The Greek Syrian (Seleucid) empire that ruled Judea 2,200 years ago conquered it in a war with Egypt’s Ptolemaic Empire; another Greek empire spawned by conquests of Alexander the Great, who had conquered the region 100 years earlier. During that war, the armies of the Greek Syrian empire would have been even more successful but for the intervention of a man who took his sandal off near Gaza and with it drew a line in the sand. He told the Greek Syrians that if they crossed that line there would be war with his own employer – the Roman Senate. From that point on, the Egyptian kingdom was a protectorate of the new power on the horizon, Rome.
When he was fighting Antiochus Epiphanes, Judah the Maccabee must have thought he was awful clever to send a large bribe along with an ambassador to the Roman Senate to obtain a letter of friendship from that body. He got the letter, and after he died in battle, his brother Jonathan and after him, his brother Shimon, renewed the letter of friendship. That letter, amongst other things, stopped the Greek Syrian empire from devoting its full attention to rooting out the stubborn Jewish rebels in their border province in the south. Judea eventually became almost independent of the Greek Syrian empire. But there would be a price to be paid. Had Judah the Maccabee understood that price; he might never have consented to seek friendship with Rome.
When the Greek Syrian Empire started to fall apart, the Romans became the “sole superpower” in the region. They demanded from the Jewish kingdom the right to a naval base in Acre (just north of modern Haifa) and started to meddle in the politics of the country. Eventually and inevitably, they absorbed Judea into their own expanding empire. They chose as their tool the angry and ambitious prince of the Idumaians whose people had been forcibly converted to Judaism just a few decades before and who therefore hated Jews. His name was Hordos, known to history as Herod of Idumaia. The accession of Hordos completed the corruption of Jewish institutions and led to dreams of national salvation and revolt against the new persecutors, Rome. The unsuccessful rebellion against Roman rule 1,930 years ago cost us our Temple and resulted in the exile our people have suffered until the rise of the modern State of Israel.
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