Judean Civil War

Alexander Jannaeus ascended the Hasmonean throne following the death of his brother, Judah Aristobulus I, c. 103 BCE, and continued the military campaigns initiated by their father, John Hyrcanus, to expand the borders of Judea.^[1] His early reign was consumed by military campaigns along the Mediterranean coast and in Transjordan, including involvement in the so-called "War of the Scepters," a regional conflict between rival claimants to the Ptolemaic and Seleucid thrones.^[2]

If Josephus's record of a six-year internal conflict is reliable, the Hasmonean conquest of Gaza in 96/95 BCE likely marked the start of domestic opposition to Jannaeus.^[3]

Both Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War record that the conflict ignited during the Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles), one of Judaism's three pilgrimage festivals.^[3] In Antiquities of the Jews (13:372), Josephus specifies that the violence erupted while Jannaeus was performing sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple in his capacity as High Priest; the worshipping crowd pelted the king with citrons (etrogim) and palm-branch wands (lulavim), which are among the four species used as part of the Sukkot service.^[3] Josephus wrote that some worshippers leveled the accusation that Jannaeus's mother had once been a captive. They argued that this rendered him unfit for the high priesthood, as she would likely have been raped during her captivity, which would technically make Jannaeus a bastard under the biblical laws governing the priesthood.^[7][8] According to the Book of Leviticus (21:4), a priest could not marry a woman who had engaged in sexual relations under certain disqualifying circumstances, and their offspring were barred from the priesthood.^[9][a]

The accusation that a Hasmonean ruler was illegitimate because his mother had been a captive is also mentioned earlier by Josephus in Antiquities (13.292), as voiced against Jannaeus's grandfather, John Hyrcanus, by a Pharisee named Eleazar during a feast with other Pharisees.^[7][10] On this basis, Atkinson suggests that this "could indicate that Josephus did not know which Hasmonean was the object of this accusation," adding that such a claim may have been merely a slander sometimes used against the dynasty.^[7] Grabbe writes that this accusation "sounds more like a pretext than the true reason".^[8]

The Mishnah (Sukkah 4:9) mentions a priest who poured the customary libation over his feet, rather onto the altar; in response, the outraged crowd pelted him with their citrons (etrogim).^[11] A similar narrative appears in the later Talmuds (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 26b and Sukkah 48b; Jerusalem Talmud, Sukkah 4:8, 54d), which identifies this priest as a Sadducee; in the Tosefta (Sukkah 3:16) he is a Bethousian.^[11][12] These accounts appear to be independent sources for the Jannaeus pelting episode (though they do not explicitly mention him), and they suggest that Jannaeus, aligning himself with Sadducean tradition, deliberately provoked the Pharisees during this high-profile public ceremony.^[11]

According to Talmudic scholar Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, the rabbinic version likely originated as an adaptation of Josephus's story. He argues that the rabbis reshaped the episode to serve their own concerns, transforming Josephus's account of popular anger at Jannaeus's cruelty into a dispute over the proper performance of the water libation ritual.^[12] He notes that examples of pelting with citrons are attested elsewhere in rabbinic literature: in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Zeira is pelted with citrons by the people of Mahoza, while a midrash (late-antique rabbinic exegesis) describes a man whose gifts to Hadrian are thrown back at him by soldiers; he later remarks that had he brought citrons instead, they would have pelted him even more severely.^[13] Historian Gedaliah Alon, citing the story of Rabbi Zeira, argued that the etrog-pelting episodes involving Jannaeus in Josephus and rabbinic literature refer to two different events, explaining that pelting someone with etrogim was a common form of insult during the period.^[13][14]

Rabbinic traditions also preserve a story in which the Pharisees, too, tell Jannaeus that his mother had been taken captive, paralleling a similar account in Josephus involving John Hyrcanus I instead. Talmudic scholar Vered Noam argues that this tradition preserves an early Pharisaic polemical work.^[11]

