In Our Time - Judas Maccabeus

Episode Date: November 24, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the revolutionary Jewish leader Judas Maccabeus. Born in the second century BC, Judas led his followers, the Maccabees, in a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, which was attempting to impose the Greek culture and religion on the Jews. After a succession of battles he succeeded and the Seleucid king granted the Jews religious freedom. But even after that freedom was granted the struggle for political independence continued, and it was not until twenty years after Judas's death that Judaea finally became an independent state. Thanks to an extensive, if often confused, historical record of these events, the story of the Maccabees is well known. Judas Maccabeus has become a celebrated folk hero, and one of his achievements, the restoration and purification of the Temple of Jerusalem after its desecration by the Seleucids, is commemorated every year at the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.With: Helen Bond, Senior Lecturer in the New Testament at Edinburgh University Tessa Rajak, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of ReadingPhilip Alexander, Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of ManchesterProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, so he got his people great honour and put on a breastplate as a giant and girt his warlike harness about him, and he made battles protecting the host with his sword.

In his acts he was like a lion and like a lion's whelp roaring for his prey. This is how Judas Maccabas, the revolutionary Jewish leader from the second century BC, is described in the first book of the Maccabees, written a century or so later. In the book, Judas Maccabias is every inch the conquering hero, the dedicated fighter, whose quest for religious freedom drives him to take up arms against the oppressors of the Jewish people, the Syrian Seleucid Empire. It's an astonishing tale of battles, bloodshed, and ultimately victory against great odds. But who was the man behind the legend, and how did he and his guerrilla forces,

the Maccabees managed to triumph over such military might. And how reliable are the biblical versions of Judas and his actions? With me to discuss Judas Maccabias are Helen Bond, senior lecturer in the New Testament at Edinburgh University, Tessa Rejerk, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading, and Philip Alexander, emeritus professor of Jewish studies at the University of Manchester. Helen Bond, can you give us a bit of the background here?

What was going on in Judas Maccabia's life? What was going on in that part of the world? Well, you have to really take things back to the time of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE. Alexander, of course, had had a huge empire stretching from his native Macedonia, northern Greece, right through to the east, right through to Punjab. And when Alexander died extremely early, leaving no heirs, his empire was then divided between a number of his generals. And the ones that interest us are Seleucus, who had his empire up in the northern part, centered on Antioch, Syria and Persia, and the Ptolemies down in the south, who had their empire in, centered on Alexandria and Egypt in the south. And Judea was a tiny, tiny little country at the time,

basically just Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. And that was right in the middle of these two warring superpowers. Throughout the third century, B.C.E, it belonged to the Ptolemies in Egypt, but around about 200 BCE, it was taken over for the Seleucid Empire. And so from, from 200 BCE, it came under the jurisdiction of the kings in Antioch. And so it's at this point that the story really starts. There were differences between the Ptolemaic Empire and the Seleucid Empire, but they don't really matter so much. The main thing that all of these people had in common was that they were heirs of Alexander the Great, and they shared his cultural program of uniting the empire, not just militarily and politically, but also by a shared culture.

and they were very interested in propagating Greek or Hellenistic culture, as it's known. This is a sort of creative blend of Hellenists, of Greek, and also native ideas in the East. But as I understand it, when the Jews came back from Babylon, they settled in and around Jerusalem, and they got on reasonably comfortably with their own faith, reasonably uninterruptedly for a long time. Is that true? Yes, for most of this period, although they weren't an independent, nation politically, the powers that be more or less left them to get on with things. There was a governor, but the governor didn't really interfere too much. Jews were allowed to keep to their

native traditions, even when the new influx of Greek ideas were coming through, and even though the Jews were influenced in every sphere by Greek ideas, it didn't really affect the practice of religion. And so that was the main thing, that people were allowed to carry on with their ancestral customs. And it didn't matter a huge amount who the actual political or authorities were. People were allowed to carry on just as they had been before. And Judas's family background? We don't know a huge amount about him. It seems that the family came from a small village or town called Moda'in, which is to the northwest of Jerusalem, about 20 miles or so to the

northwest. They belong to a priestly tribe of Yehoerib. According to 1 Chronicles 24, this was the first of the priestly divisions. There were actually 24 divisions. There were actually 24 divisions of the priesthood. And this may suggest that they were the most important of the divisions. And certainly Judas and his four brothers and his father, Mattathias, would have spent a certain amount of time in the Jerusalem temple as priests, maybe a few weeks per year. And the rest of the time they would have lived in the town of Mordean. They would have presumably been quite respected members, not high status particularly, but, you know, respected members of the town. Thank you. Tessarajak, Antiochus the 4th was the king of the Salucid Empire when the Maccabin revolt began in 167 BC.

