The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
The Middle Maccabees
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Andrea Berlin is the James R. Wiseman Chair in Classical Archaeology and a Professor of Archaeology and Religion at Boston University. Her research focuses on the archaeology and history of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and Roman East, Ceramic Studies, Second-Temple Judaism, and the archaeology of Israel. In this episode, we discuss the book The Middle Maccabees of which she is a co-editor and a contributing author. The book examines the beginnings of the independent Jewish state founded in the second century BCE and frames it within the wider world of conflicts between the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Syria, and the Romans. You can purchase a copy of the book on Amazon.
I'm your host, Alex, and welcome to the Levantini Podcast, a show about Near Eastern history, language, and culture. To learn more about the show and get in touch, you can visit our website at LeventinePod.com. Andrea Berlin is the James R. Wiseman chair in classical archaeology, as well as a professor of archaeology and religion at Boston University. Her research focuses on the archaeology and history of the Achimented, Hellenistic, and Roman East, as well as ceramic studies, Second Temple Judaism, and Archaeology of Israel. She's the co-editor and a contributing author to the book The Middle Maccabees, Archaeology, History, and the Rise of the Hasmonean Kingdom, which examines the beginnings of the independent Jewish state founded in the 2nd century BCE and frames it within the wider world of conflicts between the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Syria, and the Romans. I had a great time talking with her, and I hope you enjoy the show. Okay, we're live. Thanks for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_00My pleasure.
SPEAKER_01So before we get started, it'd be helpful if you can paint a broader picture of the regional developments that set the stage for the Hasmoneans and other regional revolts that took place at that time.
SPEAKER_00Well, regional developments sounds like a single sort of thing, but the deal with this region writ large, the Southern Levant, is that it's so many discrete regions. For anybody who's traveled there, two things are always so striking. One, how small it actually is, and two how diverse it actually is. And every one of those diverse regions was the homeland of a different group of people. Their base, they had different forms of subsistence, they had different economic patterns and different cultural affiliations, they had different deities and languages and cultural and legal systems. And the Judeans were just one of many peoples throughout this territory. And I guess the other important thing to say is all of them were overlaid by two quite interested big power polities. And those were the Seleucids, the Seleucid state, whose capital was at Antioch, on the very northernmost Levantine coast, and the Ptolemies, the Ptolemaic state, which we think of as Egyptian and whose capital was at Alexandria, but both of whom regarded this entire region as rightly theirs.
SPEAKER_01And how long was this after the death of Alexander and the dissolution of his empire into competing kingdoms?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Alexander dies in Babylon in the year 323 BCE. We are, I don't know, about 150 years after that. When our story gets started, we're about 150 years after that. I guess at the level of big political history, the sort of history that nobody wants to learn about in school because it's all big names and dates. There's the generation or so in the immediate aftermath after Alexander when things weren't settled because there were a lot of people who thought, I'll be the one to take it all over, and they fought among themselves. That lasted for about a generation, and people on the ground, lower than these big fighters, just kind of laid low. Not much changes at ground level for most people. Then the dust settles, and there's a period of about a hundred years in our region. That's more or less the entirety of the third century BCE, where the Ptolemies are in charge. The Ptolemies win, as it were, they're in charge, and they immediately they're very delighted to be in charge of this highly agriculturally productive strategic zone. And they send tax agents throughout this zone regularly and exploit it. I think that's the simplest thing to say. And the Seleucids want it back. And throughout the third century, there are wars. Every 20 years, there's another war. Nobody gives up the idea that this should be theirs. It looks settled only because the Ptolemies, throughout the third century, win all the wars. So when you look at a map, they're in charge the whole time. But the Seleucids keep fighting. Eventually they win. Right at the beginning of the second century BCE, the Seleucids take over this territory, and they make some changes when they do that.
SPEAKER_01And how drained were both empires when it came to the warfare between them. You know, it's people in the book that makes this comparison as well between the Bronze Age collapse, and I don't know how much of a fair comparison that is, and I'll ask you about that in a second. But whether it's the history kind of repeats itself in this region just like it does everywhere. And you see, there's always warring empires going after this territory, and over the course of generations, they seem to weaken themselves and it opens up power vacuums for other powers to come up in that during that stage, whether it was the Asmonians or the Romans, what was going on in that front?
