Download Greek Persecution

© 2008
Women who allowed their sons to be circumcised were killed
with their babies tied around their necks.
by Rabbi Ken Spiro
When they first met the Jews, the Greeks – who had conquered the entire
known world – were astonished; they’d never encountered people like this
before.
The Jews were the only monotheists in the world, and they subscribed to a
worldview that is totally different from anyone else’s – namely, that
everything that exists has been created and is sustained by one infinite,
invisible and caring God. This idea – particularly, that this caring, perfect
God busies Himself with the lives of imperfect mortals – the Greeks found
just about incomprehensible. The Greek historian Hecateus describes the
unique monotheism of the Temple in Jerusalem:
There is no image, nor statue, nor votive offering therein; nothing at
all is planted there, neither grove nor anything of the sort. The
1
priests abide therein both nights and days, performing certain
purification rites, and drinking not the least drop of wine while they
are in the Temple.1
On top of that, the Greeks could not understand the Jewish adherence to
the Torah. This was an ancient book, which the Jews claimed they got from
God, and which contained odd teachings on how to lead a life of peace,
brotherhood and social responsibility – values that were far removed from
Greek ideals.
In short, the Greeks didn’t know what to make of the Jews.
The Jews were likewise confounded. The Greeks were people who valued
education and intellectual pursuits – something the Jews also valued and
very much admired. The Greeks spoke a beautiful language, which the Jews
appreciated very much.2
Indeed, the Torah was promptly translated into Greek (in the 3rd century
BCE) at the behest of Ptolemy III – the first such translation in Jewish
history. This translation was called the Septuagint after the 70 rabbis who
did it. As the Talmud relates:
It happened that King Ptolemy gathered 72 sages and placed them in
72 houses without telling them why he had brought them together.
He went to each one of them and told him, “translate for me [into
Greek] the Torah of your master Moses.”3
(This translation is considered a national disaster for the Jewish people. In
the hands of the non-Jewish world, the Hebrew Bible has often been used
against the Jews and has been deliberately mistranslated. Most Christian
Bibles in English today depend on the Greek translation which was then
1
The Greek historian Hecateus lived circa 360-290 BCE. He is quoted by Josephus in his Contra Apion 1:198-199 (The
New Complete Works of Josephus, p. 949).
2
See Talmud, Tractate Megillah 9a: “Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel said: ‘Even books of scripture the sages did not permit
to be written in any foreign language other than Greek.’” It is important to mention that the Talmud here refers to the
original, pure ancient Greek, not the common Greek dialect, koine, of the Hellenistic world nor the modern Greek of
today.
Talmud, Tractate Megillah 9b.
3
2
translated into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and from there
into English. You can just imagine how many interpretations and mistakes
and deliberate mistranslations were made along the way.4)
However, it was inevitable that the Bible
would be translated into Greek because
Greek
became
intellectual
the
language
of
international
the
ancient
Mediterranean world. It was as common
everywhere as English is today! And the
Jews
who
were
mostly
speaking
Aramaic, thanks to their foray in the Babylonian exile, became conversant
in Greek as well. (Hebrew was then a language primarily of prayer and of
study but not the spoken language of the street, even in Israel.)
Despite this mutual appreciation between the Greeks and the Jews, the vast
differences could not be tolerated by the dominant culture for long.
Jew versus Jew
The Hanukah story is often portrayed as a struggle for national liberation –
the Jewish revolt against the Greek occupation of Israel. In reality, it is
much more complicated than that. The real conflict was not physical but
intellectual. Hanukah was ultimately an ideological-spiritual war between
paganism and Judaism. It was also not a struggle purely between Greeks
and Jews. It was first and foremost a civil war of Jew versus Jew. The initial
impetus for the Greek attack on Judaism came from a certain splinter group
of the Jewish people themselves – the Hellenized Jews.
These were Jews who had been sucked into Greek culture. And it is no
wonder why. Greek culture was the major cultural milieu of the ancient
world.
4
Deliberate mistranslations were perpetrated by Christians scholars in order to “bend” the text to prove Christian
theology. The classic example is Isaiah 7:14 where the Hebrew word almah meaning “young woman/maiden” is
deliberately mistranslated into “virgin” (betulah in Hebrew) to support the Christian concept of virgin birth.
