I Let Go – משמט אני

Part 2: The Maccabean Social Revolution

Introduction:  

We have elsewhere described at length the course of the Maccabean Revolution and its religious side. In this piece we will be content to survey the economic and political status quo ante bellum and the changes the Revolution brought about.

But first, I feel we must justify the use of the term “revolution” rather than “rebellion”, uprising” or “revolt”. For indeed, the Jewish-Seleucid wars of the 2^nd century BC were not merely conflict against a distant suzerain, a war between two capitals, Jerusalem and Antioch, but rather a Jewish uprising against the existing political order of Judea and for the establishment of a new one in its place.

I: Condition of the Jewish Polity on the Eve of The Revolution

As we have observed before, Nehemiah’s great reform was quintessentially aristocratic in the best sense of the word: the leaders of the people, the wealthy and the connected, had assumed the burden of the Persian taxes.

In return, they were confirmed in their preeminent social and political positions, and even strengthen them, both internally and externally: after all, both the People and the Satrap Eber-Nahara ought to treat the men who, between them, pay the  entirety of the king’s Mindah quite differently than a group of equally wealthy persons who are merely the largest taxpayers among many in the province.  

The greatest of these aristocrats was no other of the High Priest.

Minor (or even an antagonistic) figures in the scriptural narratives of the Persian period, or even a subject of rebuke and humiliation in the prophetic literature of the early part of the period (which preferred the leadership of the still extant Davidic dynasty), the High Priests were without doubt the head of the most prestigious institution in Jerusalem: The Temple. Not only were the Temple and its hereditary priesthood the house of God Himself, it was also, conversely, the impetus for the reconstruction of the city itself.  

It is to the High Priest that Jewish communities (such as the community of Jewish soldiers in Ieb-Elephentine) differ and with which they corresponded requiring religious knowledge and support. This is not to say that the High Priest was effectively a monarch: The pre-Hasmonean accounts mention sufficient number of non-priestly families (such as the Tobiads, who have started as the leaders of another Jewish military colony on the eastern side of the Jordan) as well as the chain of events leading to the Maccabean Revolution demonstrate that Judea, especially Jerusalem, was ruled by an urban aristocracy who sought the assent of the people on occasion, but ruled on its own (see for instance the descriptions of the Great Assembly in Ezra and Nehemiah, including the lengthy lists of families and their lineages)[1].

 These families drew their power and wealth not from a monopoly or near monopoly of land ownership, since the Nehemiad legislation had prevented the expropriation of smallholders. Rather, we see them influence Ptolemaic and Seleucid politics in their own advantage (such as Menelaus and Jason’s purchase of the High Priesthood, and, earlier, the internal bickering of the Oniads) through cash contributions to these specie-hungry kings, whose vast revenues were never sufficient to fund their constant wars.

The use of monetary contributions for political ends, rather than the drafting of troops or supply of produce, as well as the focus of all political intrigue on the control of the High Priesthood in particular and the Temple in general, demonstrate the economic role of the Temple and the symbiotic relationship with the priestly and lay elites: namely, the Temple, by its very presence, was a great economic engine drawing in pilgrims, consumption and trade. Since Nehemiah’s reforms dispersed the people to their rural farms, the control and advantage of this trade was seized by the Seganim class, which also bore the Imperial tax burden that allowed the Temple to continue its existence.

The Macedonian conquest did not alter this fundamental relationship between the city and the countryside but rather exacerbated it.

Since the Hellenistic kingdoms had been locked in a centuries long war over control of the Land of Israel, they found themselves, despite their great revenues, strapped for cash to pay their troops. Therefore, the cash-laden city of Jerusalem have become a tempting target, while the Judean countryside, which had only marginal utility in supplying large armies compared to Syria and Egypt, was largely ignored[2].

