A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can produce a tornado in Texas. Edward Norton Lorenz
In 167 BCE an unknown man in the village of Modiin near Jerusalem prepared to offer a sacrifice on a pagan altar. He was obeying the command issued by the Seleucid Greek occupiers of Israel, to abandon Judaism and worship heathen gods. Before he could offer his sacrifice however, a local Jewish priest, Mattathias, outraged by what he was witnessing, stepped forward and slaughtered him. After the murder, Mattathias and his five sons fled into the hills.
Gradually others joined them, they formed themselves into a fighting unit, adopted guerrilla tactics and began to launch attacks on the Seleucid forces. The rebellion grew until it was powerful enough to confront and defeat the Seleucid king, Antiochus. They recaptured Jerusalem, cleansed the Temple and drove the occupiers from the country. The story is well known, it led to the events that are celebrated at the festival of Hannukah and is recorded in the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees. The tale as it is told today contains as much legend as it does history, but the key events and its consequences are well attested.
After defeating Antiochus, Mattathias’s son Judah, who had led the revolt, became the de facto leader of the country. Five years later his brother Jonathan was declared High Priest, even though he had no hereditary right to the title. In 140 BCE, after Jonathan’s death, a national assembly bestowed the High Priesthood in perpetuity upon his brother Simon and appointed him and his heirs to the position of ethnarch, or national ruler, ‘until a trustworthy prophet will arise’. The event marked the beginning of the Hasmonean dynasty.
With the nation liberated and, for the first time for many years free from any foreign domination, the Hasmonean family made no pretence of their expansionary ambitions. Transforming themselves from priests to rulers, from freedom fighters to military adventurers, the Hasmoneans acquired a reputation as a bellicose minor power, constantly on the lookout for more territory to sweep up. Among the most aggressive was Yohanan, or John, Hyrcanus, the son of Simon, who came to power after his father was murdered by his son-in-law. Hyrcanus’s conquests included the neighbouring territory of Idumea, a feat proclaimed even by his enemies as a great military triumph.
But what looked like a triumph at the time turned out to be an event that would haunt future generations. John Hyrcanus annexed the Idumean lands, warning its inhabitants that if they wished to retain their ancestral homes they would have to adopt Israelite ways, including circumcision for the men.
John Hyrcanus died in 104 BCE. His son Aristobulus, not satisfied with being High Priest, had himself crowned as king. It was an egregious act. Throughout Israelite history political and spiritual authority had always been entrusted to different hands. It was a paradigm so ancient that it was even attested in the Bible. Moses was the nation’s law maker and civil leader; his brother Aaron was the High Priest. Throughout Israel’s pre-history the same model had prevailed, priests and kings each exerting authority in their own sphere; the king exercising supreme power on earth, the High Priest as advocate in heaven. But the Hasmoneans, priests (though not High Priests) by birth but rulers by dint of military victory, put an end to such clear-cut, constitutional niceties. The subsequent history of the Hasmonean dynasty demonstrated how much more sensible it would have been had Aristobulus not arrogated both roles to himself.
Aristobulus and his younger brother Alexander Jannaeus, or Yannai, who succeeded him after only one year continued the Hasmonean policy of territorial expansion. When Yannai died Aristobulus’s widow Salome Alexandra became queen. And although she is generally regarded as the most benign of Hasmonean rulers, it was during her reign that everything began to fall apart.
The reason was that as a woman Alexandra could not be High Priest. So she appointed her son Hyrcanus II to the job. She probably chose him over his brother, Aristobulus II, because Hyrcanus was weak and easily manipulated. But when Alexandra died in 67 BCE Aristobulus claimed the throne for himself. Civil war broke out between the brothers and each turned for support to Rome, which was by now the undisputed regional power. Each brother sent bribes to Pompey, the Roman governor of neighbouring Syria, competing to outdo each other with their gifts. Aristobulus sent a golden grapevine which was so valuable that it was put on display in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome.
Initially, it made little difference to Pompey which of the two brothers emerged victorious from their civil war; he was happy to take bribes from both sides. But the nation was becoming disturbingly volatile; both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were hated by the masses, and political insecurity in a disputatious nation on the borders of the Roman Empire was more than Pompey was willing to stomach. In 63 BCE he decided that the only way he could quell the power struggle between the two brothers was to intervene in the dispute and restore stability to the region. He marched on Jerusalem, besieging the city for three months before gaining control,
Pompey incorporated Judea into the Roman province of Syria, thereby restraining the power of the Hasmoneans. He sided with Hyrcanus II against his brother, making him High Priest but answerable to the Roman governor in Syria. Restricted in authority but with his position now secure Hyrcanus functioned as de facto leader of the nation.
But the rivalry between Hyrcanus and his brother Aristobulus never fully subsided. In 40 BCE Aristobulus’s son Antigonus invaded, supported by the Parthian Empire who were Rome’s major rivals to the east. Antigonus took Hyrcanus captive and installed himself as king in his place. He mutilated Hyrcanus’s ears, a blemish which disqualified him from ever again serving as a priest. It was all too much for Rome; it was obvious now that Hasmonean in-fighting had gone on for too long and that Pompey’s earlier intervention had not solved the problem. This time Rome would put an end to the quarrel, once and for all. They entered Jerusalem once again, to reassert their control.
When the Roman legions marched into Jerusalem, the villainous Herod, a man vilified in both Christian and Jewish tradition, rode at their head. The Senate in Rome had declared him king. Born into an aristocratic family from Idumea, the nation that John Hyrcanus had conquered, Herod’s father, Antipater, had served as Hyrcanus II’s chief minister. Ambitious and venal, Herod had learnt the art of tyranny as a very young man when his father had placed him in charge of the northern province of Galilee. Now he had the opportunity to tyrannise the entire nation. The accusation in the Gospel of Matthew that Herod slaughtered all the babies in Bethlehem exemplifies his long and murderous reign. His victims included two of his sons, one of his ten wives, several in-laws and any member of the Hasmonean dynasty whom he perceived as a threat. As an outsider, who had no reason to favour the interests of the local population over those of Rome, Herod was an ideal candidate for the occupiers to leave in charge. He ruled as a vassal of Rome until 4 BCE.
The Roman occupation of Judea marked the end of the last independent Jewish state for nearly 2,000 years, until 1948. But the consequences of the Roman conquest were even weightier. Their invasion was a turning point in world history, leading directly to the crucifixion of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple. It was a pivotal moment that resulted in the birth of Christianity, the construction of Talmudic Judaism and eventually the emergence of Islam. It caused the Christianisation of the Roman Empire and everything that followed in its wake; the cultural, intellectual, military and colonial history of Europe and the west, of large parts of Africa and Asia.
Had the Romans not brought the Hasmonean dynasty to an end and created the province of Judaea, the world would be very different today, for better or for worse. And it all began with one particular event, with an unknown man in the village of Modiin who wanted to sacrifice on a pagan altar and another man who stopped him. It is history’s outstanding example of the butterfly effect, of how an apparently minor incident can initiate a chain of events leading to a climax of unimaginable proportions.
You track the historical manifestation of the bedeviled relationship between king and high priest, state and church, human and 'divine', which sheds light on the same conflicted entanglement in the global present...........