Judea Gains Independence under the Hasmoneans

142 BC, firm dateFirm date

Simon, the last of the Maccabee brothers, wins freedom from Seleucid tribute and is made high priest and ruler by a national assembly. His son John Hyrcanus enlarges the state by conquest. Judea is ruled by its own priest-princes for some eighty years.

Judas Maccabeus died in battle, and his brother Jonathan took his place (1 Maccabees 9:18, 28–31). One of two rivals for the Seleucid throne appointed him high priest, and he first officiated at the feast of Booths in the 160th year, 152 BC (1 Maccabees 10:1–2, 15–21). He was later seized by treachery and killed by the usurper Tryphon (1 Maccabees 12:46–48) (1 Maccabees 13:23). The people then acclaimed the last of the brothers, Simon Thassi, as their leader (1 Maccabees 13:1–9).

Simon took the side of King Demetrius II against Tryphon, and Demetrius in return cancelled the tribute owed by the Jews. In the 170th year, says 1 Maccabees, “was the yoke of the heathen taken away from Israel”, and the people began to date their contracts by the years of Simon, “the great high priest and captain and leader of the Jews” (1 Maccabees 13:34–42). The next year the Seleucid garrison that had held the citadel in Jerusalem since the days of Antiochus IV was starved out. Simon entered it with palm branches, harps and hymns (1 Maccabees 13:49–52).

In the third year a great assembly of priests, people and elders recorded its decision on bronze tablets set up on Mount Zion. Simon was to be their leader and high priest “forever, until there should arise a faithful prophet”, to command the army and to wear purple and gold (1 Maccabees 14:27–47). Rome renewed the friendship it had made with his brothers (1 Maccabees 14:16–19).

Simon was murdered at a banquet near Jericho by his son-in-law, and his son John Hyrcanus succeeded him as high priest (1 Maccabees 16:11–24). There 1 Maccabees ends, and Josephus becomes the only narrative. He reports that Antiochus VII besieged Jerusalem and that Hyrcanus bought peace (Josephus, Antiquities 13.236–248). After that king died, Hyrcanus took Shechem and Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritan temple stood, and conquered the Idumeans to the south, who might stay if they accepted circumcision and the Jewish law (Josephus, Antiquities 13.254–258). Josephus also tells how Hyrcanus, once a disciple of the Pharisees, broke with them at the urging of a Sadducee friend (Josephus, Antiquities 13.288–298). On his death, Josephus says, his son Aristobulus was the first of the family to put on a crown (Josephus, Antiquities 13.299–301).

The Hasmoneans thus joined the high priesthood to political rule and then to kingship, though they were a priestly family and not of David’s line (1 Maccabees 2:1). A psalm written in Jerusalem after the Roman conquest accuses rulers who “laid waste the throne of David” and prays for a king who is David’s son (Psalms of Solomon 17). The Pharisees and Sadducees whom the Gospels show disputing with Jesus appear as rival parties in Josephus’s account of these years (Josephus, Antiquities 13.288–298) (Matthew 22:23, 34). And the Idumeans whom Hyrcanus brought into the Jewish people were the nation of Antipater, the father of Herod (Josephus, Antiquities 14.8–9). Independence ended when Rome stepped into a quarrel between two brothers of the family; see Pompey Takes Jerusalem.

How this is dated

Firm date. Fixed by contemporary documentation and not seriously disputed.

1 Maccabees says that “the yoke of the heathen” was taken from Israel in the 170th year of the Seleucid era and that documents were then dated by the first year of Simon (1 Maccabees 13:41–42). The era was counted from 312/311 BC, so the 170th year is 143/142 BC, and the grant of freedom from tribute is placed in 142 BC. Josephus gives the same figure of 170 years (Josephus, Antiquities 13.213–214). The citadel fell in the second month of year 171, the spring of 141 BC, and the assembly that confirmed Simon met in year 172, 140 BC (1 Maccabees 13:51) (1 Maccabees 14:27). Simon was killed in the eleventh month of year 177, about February of 134 BC (1 Maccabees 16:14).

For Simon the source is 1 Maccabees, which is favourable to the family and is generally dated to the time of his son John Hyrcanus or soon after; Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees (Anchor Bible, 1976), puts it under Hyrcanus’s son Alexander Jannaeus. The book is counted as canonical Scripture by the Catholic Church, as defined at Trent (Council of Trent Session 4, decree on the canonical Scriptures), and by the Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 (Confession of Dositheus question 3 (p. 155)). Protestant churches do not count it as canonical Scripture; the Church of England lists it among the books that are read “for example of life and instruction of manners” but not used to establish doctrine (Thirty-Nine Articles article 6). For John Hyrcanus the only narrative is that of Josephus, who wrote more than two hundred years later and drew on earlier historians such as Nicolaus of Damascus, whom he names (Josephus, Antiquities 13.249–251). In the psalm quoted at the end, the rulers who usurped David’s throne are not named; that they are the Hasmoneans is the usual reading (Kenneth Atkinson, I Cried to the Lord, 2004). Josephus gives Hyrcanus thirty-one years (Josephus, Antiquities 13.299–301), which puts his death in 104 BC.