Hasmonean Kingdom

The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes provoked the revolt that created the Hasmonean Kingdom when he moved, in the 160s BCE, to suppress traditional Jewish religious practice in Judea, banning circumcision and Sabbath observance and rededicating the Jerusalem Temple's altar to Greek worship. A study of the revolt's origins argues the crisis was as much a Judean civil conflict, between Hellenizing and traditionalist Jewish factions contesting the high priesthood, as it was a straightforward foreign persecution, with Antiochus's decrees escalating an internal dispute he had been drawn into rather than starting one from outside.

Judah Maccabee led the military resistance that followed, and the recapture and rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE, commemorated ever since in the eight day festival of Hanukkah, marked the moment the revolt turned from resistance into the foundation of an independent state. Judah's brothers Jonathan and Simon consolidated that independence over the following two decades, and Simon's recognition as high priest and ethnarch by Rome and by a Judean assembly in 140 BCE is usually taken as the formal founding of Hasmonean self-rule, the first sustained period of Jewish political sovereignty since the Babylonian conquest nearly four and a half centuries earlier.

Hasmonean rule combined the high priesthood with royal power in a single dynasty, an arrangement that had no real precedent in earlier Judean history and that generated real religious controversy of its own. A study of the period from the Maccabees to the rabbinic era describes the Pharisee and Sadducee parties crystallizing specifically as rival positions on how a priestly dynasty should exercise political authority, with the historian Josephus recording that John Hyrcanus, an early Hasmonean ruler, broke publicly with the Pharisees over exactly this question after having favored them earlier in his reign.

Hyrcanus and his son Aristobulus I also expanded Hasmonean territory by conquest and imposed Judaism on the conquered populations, most notably requiring the Idumeans of the south and later the Itureans of the Galilee to accept circumcision and Jewish law as a condition of remaining in their homelands, an expansion of Jewish religious identity by state compulsion that has few real parallels in the ancient Mediterranean world. The dynasty's own succession disputes eventually invited Roman intervention: Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and a final Hasmonean civil war gave Rome the opening to install the Idumean convert Herod as king in 37 BCE, ending a century of Jewish sovereignty that had itself begun as an act of religious resistance.