Chanukah 5783

 In the years following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, Israel bounced back and forth half a dozen times between the Egyptian Empire and the Syrian Empire. Each change of government resulted from a separate war, collectively if vaguely known to historians as the Syrian Wars, but the details have almost all been forgotten. Tens of thousands died on the battlefield. None of these wars accomplished much of anything, however—other than laying the groundwork for yet another war intended by the party that lost as a means of gaining back the territory surrendered to the party that won in the previous one. It’s almost impossible to keep the details straight, and not least of all because all the kings of Egypt involved in all six of these wars were named Ptolemy and almost all the kings of Syria, then called the Seleucid Empire after its founder, were named Antiochus. I remember trying to master the details back in graduate school and thinking that my task was something like what it would be like to attempt to master the plots of all of Shakespeare’s plays if all the protagonists in all the plays had the same names. Possible, obviously. But just barely.

Two battles count more than most: the Battle of Gaza in 217 BCE, which was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of ancient times and which ended with a resounding victory for Egypt; and the Battle of Panium (now the site of a lovely park in northern Israel) in 200 BCE, which led to the permanent annexation of Israel by the Syrians, which in turn led eventually into the events of the Chanukah story. All of this has been long forgotten by all. Indeed, the thought that the “real” reason Antiochus IV, the king who went to war with the Maccabees, was so eager to rule Israel with an iron fist had much more to do with his fear of yet another Egyptian invasion than it did with any specific desire to alter the course of Jewish history will itself seem vaguely blasphemous to most: we have all been raised to hate the wicked king who attempted to outlaw Judaism, but which of us was ever invited into the incredibly complex political background that went into the king’s eventually tragic decision to favor the party in Jerusalem he considered the most likely to return his support later on should yet another war erupt.

I thought I would write my pre-Chanukah letter this week about Antiochus IV, the king we all love to hate. He was, in fact, more of a shlimazel than anything else, the heir to a complex set of political realities he seems to have been only barely capable of mastering, let along using creatively for his nation’s benefit. And here he is in a flattering coin-portrait created by an artist of his own day.

There’s lots to say. First of all, his name wasn’t really Antiochus: his parents named him Mithridates and he merely took the name Antiochus, his father’s name, when he ascended to the throne in the fall of 175 BCE. (Whether his father had a different name too before he ascended to the throne is not known.) But he was not his father’s immediate successor. That would have been his brother Seleucus, who reigned from 187 until his murder in 175 BCE. The legal successor should have been Seleucus’s son Demetrius, who was actually declared king by his father’s assassin even though he was being held captive in Rome. His absence created a vacuum of power at the top which was quickly filled by “our” Antiochus, who declared the new king to be a different son of Seleucus, also named Antiochus (you see what I mean about these people’s names), whom he himself had murdered shortly thereafter…which left him free to seize the throne, illegally but effectively, in 175. And so “our” Antiochus became the king of Syria. Not a nice man, although one with nice-looking hair. (Were the curls natural? Did they even have curling irons in antiquity? I’ll try to find out.)

He was widely thought to be at least slightly demented. In fact, his official name Antiochus Epiphanes (literally, “Antiochus the Magnificent”) was often altered by his subjects to Antiochus Epimanes, literally “Antiochus the Madman.” And he behaved oddly too, often abandoning the palace to show up naked in a public bathhouse or weirdly attempting to run for public office as though his great ambition in life was to become a paid alderman situated a thousand ranks lower than his actual status.

But mostly his foreign policy was about keeping the Romans calm and keeping the Egyptians from re-seizing Israel. He got off to a good start with the Romans by paying off the huge sum of money owed them after their victory in what historians now call the four-year-long Roman-Seleucid War that raged from 192 BCE to 188. The Egyptians, not so much. But the Romans were the allies of Egypt…and in that detail lay the ultimate cause of Antiochus’s undoing.

The real background to the Chanukah story is called by historians the Sixth Syrian War. In 170, the Egyptians declared war yet again on the Syrians with the specific intention of regaining Israel for their empire. This did not go at all well: the Syrians counterattacked ferociously, seized almost all of Egypt except Alexandria, and took their king (called, because what else, Ptolemy) captive. Antiochus allowed the Egyptian king to continue to reign, but only as a servant to Syrian interests. This did not go over well with the Egyptians, however, who revolted and succeeded in putting a brother of Ptolemy, also (of course) named Ptolemy, on the throne. This was a direct repudiation of Syria’s victory, and so Antiochus sent a huge army, headed by himself, to attack Egypt again two years later in 168 BCE. But he didn’t anticipate the degree to which this would anger the Romans. Nor did he anticipate what happened next.

That story, we know only from the great Roman historian Polybius, who lived from about 200 BCE to about 116 BCE. To read the story in his Histories, Antiochus landed and began his march into Egypt, only to find himself facing not a Roman army intent on thwarting his plans, but a single Roman individual, a man named Caius Popilius Laenas who had come from Rome with a letter from the Senate ordering Antiochus to go home and leave the Egyptians be. Imagine the scene: Antiochus, king of Syria, with thousands of soldiers behind him and a single man, an emissary from the Roman Senate, standing in the road in front of him. The latter handed Antiochus a letter from the Senate ordering him to retreat. Antiochus, no doubt uncertain how to respond, said he needed time to consider the offer. Popilius said that was fine, then took a stick from the ground and drew a circle around Antiochus, informing him that he needed to make his decision before stepping outside the circle. Thus humiliated in front of his own men yet terrified to defy Rome openly, he politely—and more than just a bit pathetically, given that he was leading an army and Popilius was one single man—he politely agree to go home, which he then did.

And that instance of public disgrace was the background that led to the Maccabean revolt. Antiochus, more eager than ever to keep the Jews of Judea happy and disinclined to fight with the Egyptians during the inevitable next war, lighted on the idea of putting in power those Jews who seemed the most eager to become part of his world—to worship in the Syrian-Greek style, to speak Greek, to frequent Greek-style gymnasiums, to attend theaters featuring the great dramas of the Greek playwrights, etc. For good measure, he outlawed practices liked the least by the Jews he liked the most, and circumcision foremost among them. Calculating incredibly incorrectly, Antiochus imagined “his” Jews to be invincible with his royal support. But he failed to take into account the detail that the large majority of Jews were revolted by those innovations and wanted only to maintain their ancient ways and their ancient cult without some outside authority bossing them around and telling them how to conduct themselves spiritually or religiously. And it was at that precise moment that the Maccabee brothers, sensing the potential inherent in the situation, began a guerilla war against the Syrians, eventually wresting some kind of autonomy from the Seleucids. So that was in 164 BCE. But within a few decades, the Syrian Empire had become so riddled with insurrection and civil unrest that the Jews of Israel were able to function as an autonomous region within the empire. In 104 BCE, a descendent of the original Maccabees proclaimed himself king…and Jewish autonomy morphed into real independence, which lasted for about forty years. But that’s a whole different story, the one featuring the Romans landing on the shores of Israel and slowly taking over. It’s a good story too, though. I’ll tell it another time.

So Antiochus the Shlimazel. Humiliated before his troops. Illegitimately on the throne in the first place. Mocked as a crazy person by his own subjects. And, in the end, a failure whose own personal poor decision making led not only to Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel, but also eventually to the end of his own dynasty.

By the end, he didn’t look so well either.

Sic semper tyrannis! Happy Chanukah to all!