24 A History of Judaism
The sudden demise of the Persian empire in 331 bce through the
conquests of Alexander of Macedon made little change to the status of
the Jews of Yehud, which the Greeks called ‘Judaea’. The struggles for
his territory between the generals who succeeded Alexander after his
death in 323 bce left Judaea by 301 bce as part of the empire of the
Ptolemies, which was based in Egypt. After a century of conflict, includ-
ing six ‘Syrian wars’ in the region of Judaea between the Ptolemies and
their Seleucid rivals, whose sprawling territories included Syria and
Mesopotamia, Judaea was under Seleucid control by 198 bce.
The change in regime made little difference to the Jews of Judaea
until the intervention of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes
(175– 164 bce) described so vividly by Josephus. The precise course of
events, and their causes, are unclear (see Chapter 5), but by 167 bce
Antiochus had sanctioned not only the settlement of a non- Jewish
population in Jerusalem but the introduction of a pagan cult into the
Temple. Successful resistance led by Judah Maccabee recovered the
Temple for Jewish worship by 164 bce and in due course led to the
establishment of Judah’s family as a new ruling dynasty in Judaea.
By 129 bce, the government of Judaea was effectively independent of
Seleucid control.
In the early first century bce, the Hasmonaean dynasty (so called
after an ancestor of Judah Maccabee) extended Jewish rule to a terri-
tory comparable in extent to the kingdom of David. But independence
was temporary. With the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 bce,
Judaea came under Roman sway, exercised at first through support of
individual members of the Hasmonaean family as client rulers, and
from 37 bce through the imposition of Herod as king of Judaea. Her-
od’s rule depended entirely on Roman backing, and on his death in 4
bce his kingdom was divided by the Romans between three of his sons.
Archelaus, who had been appointed ethnarch of Judaea, was dismissed
from his post in 6 ce following an appeal by his subjects to the emperor
Augustus, and for the next sixty years Judaea was placed under the con-
trol of a Roman governor in the same way as other provinces, with the
exception of a brief period (41 to 44 ce) when Agrippa I, Herod’s
grandson, ruled over a kingdom as extensive as that of his grandfather.
Direct Roman rule proved to be a disaster. In 66 ce the Jews of Judaea
rebelled and in 70 ce, after a brutal siege, both the Temple and the city
of Jerusalem were destroyed.
Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities ended with a reference to this destruc-
tion, which he had described in full in his earlier account of the war