These urban aristocracy wished to be integrated into the wider Hellenistic world in the same way that cities like Antioch or Alexandria were: To fence off the city as a polis which a specific group, its declared demos (which in reality would have included only the urban aristocracy) have rights to, and which controls a larger territory which it can dictate policy to (including cultic policy). Under the old Nehemiad arrangement, this was not possible: Jerusalem belonged to the people, not merely to its permanent residents.

Only a new constitution, imposed by the authority of the King, could establish it as a polis. But the kings would name their price: they would demand that the new polis will be dedicated to them as a royal polis, bearing their name, and that the cultic practices of the city be reformed to respectable Hellenistic forms: If El-YHWH is the God of Heaven, than in the Hellenistic interpretation he is either subordinate to or indistinguishable from Zeus. Therefore, His temple must honor Zeus in the accepted Greek forms rather than the native “barbarian” ones. Since the entire goal of the polis project was to achieve standing and respectability as a great Hellenic city, the aristocratic faction headed by men such as Jason and Menelaus saw this not as a price, but as an additional benefit.

II: The Economic and Political Maccabean Revolution

Even if we ignore, for the sake of brevity, all other aspects of the events between the killing of the Seleucid envoy in Modi’in on the altar of Zeus in 167 BC and the signing of the treaty between Simon Thassi and Demetrius II in 142 BC, one fact is undeniable:

In less than 3 decades, a family of country priests assembled an army, conquered the capital, took on the administration of the Temple, and established a self-ruling state in which the old Nehemiad aristocracy, if it survived, had lost its traditional claim to prestige since Judea no longer paid foreign taxes.

The new Hasmonean state went further and redistributed lands previously held by the Seleucid, their aristocratic supporters and foreign military settlers (klērouchoi, Cleruches) to their own (largely rural) supporters under the same conditions Hellenistic states (including the Seleucids) did to military settlers: prosperous farming communities were established, with inalienable titles to large tracts of land given to soldiers, in exchange for intergenerational commitment to service at time of need.

The phenomenon was extensive enough to alter the demography of regions like Galilee: At the end of the Hasmonean period, we find Galileans hold on to practices that had survived in the South only among the best (and therefore most conservative) families[3], such as the chaperoning of betrothed couples, and that Galileans of middling standing such as Joseph of Nazareth still considered Bethlehem in Judah to be his “family seat”.  Such actions were the hallmarks of democratic revolutions in the ancient world. In fact, they were often the main goal of the most violent ones since at least the 5^th century BC.

While we have no conclusive material evidence, some otherwise opaque literary hints might point out that to the degree pre-Hasmonean Jerusalemite aristocrats survived, they were politically suspected and disempowered by the Hasmonean order until the Roman period. The Sages record (and the Gospel implies) a curious prohibition on renting out houses or even beds in Jerusalem and, instead, “the pilgrims take them (the rooms) by force”[4].  Such a regulation could only disadvantage the best-off permanent residents of the city on behalf of pilgrims from the countryside, not to mention, humiliate them and reinforce the idea that Jerusalem is not a polis controlling the countryside as a subjugated chora, but on the contrary, is the assembly place servicing the countryside politically and religiously. This regulation could have not been invented in the post-70 AD period, since the narrative trend in the Rabbinic sources of that period was to idealize social relations in pre-66 AD Jerusalem and the legal trend was to emphasize property rights, and this Baraita flies in the face of both trends. If anything, the most famous rabbinic legend about pre-66 Jerusalemite social life, the story of Qamsa and Bar Qamsa, emphasizes property rights, highlighting precisely the inability of an uninvited guest to impose himself upon a host[5].

Therefore, we can conclude that the Maccabean Revolution was not, in essence, different from other Greek and Hellenistic democratic[6] revolutions: the common people take possession of the previously aristocratic State, they privatize and divide its assets between themselves, empower and honor their leaders, and disempower and establish some permanent signs of dishonor upon their opponents.

