(January 7, 2013 at 10:18 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Yeah...way ahead of you.
One needs to understand the political situation in Judaea c 165 BC. The Seleucids were the nominal rulers having evicted the Ptolemaic Greeks a century or so earlier. The Seleucids, however, had their asses kicked by the Romans at Magnesia in 190. Antiochus the Great died while trying to collect the indemnity that the Romans demanded in exchange for peace which led to 25 years of internecine strife, revolts and assassinations among various claimants to the throne. Meanwhile, the Seleucid empire continued to vanish piece-by-piece.
So, in that atmosphere, one should not be surprised that a group of nobles took the opportunity also to rebel against Seleucid control and seek independence. All of this horseshit about god could well have been written into the story later on by priests seeking to establish their own position in the new kingdom. Certainly, the establishment of the Hasmonean monarchy represents the only time in the entire first millenium when there was actually an admittedly minor regional power in Judaea which could make a pretension to expansionist policy.
This covers a very short period of time, perhaps 60 years before the Hasmoneans, like the Seleucids earlier, dissolved into a bickering bloody clan which ended up being swept aside when Pompeius Magnus came rolling through the region.
Just before I came to the conclusion in the subject I had not gotten into Josephus but was publicly betting the Maccabes would be a border war between the Greeks sort of like Vietnam. The first sentence of Wars of the Jews said exactly that. It was all downhill.
What is surprising is the modern narrative of the Maccabes is so contrary to the only known history of the events. The ancestors of New Testament Galileans were forced to convert to Judaism. Whether or not there was a Jesus that he is a Galilean and his career mostly in Galilee along with the forced conversion puts an entirely different view on his likely ancestral religion teachings and the animosity between the conquering priests of Judea and the conquered Galileans. His hatred of Jews, aka Judeans, was a natural. Presuming Jesus did not exist when Rome smashed Judea, the Jews, twice the Galileans ruled from Syria had a free hand in spreading their version of the Yahweh cult without hindrance.
