A Priest with a Sword: The Hasmoneans, Chanukah, and the Road to Rome

When Alexander the Great rode down from the north, the story preserved in the tradition is that Shimon ha-Tzaddik, the High Priest, walked out of Jerusalem in his eight golden vestments to meet him. Alexander dismounted and bowed. Judea passed to the Greeks without a fight.

After Alexander's death, his generals divided the empire. Judea went first to the Ptolemies in Egypt — who, in one famous episode, are said to have locked seventy-two Jewish elders in seventy-two separate rooms to translate the Torah into Greek, and to have received seventy-two identical translations. Judea then passed to the Seleucids in Syria. One Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, styled himself 'god manifest' and set out to end Jewish practice. He outlawed Torah study, circumcision, and Shabbat. He brought a pig up to the altar. He set an idol in the Sanctuary.

In the village of 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 forward to comply for him, Mattityahu killed the man and killed the Greek officer, and shouted the sentence that started the war: 'Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.' He and his five sons went into the hills.

For three years they fought a guerrilla war against an army many times their size. Yehudah — 'the Maccabee,' the Hammer — retook Jerusalem, cleared the Sanctuary, and on the twenty-fifth of Kislev relit the Menorah. There was only enough pure oil for one day. It burned for eight. That is Chanukah.

The Hasmoneans then ruled an independent Jewish state for roughly eighty years. Slowly, and to the tradition's lasting sorrow, they took the crown of king along with the priesthood. Centuries later, the Ramban would identify that combination as the sin that finished the family: the crown belongs to Yehudah and the priesthood 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 settle it.

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