God Against the Gods (11 page)

Mattathias and his sons put themselves in command of an army of Jewish partisans and conducted a sustained campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Syrian invaders. The battlefield commander was one of Mattathias’s sons, Judah, whose toughness and tenacity earned him the nickname Maccabee (“hammer”), and the Jewish resistance movement came to be known as the Maccabees. Under Judah and his successors, the Maccabees defeated the armies of Antiochus and restored the sovereignty of the Jewish homeland for the first time since the Babylonian conquest in 586 B.C.E.

But the struggle of the Maccabees was more than a war of national liberation—it was also a holy war. They fought against the armies of the Syrian king with the sure conviction that God was on their side, and they enjoyed the tactical advantage that is bestowed upon any soldier who is willing and even eager to die. But the pagan army from beyond the borders was not the only enemy. The Maccabees and their successors targeted not only the Syrian overlords but also their fellow Jews, punishing the Jewish assimilationists and collaborators who were deemed too friendly with the army of occupation.

Among the less celebrated exploits of the Maccabees, for example, was a campaign of forcible circumcision that was directed against any Jew, whether infant or adult, who had neglected the ancient and all-important rite. Some of the Jewish fathers and mothers who failed to circumcise their sons, of course, were merely seeking to spare their lives by complying with the royal decree of Antiochus that criminalized the practice. Others, as we have seen, were seeking to ape the ways of Hellenism and perhaps even to conceal their Jewish origins so they could pass into the pagan world. To the rigorists, however, it did not matter whether the failure to circumcise was the result of coercion or collaboration—it was an act of disobedience to Yahweh, and disobedience, as the prophet Samuel put it, is the theological equivalent of sorcery and idolatry.

No single point of conflict between the rigorists and the assimilationists in Judaism offers a clearer example of what was at stake in the larger conflict between monotheism and polytheism. Circumcision was an unmistakable and ineradicable sign of membership in the Chosen People, a sign that is literally carved into the flesh. As the Jewish rigorists saw it, circumcision at the point of a sword was “not an act of tyranny,” explains historian Steven Weitzman, “but an act of zeal required to restore the social boundaries between Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Land.”
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The God of Israel, according to the strictest practitioners of monotheism, required nothing less of his worshippers.

The Invention of Holy Martyrdom

The war that the Maccabees fought against Antiochus ended in victory. But, significantly, the Book of Maccabees preserves the memory of those moments when the worshippers of Yahweh were victims rather than victors. It is a collection of stomach-turning and heartrending accounts of the Pious Ones who preferred to perish by fire or by sword rather than break faith with the Only True God. The most horrific of these tales shows us the ordeal of a mother who is forced to witness Antiochus’s torture of her seven sons in the hope that she will persuade at least one of them to comply with the king’s command to taste a morsel of pork. How she responds to the king’s cruel demand marks the beginning of something new and crucial in the history of monotheism—the invention of the holy martyr.

The author spares his readers no gruesome detail in describing the ordeal of the Jewish mother and her sons—that’s the whole point of telling the tale in the first place. The seven brothers are beaten with whips and straps, but they are resolute: “We are ready to die,” declares one of the brothers, “rather than break the laws of our fathers.” The outraged king orders that his tongue be cut out, his scalp torn from his skull and his body mutilated. At last, what is left of the young man, still alive, is roasted in a cauldron. One by one, the brothers suffer the same horrific fate until only the youngest remains. The king, maddened by their defiance, demands that the woman use her motherly wiles to persuade her last surviving son to swallow a bite of pork and thus save himself.