3
We see this as a pattern in Jewish history. A world culture comes along
which is enlightened and progressive and is changing the world, and some
of the upper-class Jews always get into it. Why? Because they are rich,
sophisticated and have lot of spare time. Then, they say to the rest of the
Jewish people: “Let’s get modern. Forget this ancient Jewish stuff.” (We will
see this pattern repeated in Spain, and in Germany, and even today in
America and Israel.)
At the time of the Hanukah story, there was a small but very vocal and
powerful group of Jews who aligned themselves with the Greek authorities.
They became Hellenized, and they did everything the Greeks did. They sent
their children to the gymnasium, and they reversed their circumcisions – a
very painful operation – because so much of Greek stuff was done naked,
and the Greeks would consider them mutilated otherwise.
To make matters worse, the schism between the Hellenized Jews and
mainstream Jews was paralleled by another schism – between two factions
of religious Jews.
It began in the 3rd century BCE when two students named – Zadok and
Bysos – started preaching a new form of Judaism, devoid of belief in the
Divine origin of the Oral Torah (the importance of which we explained in
class #26). There is little doubt that Greek thought played a significant role
in creating this early break with mainstream Judaism. Their followers were
called the Zadukim and Bysosim, though it is the Zadukim – i.e. Sadducees
– that have gone down in history.
The mainstream observant Jews, who followed the rabbis and kept Jewish
law as it has always been practiced, were called ironically “separatists” –
Perushim or Pharisees – to distinguish them from the others.
Since the Sadducees did not believe that the Oral Torah came from God,
they maintained that they were only obligated to keep the laws of the
Written Torah, which they read literally.5 But so many of the laws of the
Written Torah are incomprehensible without the Oral Torah. Their answer?
5
Incidentally, this denial of the Oral Law will recur later in Jewish history with the Karaite schism, as we will see in class
#43.
4
Each man for himself – anyone can decide what it means and act
accordingly.
The Sadducees found natural allies among the Hellenized Jews, as modernday historian, Rabbi Berel Wein, explains:
The Sadducees were always more acceptable in the eyes of the
Hellenist Jews than their rabbinic foes. The alliance of the Hellenists
and the Sadducees against traditional Judaism guaranteed constant
turmoil in Jewish life throughout the time of the Second Temple and
even thereafter.6
This is how the ancient historian Josephus describes the beliefs of the Jews
at this time:
The Pharisees are considered most skillful in the exact explication of
their laws and are the leading school; they ascribe all to fate and to
God and yet allow that to do what is right or to the contrary is
principally in the power of men, although fate does cooperate in
every action. They say that all souls are imperishable but that the
souls of good men only pass into other bodies while the souls of evil
men are subject to eternal punishment.
But the Sadducees are those that compose the second order and
exclude fate entirely and suppose that God is not concerned with our
doing or not doing what is evil. They say that to do what is good or
what is evil is man’s own choice and that the choice of one or the
other belongs to each person who may act as he pleases. They also
exclude the belief in immortality of the soul and the punishment and
rewards of the afterworld.
Moreover, the Pharisees are friendly to one another and cultivate
harmonious relations with the community, but the behavior of the
Sadducees towards one another is to some degree boorish, and their
conversation with those other than of their own party is barbarous as
if they were strangers to them.7
6
7
Wein, Berel, Echoes of Glory, Brooklyn, NY: Shaar Press, 1995, p. 38.
Josephus, Jewish War, 2:166, (The New Complete Works of Josephus, p. 739).
5
You can see how the Sadducees were influenced by Greek thought. They
were part of the reason that the priesthood and the Temple service became
so corrupt (as many of the priestly class, an upper class at that time,
became Sadducees). And this is why the Talmud says that so many High
Priests died during the service of Yom Kippur.
(We shall discuss the Sadducees in greater detail in class #34 when we
come to the Roman Empire and its domination of the Jews.)
Forced Hellenization
Meanwhile, the Greeks under Antiochus IV, Epiphanes,
were
taking
deliberate
steps
to
Hellenize
the
mainstream Jews by attempting to destroy Judaism.
