Jerusalem: The Biography

* His family is correctly known as the Hasmonean dynasty, but for simplicity they are identified in this book as the Maccabeans. The Maccabee became the medieval prototype for Christian chivalry alongside King Arthur and Charlemagne. Charles ‘Martel’ – the Hammer – who defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Tours in 732; Richard the Lionheart in the twelfth century and Edward I (1272–1303) promoted themselves as latterday Maccabees. Later, Rubens painted Judah the Maccabee; Handel wrote an oratorio dedicated to him. The Maccabees have especially inspired Israel, where many of the football teams are named after them. As the heroes of Hanukkah, Jews traditionally regard them as freedom-fighters against a genocidal tyrant, a precursor of Hitler. But some have suggested another view, inspired by today’s struggle between American democracy and jihadist terrorism, in which the Greeks are the civilized ones fighting Maccabee religious fanatics who resemble a Jewish Taleban.

* This new high priest was not even a member of the Zadokite House of Onias. Its rightful heir was Onias IV, who now fled with his followers to Egypt where he was welcomed by King Ptolemy VI Philometer. Philometer allowed him to build a Jewish temple on the site of a disused Egyptian shrine at Leontopolis in the Nile Delta, and there he created his own Jerusalem, still known as Tell al-Jahudiya – Hill of the Jews. These Jewish princes became powerful military commanders in Egypt. Onias’ temple lasted until Titus ordered its destruction in AD 70.

* Philometer’s successor was hostile to the Jews because Onias and the Alexandrian Jews had supported Philometer. Even by the family’s vicious standards, Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, nicknamed Fatso (Physkon) by the Alexandrian mob, was a monster. Fatso took revenge on the Jews in Egypt, massing his elephants to trample them, but, perhaps in a divine miracle, the elephants trampled the king’s entourage instead. The climax of his cruelties was the murder of his own fourteen-year-old son who totally trusted his father: Fatso had the boy’s head, legs and hands cut off and sent to his own mother, Cleopatra II. When another of the family, Cleopatra Thea who married the Syrian king Demetrius II, decided to murder her own son, she offered him a cup of poison. But the son forced the mother to drink it. Such was family life among the Ptolemies.

† No trace has been found of the Acra. Some scholars believe it stood just south of Temple Mount. Herod the Great was to extend the Temple Mount, so probably the razed hill of the Acra is now beneath the Temple platform where al-Aqsa Mosque stands. For those who question why so little survives from the reign of, say, King David, this demonstrates that enormous constructions can leave no archaeological trace.

* And with a new nickname, Hyrcanus, surely the result of his Parthian adventures, even though he never reached Hyrcania on the Caspian. He consolidated his power abroad with a new Roman alliance and in Jerusalem through the backing of the rich Temple elite, the Sadducees, descendants of the house of Zadok – hence their name.

* The city wall extended from the Temple Mount to the Siloam Pool and thence to the Citadel, where the foundations of his towers remain today, and where one can see little residential houses of Maccabean Jerusalem. Sections of his wall survive at various places: on the south slope of Mount Zion, just west of the Catholic Cemetery, there is a place where John’s wall still stands next to the bigger stones of Hezekiah’s and the much later ones of the Byzantine empress Eudocia. In 1985, Israeli archaeologists discovered a subterranean aqueduct and large pool built by John and the Maccabees. British, German and French archaeologists in the nineteenth century had uncovered this Struthion Pool underground in 1870 when the Sisters of Zion convent was built on the Via Dolorosa. The aqueduct reveals how the Struthion Pool was supplied and, beneath the Convent, close to the Via Dolorosa, visitors can walk along this aqueduct, now part of the Temple Tunnel. The Maccabees also built a bridge across the deepvalley between the Temple Mount and the Upper City. John himself resided in his Baris stronghold, north of the Temple, but he also probably started to build a palace in the expanding Upper City.

* When he attacked the Greek city Ptolemais, Ptolemy IX Soter, then ruling in Cyprus, intervened and defeated Alexander. But he was rescued by Jewish connections: Soter was at war with his mother Cleopatra III, Queen of Egypt, who feared her son’s power in Judaea. Cleopatra’s commander was the Jewish Ananias, the son of the ex-high priest Onias, who rescued the Maccabean king. Cleopatra considered annexing Judaea, but her Jewish general advised against this, and she was in no position to take on her own army.