She pretends to agree, but when she addresses her son—speaking in her native tongue so that the king will not understand what she is saying—the heroic mother delivers a very different message. “Do not be afraid of this man,” she boldly counsels her seventh son before the both of them give up their lives. “Accept death and prove yourself worthy of your brothers.”
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Here we are witnessing the birth of a tradition that is absent from the triumphal passages of the Torah where Yahweh, the God of Armies, decrees a holy war against the abominations of paganism. It is the Maccabees, insists Rabbi Emil L. Fackenheim, a Holocaust survivor and a contemporary Jewish philosopher, who literally “invented martyrdom.”
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And martyrdom, as we shall see, is the moral counterweight of holy war. The soldier of God may delight in taking the enemy’s life, but when the battle turns against him, he must be equally willing to offer his own life, all in the name of the True God. Holy war is the weapon of the powerful and the victorious; martyrdom is the weapon of the weak and the vanquished. Both will be wielded in the war of God against the gods.

The Jewish War

The Maccabees defeated the army of Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and promptly set up the first independent Jewish state since the last descendant of King David had been dragged from the throne in Jerusalem some four hundred years before. The new Jewish kings are known as the Hasmonean dynasty, a term that derives from Hasmon, the family name of Mattathias, Judah and his brothers. But the new Jewish commonwealth was not the theocracy that the Maccabees had fought to establish. The Hasmonean kings were accommodationists and assimilationists who made their peace with the pagan world of Hellenism, adopting Greek names, titles, dress and manners. By then, both Judah the Maccabee and Antiochus the Madman were dead, and their successors were far more inclined to compromise, thus proving that rigorism in both religion and politics burns so hot that it sometimes burns itself out.

Indeed, the victory of the Maccabees did not erase the old struggle between the Pious Ones and the less rigorous Jews who preferred the pleasures of Hellenism, and a civil war broke out in the little Jewish kingdom in the first century B.C.E. By now, a new superpower dominated the ancient world—the empire of pagan Rome—and each of the warring Jewish factions struggled to win the support of the Roman emperor. But the Romans, who sought to impose the so-called
Pax Romana
(“Roman Peace”) on the whole of the known world, refused to be drawn into the treacherous politics of the tiny Jewish state. Instead, a Roman army marched into Judea in 63 B.C.E., conquered Jerusalem and ultimately installed a king to serve as both “King of the Jews” and a client of pagan Rome.

The new king was Herod (73-4 B.C.E.), a man of Arab descent whose family had been converted to Judaism during the reign of the Hasmoneans. Herod had come to the attention of the Roman authorities when, as a provincial governor in the Galilee, he was charged with the task of searching out and exterminating the latest generation of Jewish rigorists who challenged the occupation of their homeland by the Roman legions. He found out for himself that some of the Jewish partisans who had taken up arms against Roman occupation were perfectly willing to martyr themselves in defense of their faith and their country. During one operation, for example, he pursued a band of resistance fighters to a cliffside cave and contrived to lower a few of his soldiers from the cliff top in baskets so they could haul out the fugitives. One man sheltering inside the cave was seen to cut the throats of his wife and children before taking his own life, preferring to die by his own hand rather than surrender to Herod’s army.

Herod was no mere puppet king, and he earned the same title that was bestowed upon Alexander before him and Constantine after him: “the Great.” His army managed to suppress the Jewish rigorists who still sought a purer form of Judaism and a free Jewish state, and he succeeded in brokering an uneasy peace between his unruly Jewish subjects and his Roman overlords, who followed the customary pagan practice of letting the locals worship as they pleased. A golden eagle, the symbol of Rome, was mounted on the gateway to the Temple, but—quite unlike Antiochus—the Romans declined to defile the inner chambers of the Temple itself with pagan imagery. So deferential were the Romans to Jewish sensibilities, in fact, that a Roman legionnaire who defied the Jewish prohibition against entering the inner courtyards of the Temple in Jerusalem could be put to death for the offense.

“Even the Jews, a wretched people as they are, and separate from all other nations, certainly worship but one God,” allows one ancient writer who disdains the theology of Judaism but recognizes something familiar in the Jewish rituals of worship. “Yet they do it openly, they do it in temples, they do it with altars, sacrifices and ceremonies.”
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The Temple remained the single most important site in Jewish observance, a place where thousands of sheep and goats were sacrificed to Yahweh according to the rituals that are prescribed in the Torah. Herod expanded and enhanced the Temple, enclosing the old structure that had been rebuilt when the exiles returned from Babylon inside a vastly larger construction that aped the architecture of Greece and Rome and was regarded as one of the wonders of the ancient world; indeed, the Temple was a kind of tourist attraction. But the Temple was not the only monument to Hellenism—Herod built amphitheaters and stadiums, baths and gymnasiums, all the facilities that the Greco-Roman culture demanded. Fatefully, he also built for himself a fortified palace in the desert wilderness at a place called Masada.