What sort of ruler was he? Well, he was in a sense the last fling of the Seleucid dynasty that Helen spoke about. For us, of course, and for the Jewish narratives, Jewish Greek narratives that we depend on, he's the villain of the peace. but a rather different picture emerges from historians of the wider world. His father was the great Antiochus third who'd taken over the region in which Judea was, Coelis Syria, from the Ptolemies in 200 BC, but then had met his match at the hands of the Romans at a great battle in Magnesia

and had been forced to settle on pretty humiliating terms, to get out of Asia, to give up his elephants, all sorts of things. Antiochus then succeeded his brother, Seleucus I, 4th, because the rightful heir, Demetrius was in Rome as a hostage. That was part of the deal with Rome. So he comes to the throne with a kind of a deficit. It's not clear when you took the title Epiphanes, which means glorious or even manifest God,

but it was certainly used. and he was holding together not unsuccessfully the largest of the successor empires. It extended as far as the Caspian Sea, so if you think of that, they'd got out of Western Asia Minor, but they were still on the Mediterranean. He was concerned mainly with the East, and often he left operations in Judea to subordinates to a succession of generals, even though he is the notional big enemy. He seems to have conducted a vigorous policy in a sort of a centrifugal empire,

which was a mosaic of Greek and Oriental states. But, but, but, but, the only description we have of his personality, which comes from the great Greek historian Polyvius, who's mostly lost on this whole episode, sadly, is that he was highly eccentric and really very, very odd. He had a bunch of peculiar habits, practical jokes, things like pouring oil over people in the bath, so they would then slip, roaming the streets in a sort of prince house,

like way talking to common people, dressing up in a Roman toga, obviously they're saying something satirical about the Romans. So he's very odd, and people, Polybius says, called him epimenase, instead of epiphanes, epiphanes meaning dotty or mad. How seriously we take all that?

It's hard to tell. If we take it seriously, it sounds quite fun. It sounds like a good laugh, if you like, that sort of thing. Whether it explains our great, Dravers is another question. And how did he, we have this empire which is hard to hold together

which is massive there and he's part of the Hellenistic Empire. How did his persecution of the Jews manifest itself? How did it begin? If you can tell us that, can I just lead in a slight way here

but you'll obviously correct me if I'm wrong that in Jerusalem there were factions between different Jewish high priests and some of them were welcoming to the Hellenistic idea. Some of them wanted at an extreme, I'm just reading from talking from your notes, at an extreme, one of them wanted the temple to be turned into a Greek gymnasium with a naked athletic, and so on, am I right there? So is he exploiting divisions there? Well, I'm not sure if he's exploiting divisions or having to deal with an increasing mess with what was real turmoil.

Certainly the high priests were at each other's throats and behaving extremely badly and rushing off. This already began in the previous reign in 175 BC under Seleucus, rushing off to Antioch, supposedly depositing great bribes and pinching the position from each other. This is a whole new thing because to have the moniker pointing the high priest wasn't exactly kosher. I just want to get to the heart of this, Tessa, because you know all about this. Is he moving in to Jerusalem and saying, I am going to impose Hellenism on you, I am going to turn your great temple and other temples into pagan temples,

or is he caught up in the politics of the temple itself between different factions already there? Is there any clarity there? It's a step-by-step thing. I think the idea that Hellenism was going to be imposed, which is certainly part of the traditional Jewish narrative that sees this as a great contest between pure Judaism and pure Hellenism isn't going to wash these days.

I mean, even our take on Alexander is no longer really that he was spreading pure Greek sweetness and light around the world, you know, just as the British Empire was spreading some other kind of sweetness and light around the world. So, and the Jews were quite Hellenized already. They had their Bible in Greek, and we found fragments of it in 2nd century BC, fragments in Palestine even in caves.

