Between the Temples: A Priest with a Sword

When Alexander the Great came riding down from the north, the story is that Shimon ha-Tzaddik, the High Priest, walked out of Jerusalem in his eight golden priestly clothes to meet him. When Alexander saw him, he got off his horse and bowed. Judea passed to the Greeks without a fight.

After Alexander died, his generals cut up his empire. Judea went first to the Ptolemies in Egypt (who once locked seventy-two Jewish elders in seventy-two separate rooms to translate the Torah into Greek — and each one, miraculously, produced exactly the same translation). Then it went to the Seleucids in Syria. One Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, called himself 'god manifest' and decided the Jews would stop being Jewish. He outlawed Torah study, circumcision, and Shabbat. He brought a pig up to the altar and offered it there. He set an idol in the Temple.

In a village called Modi'in, Greek soldiers ordered an old priest named Mattityahu to sacrifice on a Greek altar in the town square. He refused. When another Jew stepped up to do it for him, Mattityahu killed him and killed the Greek officer, and shouted the sentence that started the war: 'Whoever is for Hashem, come to me!' He and his five sons ran to the hills.

For three years they fought a guerrilla war against an army many times their size. His son Yehudah — 'the Maccabee,' the Hammer — took Jerusalem back, cleaned out the Sanctuary, and on the twenty-fifth of Kislev lit the Menorah again. There was only enough pure oil for one day. It burned for eight. We remember it every year as Chanukah.

The family — the Hasmoneans — ruled an independent Jewish country for about eighty years. Slowly and sadly, they took the crown of king for themselves along with the priesthood. The Ramban, centuries later, will say this was the sin that finished the family, because the crown belongs to the tribe of Yehudah and the priesthood belongs to Levi and no one is allowed to hold both. Two of the last brothers, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, fought a civil war for the throne. Running out of allies, they invited a Roman general named Pompey to come settle it.

Pompey settled it by marching on Jerusalem. He broke into the Temple Mount on Yom Kippur. He walked into the innermost room expecting to find a god. He found an empty room. He came out, Josephus says, pale and silent. Judea has been under Rome ever since. Twenty-six years after Pompey, Rome will install a converted Idumean named Herod as king of the Jews. And it is Herod who will rebuild the Second Temple into something rivaling Shlomo's — the very House that will burn on the ninth of Av a century after him.