Hanukkah history
December 13th, 2009 by AriThis morning in shul I was playing with Aliza in the kids room, and she brought over “Hanukkah ABCs” for me to read. I obliged and was promptly met with the following:
A if for Antiochus, the Syrian king who….
Say what? Antiochus was a Seleucid Greek, not a Syrian. I don’t think there even was a place called Syria at that time. I also remembered back to my younger days – ancient history isn’t really taught at the elementary school level, and I remember never being really sure who exactly it was that the Maccabees fought against. Was it the Greeks? The Syrians? The Romans? The Borg? To that end, I now provide you with a very short answer to the question of just who was it that the Maccabees fought, and how it fit into the larger historical context of the time.
Alexander the Great was a Macedonian Greek who conquered a huge empire – from mainland Greece to the edge of India. When he died in 323 BCE, he had no obvious successor. After a few decades of fighting amongst the various attempted successors, his empire eventually fell out into four stable pieces – The Ptolemies, Seleucids, Pergamon, and Macedon. (map here). For our purposes the Ptolemies and Seleucids are the most important ones. The Ptolemies controlled modern day Egypt and parts of Africa, and the Seleucids controlled the area made up of modern day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. These two powers did fight numerous wars with each other, with Judea caught in the middle. Antiochus III was the Seleucid king who conquered Judea, and was actually a pretty nice guy to the Jews. It was his son, Antiochus IV, who ultimately outlawed Jewish ritual and tried to force the worship of Greek gods in the temple. This angered the Maccabees, and the whole Hanukkah story occurs. As a postscript to the story, the Seleucid empire didn’t have too much longer to live, and just a few decades later it’s power was negligible, although they continued in independence until Pompey the great decided to turn them into a Roman republic in 63 BCE.
The main issue of course is Antiochus. He was part of a line of Seleucid kings. The Seleucid empire was clearly Hellenistic, and was a direct descendant of Alexander the great. Calling anyone at that time a Syrian seems to be a bit of s stretch as Syria is a far more modern construct. I really have no idea how the whole Syrian thing crept into the elementary school curriculum. (Subversive anti-Syrian propaganda perhaps? :-)). The Jews were fighting against one of the Hellenistic Greek empires that existed at that time.
update: In the comments Yehuda points out that Herodotus used the term Syrian as early as 5th cent BCE, so my initial comments above may have been somewhat overstated. Thanks for the correction.
December 13th, 2009 at 4:27 am
I don’t know you, but am a reader of your blog through our mutual friend Zev. I could not resist pointing out, though, that there were certainly Syrians at the time of the Hanukkah story, though certainly Antiochus was not one of them. The earliest reference I can think of to Syrians off the top of my head is in Herodotus, who wrote around the 5th century BCE. Herodotus’ Syria was significantly bigger than modern Syria and appears to have included what is today Israel and Cyprus. The fact that ancient Syria included what is today modern Israel played a large political part in the plans for a merger between Syria and Egypt in the 1950s.
December 13th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
The folks who were implementing the hellenizing reforms that the Maccabees were so upset about were not actually the Selucids, but were other Jews: the Maccabean war was a civil war, and Antiochus IV only got involved after the second year of that war. I wrote about my annoyance with the term “syrian greek” a few years ago.
December 13th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
The term that I always remember being used was “Assyrian-Greek” – and, as the Seleucids controlled Assyria – and, perhaps, made their capital there – hence the name, and then I’m guessing that some less-informed folk dropped the first ‘a’ and ‘s’ from “Assyrian”…