Following this episode, Jannaeus turned eastward, campaigning in Moab and Gilead, but suffered a defeat at the hands of Obodas I, king of the Nabateans; According to Lester L. Grabbe, this defeat emboldened Jannaeus's internal foes, transforming previous episodes of domestic conflict into a full-scale, six-year civil war.^[15]

After Jannaeus succeeded early in the war, the rebels relocated to Sepphoris, in the heavily pro-Pharisee region of Galilee, and appealed for Seleucid assistance. Judean insurgents joined forces with Demetrius III Eucaerus to fight against Alexander.^[16] Demetrius may have been motivated by a desire for retribution following undocumented raids by Jannaeus in the region of Damascus, carried out in the preceding years to exploit the instability then gripping the Seleucid Empire.^[17]

Jannaeus had gathered six thousand two hundred mercenaries and twenty thousand Jews for battle, while Demetrius had forty thousand soldiers and three thousand horses. There were attempts from both sides to persuade each other to abandon their positions, but they were unsuccessful. The Seleucid forces defeated Jannaeus at Shechem, and all of Jannaeus's mercenaries were killed in battle. This defeat forced Jannaeus to take refuge in the mountains.^[16]

According to Josephus, many of the Jews who had invited Demetrius now deserted him, with 6,000 rallying to Jannaeus.^[18][19] It is possible that the prospect of a Seleucid advance on Jerusalem may have been intolerable even to Jannaeus's opponents.^[18] Demetrius's withdrawal was likely further compelled by the need to defend his capital, Damascus, from an invasion by his brother Philip I Philadelphus, a rival claimant to the Seleucid throne who held power in northern Syria.^[18]

Following Demetrius's retreat, Jannaeus moved to crush the remaining local resistance, driving many of his opponents into the city of Bethoma (referred to as Bemeselis in The Jewish War) and capturing it.^[20] Its exact location is unknown, though it is thought to lie somewhere northeast of Samaria.^[20] According to Josephus, Jannaeus transported his captives to Jerusalem, where he crucified 800 of them and had their wives and children killed before their eyes while he feasted with his concubines.^[18] Josephus records that the Jews bestowed upon Jannaeus the sobriquet Thrakidas in response to this act of extreme cruelty; the name, an allusion to the Thracians, most likely denoted barbarity,^[18][20] though it may also reflect the presence of Thracian soldiers among his mercenaries.^[21] Some of 8,000 of Jannaeus's opponents reportedly fled the country by night in fear of Alexander; they remained in exile for the remainder of his reign.^[18][22]

Alexander Jannaeus died in 76 BCE after a 27-year reign,^[26] naming his wife Salome Alexandra as his successor. This choice handed the monarchy to a queen governing on fundamentally different terms.^[27] In an account found in Josephus's Antiquities but absent from The Jewish War, on his deathbed, Jannaeus advised Salome Alexandra to cede a measure of power to the Pharisees and to distance herself from his own conduct.^[26][b] He also counseled her to permit the Pharisees to treat his corpse with contempt, calculating that they would respond to this gesture by granting him an honorable funeral instead.^[27] In doing so, he effectively acknowledged that his persecution of the Pharisees had been a source of political instability and a threat to Hasmonean continuity.^[28]

Alexandra's nine-year reign proved among the most consequential in Hasmonean history, what Kenneth Atkinson calls "the most unique period of the Hasmonean monarchy ... and the final glorious period of the Hasmonean state."^[27] She aligned with the Pharisees, restoring their religious laws following their suppression under John Hyrcanus and dismantling the Sadducean dominance over the Temple cult that had defined her husband's reign.^[29] As a result, the Pharisees attained political influence unprecedented in the Hasmonean period, and moved swiftly to settle accounts with those who had counseled Jannaeus's mass executions.^[29] Alexandra appointed her elder son Hyrcanus II as high priest, and he appears to have been aligned with the Pharisees as well. Her younger son Aristobulus II, who had remained close to his father's Sadducean circle, became the nucleus of opposition to her government.^[30] Later, upon her death in 67 BCE, the succession dispute between the two escalated into a civil war, which ultimately drew in Pompey's intervention and resulted in Judea becoming a client state of Rome.

• List of Jewish civil wars