Nothing dynastic. No exile branch, no pretender, no later house claiming the name.

What survived was the festival. The rededication of the Temple that the first generation of the family had carried out in 164, before there was a Hasmonean kingdom or a Hasmonean crown, is kept annually and has been ever since — outlasting the dynasty by two thousand years, in a form that commemorates the revolt and not one of the kings it produced.

Arch of Titus, Rome · Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895) · Photograph: Sailko · CC BY 3.0

That is an unusually exact division. The Hasmoneans as rulers left a crucifixion, a civil war, two brothers who each invited Rome in, and a son-in-law who drowned the last of them in a swimming pool. The Hasmoneans as a rebellion left a holiday.