So they were not unhellenised, and they did have that gymnasium. We're told that they rushed off, you know, with the athletes hat and nothing much else on to do their games in the gymnasium. And some Jews were appalled, particularly the author of one of our sources, two macabees. But others obviously swallowed this. There was a lot of division, and Hellenism has some part in it. But I think we want to be a bit careful about saying, ha-ha, this is Greeks versus Jews. but certainly the warring high priests, and their behaviour was pretty appalling on occasion, didn't help much. And Antiochus really, I think, wanted a stable situation in his rear because his great aim,

having himself to compensate for a humiliation in Egypt at the hands of Rome was to make off and defeat the Parthians and have it all quiet, and he got infuriated. That's what I think. So this came out of a fury. Philip Alexander, can you tell us what he, is there a single cluster of acts that Antiochus did that set out a alarm bells?

There is a start even with, there is a trigger. Let's cut to the show. So Judas's father. Now can you tell us how Judas, why Judas's father got to the point he did, which can be said to be the start of the whole business? Well, this is where the book of Maccabees, the first book of Maccabees puts the start of it in 167.

The King's reforms, if we want to call them that, the changes to the Jewish religious life, were actually very thorough. He sent inspectors around to check that things were being done as he wanted them to be done. And these inspectors came to the little town of Maudiene, which we heard of earlier as the place where Judas's family, Judas's father and the brothers lived.

And there had been erected an altar there, and he came and he assembled the people, including Mattathias, who was living there at the time. Judas's father. Judas's father. And he invited Mattathias to actually sacrifice on this altar. Now, Matathias was probably invited to do this because he was the leading priest there.

He refused to do it, and the question is why. It probably was not because the altar was dedicated to a pagan God. It was simply because it was an altar outside Jerusalem, and for many centuries it had been accepted within Judaism that the only place that you could sacrifice to God was in the Jerusalem Temple. this of course way back to the time before the Babylonian exile they had dismantled the local altars and everything was centralised on the temple

so now what was happening was these altars were being set up again and here was a priest loyal to the Jerusalem temple being asked to offer sacrifice on it so Matathas flatly refuses but some Jew in the assembled company comes forward, maybe another priest, and makes as if to offer the sacrifice.

Matathiasen rage goes up and stabs him on the altar. He then stabs the officer, the royal officer, the inspector, who's there to oversee things, and immediately issues a call to the people to be zealous for the Torah, to be zealous for the law, and resist these innovations. So he and his sons, of course, have crossed a line. His five sons have crossed a line.

There's no going back. They rush off with some of their followers into the surrounding country and start a guerrilla warfare. What is very interesting is, though even when Maccabees realizes that they weren't the only ones to do this, where others had already responded with this kind of outrage. but what they did was to provide the kind of focus of leadership for that more popular movement

and this is then normally regarded as the beginning of the revolt. And they went into the hills and the forests around that particular area as I understand it, Philip. Do we have any evidence of what sort of resources? We have this father, obviously a fierce man and his five sons who turn out to be extremely able and fierce men also. Do we know how many people went with him?

Do you know what their resources were? We don't know a lot. I mean, one thing we can be fairly sure of was that they had very few resources because it happened very suddenly. And one of the great achievements in some ways of the Maccabees was to put together fairly quickly forces, military forces,

that actually could inflict some harm on the regular troops of the Seleucid army. But just exactly how they put those together is not at all clear. And the numbers must initially have been small, very small indeed. So we're talking about guerrilla warfare? We're talking absolutely about guerrilla warfare in this case. And then the father died, and although he's not supposed to have been the eldest son, Helen Bond, he, Judas became the military leader among these brothers.

And let's move to his first proof of being military reader. So the battle, as I understand, amoeus. Ammaus, yes. Can you briskly tell us what happened there? Yeah, well, this was, as has been said already, first of all, it's guerrilla warfare, but clearly more and more people are joining Judas's band, and they're bringing their weapons,

they're becoming a much more organized group. And first of all, the salucids aren't really too bothered about what's happening in Judea. Antiochus is off in Parthia, but gradually they begin to realize that they need to do something about this because the revolt has been rumbling on for quite a while. So around about 165 then, they bring a force Assyrians down to Judea, and they camp out at Emmaus.