SPEAKER_00Well, that's a great question, Alex. But the idea of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids at this point in the pre-Maccabean revolt phase weakening themselves or diminishing their wealth is, I think, incorrect. And if we would try to read that history through the lens of what happens later, that would be an unfair retrojection. Similar, I suppose, to somebody looking back at the Victorian age or one of the great Elizabethan ages of exploration of Britain, and then saying, well, in the 19th century, the empire is starting to crumble in post-colonial, you know, and you could see the seeds of it then, but really you can't. You know, those were years when they were that was a strong empire. And likewise, the third and the first half of the second centuries BCE, 150 years. The Ptolemies are wealthy. The Seleucids are wealthy. The Seleucids do suffer a sort of major setback in Anatolia in the year 190, in a bit huge battle, the Battle of Magnesia, which is far away from here and doesn't have any effect on this region. So it would be a misreading to see the ability of the Hasmonean state to rise later as its seeds planted here. Nobody would have seen that coming.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting. Zooming in on Judea, what was happening on the Judean political and religious establishment stage that left room for the Hasmoneans to come onto the scene?
SPEAKER_00Well, that is in a way a question that gets at an enduring mystery that's not truly answerable, either by archaeology or by the kind of historical analysis that we do with text. And here's why, Alex. There were a lot of people, peoples living in this area. Only the Judeans rebel. Nobody else does that. You can make two choices about how to accommodate yourself to a political overlordship autonomy, hegemony, whatever you want to call it, that doesn't seek to squash your own cultural linguistic legal bona fides. One is the attitude of win-win or lay low or lean into the parts that nobody is bothering you about. And that's what almost everybody does, who lives under empire and isn't forced to give up their own ways. And neither the Ptolemies nor the Seleucids forced people to completely turn their backs on their own ways. Native languages remain and native legal systems and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_01So who were the people in charge in Judea at the time? Understanding they were essentially a vassal. I don't know if I call it a vassal kingdom, but a vassal. Well, they weren't a kingdom. A vassal territory under the Greeks, right?
SPEAKER_00I don't even know if I would call them a vassal because that gives them a sense of political legitimacy that they didn't have. They were people who self-defined themselves. They thought of themselves as they knew they were different. It wasn't just that they had their own language and their own territory and their own God. They had their own history. And they they were very proud of it and they knew it. This is probably one of the most key differences, and possibly gets back to answering the question that you just asked me before, that gave at least some Judeans in the early second century BCE the very idea to revolt. A deep history is a very effective counterweight to the political domination of empire.
SPEAKER_01So to that point, from a historian's perspective, what set off the revolt and what was its initial outcome? And I understand from a historian's perspective, you have to take in the religious text as well with the book of Maccabees, because it is a source, but I'd love to hear your perspective on that. What was the spark that set it off?
SPEAKER_00It is very, very likely that some Judean, I would say elites, just as a sense of some well-connected Judeans, but Judea was socially fractured. There were various folks who had different levels and degrees of connections and different negotiating styles with those above them. So there was a high priest, there were high priests in the temple in Jerusalem who were happy to live with and under Seleucid domination, which initially, when the Seleucids first conquered this territory, Antiochus III is the Seleucid who first conquers it. The Judeans got a lot of benefits. They got a lot, they got tax breaks and extra money and special things for the temple. And part of the deal was that they stayed quiet. They didn't make trouble. Now, for quite a few generations, nobody felt like they needed to make any trouble. Antigus III, you know, eventually dies. A new king comes along, Antiochus IV. Anticus IV has very grandiose ambitions. So did Antiochus III, as a matter of fact. He's the one who lost at Magnesia. Anticus IV invades Egypt. It doesn't go well. It's one of the famous scenes from history where a Roman legate draws a circle in the sand around him and says, you know, make a decision about retreating before you step out of this circle. And he leaves and he returns. What we know archaeologically on the ground is that in short order, our new fortification is built in the city of Jerusalem. This is the famous Akra. Now, why would Antiochus IV do that? Somebody in Jerusalem, some bodies, must have made some trouble for him. Why? Two reasons. One, they saw a moment of weakness and because he was on the retreat from Egypt and decided to exploit it. And number two, there was this sense of we are both special and we are aggrieved. So more special than you know, maybe other peoples, the Edoumeans and various other folks who lived in the Sidonians and Tyrians who lived in the area who didn't feel the need to beat their chest and make trouble. But the Judeans did. Judeans did not. And he makes quick work of this rebellion, of which we see pretty much no evidence on the ground. If we didn't have 1 Maccabees, we wouldn't know much about it.
SPEAKER_01So what was the initial outcome of the revolt?
SPEAKER_00The initial outcome of the revolt is an armed, Seleucid garrison in Jerusalem. And that is a very antagonistic move. And we all have, well, I don't know if we all have, but at least we should hopefully learn some lessons from the way a dominating outside presence flexes their muscle on a people. When you make your militarized strength felt, you will get a reaction very often. It will not be that everybody just sits down and says, Oh, we see you're very strong. Okay, we'll stop making trouble now. That's not usually what happens, and that's not what happened in Judea.
