You have probably all heard the story
of Chanukah and the Maccabees. King Antiochus Epiphanes had erected
a statue of himself in the Temple in Jerusalem. A family called the
Maccabees led a rebellion, captured the temple, and rededicated it.
A supply of oil that should have kept the lamp over the alter lit for one
day miraculously lasted eight days, until more oil could be obtained.
Hence the eight days of Chanukah. It is a very minor Jewish holiday
- it isn't even important enough to make the Bible - and is noticed in
America mainly due to its proximity to Christmas.
Did you ever wonder why
it didn't make the Bible? I wondered once, and started to look into
it. It turns out to open a Pandora's Box of other questions, and
I can't help but list a few of them.
What happened between the
Old Testament and the New Testament?
What were the Romans doing in Israel, during the New Testament period?
Or if you prefer in historical rather than biblical terms, What happened
between the time of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar? And while we
are at it, when did people stop living like they did in the Old Testament,
and start living more like we do? (and fighting wars the way we do instead
of like in the Bible)?
Well, a lot of the answers are
in a book called First Maccabees. It didn't make the Bible. When
the committee sat down - yes, there really was a committee and voted
on which books went in the Bible (the Old Testament), this book was rejected.
It is now included in the Old Testament Apocrypha. Many of you will
have a Bible that has those books in the back, or can find one in the (synagogue,
church, or town) library. It's interesting to read.
Egypt and the lands of the
fertile crescent Babylonia, Assyria, Persia had fought back and forth
through the Land of Israel for centuries. Then Alexander the Great
came through and conquered all of them. When Alexander died, he had no
children. His empire was divided into thirds, among his three main
generals. And once again Israel was caught in the middle, sometimes
being ruled by the dynasty of Ptolemy, down in Egypt, and sometimes by
the dynasty including Antiochus, up in Syria. A couple of generations
later, One of the Anitochuses -- Antiochus Epiphanes -- got fed up with
the rebellions among the Jews in Israel and tried to change their religion.
He figured if he could get them to worship him, they'd be more loyal to
his kingdom in the wars with the Ptolomies. Of course, what he did
was upset the Maccabees enough that they took to the hills and started
a rebellion.
It was an interesting rebellion.
It was, arguably, the first of the modern-style terrorist movements.
My own father (who was rather a nonconformist) once asked me if the Maccabees
were more like the Palestine Liberation Front, or more like the Viet Cong
in the Vietnamese war. Even harder, he sometimes asked,
why? (It's a useful exercise, in trying to understand modern terrorists
and independence movements.)
In the early part of the war,
the Maccabees lived in the hills, came down occasionally to attack, and
refused to fight on the Sabbath. But the King's army caught onto
that pretty quickly, and started attacking on Saturday. So after
awhile the Maccabees found they had no choice but to fight on Saturday.
The war dragged on. It got bloody
and nasty. The Maccabees needed recruits and supplies, which they
demanded from some of the villages. If a village didn't pay up, it
was likely to be attacked. In some cases, the Maccabees would swoop
down on a town and forcibly circumcise all the uncircumcised men they found
there, which strikes me as a pretty frightening terrorist technique.
But the world was already getting modern,
in some ways. Already, you couldn't run a good terrorist-style independence
movement without foreign aid. Now the Ptolomies didn't want Israel
independent any more than the Antiochus dynasty did, so they couldn't turn
there. But the Maccabees heard that out west, across the great Sea
(the Mediterranean), was a place that was actually independent of the three
descendants of Alexander's generals who seemed to rule all of the world.
They appointed an ambassador, who traveled west by ship and found the place.
He looked for the King, but they claimed not to have one. He had
to ask who you had to talk with, and found it confusing, but eventually
figured it out. He negotiated a mutual defense treaty with the Senate
of the Roman Republic; Israel and Rome agreed to mutual support and military
aid in any war either had against the descendants of Alexander's
generals.
The treaty, incidentally, is surprisingly
modern in language, and the whole thing is in the First Book of Maccabees,
in the Apocrypha.
I don't know how much aid the
Romans gave, early on. But the Maccabees won, the Temple got rededicated,
and the Maccabees founded a dynasty of Jewish Kings that stayed independent
for several generations a longer-lasting and larger Jewish kingdom than
that of David. And part of the reason it stayed independent was that
the Romans actually did help with supplies, and advisors, and armies
and then when the war between the Persians and Romans got bad enough,
enough Romans were there that Rome decided it would be easier to just take
over, and they did.
Now, why didn't this book get
into the Bible? I've heard two reasons. I'll call one the Biblical-style,
or official reason. Some people on the committee making the decision
said that the Maccabees weren't acting like biblical heroes were supposed
to act. The bloodiness might have been tolerable, in semi-mythical
characters, but fighting on the Sabbath was not. But I prefer the
second reason. When the committee was meeting, descendants of the
Maccabees were still around, active in politics, and still claiming one
could get along with the Romans. And some of those on the committee,
who were no longer confident that being on the same side as the Romans
was a good thing, were not about to let their political opponents be the
direct descendants of biblical heroes.
(C) Edward Ordman 2000