Judas, meanwhile, brings his troops to Mispah, which is about 20 miles away, and they have a kind of a religious ceremony there mourning the loss of the temple. And then Judas hears that one of the generals of the Seleucids, Gorgias, is bringing a deal. detachment of troops by night to come and surprise Judas and his men. So having got wind of this, he decides that he's going to disband the camp. He handpicks some troops to go with him, and they march by night, 20 miles back down to Emmaus. And then they have the element of surprise.

So whilst the Seleucid troops are sleeping in the camp, Judas and his men wait till dawn, and then they strike, and they have a victory there. So Judas is so. Judas is so, and the salucid troops, are sleeping in the camp. to his men, just wait, wait for Gorgias's men to come back. And so Gorgias, who's meanwhile gone up to Mispah, found nobody there, he looks around, assumes that Judas's army have simply disbanded, and he goes back to his camp at Emmaus, sees all the camp fires, the whole camp is burning, and sees Judas's men lined up in the plane, and realizes what's happened, and apparently his men run off too. What are our sources for this? Are they sound?

This is, yeah, very sound. This comes from. from Juan Maccabees, which actually, I mean, it has its problems. It inflates the number of Syrian troops and inflates the number of deaths and I think deflates the number of Judas's troops because it wants to sort of harp on with a sort of a David and Goliath-type conflict. But clearly what we have here is a very clear description of a very clever ruse by Judas to actually undermine a much more, a much stronger enemy body here. And Jews actually emerge as the victors here, which is really incredible. There's all these slave traders there too, expecting huge amounts of prisoners of war.

They think that they're going to be able to take them and sell them as slaves. And actually, because of the Jewish victory, they get all the money and all the weapons in the camp. Tessa. I just want, if I might, um, if I might, um, interject. Just to make it clear that none of this could have got fired up and turned into what, in effect, is a sort of mix of a holy war and a war of national liberation, if Antiochus hadn't, for whatever reasons, unleashed really what was an extremely bloody and vicious persecution, and possibly the first in Western history.

There was a huge massacre in Jerusalem. Well, in terms of a religious persecution, that's what's so puzzling because suddenly the Greek or Roman world didn't produce that kind of intolerance. But the tradition that he wanted completely to extirpate Judaism seems to have an element of truth in it. And if you go with our other source,

two Maccabees, which has lots of better stories in, and is sometimes reliable. And also the book of Daniel, which was written at the time, speaks about the abomination of desolation, the desecration of the central altar in Jerusalem, but particularly also the cruel way in which the practices of Judaism were forbidden. And this is also the beginning of martyrdom. We've got the ban on circumcision and mothers having their circumcised babies killed

and hung around their necks. All this is what I think fires, Judas up. There's certainly masses of talent, but... It is absolutely a dreadful story. I mean, are you sure about the reliability of these texts? Because these are written, I'm like, to praise what's gone on, quite understandably. It was an amazing feat that Judas accomplished. But you're... Because this is a huge element in this story, isn't it? And it's so strange, as you say, that this wasn't part of what was going on.

And then all of us suddenly happened in this particular place, this particular persecution, this particular attempt to use your word. extiration. Do you have a view on this sort of Philip Alexander? Yes, I mean, I'm not so strong as Tess, I think, in accepting the element of replacement. I'm not quite sure this is what you're saying, that he was trying to replace Judaism. I think he was trying to replace, in some people's view, a certain type of Judaism, that I would go back to this idea

that what we have here are too, parties within Judaism, modernists and traditionalists, if you like, and the modernists were wanting to accommodate with the world of their day, which was the Greek world and so on. And they were wanting to introduce reforms into Judaism. You know, from their point of view, it was reform rather than replacement. But at the end of the day, there is an absolutely irreducible element of violence against the Jewish people.

in the stories. And as Tessa says about the martyrdom, is very significant that the people were killed for their faith, because they refused to give up their faith. So he did trigger it all off with this violence, which was to a degree, and I would agree with Tessa here, was a little unusual to persecute people for purely their religious beliefs in this way.