SPEAKER_01So outside of the Book of Maccabees, what are the other sources that historians and archaeologists have to reconstruct the rise and reign of that dynasty?
SPEAKER_00We don't have other written sources, which is one of the reasons that we started the Maccabees Project. We do not have so, which is why for many, many, many generations, the way that the story has been understood is a reading essentially of 1 Maccabees or 1 Maccabees vis-a-vis 2nd Maccabees, whether that reading is quite literal, quite skeptical, or someplace on the balance line between those two, those have been the options. One of the things that I came to understand a little by accident, and then very purposely, once I started exploring it, was wow, in the last 20 years, we've got a lot of archaeology for this exact period. And it turns out that when you look at all this archaeology side by side, region by region, we get a story that we just could not see before.
SPEAKER_01And does that story that's supported by the archaeological record reflect in some way the little kernels of history or truth that you can pick out from the Book of Maccabees when it comes to how they established their rule over time? You know, I think that the traditional narrative is that there was a revolt, the Judeans succeeded in ejecting the Greeks from the territory, they set up an independent kingdom, but it's a lot messier than that. It's more a series of back and forths and concessions and tacit agreements under the great powers. Do you see that in in the record, in the in the archaeological record?
SPEAKER_00What we mostly see in the archaeological record is what I think I would call the texture of time. And that is a sensation that's hard to really feel and appreciate from reading the book. I mean, skilled historians acknowledge this, but we can't help but flatten out the years and the decades that this took. And by omitting that complexity, we simplify the story in our minds and in the reconstructed tales that get told.
SPEAKER_01One thing that's very interesting, was very interesting to me when I read your book, or a book that you co-authored and were a co-editor on, and there are many authors of the book. But one thing that was interesting to me in reading that, and then also going back and reading first Maccabees, which frankly like I had never read growing up. It's not something that's read, you know, if you're Jewish in the United States, you don't grow up or any, you know, anywhere, you don't grow up reading first Maccabees. You know, you celebrate Hanukkah, but it's not like Purim where people read the book of Esther. It's just you have the high-level story and nobody you know takes a look at a first Maccabees. So it was really interesting. And one thing that was particularly interesting was the different characters that come up, and you can see different personality traits, whether it's you know, starting with Judah to his brothers, to other successors, it's you really see some different characters popping up. And to kind of set the stage for that, it'd be helpful if you can paint a picture of in the history of the dynasty, who were the important figures in the Hasmonean family tree, the ones that you know their names stood the test of time.
SPEAKER_00Well, the first thing to say about this is that the story that you just therefore recently read is a very much after-the-fact, deliberately glorifying family saga made into an epic tale. And therefore, there has to be an epic hero at the start. And that epic hero is Judah Maccabe, who is the fiery leader, the guerrilla leader, actually, a man who for whom principle is everything and fears nothing. And he occupies a very fundamental role as showing the Seleucids who's boss. The archaeology is very different, however, as I said before, because it's pretty clear that he didn't actually accomplish very much. He doesn't win, he probably wins very little, if any, battles. So we're already at some kind of schism between these great personalities and the reality on the ground. The successors to Judah Maccabe in the Book of Maccabees are then his two younger brothers, Jonathan and Simon. We can tell from comparative scrutiny of how they interacted with Ptolemaic and Seleucid kings, the ones with whom they were contemporary, that they were players. Now, in the Book of Maccabees, they're represented as as leaders, great leaders, not exactly autonomous, but close to autonomous. That's not the way it would have been. They were, well, eventually, generals in the employ of whichever Seleucid dynast they had pled their troth to for a certain moment. The big winner, the pendant, the book and pendant personality-wise, both in the book of Maccabees and probably also in reality, was John Hercanus. That's the son of Simon and the guy who really makes the Hasmonean kingdom happen, and in whose court, as it were, and by now you can use the word court because he had a kingdom, the book of Maccabees was written.
SPEAKER_01And when you're reading the first Maccabees, and correct me if I'm this is completely off base, but when you're looking at the character of Judah and understanding that his background was propped up in some degree in order to create that hero character, but you do, when you're reading it, you do, I think, come away with a sense of that there might have been some truth in his rebellious or warlike nature versus his brothers, you know, whether you see it just the standard tragedy of rebellions is somebody gets overzealous in their capabilities and overconfident in their capabilities, which happened to him. And in his last battle, nobody shows up. But then his brothers are right there to take up the mantle afterwards, and they're more than happy to talk with the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. So I thought that was, you know, that's a little telling.
