Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And let me tell you, Ben Folds and his band, the Ben Folds V were on an absolute heater in the early 2000s. Those guys were great. I still think Ben Folds is a genius. One of the songs that I remember from back then when he was absolutely on fire was a song called The Ascent of Stan. And it's about a hippie who grows up to become a corporate stooge. He's the critic of the man. He's the revolutionary when he's young. But then he wins. And well, what is it like to be the one in charge now? Stan, once you wanted revolution, now you're the institution. How's it feel to be the man? It's no fun to be the man. Likewise, Judas Maccabees, Judah Maccabees. He was a really good revolutionary. He was excellent at it. Brilliant strategist. He could rally people. He was principled. But I think a fair reading of his life and first and second Maccabees and other historical sources on him is that, like so many revolutionaries, it's pretty hard to know what to do next after you got the thing. It's, you know, the old metaphor about what happens if the dog actually catches the garbage truck. What do you do? Bark at it, bite it? I mean, it's a garbage truck. Well, in our last conversation, we talked about how effectively Judas Maccabees defeated the Seleucid invaders, made his way into Jerusalem, purified the temple from all the horrible things that had happened there. And then what do you do next? Well, he goes around, he tries to get rid of some more of the Greek outposts, but times are changing. Leadership is needed. At some point, you have to build an actual kingdom. And what is that going to look like? Will Judas Maccabees be the guy to do it? Or is he the revolution who won't be able to make the leap to being the institution? How's it feel to be the man? So the temple gets purified now. Judas stays on the offensive with all of his brothers in tow, and they're gonna go try to lay siege to some of the remaining Greek outposts. But a new invasion gets sent down from the north from the Seleucids. This time around, for the first time ever, the Judas Maccabees and his brothers decide to meet them in open battle. Now, this is the biggest battle of the whole war, the whole rebellion to this point. For the first time, the Maccabees forces are pretty loaded. I mean, they got a ton of guys, like maybe 20,000, but the Greeks have a ton of dudes, and this is so fascinating. They have a key strategic advantage for fighting in the open field, and that is that they got a bunch of war elephants, 20, 30, 40 of them. Historical sources disagree. Like legit armored up war elephants. Yes, this is in the book. It's in 1 Maccabees 6. Judah's made his money, he's made his name doing guerrilla warfare, and it doesn't go as well in open battle. And in an attempt to try to rally the troops, Judah's younger brother, Eliezer. I'm literally only telling you this story because it's awesome. I don't know, I mean, it's not the most important thing, it's just awesome. He sees that the war elephants are breaking the spirit of the men. And so he does this Jon Snow ride out against the forces of Ramsey Bolton. It's okay if you don't know what that reference is from. All alone, stand in the field with the sword loaded up or whatever. And well, here's the story. First Maccabees 6. Everyone trembled when they heard the sounds of the soldiers and they marched along and the clanging of their weapons as the army was massive and very strong. But Judas drew near with the army in battle formation, and 600 of the king's men fell. Then Eliezer, called Avron, he's one of Mattathias' son, younger brother of Judas, saw one of the elephants covered with royal armor. It was taller than the rest, and he reasoned the king was riding it. So he laid down his life to rescue his people and to make an everlasting name for himself. He ran boldly into the center of the phalanx, that impenetrable formation that I was telling you about that the Greeks used. He ran boldly into the center of the phalanx, killing soldiers to the right and the left, and they got out of the way on both of his flanks. Then he crawled under the elephant, struck it from beneath, and killed it, but it fell to the ground on top of him, and he died there. Even though that was a ridiculously awesome story and a super brave thing to do, it doesn't ultimately work. Judah loses, they flee the field, but they have the advantage. They're defending their homeland. They go up in the mountains and they regroup and they start doing guerrilla warfare again, and it goes better. They win a couple of minor victories. Maybe the Greeks could have still come back and beat them at this point. We're into uh like the like 161, 162. But the instability of the crown and the court situation back up in the homeland of the Seleucids is such that Lysias, commander of the Seleucid army against Judas, he has to go back home to Jockey for his position and standing in the court. Young Antiochus