So he was, in some ways, the author of his own downfall. But given that it was unusual, And given that it was so terrible, you have to probe away as to why he wanted to do it. I mean, given that he was not a completely stupid man, it pulled the solicit empire together in some ways. So what was going on? You've spoken about the split between the Jewish, let's call it the priesthood. Anyway, the Greek, those inclined to Greek and those inclined against them. But what was, do you know anything about the nub of it?

I'm not sure about the nub of it, but I think certainly politics played a huge part in it. I think he was getting a bit sick. of the fact that, as we've already said, there's competing high priestly factions, people paying more and more for the high priesthood, people taking the high priesthood by force from one another. This rebellion has been going on for a long time amongst the high priesthood. And I think the fact that Antiochus had just been humiliated in Egypt as well,

he's gone down to Egypt and he'd been put in his place by the Romans. And certainly the book of Daniel gives the impression. that that was part of it. He's just sick and he wants to assert himself. And perhaps one of the ways in which he thought he could do that was by sorting out the problem in Jerusalem. Politics is the main thing, but maybe he thought that the particular religion of the Jewish people

had something to do with it. And so he said, well, just get rid of it, ban it. Tessar you want to come in, Tessarago. We shouldn't forget that he did need money which kept taking him back to the Holy of Holies and stealing stuff. It was a treasury. It had all the temple impedimenta,

which is not to say that the most wicked of the high priests, Menelaus, wonderful Greek name there, didn't also steal gold from the temple himself. So there were these imperatives and increasingly a sense that the Jewish religion was standing in his way. I think he suddenly grasped, as did Judas, the connection between religion and politics for the Jews,

that it was somehow slightly different than even for Greeks. Well, I think that's as far as we're going to get on that, and that's a very strong, well, a strong platform there. Philip, can I ask you, Judas then made, had remarkable success, given that he was a priest and therefore untrained in military matters. He started well from the beginning.

And then there were a series of victories or got to a point where his opponent's solicit had to back off, and go somewhere else. So in your notes, all three of you, and what I've read around it, it's a mixture of great zeal and cunning and bravery, and also sometimes the army of slewis has been pulled away to do something else

in a different part of the empire. But can you, that's maybe, can you give us an idea of the trajectory of Judas's victories, please? Well, it really just saws backwards and forwards. We've heard about the Battle of Emmaus. And he, let's go back. The real key to this, Melvin, is the situation back in Antioch.

Right. And the Seleucid throne there was very unstable. There were continual challenges to Antiochus and his followers rule. And the very complicated series of battles that there were, every time that Judas faced. small cellucid forces, led by local commanders, if you like,

people pretty far down the chain of command. He was successful. But once the top guns came into the picture, then he was usually defeated. But nearly every time, except for the last, the Battle of Elasa, he was saved from the big forces by political developments back in Antioch.

So they had to withdraw from the field, the Syrians, to deal with what was happening back in Antioch. So he was saved in the nick of time regularly by political events in Antioch, save in the last case when he was finally killed. But when they retreated, he reinforced his position very strikingly, didn't he, for instance, he cleansed and reclaimed the Temple of Jerusalem. Can you tell us something of that? Well, the great moment in Jewish tradition,

which is, of course, celebrated at the festival of Hanukkah and how timely your programme is, whether deliberately or not, was precisely the rededication of the temple, the cleansing and the rededication. And one might well ask why he had to go on fighting after that. One reason was that the salucids, together with wicked Jews, as our text, Tell us, still kept a fortress right there overlooking the temple, the Accra.

But there are other reasons. I think he really had got the bit between his teeth. And what began as a knee-jerk reaction was now turning out into a sustained campaign. And actually, I think war was his matier. He was something of a military genius. You can read that out of the sources, even though they talk him up. and they gloss over his defeats. When he met the solucids in pitch battles on more or less level grounds,

he had serious defeats, the last of which saw the end of him. And one Maccabees says that his troops simply melted away. But actually, I think, you know, this was for him an impossible situation. So he didn't always win. he did build up his numbers. We're now, of course, beyond the raid of Antiochus Fourth. He goes all into the successor, his successor, the boy king, with his...