SPEAKER_00I think that's absolutely right, Alex. Judah Maccabe was an instigator and uh fighter. And his brothers were canny and strategic and negotiators. In that regard, the real descendant of Judah is, and I don't know that I will get the kinship exactly right. I guess it would be his great nephew, Alexander Ginaeus. That is the son, the younger son of John Hercanus, who was a nephew of Judah Maccabe. So we're a few generations down now. And he is also a fighter. Like Judah Maccabees, he loses a lot. He has big ambitions, but he does not win a lot of his battles. That's getting way ahead of the story that we tell in our book about the Middle Maccabees. But just to say, you're absolutely right when you put your finger on it, there are different ways to lead, to foster, inspire, foster, and lead a revolution. And Judah Maccabe was the instigator, spark plug, but his brothers, especially his younger brothers, were the strategists.
SPEAKER_01And you're gonna hate me for asking this, but if this was a movie and we're at this scene, do you get the sense that there was some betrayal going on and deceit behind the scenes that nobody showed up at the end of the day and he ends up dying?
SPEAKER_00For who? For which oh well betrayal. Hmm. Maybe betrayal in the sense that, you know, there were people who began to feel this was a they weren't gonna win. They weren't gonna win, they didn't want to die. This wasn't a fight worth fighting.
SPEAKER_01And he couldn't see that. You know, or wouldn't accept it.
SPEAKER_00The way First Maccabees presents it is the Judeans were no longer going to the entire basis of their religious identity. Was under siege and imperiled. And that is a reading that you can have if you have a very binary, there can only be one deity worshiped in this temple. The minute you open that up, then you have eradicated its legitimacy. So Antiochus IV very likely introduced ruler cults into the Judean countryside and possibly also onto the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and that was 100% unacceptable to Judah Maccabe, but it might not have been 100% unacceptable to many other Judeans.
SPEAKER_01It took the Hasmoneans some 30 or 40 years, right, to gain control of the region or for their dynasty to become somewhat established and accepted. What were some of the drivers of Hasmonean expansion strategically versus nationalistically from in the course of their reign, and especially when you get into John Harkiness and his son?
SPEAKER_00I think that I would see the ability of the Maccabees slash Hasmoneans to make a little state for themselves as a chapter book. Chapter one under Judah Maccabees, the initial revolt, that's not an attempt to create a state per se. It's an attempt to reclaim a particular religious legitimacy. And it doesn't succeed. And then a half a generation goes by before anything else happens. So one attraction of framing this as chapters is that it doesn't make it a one thing happens after the next thing after the next thing sort of story in an ineluctable progression. It wasn't like that. What happened a half a generation later, very importantly, was an opportunity that had not presented itself before and came from outside. The Hasmoneans don't create this opportunity. They weren't even looking for it. And I think it could be said that they might not have even imagined it. Because what happens is the big superpowers get internecine and they duke it out among themselves. And this happens in the 140s. So it's a full 20 years after the initial revolt. For a full 20 years, everybody went about their business day to day. The ocra was in Jerusalem. We see no changes on the ground. We see no changes in the surrounding area. We see no evidence of anybody fighting or anything being different. And this battle that erupts, which is inspired actually by a particular decision by the current Ptolemaic king, Ptolemy VI. He's a little evil. As today, I will just go sideways for a second, Alex, to say, I don't know about you, but I read the updates about what is happening in Ukraine every single day and think, wow, if we would put this in the framework of ancient history, we would have no trouble hooking up some of these people. So I would say that Ptolemy VI had designs on the Levant as Vladimir Putin has today on the Ukraine. And it is a zone that used to be part of his slash their territory, and in their mind's eyes should be again. And an opportunity is presenting itself to take advantage of that. And to go back to the second century BC, that's what Ptolemy VI does. He marches up the Levantine Coast. He makes it all the way to Antioch. There's a big battle. He ends up winning the battle, but then dying three days later from wounds that he suffered in it. That opens up an enormous rift. Well, it exposes a rift that's been ongoing on the Seleucid side. And for the next five years, there is a hugely pitched, very lethal civil war among the Seleucids, mostly fought in the hinterlands of the cities and very, very largely, as it happens, in the Galilee. And the result of that is a big swath of territory that are vacated and a Seleucid state that now can not really attend to business the way they used to. And all of a sudden, Simon, by this time it's Simon, who's Jonathan has been killed actually in this kerfuffle between these warring Seleucid forces, Simon sees that there's nothing in his way. And he slowly, really slowly, and now we're in chapter three, really slowly, step by step, very gingerly, then followed by his son John Herconus, start to see what they can take control of.