The Fire Within

After the death of Herod in 4 B.C.E., Rome left his sons in charge of various provinces of his kingdom, but the whole of Judea was now under Roman occupation. The Romans discovered that Jewish resistance was still alive. Just as one person’s “terrorist” is another person’s “freedom fighter,” the Romans called them “brigands” and “bandits,” but they regarded themselves as holy warriors in a struggle to restore Jewish sovereignty in the land of the Jews. Just like the Maccabees, they resorted to what we would today call acts of terrorism against both the Roman overlords and those of their fellow Jews who were deemed too friendly toward the occupation authorities.

The so-called Sicarii, for example, were urban guerrillas who adopted the tactic of slipping into a crowded public square in Jerusalem, drawing close to some Jewish collaborator, striking him down with the stealthy blow of a dagger (
sica
) and then disappearing into the crowd again. Precisely because they embraced the old traditions of holy war—like Phinehas and Mattathias, they were “zealous for the Lord”—the ancient Jewish historian Josephus coined a new term to describe the Jewish partisans who resisted the Roman occupiers and their Jewish collaborators. He called them Zealots.

The Zealots rose up in open rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E., a guerrilla army challenging a superpower. For four years, the Zealots and their allies managed to keep the most formidable army in the ancient world at bay. But, unlike the holy war that the Maccabees conducted against Antiochus, the latest war of national liberation ended in defeat. In 70 C.E., Roman legions fought their way into Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and put to death all but a remnant of the resistance fighters. Perhaps a thousand survivors of the siege of Jerusalem sought refuge in the palace Herod had built for himself in the Judean desert—the mountaintop fortress called Masada—where they held out for another two years. But Jewish armed resistance and Jewish political sovereignty had been crushed by the weight of Roman arms. All that was left was the opportunity for martyrdom.

Masada, of course, is the ultimate and enduring symbol of martyrdom in Jewish history. Surrounded by a Roman army, watching Jewish prisoners at work on an earthen ramp that would allow the legionaries and their siege engines to reach the walls of the fortress and awaiting the inevitable moment of defeat and death, the defenders of Masada chose to slay themselves rather than be slain by their enemies. Or, perhaps more accurately, the most zealous of their leaders made the choice on their behalf. On the night before the final assault by the Roman army, lots were cast to determine who would put nearly one thousand Jewish men, women and children to the sword before taking their own lives.

“[W]hen ten of them had been chosen by lot to be the executioners of the rest,” reports Josephus, “every man flung himself down beside his wife and children where they lay, put his arms round them, and exposed his throat to those who must perform the painful office.”
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The ten executioners drew lots again, and one of the ten was selected to cut the throats of the other nine. At last, only a single man remained alive atop Masada. As his last act of defiance, he set fire to the palace of Herod, “and, summoning all his strength, drove his sword right through his body and fell dead by the side of his family.” When the Roman soldiers finally reached the summit of Masada at dawn, fully expecting a last stand by the most zealous of the Jewish freedom fighters, they found only corpses: “Dreadful solitude on every side,” as Josephus recalls it, “fire within, and silence.”
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The Turncoat General

Jewish armed resistance against Rome did not come to a final end at Masada. Another major insurrection against Roman occupation took placed under Bar Kokhba in the second century C.E., and Jewish uprisings on a more modest scale continued to flare up now and then over the next several hundred years. But Judaism was ready to make its peace with pagan Rome. Indeed, the ancient historian who recorded the events of the Jewish War, including the last hours of the martyrs of Masada, offers a good example of the spirit of compromise that replaced the spirit of zealotry that had exhausted itself in the war.