III: The Post-Revolutionary Economy of Hasmonaean Judea

The result of this new order was an economy in which the common Jew was a smallholder, and that smallholder had been economically empowered even more than in the Perso-Hellenistic period. In the extreme north and south of the new Hasmonean state, conquests were followed by a policy of wholesale conversion, which resulted in whole populations being brought into the Hasmonean order[7]. In the West, Hasmonean policy was focused on the economic rather than political and religious integration of Greek (or rather, Hellenized) settlements into the new state to open the wider Mediterranean market to Jewish products[8], as well as the extraction of tribute.  At most, the Hasmoneans either planted, replanted and protected Jewish communities in these cities,

This relationship was quite normal for Hellenistic states, including, for instance, pre-Social War Rome, which bound to itself its former Italian enemies as allies, extracted tribute and troops, settled its own soldiers on confiscated lands as anchors within their territories and use their commercial access to the wider Mediterranean[9], without compromising their political structures or intervening in their ritual lives.

As a result, Jewish farmer-soldiers had a secured land tenure and open market for their cash crops. Both Josephus (explicitly) and the sages (implicitly) attribute the absence of the typical Hellenistic large scale rural slavery to the Jewish moral ethos and Law, but it is worth noting that in the small-family-farm economy of Judea, the employment of slaves on a commercial scale was simply uneconomic. It is  quite possible that Jews could have seen the cruelty and immorality of this type of slavery specifically because they didn’t practice it, not the other way around[10], which eventually led to slavery being so legally abstracted and overregulated by the Pharisees (who represented the common smallholders, who owned little to no slaves) that salves seems to have become rare even as domestic servants, and hired free servants becoming the norm[11].

At the base of the system the Temple still stood as the most important engine of demand but, if anything, Hasmonean policy (at least up to John Hyrcanus II) was aimed to minimize the economic dependency of the countryside on Jerusalem. 

IV: Synagogue, Solidarity and Soldier-Farmer Politics

As we established the Hasmonean State's revolutionary bona fides, and its commitment in principle (at least until the 1^st Jewish Civil War in the reign of Jonathan Alexander Jannaeus if not beyond), we must think about the ways in which this state maintained the ideological commitment of its population. Enter the synagogue.

The 2^nd Temple synagogue was not merely a religious institution.

As Lee I. Levine observes[12] but had a whole-of-society function. Where Jews were the majority, it served as the local ecclesiasterion, the Hellenistic (indoors) replacement for the Agora's democratic functions. Where they weren't, it housed the local community's treasury, archives and executive and judicial councils. In Jerusalem, the Theodotos synagogue dedicated much of its space to accommodate pilgrims (no doubt to alleviate the pressure on private homes). But everywhere, the synagogue is described by 2^nd Temple Period authors as a place dedicated to "teaching the Laws" (didaskalia tōn nomōn). The term Law was never politically neutral in Graeco-Roman discourse. In fact, Nomos almost always meant the political constitution (or ideology) of a community, not its religious observances (Eusebia, pietas). To the fact that such political constitutions were almost always sanctioned by the authority of the Deity and whose reading was often accompanied by religious observances was immaterial. Nor is it material that the decision to translate Torah as Nomos or Lex precedes Philo and Josephus material. If anything, it strengthens our position: that in the Hasmonean period, the Torah was understood as a divine social and political order. That God was understood as a God of Justice and Law, and therefore, that the place in which it was taught was a political, ideological institution. In a revolutionary state such as the Hasmonean dynasty, the proliferation of such an institution should be interpreted, simply, as the spread of political ideological clubs. Not unlike the Jacobin and Girondin clubs in Revolutionary France.  

When we examine the deeper roots of the synagogue, this sense deepens. The synagogue after all was not native to Hasmonean Judea. It was invented by Jewish mercenaries in evolving slowly from the miniature, subordinated replicas of the Jerusalem Temple in Elephantine to sanctuaries (temenoi) and "Houses of Life" under the patronship of Ptolemaic monarchs into the proseuchai (the more common word for synagogue in the period) of the 2^nd century onwards. Since these institutions provided a perfect example of how to keep a sense of community among Jewish soldier-settlers (and their descendants), it is no wonder that the Hasmoneans, whose rise and success (and the entire project of their early state) was bound to that of a class of post-revolutionary Jewish soldier-farmers, there is no wonder they adapted this institution and encouraged its spread.