SPEAKER_01It's really similar to just other patterns throughout history. Even if you're looking at the Byzantines going at the Persians, and then there's an opening in the Levant, and it kind of makes perfect room for the Arab conquest to come on the scene because there weren't giant armies there anymore, really. Or if there were, they didn't really care to fight.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly right. These are patterns that recur, and these are dynamics that recur. Small rebellious, independent forces that wage guerrilla fights in what they think of as their own territory. Think, for example, of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They have the advantage of what is the right word for this? There's no place else for them to go. They have the advantage of place. They have the advantage of place because it's the place that they know, but they have the advantage of place because it's the only one for them. And these other powers, if other things happen to them, they get waylaid, they get distracted, they get temporarily discombobulated by things that are happening on other fronts because they're big, hyperextended forces. Well, those are moments for these folks who are on the ground and aren't going anywhere else because this is their only ground. It is their moment.
SPEAKER_01So during that era of expansion, I guess, and it moved pretty slowly, what do we see on the ground? Were there did that expansion take violent forms at times, or was it more of a slower, peaceful infiltration or expansion, would you call it?
SPEAKER_00It is a little bit of either one of those, or possibly not exactly either one of those. It is less heroic and more, I don't know what. Well, it goes like this. First of all, at the end of chapter two, the end of the Seleucid Civil War in the 140s and the 130s, there was a lot of empty territory. It wasn't emptied out by Hausmanians doing anything anywhere. It was emptied out because the Seleucids were duking it out among each other, and it was unsafe for people in small villages and agricultural hinterlands of cities, and they left. A few places, a few places have actual damage and destruction. That's probably from Seleucid fighting. But most places are just abandoned. People probably move to the cities. That's where people go to. You know, it's crowded in the cities. None of these battles ever take place in the cities. The cities are economic engines. Nobody fights a city and makes it the cities are not antagonistic. You need your cities. But the countryside is abandoned. It's abandoned for a long time. Two things happen, or the Hasmoneans make two things happen. One is Judean expansion into certain agricultural areas that have been abandoned. The most obvious is the Galilee. The Lower Galilee becomes slowly, slowly repopulated, starting in the 120s. We are now 20, it's been laying fallow for 20 years, since the late 140s. So this is how cautious Simon and then John Hercanus were. Actually, the piece that probably gave them the green light is that in 129, the last Seleucid to try to exert imperial authority dies. That's Antiochus VII. He had made an attack on Jerusalem, which didn't succeed. He also retreats. He goes to fight on the Parthian front and he is killed. And then the coast is really clear. And slowly, slowly, slowly, then in the 120s, we see Judean settlements moving up into the Galilee. There remain, however, in the interior, well-functioning, wealthy cities that are either Greek or Gentile, or are not, according to the quite particular definition of John Hercanus and the Hasmonean kingdom, sufficiently Judean, or maybe by this time you would actually translate that word better as Jewish. And here I'm thinking especially of the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim, who worship, incidentally, the same God as those in Jerusalem. They just worship that God at Mount Gerizim instead of Jerusalem. And that is unacceptable to John Hercanus. So in the very late teens, starting in 112, 112, 111, and 109, so now we are another, ten years later from that slow resettlement of Galilee, John Hercines quote unquote attacks and destroys a few of these Gentile cities. That's Marisha in Edomia, Samaria in Samaria in the northern central highlands, Schethopolis, which is adjacent to Bethan at the eastern end of the Jezreel Valley, and Mount Gerizim, the temple of the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim. But you know, to say it wasn't a fair fight is even misleading, because in most of these cases it wasn't a fight. Maraisha is abandoned. There were a few battles at small fortifications on the perimeter of Edumia. A recent one was just in the news, not too far from Lahish, a little fortress that was attacked in the later in around 112. And it's probably exactly that sort of thing that when first Maccabees says John Herconus destroyed Marisha, he did not. He created conditions that made it too uncomfortable, indeed impossible for anybody to live there, and they all moved away. Same for Samaria. Scathopolis, we actually have some destruction, debris, not much. This is not a city with an army. This is just a place that people lived. It is very likely that people were scared and abandoned their homes, and then the Hasmonean forces go in and wreak a little havoc. They pillage, and that's what happens on Mount Gerizim. These are not pitched battles. These are not fortified sites. The Hasmoneans are not defeating anybody. They are wreaking havoc on places where the people have left.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting when you get to this stage of their history, too. If you're not an historian or archaeologist, you think of the region of Judea as populated by Jews. But it really wasn't the case for a long time. By this period, there were Greek cities. If you read Josephus, there's entire cities on the coast that are Greek. They're not Jewish, they're I'm sure there were Jews there, but it wasn't this homogenous territory populated by one people with one belief. And by the time you get to the reign of John Harkinus, there was definitely something going on in terms of him trying to recapture this golden Israelite age in terms of his expansion. And it wasn't non-important to him that some of these areas were populated by Greeks or Samaritans or non-Jews, correct?