Nine-year-old. Yeah, yeah, and his regent Lysias, and then into Demetrius, who comes out of his situation in Rome to seize the throne, and Judas is fighting on and on. He seems to, by now, he's facing these huge, Macedonian phalanxes, I mean military historians tell us that, you know, in this sense,

the Seleucids had not lost their grip. They were still fighting to the great effect that Alexander was. I think one of the points that one's got to remember here is that even the traditionalist camp, as we referred to earlier, the people who were opposed to the Greek reforms and the Greek, reformers. They were split between those who were nationalists and those who were simply traditionalists. Now, the nationalists who were led by Judas, they really felt that they couldn't be guaranteed the freedom to practice their religion without national independence. That's the crux at this point, isn't it? Also, can I answer to talk about one second, because

there's a lot of information. He is now behaving brilliantly like a head of state. He's opening negotiations with the emerging empire of Rome. Absolutely. We are told he sends ambassadors there. So he's taking control in a bigger way. He's taking control in a bigger way, but also just to complete that former point, there comes a point where the alchemus, the high priest, Yakim, the Jewish high priest, comes with a large force of Syrians to put him in power

in Jerusalem. and the traditionalists who are not nationalists, they accept alchemus. They say he is a descendant of Aaron, he's a perfectly kosher priest, we are going to accept him. And that group of traditionalists are called the Hasidians, the Hasidim, the devout.

They desert at this point, Judas, but he is absolutely determined, no, this isn't enough. We are going to still remain within the Syrian Empire. We won't have national independence. We won't have our freedom guaranteed. So he goes on fighting. Can you tell us, Helen Lund, how, when Judas was killed in battle,

how that affected his policy and what effect that had on Judea? Well, it had a huge effect. as Philip said, some people had already withdrawn from the struggle because they were quite happy that once religious freedom was guaranteed, they thought, well, that's as good as we're going to get. When Judas and his by now fairly small force were killed at the Battle of Elasa around about 161, the Maccabee group was very much almost destroyed, really. They managed to, a few of them managed to regroup.

They went down to the desert. Then Judas's brother, Jonathan, became leader of the group. But they very much sort of laid low for a while, trying to work out what the best strategy was. I mean, they still thought clearly that political independence was the only absolute sure guarantee. But it took some time before, and I think they were sort of quietly sort of underground guerrilla sort of tactics, converting people back to their way of thinking. But was this, can I come back to you, Tessa, please, Tessor, was this, in a sense, the tilting point?

Because the idea of an independent state had become very important, the idea of a force that could challenge the Great Empire had become important, and they'd been routed and they, as it were, gone back to their beginnings, a few men out in the desert or in the forest. Was this a tilting point? Well, I mean, one qualification that we must make is that independence remained very, very partial. The garrison on the Accra stayed until Jonathan's successor, another brother,

Saiband, who then made a great display of inaugurating a new truly independent regime in 141, 140 BCE. But even then, as you yourself said, it became a question of endless negotiation and parleying. And indeed, the subsequent Hasmanians, as the Maccabian dynasty became called, after a supposed ancestor, were much more involved in running things as a sort of mini-Helenistic state playing off the by now, are really quite decadence, solucids against the Romans. But still, that they had an army, they had a temple, they had a capital,

they became high priests themselves, eventually they become kings and create the only Jewish state between David and today, as people like to say. So they do sort of get there bit by bit. I think Judas already had that vision, but it is remarkable that the brothers were able to follow through and after a very difficult period, as Helen said,

and it is interesting to reflect on where their support came from, how they were able to rebuild it. I think the opportunities out there were very clear. And Jonathan makes another treaty with Rome, building on the one that Judas had done. And then, of course, we never see the Romans coming in to do anything. I think this is extremely important in symbolic terms, and the whole world knows that these are friends and allies of Rome.

So be careful. Can you just let's worry this through, and then we'll talk about sources. When would you say political independence that Tess has spoken about so glibly? When was that achieved and when was it known to be achieved by others around the empire, the solicit empire? I'll recognize, rather. I think the point that Tessa's hinting at is that in reality it was never totally achieved.