Thus, the synagogue was an institution that kept the spirit of the Maccabean revolution alive and kept strong the cohesion and solidarity of cleruchic and cleruchic-descended Jewish communities. There is no wonder that the Pharisees, which, as a class, grew up ad-hoc from the synagogal floor, were able, when the Hasmonean seemed to turn away from the traditional cleruchic Jewish army and towards the new mercenary corps, to whip up a revolt that almost toppled the reign of Jannaeus and ultimately reasserted the revolutionary order during the reign of Salome Alexandra.

Conclusion: “I Let Go”: The Dialectics of Ancient Judea

After the death of Alexandra, the 2^nd Jewish Civil War and, finally, the crucifixion of Alexandra's grandson King Antignos II Matthias and the rise of Herod to the Jewish throne as a Roman client king, the Jews found themselves again in the clutches of a tributary empire.

 At that time, however, Judea, which will not become a Roman province until 6 AD, did not suffer the full brunt of direct Imperial taxation. Rather, wealthy Jews were often the target of arbitrary predation by Herod and his court. Since Herod (an Idumean, and certainly not a priest) was not eligible to the high priesthood, he could not touch the Temple treasury[13], the traditional Hasmonean source of state-funds, without sparking a revolt. For that reason, and since he was on a major building project, he was always hungry for cash[14].

 In addition, the de-facto joining of Judea into the Roman sphere of influence and its effective economic integration with Egypt meant that at this time, Jews of the homeland gained access to the Alexandrian market. This market both competed with some Judean cash crops (such as grain) but was hungry for others (kosher wine and olive oil, sacrificial animals and so on). In addition, Jewish artisans tapped into the margins of Alexandrian industry, producing semi-transparent colored glass which competed in the low-end glass market with Alexandrian "white" (transparent) glass.

Under these circumstances, there was a real danger that a stunted credit system would lead to the opposite result of the intent of the original Nehemiad restoration of the Sabbatical Year's debt remission: Namely, money will disappear from the Judean low end market, streaming into larger markets, and become the sole possession of the rich. The prosperity of the common smallholder and artisan would stagnate and diminish for the lack of funds to invest, while the wealthy and connected rip all the benefits.

It is on this background that the Sanhedrin (headed by Hillel the Elder) had issued their "Prozbul" – really, the word is a corruption of πρὸς βουλήν "(That which came from) before the council / the council house", a general Hellenistic term for a decree by the council, or προσβολή, "(I) submit (this matter) before the council", that is, a deposition in court, or an a creation of a trust under the authority and administration of the Court. In this instrument, debts were assumed by the corporate body of local communities. This way, the duty to remit the debt was voided since the Law applied only to personal debts.

Thus, credit was made available to the common man. But the Mishnah still records a widespread phenomenon of creditors who, when approached by their debtors at the end of the year (assuming that the debt was "assumed" by the council and thus still in force), had informed them משמט אני "I let go", that is, they have deliberately avoided the submission of debts in order to remit the debt out of personal piety:

הַמַּחֲזִיר חוֹב בַּשְּׁבִיעִית, יֹאמַר לוֹ מְשַׁמֵּט אָנִי. אָמַר לוֹ אַף עַל פִּי כֵן, יְקַבֵּל מִמֶּנּוּ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (דברים טו) וְזֶה דְּבַר הַשְּׁמִטָּה. כַּיּוֹצֵא בוֹ, רוֹצֵחַ שֶׁגָּלָה לְעִיר מִקְלָט וְרָצוּ אַנְשֵׁי הָעִיר לְכַבְּדוֹ, יֹאמַר לָהֶם, רוֹצֵחַ אָנִי. אָמְרוּ לוֹ, אַף עַל פִּי כֵן, יְקַבֵּל מֵהֶם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (שם יט) וְזֶה דְּבַר הָרוֹצֵחַ: הַמַּחֲזִיר חוֹב בַּשְּׁבִיעִית, רוּחַ חֲכָמִים נוֹחָה מִמֶּנּוּ. הַלֹּוֶה מִן הַגֵּר שֶׁנִּתְגַּיְּרוּ בָנָיו עִמּוֹ, לֹא יַחֲזִיר לְבָנָיו. וְאִם הֶחֱזִיר, רוּחַ חֲכָמִים נוֹחָה מִמֶּנּוּ. כָּל הַמִּטַּלְטְלִין, נִקְנִין בִּמְשִׁיכָה. וְכָל הַמְקַיֵּם אֶת דְּבָרוֹ, רוּחַ חֲכָמִים נוֹחָה מִמֶּנּוּ:

One who returns a debt [after] the seventh year, the [creditor] must say to [the debtor]: “I remit it.” But [the debtor] should say: “Even so [I will repay it].” [The creditor] may then accept it from him, because it says: “And this is the word of the release” (Deuteronomy 15:2). Similarly, when [an accidental] killer has been exiled to a city of refuge, and the citizens want to honor him, he must say to them: “I am a murderer.” If they say: “Even so, [we want to honor you], then he may accept [the honor] from them, because it says: “And this is the word of the murderer” (Deuteronomy 19:4). One who repays his debts after the seventh year, the sages are pleased with him. One who borrows from a convert whose sons had converted with him, the debt need not be repaid to his sons, but if he returns it the sages are pleased with him. All movable property can be acquired [only] by the act of drawing, but whoever fulfills his word, the sages are well pleased with him[15].

What we can see here is a thinly veiled criticism: The creditor is compared to a killer who still have social pretension in his place of exile, and the entire tractate concludes by asserting the validity of a string of ancient statutes (acquisition by drawing rather than exchange of money) and non-obligatory market practices which supersede the letter of the Law in order to benefit the community.

And nevertheless, the practice of remitting debts persisted and was not surpassed. The world which the Hasmoneans created, that little prosperous country, strewn with strong communities and opinionated common people, was a dialectical place: The synagogue could have produced solidarity or factions hellbent on civil war. It was based on the remission of debts, but created the conditions to its ceasing in order to stabilize the economy. It was a revolutionary state, but an incredibly conservative one.

[1] Benhamin Mazar connect the Tobiads to a noble family of the 1^st Temple Period and theorized they and other Sarim had never lost their estates. In either case, the existence of non-liturgical aristocracy in Persian / Hellenistic Jerusalem is well established.

[2] See for instance the description by Agatharcides, quoted by Josephus in Against Apion I:22:

"The people known as Jews, who inhabit the most strongly fortified of cities, called by the natives Jerusalem, have a custom of abstaining from work every seventh day; on those occasions. they neither bear arms nor take any agricultural operations in hand, nor engage in any other form of public service, but pray with outstretched hands in the temples until the evening.

Consequently, because the inhabitants, instead of protecting their city, persevered in their folly, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, was allowed to enter with his army; the country was thus given over to a cruel master, and the defect of a practice enjoined by law was exposed. That experience has taught the whole world, except that nation, the lesson not to resort to dreams and traditional fancies about the law, until its difficulties are such as to baffle human reason.”

We can take note that it is the city that was not defended on the Sabbath, and, subsequently, the entire country fell to the hands of a “cruel master”.  This makes sense only in the context of a siege.

[3] See Mishnah Ketubot 1:5 and the Yerushalmi. While the Babli attempts to softens it, the Yerushalmi makes it clear that the prospect of premarital intercourse between the bride and groom was intended and even considered desirable for the families, albeit the reasoning it gives seems ahistorical. On the chaperoning of betrothed couples in Galilee and among the aristocratic families in Judea see the Tosefta (Ketubot 1:4/6)

[4] See Tosefta Maaser Sheni 1:12 and in an expanded form quoted in the Babli, Yoma 12a. The stated reason is sharpened in the Babylonian recension of the Baraita (“They (the houses of Jerusalem) do not belong to them (the owners)” rather than the Tosefta recension (“It (Jerusalem) was not divided to the tribes / still belongs to all the tribes”). Iin the Gospel accounts (Mark 14:12-26, Matt 26:17-30) Jesus simply informs a house owner that he will be taking over his guest room, without mentioning compensation or the owner participating in Jesus’ sacrificial band. The owner was probably relieved that he will have to host only a small and relatively polite party that took the trouble to inform him rather than take the room by force.

[5] See Gittin 55b-56a. Similarly, in the Nativity narrative of Luke 2, we see that in Bethlehem, guests had to pay for their rooms and therefore there could be dedicated inns and that when these full, said guests had to resort to lodging in marginal premises such as stables rather than commandeering private dwellings. Thus we can se that the Gospel authors did not see the situation described in the Last Supper narrative as normal for anywhere but Jerusalem and thus would have not invented it after the fact.

[6] In the sense that they were carried out by the demos against the aristocracy, not that the resulting regime would have satisfy the criteria of modern liberal democracy. We should refrain from falling into the Marxian framework: the rural demos was first and foremost defined by occupying a geographically and ritually distinct space (the countryside) than the urban elites. This was not a “social” revolution in the Marxist sense of the word, driven by economic oppression, but rather, the act of an already prosperous countryside reacting to attempts to disenfranchise it and to dictate to it a new political and ritual order it found offensive. In many regards, it is not dissimilar to the Europeans (and especially English) wars of religion in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  

[7]  While both Josephus and the Sages record the disdain by which native Jews regarded such populations, e.g. the Idumeans and Ieturians, we have no instance in which they open in outright revolt against the Hasmonean State. On the contrary, as the case of the Antipatrene-Herodian family demonstrates, the Hasmoneans valued them as a base of power independent of the common people and the Jewish Cleruchic army. There is some interesting scholarship claiming the conversions either did not occur or were more widespread than that. At either rate, since the research is still inconclusive, for the purposes of this piece, I adopt the traditional view pending further evidence.

[8] See Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 41-47.

[9] Cf. the case of Roman Capua, which maintained its political independence and economic dominance within Italy long after its inclusion in the Roman Italian system

[10] 2^nd Temple Judaism, like other societies at the time, did not produce a condemnation of slavery in principle, but condemned various social ills associated with slavery as well as the cruel and murderous nature of Hellenistic and Roman slavery, and sought to limit slavery in its own society.

^[11] Mishnah Pesahim 7:13 demonstrates that freeborn Jewish servants were utilized even when their status caused awkward and inconvenient situations.

[12] Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue; The First Thousand Years (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 27 (quoting Rivkin), 52 (the Josephus testimony of the Synagogue as a political space), 74-80 (on the synagogue as a "communal space" with a religious dimension rather than the other way around. Levine makes the point (pp 75) that Diasporic and coastal synagogues, that is, those whose  Jewish membership have been the minority in their cities, might have a greater "religious" character than those which had to serve, essentially,, as a Jewish city or village's center of self-government.

[13] It is not unreasonable to speculate that the entire renovation project of the Temple in his reign was an elaborate attempt to access, or even siphon funds off the Temple treasury.  Judging by the large treasure houses and fortress-palaces he built afterwards, as well as his increasing paranoia and fear of revolt, he just might have done so.

[14] Considering Herod restored to his kingdom the coast, which was taken away from John Hyracanus II by Pompey Magnus, only through Roman favor, his attempt to portray himself as Friend of the Hellenes through large benefactions to the same cities, makes a great deal of political and economic sense.

[15] Mishnah, Sheviit, 10:8-9