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From the Maccabees, A Lesson on Separation of Church and State

Dec. 28 2016

Mattathias the Hasmonean, leader of the revolt against the Syrian-Greek king Antiochus, was also a member of the priestly caste. After the successful expulsion of the Greeks from the land of Israel, his son Judah the Maccabee and their descendants assumed both the high priesthood and, in the absence of a legitimate descendant of the Davidic dynasty, the kingship. The merging of these two roles earned the Hasmoneans criticism in rabbinic and proto-rabbinic sources. Richard Hidary explains:

The Hasmoneans themselves had no shortage of detractors even in their own days, and more so after their downfall in 63 BCE. Josephus reports that the Pharisees reviled King John Hyrcanus, the grandson of Mattathias, and insisted that he should be content with the monarchy and leave the spiritual leadership to a descendant of the Zadokite family, the legitimate high-priestly dynasty, thus restoring the biblical separation between political and priestly power.

The Babylonian Talmud echoes a similar complaint against Hyrcanus’ son, Alexander Yannai. Both sources tell the story of Pharisees pelting Alexander Yannai with etrogim (citrons) on the holiday of Sukkot, leading to a civil war that left tens of thousands dead. We should recall that at the time they told this story, both Josephus and the rabbis sought peaceful relations with the Romans and wanted to discourage any “zealous” [a code-word for religiously motivated violent] behavior by their co-religionists. It is not surprising that they did not look back in admiration or nostalgia to the Hasmonean kings. . . .

The groups [criticizing] the Hasmoneans, mostly Pharisees, did not object to Jewish sovereignty, but they did object to the Hasmonean consolidation of political and religious power. The latter was to be the domain of the Levites and priests, while kingship was the exclusive inheritance of the tribe of Judah [of which King David was a member]. More than a thousand years later, the 13th-century Spanish rabbi Moses Naḥmanides would attribute the rapid fall of the Hasmonean dynasty to its illegitimate consolidation of priestly and monarchical power.

The books of Maccabees (there are four of them) inspired many generations of religious zealots, including the Bar Kokhba rebels and Christian martyrs. The early rabbis rejected these books from the canon not only because of the late date of their composition but likely also because they wanted to suppress their revolutionary message. When it came to the celebration of Hanukkah, however, the rabbis found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, they too yearned for Jewish national sovereignty; the success of the Hasmoneans, even if short-lived and imperfect, could not be denied. On the other hand, their antipathy to the combination of kingship and the priesthood and the subsequent Hasmonean corruption forced them to reject the history presented in the books of Maccabees.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Hasmoneans, History & Ideas, Maccabees, Pharisees, Religion and politics, Second Temple

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic