Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World

Alexander himself was dead by 323 B.C.E., only thirty-three years old and already weeping for want of new worlds to conquer, but he left behind an empire that now included the land of the Jews. And in Judea, as elsewhere throughout the ancient world, the local gentry were eager to embrace the alluring new ways of their latest overlords. So it was that the Jewish aristocracy and intelligentsia began to speak and write in Greek. The earliest translation of the Bible into a language other than Hebrew, for example, is the Greek version called the Septuagint. But, significantly, the aping of Greek ways by Jewish men and women went far beyond the otherwise pious study of scripture in translation.

“They frequented the theatres and sports meetings, held drinking bouts, and generally adopted the Greek manner of gay living,” writes Simon Dubnow, the twentieth-century scholar who revolutionized the study of Jewish history before his death during the Holocaust. 35They sent their sons to gymnasia, a form of schooling borrowed from the Greeks. They consorted with female dancers and singers, “the attractive vice which the Judaeans learned from the Greeks,” according to Heinrich Graetz, the pioneering Jewish historian of the nineteenth century. 36They even participated in the athletic competitions that were the centerpiece of Greek culture. And, because the athletes in the Greek games competed in the nude, some assimilated Jews sought to conceal the fact that they had been circumcised by a primitive version of plastic surgery, “submit[ting] to painful operations in order to remove the sign of the covenant,” as Graetz puts it, “and thus avoid the ridicule of the Greeks on the occasion of the Olympic Games.” 37

So powerful was the allure of Hellenism that it worked its seductive magic even on the priests who served in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem. At one point, for example, the two rivals for the high priesthood were Jewish men known as Jason and Menelaus; their names can be found nowhere in the Torah, of course, but they feature prominently in its pagan equivalent, the sacred myths of ancient Greece and Rome. And when Jason was elevated to the post of high priest, he found it appropriate to establish a palaestra—a public facility for the training of young men in the art of wrestling and other Greek sports—in the very heart of Jerusalem, the holiest place in all of Jewish tradition. To the horror and outrage of pious Jews, even the priests charged with the sacred duty of conducting daily sacrifices to Yahweh “neglected their duties to join the games.” 38

All of these practices were deeply offensive to the strict fundamentalists of Judaism, a faction that has come to be known as the Hasidim (“Pious Ones”). They detested the hedonistic ways of Hellenism, including the promiscuous display of the naked human body and the idle distractions of the theater and the stadium. They condemned their fellow Jews who embraced the Greek way of life as “violators of the Law” and vilified them as “evildoers against the Covenant.” 39The bitter struggle between the assimilationists and the fundamentalists of ancient Judea has been called “a ‘Kulturkampf’ between Judaism and Hellenism.” 40

“Kulturkampf,” of course, is a term commonly used nowadays in its rough English translation—“culture war”—to refer to any struggle between two warring value systems and ways of life. 41Just as the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” movements confront each other across the front lines of the culture war in the modern world, the pious Jews of antiquity who insisted on circumcision as a sacred rite confronted the assimilated Jews who chose to forgo the old ways. And so, as we shall come to see, “culture war” is equally useful in describing what was really at stake in the apocalyptic tradition and, especially, the book of Revelation.

But the tensions in the Jewish world of the second century B.C.E. were not merely the result of a clash between assimilationists and fundamentalists. The pagan king who ruled over Judea, as the ancient chroniclers described him, was a monster whose excesses eventually sparked a war of national liberation under the leadership of a man called Judah Maccabee, “Judah the Hammer.” Here, for the first time in recorded history, we are able to glimpse the remarkable power of the apocalyptic idea to move otherwise ordinary men and women to offer their lives, sometimes as soldiers and sometimes as martyrs, in the name of God.

On the death of Alexander the Great, his vast empire was divided up among his generals. The land of Judea, a small but strategically significant province that served as a land bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa, passed under the control of the Syrian dynasty founded by one of Alexander’s generals, a man called Seleucus. Starting in 175 B.C.E., the reigning king of the Seleucid dynasty was a particularly vile and hateful man called Antiochus IV. By an accident of history, as we shall shortly see, he will figure crucially in the book of Daniel, the only apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible and a text that served as one of the “models and sources” for the book of Revelation.

One of the glories of Hellenism was its open-mindedness toward religious beliefs and practices, a core value that characterized the world of classical paganism. But Antiochus IV was an aberration among the monarchs of the Greco-Roman world, an arbitrary and impulsive autocrat who sought to suppress the unruly Jewish fundamentalists in Judea by force of arms. He called himself Antiochus Epiphanes (“Antiochus the Manifestation of God”), but his excesses against the Jewish people were so much at odds with the tolerance that Hellenism displayed toward the religions of conquered people that he earned himself the moniker Antiochus Epimanes—Antiochus the Madman.

Antiochus was troubled by the unsettled state of affairs in Judea for mostly geopolitical reasons. The culture war among Jewish factions was approaching a state of civil war, and the Jewish fundamentalists were seeking to ally themselves with a rival pagan monarch, the pharaoh of Egypt, the descendant of yet another general who had served Alexander. When Antiochus finally marched into Judea on his way to Egypt in 168 B.C.E., his strategic objective was to secure his southern flank in Judea before making war on the meddlesome pharaoh. But he resolved to restore law and order in Judea by rooting out the practice of Judaism through a series of hateful and humiliating decrees.

Under Antiochus, the fundamental rites of Judaism—circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath, and the dietary laws of kashrut—were criminalized. The worship of the God of Israel was forbidden, and an image of Zeus, the high god of the Greek pantheon, was installed in the inner sanctum of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem. Thus, we are told, a pig was offered as a sacrifice on the altar of Yahweh, the high priest was ordered to eat its flesh, and its offal was poured over the scrolls of the Torah. All over the land of Judea, anyone who refused to turn over the Torah for public burning was subject to arrest, torture, and execution by the death squads of the Syrian king.

“They were whipped with rods and their bodies were torn to pieces,” reports Josephus, the Jewish general-turned-historian who eventually put himself in ser vice to the Roman Empire in the first century of the Common Era, “and they were crucified while they were still alive and breathed.” 42

Such atrocities sparked the Maccabean Revolt, an uprising against Syrian occupation and oppression led by the celebrated Judah Maccabee. Under Judah’s command, the Jewish resistance fought on two fronts, one a war of national liberation against the Syrian army, and the other a struggle against the assimilated Jews whom they regarded as both apostates and collaborators. Among the exploits of the Maccabees, for example, was the forcible circumcision of Jewish males, infant or adult, who had neglected the ancient rite that symbolized the covenant with the God of Israel. The armies of Antiochus were finally defeated in 164 B.C.E., and the Maccabees established the first independent Jewish state since the last Jewish king had been sent into captivity in Babylon.