SPEAKER_00That's correct. It wasn't non-important to him. That's absolutely correct. Well, a great piece to keep in mind is the geographic pattern that in the time of Hercanus is established, or I think, from the vantage point of the Hasmoneans, re-established. And what is that pattern? Judea, Samaria, and Galilee are re Judeanized. Not the coast, not Edumea, also known as, at least historically, slash biblically, slash topographically, Philistia. This is not the patrimonial state. This is not what's taken over. When in the 120s, Judeans go to move to an area that is unoccupied, the area they moved to is Galilee. It's hard to believe this isn't, I don't know if I would call it uh a settlement plan, but it certainly feels deliberate and purposeful. It feels ordained almost.
SPEAKER_01On that point, how concerned were the Hasmoneans at this stage in their history with religious legitimization of their rule and also portraying themselves as greater than they were as equals to the great powers?
SPEAKER_00Totally. That's why we get 1 Maccabees. That's why we get 1 Maccabees. That's why in 1 Maccabees there are diplomatic missions recorded. There's much, has been much ink spilled by historians and philologists and religious scholars about the historical veracity of these things, but that in a way misses the point. The Hasmoneans represent themselves as on equal footing and able to converse directly with the Romans, who are in the historian of ancient Rome, Duncan McRae, who's a contributor to our project and wrote a great chapter in the Middle Maccabees. He has a wonderful line where he says, by now, in this political climate, Rome is making the weather. So the Hasmoneans represent themselves as on equal footing with the Romans. That's a little hilarious, no way. But this demonstrates the circles in which they want others to believe they are running.
SPEAKER_01How is that reflected in? I'm going to get to the coin question now that you were fretting about before we got started, but when you're looking at the coins that the Hasmoneans minted, what do we see there in terms of them presenting themselves as heirs to the great Israelite age and their religious legitimization?
SPEAKER_00Well, that's a very that's a very interesting question, Alex, because the coins legitimate them on a totally different definitional mode than biblical or historical. The coins legitimate them on the stage of the current day. If you mint your own coins, you can be like the Seleucids, you can be like the Ptolemies. You are a polity who, in a sense, just to bring back Duncan's great phrase, can make your own weather. You create the means for your own economic system. You represent yourself that way via coins. Coinage is a very powerful symbol. It's not just a tool, it's a symbol. That said, very important to point out that the first Hausmanian coins are so small. If you had one in your hand, it would be about the size of your thumbnail. They're bronze, they're not silver, they're not precious metal. They're very, very little. So were they used for monetary transactions? Could you go to a market and purchase bread? Probably you could. Eventually you could. Certainly under Alexander, by the time of Alexander Ginaus, you could, he meant it thousands and thousands of coins. We have thousands of coins, and there were probably so many. But under Hercanus, there are not that many coins. It is not illegitimate to ask what purposes they could have served. And it is not unreasonable to postulate that their primary purpose was political symbolism. And this is not biblical because coinage is not biblical, but it's not that old.
SPEAKER_01But on any of their coins throughout their reign, are they using the old Hebrew script as opposed to Greek or Aramaic?
SPEAKER_00On the coins of Hercuanus, there is Hebrew script, that's for sure. And there are symbols that well, there's various little symbols, and those symbols are sometimes there's an anchor, which is a symbol of the Seleucid state. There's a lily. A lily is an old, it's possibly a symbol of the city of Jerusalem itself. But mostly, you know, the lily that was a symbol of Jerusalem was already a symbol of Jerusalem's coinage under the Seleucids. It was on the coinage of the Seleucid King Antiochus from the Seleucid Mint in Jerusalem. So what this is, most especially, Alex, is a symbol of political legitimacy. That is, you're already used to seeing a coin with a lily on it, and you accept that symbol as a valid symbol that makes this little piece of metal transactional. And now my coin has that symbol too, so you can trust it.
SPEAKER_01So they're kind of squeezing in some little pieces of legitimization onto the coins without stirring the pot. So they have group on there, but they also have Seleucid symbols on there, so they're making them happy. It's not like the coins you see of the later revolt against Rome, where there's the thoughts of the temple or language like for the freedom or redemption of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly right. They are not like that at all. That's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01So I want to go back to the Romans here, and if you can again set the stage, where were the Romans at this point in history in relation to their rise versus the Greeks' decline?
