The Maccabean family's descendants, the Hasmoneans, rule an independent Jewish state that also combines the high priesthood with kingship, a period marked by territorial expansion, forced conversions of neighbouring peoples, and, later, internal dynastic conflict and the rise of the Pharisee and Sadducee parties.
No canonical Scripture reference (historical context outside the Protestant canon)
Further context
3 min readThe family took its name from an ancestor called Hasmoneus, and what began as a revolt against a foreign king turns into a dynasty within a generation.
Simon, the last surviving brother, secures full independence in 142 BC when the Seleucids remit the tribute, and a great assembly of priests, people, rulers and elders confirms him as leader and high priest for ever, until a trustworthy prophet should arise. That last clause is a legal hedge and it is doing a great deal of work: the office is being made hereditary in a family that is not descended from the high-priestly line, and everyone knows it.
His son John Hyrcanus rules for thirty years and expands aggressively. He destroys the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, which fixes the hostility between the two communities into the form it still has in the Gospels. He conquers Idumea to the south and requires its population to be circumcised and to live under Jewish law, which is a forced conversion and which produces, three generations later, an Idumean king of the Jews called Herod.
His successors take the title king outright, and one of them, Alexander Jannaeus, fights a civil war against his own people that reportedly cost fifty thousand Jewish lives, and is said to have crucified eight hundred opponents in Jerusalem while dining with his concubines and watching.
Two of the parties that appear in the Gospels form during these decades and their disagreements are political as much as theological. The Sadducees are the priestly aristocracy attached to the temple and to the ruling house, accept only the five books of Moses as binding and reject resurrection, angels and spirits. The Pharisees are a lay movement concerned with applying the law to ordinary life, accept the oral tradition alongside the written law, and believe in resurrection. A third group, generally identified with the Essenes, withdraws altogether, and the community at Qumran that left the Dead Sea Scrolls is usually connected with them.
The word Pharisee most plausibly derives from a root meaning to separate, and Sadducee from the name of Zadok, the priest of Solomon's time. Neither party existed before this period and both are products of the Hasmonean century: one attached to the temple establishment the dynasty controlled, the other formed partly in opposition to it. Every dispute in the Gospels between those two groups goes back to a quarrel over a priest-king who was neither a proper priest nor a proper king.
The dynasty ends as it began, in a quarrel. Two brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, fight over the succession, and both appeal to the Roman general campaigning in Syria to arbitrate.
He arbitrates by taking Jerusalem.
The family that had fought for the right to keep the law ended up holding both the crown and the high priesthood, which was a combination the law itself had kept separate, and that is the source of most of what went wrong afterwards.
Simon, the last surviving brother, was confirmed as leader and high priest by a popular assembly in 141 BC, with a clause attached that has an edge to it: until a trustworthy prophet should arise. He was murdered at a banquet by his son-in-law.
His son John Hyrcanus expanded the territory considerably, conquered Idumea to the south and forcibly circumcised its population, which is how Herod's family became Jewish, and destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim.
Alexander Jannaeus, a generation later, fought a civil war against his own people and is reported to have crucified eight hundred opponents in Jerusalem while dining with his concubines.