V dies, and he's replaced by a new Seleucid king, Demetrius I, who is yet another Greek turd. While all of this is going on, the Maccabees send an envoy to Rome. That's right. Now Rome is starting to factor into the story. This is a very important detail for something that's going to happen later. They ask for recognition as an independent kingdom by Rome and get it. So maybe this is the place that you circle as saying, oh, that's kind of technically where this new Jewish independence happens. Some people will circle a date that we'll get to just a little bit later on in the story. But this kind of has the echoes of some of the mistakes that the kings in the Old Testament made when they depended on foreign nations for help. By appealing to Rome, who don't like the Seleucids and are starting to expand. The Romans had won a series of wars called the Punic Wars against elephant rider enemies of their own, led by the great Hannibal of the Carthaginians. But now the Romans have beaten the Carthaginians. They're no longer checked in the Western Mediterranean, and Rome is expanding. Well, the Maccabeans look at that and they're like, there's an opportunity here for us to curry favor with them. They're a long ways away. The enemy of our enemy is our friend, kind of thinking. For the short term, this works. Eventually, this kind of thinking will be the demise of the short-lived Jewish kingdom that is born out of this rebellion that we're talking about as we look at first and second Maccabees. Demetrius has a commander named Bacides, and he doesn't care about this stupid mutual defense pact that the Romans and the Jews have signed. He sends a huge force under the leadership of Bacides, who just it's so big he can just walk right into Jerusalem. Judas can't handle it. He and his men lose. Judah Maccabees, Judas Maccabees, he dies in 160 BC at the hand of Bacidas and some treacherous insiders who want to see the rebellion ended and the rise of Greekism once again in Israel. This is obviously a crushing blow for the rebellion, but Mattathias has more sons, and two of his younger kids, Jonathan and Simon, find a way to negotiate peace, and somehow Jonathan ends up in the role of high priest. Again, the Seleucids are a mess. They've got kings coming and going, they have so much infighting. There are opportunities to exploit that. And Jonathan, Judah, Judas Maccabe's younger brother, emerges from this and he does some good stuff. He gets Jerusalem built back up for any future problems, re-fortifies the fortifications that have been shot. But like so many leaders who come after him, Jonathan struggles with character a little bit, and ultimately he gets tricked by a representative of the Seleucids once again. Now we're all the way up into like the 150s and 140s. So after Judas Maccabees dies, I keep saying Judah and Judas because he gets referred to both ways in all of these various sources. After he dies, we've got another 20 years of scrapping and negotiations and betrayal and all kinds of short-lived Seleucid kings coming and going. During this entire period, the threat of Rome looming in the West is becoming a bigger and bigger pressure for the Seleucids. And really, it kind of is that threat that is the unspoken thing that makes the Seleucids more and more willing to negotiate. Now, you know, a reader of First and Second Maccabees might say, you know, it's the hand of God that was making them more and more willing to negotiate. But there's a lot of corruption in the second half of this story. Ultimately, Simon, the young brother, turns out to be a pretty solid leader, and he finds a way to say, hey, we're all sick of fighting. Let's be done with this. And a later Seleucid king in 142 BC named Demetrius II is like, you know what? Good enough. Let's just not do any more rebellion. Let's not do any more war. And so what turns out to be like a 25 or 30 year period of conflict with massive death tolls and expense for the people, for the land, heck, for the Seleucids as well, ultimately turns out to be more than just a political revolution. It is a religious and cultural revolution that kind of sets the trajectory for Judaism all the way to this day. It's one of the last great tests that the Jewish people, tradition, and religion has to pass in terms of maintaining its identity. Haman in the time of the Persians tried to eliminate them. All kinds of kings before that in the deep Old Testament tried to eliminate them. But here the test was really from within. The leadership wanted to be Greek, and it was the rank and file, the normal people, the country folk, who were like, no, we will fight you and the oppressors, and we'll do it for more than a generation if we have to. We will lay down our lives for this. So Simon rules over a period of peace and restoration and healing as the high priest and the king, sort of a unified authority in Israel for the first time in forever. He has kids and a family. Then he gets betrayed in one of