SPEAKER_00The Romans have been intimately involved in politics in the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the second century BCE, because at the very beginning of the second century BCE, in the year 190, they were part of the big coalition that fought against Antiochus III. They were part of a coalition with the city-state of Pergamon and the Rhodians, the island of Rhodes, fighting against the expansion of the Seleucid state in Asia Minor. Antiochus loses, the Seleucids have to retreat, giving up essentially all of Anatolia as part of their domains. The Romans allow the Pergamenes to take over this now lost Seleucid territory. The Pergamene state dissolves in the year 133. The last Adelaid king dies without an heir, and in his will, hands his entire kingdom, which is all the holdings that had been the Anatolian province of the Seleucid state. He hands them over to Rome. Rome inherits the western half of modern-day Turkey. And that gets them not really necessarily in an excited way involved in a lot of politics in the East. They weren't necessarily so interested in this. The place was kind of troublesome. And Rome was still a republic at that time. There were two consuls elected every year. The consuls were the generals in the war. In other words, you would have had to keep it quiet, to keep it under control, to keep things going, you would have had to commit forces. The Romans were not so interested in committing lots of forces to this region at this time. They would rather have people take care of themselves if they would do so in a way that didn't make trouble. The Ptolemaic state continues to function quite well, thank you very much, all the way down to the time of Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra in the 40s and 30s is an ally of Mark Antony. He's the Roman legate to the East. So what the Romans want to do, in other words, is negotiate and empower people who are local and adept. And the Hasmoneans present themselves for a little while as such a people. So from the 110s down to the 60s BCE, so for a period of 40 years, is that the Romans leave the Judeans alone. The Hasmonean kingdom is allowed to do what it wants. But then the Hasmonean kingdom itself, Alexander Ginaus dies, he has two sons, they don't get along, they start to fight. The Romans are exasperated and against their will, you know, forced to come in and settle things up. This is the year 63 BCE, the Roman legate is Pompey, and he puts an end to the Hosmonean kingdom.
SPEAKER_01Did they continue on under the Romans in just more of a symbolic nature? Because there's Hosmoneans on the scene even. With the rise of Herod, but by that time, like you can just read the text and tell there's such like pathetics that no, I wouldn't call them pathetic, Alex.
SPEAKER_00They would not like that at all, of course. But I wouldn't call them that either. Really, what happens is, of course, the Hosmoneans and their power base doesn't evaporate into thin air, but other local, well-connected, savvy power brokers are given a little more space and place. And one of those is a dude named Antipater, and he comes from Edumea, which by this time has been part of the Hasmonean kingdom, so he is what you could call a Judaized Edumean, probably. And he becomes an advisor and a helper to Julius Caesar, who, prior to Mark Antony, was the Roman on the scene in Egypt, who was Cleopatra's negotiating partner, among other things. And Antipater is an assistant to him. Antipater has a son whose name is Herod. Herod ties himself by marriage to the Hasmonean family. He marries a Hasmonean princess. There are, in other words, by the 40s BCE, 20 years after Pompey, two real parties here. And Alex, this brings us full circle back to the early second century BC. There are two parties. One of those parties, what you can call the Herodians, are the go-along-get-along party, the win-win party, the party that says there's a big power here, and we can live with them and we can work with them and we can be ourselves under them. Just like the high priests who negotiated with and lived with the Seleucids in the first half of the second century BC. And then there's another party. And that party is the Hasmoneans. And they are the no. We cannot live with these people. We don't want these people in charge. We want to be in charge of ourselves, just like in the time of Judah Maccabe. And that party is not on top for a while. So for the entirety of the reign of Herod and immediately after his death, his sons, it's the Herodian party that's on top, the go-along-get-along party, what you could call the cosmopolitan party. But that undercurrent of Judean disgruntlement finally breaks out. And that's how you get the revolt against Rome. It breaks out in 66.
SPEAKER_01And apologies to any Hasmonean listeners who are upset by my characterization of them in their later stages. What you said about the Herodians is so true, too, about how they're they're the go-along, get along, and just very practical and pragmatic in their approach to power politics. Because even, correct me if I'm wrong, but Herod sides with Brutus and Cassius during the Roman Civil War. And when they lose, he has no qualms about going to Park, Augustus, right? Octavian. Sorry, you know, come on.
SPEAKER_00Well, what he says, oh, well, this is one of the fame my most favorite set pieces in Josephus. Of course, Josephus lived two generations after Herod, and I doubt there was any firsthand report. But here I feel that Josephus has put his finger on an essential, canny intelligence that clearly Herod possessed. Josephus tells us that Herod travels to the island of Rhodes, where Octavian is wintering to plead his case. And he enters Octavian's presence and he says to him, He wasn't on the side of Brutus, he was on the side of Mark Antony. He was on the side of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, which he had to be, Herod had to be, because Cleopatra was a dynast in his backyard. Egypt was still in his backyard. So he had to be on the side of Antony and Cleopatra.
SPEAKER_01Right, that's right. It was Antony, it wasn't I was a few years off.
SPEAKER_00And he says to Octavian, I was on the side of your enemy.
