jews in a graeco- roman world 95
out with rigour. The Seleucid state sent officers throughout Judaea to
ensure that observance of the Sabbath and the circumcision of sons
ceased and that Jews offered sacrifices to pagan gods. According to the
Second Book of Maccabees, composed at the latest within a century
after these events, ‘when a festival of Dionysus was celebrated, they
were compelled to wear wreaths of ivy and to walk in the procession in
honour of Dionysus,’ and when two women were brought in for having
circumcised their children, ‘they publicly paraded them around the city,
with their babies hanging at their breasts, and then hurled them down
headlong from the wall.’^6
The veracity of such atrocity stories cannot be ascertained, but it
seems clear that the violence of this repression, in marked contrast to the
gradual syncretism which had been so successful in spreading Hellenism
throughout much of the Near East, was responsible for inciting the
armed resistance of the Maccabees – the only known case of the adher-
ents of an eastern religion opposing by force the encroachment of Greek
culture in their native land. The rebellion began in Modiin, a small town
north- west of Jerusalem, under the leadership of a priest called Mat-
tathias and his five sons. Ostentatiously refusing to worship a pagan god
when an emissary of the Seleucid state arrived in Modiin to impose the
king’s decree, Mattathias killed a Jew about to offer sacrifice at the altar,
killed the king’s officer and took refuge in the mountains, where he rap-
idly gathered together a guerrilla force of fighters committed to destroy
the pagan altars and encourage resistance by the wider Jewish popu-
lation, if necessary by force. In the words of I Maccabees, ‘They ...
struck down sinners in their anger and renegades in their wrath.’^7
Within a year of the start of the uprising, Mattathias was dead of old
age, and his place as leader of the rebels was taken by his son Judah,
whose personal name, ‘the Maccabee’ (of uncertain etymology but
probably with the meaning ‘hammer’), came to be transferred to the
rebellion as a whole. The history of Judah’s campaigns is portrayed dif-
ferently in the glowing narratives in I Maccabees and II Maccabees, and
is now impossible to discern precisely, but such hagiography of the great
general certainly reflected impressive victories against considerable
odds, culminating in the recapture of Jerusalem. In December 164 bce,
on 25 Kislev, the Temple was rededicated with a new altar and sacred
vessels, three years after it had been profaned. Neither I Maccabees nor
II Maccabees makes mention of the miracle of the oil which was to
loom large in later rabbinic commemoration of this momentous occa-
sion (see Chapter 10), but I Maccabees records that ‘Judas and his