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9 - The Hasmonean revolt and the Hasmonean dynasty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Jonathan A. Goldstein
Edited by
W. D. Davies  and
Louis Finkelstein
Jonathan A. Goldstein
Affiliation:
Univeristy of Iowa
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Summary

Great and sudden were the changes which the Hasmonean family brought to the character and religion of the Jews. Yet the members of the family never saw themselves as breaking with tradition. Their first revolutionary acts were in response to an unprecedented challenge, the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus IV, and they always took the patterns for their deeds from Scripture. To understand the changes which the Hasmoneans brought, we must consider what most believing Jews then seem to have taken for granted.

To judge by the surviving literature, all believing Jews then accepted as true the books of the Torah and the prophets. The teachings of the prophets kept pious Jews loyal to their God even after the disaster of 586 b.c.e. Their God had not been defeated when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. Rather, their almighty God was punishing them for their sins when he placed them under foreign domination. Prophets taught the Jews that refusal to accept God's sentence upon them would bring catastrophic punishment, as when Zedekiah's refusal to accept the sentence of subjection to Babylonian rule had brought the destruction both of God's Temple and of Zedekiah's kingdom of Judah.

The Jews in their long years of submission were indeed a peculiar people. There could be misguided hot-heads among them, but the nation never rebelled. Even the fall of Babylon did not end the sentence, though one might have thought so on reading Isaiah 40 to 66. Rather, instead of liberating Israel, God gave to Cyrus of Persia and his successors ‘all the kingdoms of the earth’, and though independence and glory would eventually be restored to the Jews, it would come not by their own ‘might and power’ in rebellion, but only through the act of the ‘spirit’ of the Lord.

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The Cambridge History of Judaism
, pp. 292 - 351
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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