The Book of Maccabees calls this period – between 140
BCE and 138 BCE – a “reign of terror” and describes its
beginnings as:
Not long after this, the king sent an Athenian senator to compel the
Jews to forsake the laws of their fathers and cease to live by the laws
of God, and also to pollute the Temple in Jerusalem and call it the
shrine of Olympian Zeus…8
One of the first things that Antiochus did was to take control of the Temple
by undermining the office of the High Priest. He removed the High Priest
from his position and replaced him with a Jew he had in his back pocket.
From this point on, the High Priesthood became, to a large extent, a corrupt
institution (as noted in class #25).
So here we begin to see a pattern, which is going to evolve through later
Jewish history, of all the basic institutions being corrupted – the monarchy,
the priesthood, even the Temple service. Only the Sanhedrin, the Jewish
8
2 Maccabees 6:1.
6
Supreme Court and its rabbis (who will eventually write the Talmud) will be
left relatively intact.
After he installed his own High Priest, Antiochus tried to destroy the Jewish
calendar. Why was this so important?
Because, by this time, Antiochus understood the Jews very well. To him
these people were time obsessed – they were always trying to make time
holy. Destroy time and you destroy the Jews’ ability to practice Judaism.
Therefore, Antiochus forbade the observance of Shabbat, the observance of
the New Moon (Rosh Chodesh), and the observance of the holidays –
Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot.
Next, Antiochus forbade keeping kosher and studying Torah. Torah scrolls
were publicly burned, and swine were sacrificed over sacred Jewish books to
defile them. Indeed, Antiochus seemed obsessed by swine, knowing that
this animal was particularly repugnant to the Jews; he even forced the High
Priest to institute swine sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and also to
permit worship there of a whole array of Greek gods.9
Lastly, Antiochus forbade circumcision. To the Jews, this was the physical,
tangible sign of their covenant with God. And it was the one thing the
Greeks – who worshipped the perfection of the human body – found most
abhorrent. To them, circumcision was a mutilation.
Jews resisted, so Antiochus and his henchmen went about driving the point
home in a crude and cruel fashion. Rabbi Berel Wein relates this graphically
in his Echoes of Glory:
Women who allowed their sons to be circumcised were killed with
their sons tied around their necks. The scholars of Israel were
hounded, hunted down and killed. Jews who refused to eat pork or
sacrifice hogs were tortured to death... Even the smallest hamlet in
Judah was not safe from the oppression of the Hellenists. The altars
to Zeus and other pagan deities were erected in every village, and
Jews of every area were forced to participate in the sacrificial
services.10
9
1 Maccabees 1:41-64.
Wein, Berel, Echoes of Glory, p. 63.
10
7
This type of religious persecution was, until then, unknown in human
history. Up to that time, no one in the ancient world declared war on other
people’s religion, because the attitude of polytheism was “I’ll worship your
god, you worship mine. The more gods the merrier.” (Later we will see
Greek and Roman mythologies blending – with Zeus becoming Jupiter, etc.
– in a display of ultimate pluralism where everyone’s religion will be as good
as the next, and not one really taken seriously.)
In the polytheistic world no one died for their religion. No one, except the
Jews.
The Jews maintained that there were things in this life that were worth
dying for – things that were more meaningful than life itself. Jews were
willing to give up their lives for Judaism. Not because God needs people to
die for Him, but because the ideology of Torah is something without which
humanity is doomed. The Jews, who are supposed to be “the light unto the
nations,” cannot abandon their mission, even when their lives are
threatened.
In the early stages of the conflict, many Jews chose the path of “passive
resistance” by ignoring the Greek restrictions and continuing to learn Torah
and circumcise their infant sons. However, this proved fatal as many Jews
were martyred for their continued loyalty to Judaism. Resistance to Greek
persecutions then took on a more active form – the Jews began to actively
fight against this type of tyranny. What was most terrible in this fight,
however, was that the Jews who were defending Judaism had to fight the
Greeks as well as some of their own fellow Jews who have converted to
Hellenism.
Finally, the fight erupted into an open revolt against the Greeks and their
Jewish collaborators. This open revolt of the Maccabees – which we
celebrate today as Hanukah – was as much a story of a civil war between
Jews as against Greece. It was not as much a war for national liberation nor
a struggle for physical freedom, as it was a battle of ideologies.
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