SPEAKER_01I was loyal to loyal friend, though. And I'll be a loyal friend.
SPEAKER_00And I will be just as loyal to you if you affirm me in my position. And Octavian, who also was a very canny political strategist, knew that he had what had to be the most important consideration for an imperial dynasty, somebody who would keep the peace in a place that wasn't known for it.
SPEAKER_01And going back to the earlier Roman interactions with the Hasmoneans, you know, your characterization of how they preferred to rule those territories at that time seems spot on in complete contrast to what 1 Maccabees says, you know, where they kind of give this impression of this strong and strategic alliance between Judah and the Romans, and we'll come to your aid if you're ever in trouble, but they clearly don't.
SPEAKER_00That's right. That's right. Something a little uh just to go sideways again and back up to the present, I was interested to read a couple weeks ago about the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who is wanted to become a player in the current crisis between Putin and Biden, between Russia and the United States over Ukraine, wanted to help be a broker. And a very intelligent read an essay in the New York Times a couple weeks ago said one of the advantages of that for him is that it keeps his stature, his country's stature as a player. So, yeah, does he want there not to be war in Ukraine? Certainly, and you know, does he want there to be peace and calm? Probably very much so. But he also wants to matter. He wants his country to matter. He wants still to be an equal interlocutor with these big powers. That's one of the very first considerations for a new polity. And the Hasmoneans were a new polity. They needed to show that they belonged on that big stage. And being an equal interlocutor with the Romans was one of the ways you showed that.
SPEAKER_01So, how did the the memory of the Hasmonean revolt and the story and the narrative that they created for themselves? What kind of influence did that have on the later revolts against Rome in 70 AD and then later with the second Jewish war against Rome?
SPEAKER_00That's a really good question, Alex, that I am the wrong person to opine about. I really am the wrong person to opine about. It's a question that has a lot of layers. It would seek to untangle specific historical motivations, but it would also seek to situate political and especially religious sensibilities, sensibilities about identity and autonomy and legitimacy that were informed by earlier events or earlier traditions. And this is extremely tricky to untangle. And I think you would need uh you would need a scholar of these literary traditions. And the problem with these literary traditions at this point is that they're all later retold, and it's pretty tricky, if not impossible, to situate them in some kind of linear chronology. So it's hard to say this was the story, and then people made that into the story, or they would have known this story, and so used it as a roadmap or a script for something later. That is hard to say. I will only say one thing. There are two strains, two strata or spheres. One is political, political independence, political legitimacy. That is part of the fight of the two revolts. The two revolts, the first and the second revolt, the second revolt being the Barkakba revolt, are fights for political independence and legitimacy. But there's another strain or sphere, and that's religious autonomy, not legitimacy, just religious strength and particularity, and that's the rabbis. And they haven't gone anywhere. They are around and they stay around. And at the end, they're the ones left, as it were, holding the flag. But they're not holding a flag because they're not political movers and shakers. In fact, eventually what happens after the second revolt, when the Romans really are in charge, and they've stopped trying to prop up client kings and vassal states, and they have just figured that they need to send their own administrators places, it's the rabbis who are the representatives for the Jews to the Romans. They are the elites. They are, in fact, the successors of the Herodians. They are the go-along get-alongers.
SPEAKER_01And as I asked the question, and I heard your answer, it kind of brought me back to what you said earlier, which really, I think, gets the real influence, I think, on the later revolts, and even was the same influence that it seems was on the Maccabees, in that the problem with the Judeans is they were self-aware of their history and their past. And that seemed and their their uniqueness as a people. And that seems to have been the real sticking point over the ages with them.
SPEAKER_00I think you've put your finger on exactly a critical point. I think that's absolutely right. They are a people of history, and that history is completely entangled in their self-definition and self-awareness. You could say it created problems for them in antiquity, I guess. But you could also say this, Alex. There were a lot of peoples living in the southern Levant and in this region in the second century BCE. There were Sidonians and Tyrians and Iturians and Nabataeans and Idumeans and Judeans and Samaritans. And there's only really one group who you can say are still around.
SPEAKER_01That's a great point. Well, look, I appreciate you taking time to talk with me about this topic and go over the book, The Middle Maccabees. This is no better way, I'd rather spend my Sundays. And I'm sure you you hopefully enjoyed it too. I did.
SPEAKER_00This was lots of fun. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01But for anybody who's interested in learning more, you can purchase the book, The Middle Maccabees, on Amazon. You still have a YouTube channel that's up that has some really great lectures with your students, and you clearly love what you do and you love teaching. And it's a really great way to pass the time, is to watch your some of your lectures that are available on YouTube if you just search your name. But I look forward to staying in touch and I had a really great time talking with you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Alex. Me as well.