36 CHAPTER ONEhe minted coins—another practice derived from the cities of Old Greece.^44
Like the much earlier coins of Persian Yehud, these coins were almost all of
very small denomination and so intended only for local use. In the case both
of Simon’s resolution and of John’s coinage, it is apparent that it was the Jews
themselves, or some section of them, whose expectations about the behavior
of their rulers were under strong Gree kinfluence.
The Hasmoneans exemplified the proposition that adopting Gree kculture
could function in the Hellenistic world to preserve a native culture. They also
resolved, for the time being, the tension between exclusivity and integration
fairly strongly in favor of the former and were surely helped in doing so by
the progressive decrepitude of their Seleucid overlords.^45
Expansion
Hasmonean policies and actions changed the character of Palestinian Jewish
society in more blatant ways, too. The most consequential set of events under
Hasmonean rule was their territorial expansion, begun toward the end of the
reign of John Hyrcanus I, and extended by his sons Aristobulus I and Alexan-
der Yannai. In 130B.C.E. the boundaries of Jewish Palestine contained only
the district of Judaea, but by 100, the Hasmoneans ruled the entirety of the
Palestinian hinterland, from the high hills of Upper Galilee in the north to
the edge of the Negev Desert in the south, and from the Jordan River, or
even slightly beyond it, in the east to the edge of the coastal plain in the west.
The people who dwelled within these boundaries, who had apart from the
Judaeans previously been a mixed multitude of Edomites, Samarian Israe-
lites, and in Galilee probably a mixture or patchwor kof Arabs, Gree ks, and
Syrian pagans (some of remotely Israelite descent) now became in some sense
Jewish.^46
Josephus, the main source for the expansion, provides only sketchy informa-
tion about the causes and the progress of this momentous set of events. Ac-
(^44) That John was the first Hasmonean to mint coins has been proved by the recent excavations
on Mount Gerizim: see D. Barag, “Jewish Coins in Hellenistic and Roman Time,” in T. Hackens
et al., eds.,A Survey of Numismatic Research, 1985–19901 (Brussels: International Society of
Professional Numismatists, 1991), 1:106; this replaces the view of Y. Meshorer,Ancient Jewish
Coinage(New York: Amphora, 1982), 1:35–47, that the Hasmonean coinage began with Alexan-
der Yannai. Meshorer’s collection of material, though, remains standard.
(^45) For a different, though complementary, account of the Maccabean revolt as a pivotal event
in the history of Jewish self-definition, see Cohen,Beginnings of Jewishness, 109–39.
(^46) The recent excavations at Yodfat, Josephus’s Jotapata, in Lower Galilee, suggest a shift from
pagan to Jewish habitation at the end of the second centuryB.C.E. and also suggest that the shift
was not peaceful: M. Aviam, “Yodfat: Uncovering a Jewish City in the Galilee from the Second
Temple Period and the Time of the Great Revolt,”Qadmoniot118 (1999): 92–101.