It was a kind of de facto independence. And she mentioned the sort of inauguration of independence, which Simon staged in 141. But even after that, it was really because the Syrian Empire, the Syrian state, the Seleucid Empire, was in turmoil at the centre that the small Jewish state was able to achieve any kind of independence. The real irony is we've mentioned treaties with Rome,

and there was one under Judas, which was renewed under Jonathan and was again renewed under Simon. The one under Judas involved Rome telling Demetrius, the Seleucid king, to stop attacking the Jews. If he attacked them, he would have to fight Rome by land and sea, was the formula. The letter to Demetrius either arrived too late

or he just chose to ignore it and call Rome's bluff, and he went down and totally trashed Judas. It was worth nothing to the Jews, that treaty with Rome. And the big irony is that it's in 60s, B.C.E. That Rome under Pompey the Great finally brings to an end the little period of independence

which the Hasmanian, the Maccabian state had enjoyed. Tessa. Just to make it look a little bit better than that, if this is indeed better, we should say that the last two, three of the Hasmanians, and one was a woman ruler,

Queen Salome, Alexandra, did preside over an expansion of the Jewish state. They went into conquest. Judas already was conducting some sort of skirmishes against beastly neighbours, we're told. But here they conquer the coastal plain, the Jordan Valley, all the obvious territorial areas. The people of Idumeir are converted to Judaism, the peoples of the northern part of Galilee. It is an expansionist state, again, within these parameters that Philip mentioned, that made it all possible. So you've got, and they become kings, as I said, Alexander Janius, perhaps the first or the second to do so. So you've got something of a showing there as the culmination of it all.

Helen, Mon, can we spend the remaining minutes discussing as hard-headedly as you can, you three can, because you know what, the reliability of the sources. We have the two books of Maccabees, with the book of Daniel, with the historian to Sefus, and we have other references, chronicles have been mentioned. Can I really go and tell the listeners

how reliable these sources are because it's a bit like medieval sources for English history. They're written by monks who are on the side of the victors, and these are the victors, as it were, and so just let's examine those, right? Well, I'd say they're of variable quality. By far the best one is one Maccabee.

written, I don't think as long as a century later, maybe only within a few decades, maybe sort of between about 130 BCE to about 100 BCE. Sober historian, written originally in Hebrew, it's in the manner of the biblical histories, chronicles, kings, that kind of thing. The author gets a lot of information in, may even be an eyewitness of some of the battles. In comparison to that, we have two Maccabees, which is very flowery, very dramatic.

It's often called pathetic history. It draws on your emotions, very, very strong theological overtones. This is God punishing the Jews because of the excesses of the high priests. And then because of a series of martyrdoms, God's then going to turn his anger away. So that's of less value. How do you write the Roussauceseville of Alexander? I think one Maccabees is very reliable. I'm rather more trusting of it than many historians would be.

Two Maccabees I'm highly suspicious of. It really is a propaganda document in the way that one Maccabees is not. And I think it was specifically directed that two Maccabees to the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora to try and bring them in under some kind of influence of the Hasmanians in Jerusalem. Can you tell us, as we sadly wind towards the end of this programme, what you think, in your view, is the cultural legacy of what we could call the Maccabian revolt?

Yes, I'd love to. Before that, I must just put in a very, very quick word for two Maccabees, which, after all, tells us all about that faction fighting among the high priests. We wouldn't have heard of these high priests, but for two Macabees. I'm afraid we're running out of time, and I'd love to know about the cultural legacy. The cultural legacy, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, from the Jewish point of view, of course, this is the moment of the great split between Hellenism and Judaism. It's completely foundational. It's widely believed that Judaism might have ceased to exist at that moment if the Maccabees hadn't come forward or if they'd lost. And if so, no Christianity, no Islam, no European history. And I don't think that view is totally out of order. Do you think it's totally out of order, Philip, I can't you?

I would put the emphasis slightly more on the nationalism. He raised again in Jewish consciousness the idea of a national state. And that, of course, has huge resonance right down to modern times. But you're convinced that without, I mean, it's an amazing sort of turning point in history, though. I think it is one of those pivots, watersheds, that we've perhaps forgotten. You know, when Judas Maccabees, people might well say who these days, quite educated people. Not after your contribution this morning. Thank you very much.

But I do think that, and I do think that's why it embodies and articulates something really quite important. We've got the archetypal warriors saving Europe. I'm not a sorry. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Tesla Rejack, Helen Bonn and Philip Alexander. Next week, the poet of Christina Rossetti.

Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this, BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion program about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBCworldservice.com slash forum.