Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 53

The history of the Maccabees covers a century. It begins in the year 167 BCE, at a time when Mattathias, a priest from the ›House of the Hasmoneans,‹ took up arms for the sake of the Torah against foreign rule, and it ends on the Sabbath in the fall of the year 63 BCE, when Roman legionaries stormed the temple mount and the Roman commander entered the holy of holies. The person who had led him and his troops to Jerusalem was a great-grandson of Mattathias’s, Hyrcanus II, who was fighting his own brother Aristobulus for the Jewish crown.⁴⁶

The Maccabean Revolt against Seleucid rule in 167–164 BCE and Rome’s move on Syria-Palestine in 64 BCE mark the beginning and end-points of the history of Judea in the second and first centuries BCE. This is the century of Judea’s independence as a Temple state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The Maccabean Revolt is well documented by relatively close sources (Daniel and 1 and 2 Maccabees), although the two books of Maccabees manifest their own different interests. These must always be considered in the question of the historical events.