these. There's many stories from the ancient world of these red wedding style false pretenses, meals where you invite somebody there and then you poison them or you run them all through and you lock the doors. And that happens to Simon and his family at the hand of Simon's own son-in-law, Ptolemy, who, I mean, if his name is Ptolemy, I guess I don't know this for sure, but he's gotta be from the Egyptian Ptolemies. Simon's son John is one of the few who escapes this mass assassination in an attempt to wipe out the entire line of what's left from Matathias and the Maccabees brothers. And this young John, who is known as John Hercanus I, H-Y-R-C-A-N-U-S I, he reigns for the next 20 years until almost 100, I think 104 BC. And this, in earnest, is kind of considered the first reign of about a hundred-year kingdom that is called the Hasmonean Kingdom. They draw their name from the name of Mattathias' great-grandfather. That's kind of the name of this family. So we've been calling them the Maccabees. We kind of call them the Maccabees when they're fighting because it's a military nickname, and it's just cool and awesome sounding because it means the hammer. But once they become a dynasty, you don't want to take a name from indicating that you just won by being insurgents or rebels. So it looks like they kind of drop the Maccabees name and go with something more credible, which is the oldest dynastic name of their little family, Hasmonian. So the Maccabean kingdom is more formally known as the Hasmonean kingdom. People disagree about exactly how to date the range of this Hasmonean dynasty. Typically, I think of it as starting much earlier, like in the 160s, with Rome responding positively and recognizing Judas Maccabees' appeal and saying, oh, you know, this is an independent state separate from the Seleucids. Other people would say it kind of starts at the end of Simon's reign or the beginning of John Hercanus in the 140s. I mean, whatever, it's kind of semantic. The kingdom goes for basically a hundred years. And the way it ends is a real live by the sword, die by the sword situation because the Hasmonean dynasty looks a lot like the Seleucids, but just not Greek. It looks Jewish. It's corrupt. It's flawed. Court politics kind of ruin everything. People want power. John Hercanus I's sons fight in the early first century BC over who should get to succeed him and which branch of the family line should get to be in charge. And they remember, like, oh, you know, our great uncle or whatever it was, he appealed to Rome. And the Romans came in and they sorted the whole thing out. Well, we should appeal to Rome. They've got a general in the area and a military over here. We should both appeal to that general and have that Roman general come in here in the 60s BC and solve this problem. And they both at the same time are like, and I'm gonna appeal to Rome to put me on the throne. And the other brother is like, I'm gonna appeal to Rome to put me on the throne. And Pompey the Great, buddy and then rival of Julius Caesar, or Pompey, as he's sometimes called, he responds to this double appeal and is like, Yes, I would be happy to come to the incredibly wealthy city of Jerusalem and just help you guys sort this thing out. Well, the way he sorts it out is by never leaving. And in 63 BC, the Hasmonean dynasty effectively ends. I mean, some kings still sit the throne, but there is puppet kings until 37 BC. But effectively, this short-lived, hard one Hasmonian dynasty is over when Pompey the Great responds to the invitation to come to town with legions and just takes over and says, Okay, yeah, we'll sort it out. We'll sort it out by making you client kings, subordinate to Rome henceforth forever. And thus concludes, for our purposes, the great intertestamental story of Matathias and his sons, including the great Judas Maccabees, who led the massive rebellion against their Greek Seleucid overlords, won many great victories, purified the temple, re-established Judaism, and made a short-lived kingdom of their own that ended with a whimper over a dynastic squabble that resulted in the Romans eagerly coming in and re-subjugating the Jewish people starting in 63 BC. Okay, time to get a little personal here. Before I wrap it up today, I'm not joking around at all. I want to say a very sincere thank you to all of you who came to this thing because we're talking about Philemon, and we're not even close to Philemon here. We're working our way up to it. We are going somewhere. But thank you for trusting me or maybe indulging me on filling in this gap in our knowledge as a community of people who hang out and talk about this stuff. I've wanted to go down this road for quite a while, and this seems like a time where it would really pay off in terms of what we're going to do next. But admittedly, you know, it means it's going to be a little longer before we get to Philemon. So thank you. That's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.