Jericho, 134 BCE. For nine years, Simon Thassi, the last surviving Maccabee, has served two masters. As High Priest, he leads the Jewish world in prayer and sacrifice. And as Prince, he leads Judea ever closer to political independence from the Seleucid Empire. But he is not all-powerful. The Seleucid king, Antiochus of Side, still reserves the power to appoint regional governors within Judea, and one such governor has his eye on the throne. One evening, Prince Simon attends a banquet at the home of his daughter, who is married to the governor of Jericho. The Governor gives Simon, his wife, and their two sons a warm welcome, and by the end of the night, everyone is drunk. That's when the soldiers come out and butcher the men. The last of the Maccabees is gone; every brother dead by the sword. But one of Simon's children is not in attendance tonight. In Jerusalem, two assassins sneak into the Temple to kill the Prince's youngest son, John. They enter his bedroom swords drawn. They leave with swords through them. So begins the reign of a prince who was never meant to rule. He will begin coward and a failure; a man so hated by his own people that he cannot bear to live among them. But he will die a hero, a conqueror, a father of kings... John was never meant to be High Priest. As a general in the Judean army, he had almost certainly been in contact with dead bodies, which Kohanim are never supposed to do. The Maccabees were an exception: the Temple itself was at stake back then, and the survival of the Jewish people was more important than strict adherence to ritual law. But this would be the least of John's problems. First, the Governor of Jericho had just killed his father and brothers, and had tried to kill him! And so, after making his first priestly sacrifice, John led an army to confront his would-be murderer. Upon his arrival, John discovered his mother imprisoned before the walls of the fortress of Doq. He wavered, but then heard her speak: At this, the Governor's men slowly tortured her to death. True to her last words, John besieged Doq for eight months, until the Governor fled to Syria. In a turn that will shock no one, King Antiochus of Side decided that this was as good an excuse as any to put Judea back in its place. Antiochus had never really liked Simon, and he really didn't like John. A few years earlier, Antiochus had sent a punitive expedition against Judea, only to be defeated by the superior generalship of now-Prince John. And he had probably backed the Jericho conspiracy, only to see John come out as the sole survivor. Furthermore, decades of civil war had so weakened the Seleucid Empire that Arab merchants had begun setting up city-states in upper Mesopotamia, and Judea seemed like a good place to make an example of those who defied the Hellenistic order. Antiochus thus besieged Jerusalem for a year, eventually overpowering John's forces. To his credit, Antiochus was careful not to desecrate the Temple, for which the Jews gave him the name "Antiochus the Pious." However, he would not be taken for a fool, and demanded that a permanent Seleucid garrison be allowed into the city. John came up with a different solution. He took Antiochus to the tomb of King David, unveiled its treasury, and ordered the King 3,000 talents to leave. John then offered Antiochus something even more valuable: himself. Antiochus accepted, drafting John to serve as his lieutenant in a coming campaign against Parthia. Judea languished without a High Priest, and John came to be viewed as a feckless Seleucid puppet. John was well-aware of this, and began plotting his return to Judea. He was a great warrior; so great that Antiochus even let him lead his own army against Parthia and gave him a new name: Hyrcanus. Once in that position of power, Hyrcanus went out of his way to demonstrate his piety; observing Jewish holidays and celebrating festivals all alone, just to remind his people back home that he hadn't forgotten them; all the while waiting for the moment he could return to Jerusalem. That moment finally came in 128, when King Antiochus fell in battle against the Parthians. I'd love to say that Hyrcanus got close enough to give the King a dish best served cold; unfortunately he was miles away leading his own army. But as soon as he heard the news, he immediately deserted and raced home. Now, at this point, Hyrcanus was the desperately unpopular absentee ruler of an economically-ravaged vassal kingdom in the midst of a years-long leadership crisis that he caused when he remembered: "wait, don't we have an alliance with Rome?" And after dispatching a new embassy to the Roman Senate, Hyrcanus proclaimed Judea's full independence. No more vassalship; no more Seleucids; free and sovereign. It was at this exact point that the Seleucid Empire collapsed into yet another decade-plus civil war. And in 113, as the Seleucids appeared to have exhausted themselves, Hyrcanus– who by this point had almost completely restored the Judean economy– declared war. And this is where the Hyrcanus of legend comes into play. Remember the Oniads? Well at this time, they had been living in Egypt trying to start their own separate Temple in Alexandria [correction: Leontopolis]. Hyrcanus was able to convince the Ptolemies to put a stop to this, but it created a panic in Jerusalem over any and all perceived competitors to the Hasmonean priesthood, and that meant dealing with the Samaritans. To recap, the Samaritans were the descendants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Their religion was almost identical to Judaism, but they had their own priesthood and their own temple near the city of Samaria. To make things more confusing, Samaria had a significant Jewish minority who were subject to frequent raids by the Seleucids, and overwhelmingly favored Hyrcanus' favored political party, the Pharisees. So Hyrcanus overran Samaria, besieging the capital for a year before the Samaritan High Priest surrendered. The Samaritans did rebuild their Temple, and still make sacrifices there today, but now they were emphatically subjects of Jerusalem. Having nearly doubled the size of the Jewish state in a scant three years, Hyrcanus has turned south and did it all over again, making war against the Edomites. In the Bible, the Edomites are the descendants of Israel's brother Esau. They were a fellow Hebrew-speaking people and had been Jewish vassals during th early Davidic period. But they were also idolaters, and fanatically supported the Seleucids during the Maccabean Revolt. So Judea's continued independence was contingent on removing the Edomite threat. Now, as a kid in shul, I was taught that Esau's descendants were destined to be Israel's eternal rivals, which... I don't know, was meant to be as confusing as possible? Because the Edomites don't exist anymore. This is why. After conquering Edom, probably with help from the Nabatean Arabs, almost half of Judea's population was non-Jewish, which under Jewish law meant that merely half the population was exempt from certain taxes as well as military service. With basically no legal way to deal with this, Hyrcanus had the entire Edomite population forcibly converted to Judaism– a wildly unhalachic act that had basically no precedent and tore a permanent rift between Hyrcanus and the Pharisees. I'm gonna get into this more in the next episode, but here's a basic rundown of the Pharisees: Most Pharisees came from areas with large non-Jewish populations, and thus favored greater acceptance of minorities. Forcibly assimilating an entire tribe of people kind of runs counter to that. The Pharisees also favored a strong separation of powers based on a passage in the Book of Numbers in which Moses names two successors: Eleazar as High Priest and Joshua as Ethnarch, or chief. Conquering foreign lands was distinctly kingly behavior, and there was mounting pressure for Hyrcanus to abdicate the High Priesthood in favor of his eldest son, Aristobulus. Instead, Hyrcanus defected to the conservative Sadducees, who opposed the rabbinic tradition of the Pharisees and were overall less religious and more autocratic. But this also didn't work: the Pharisees were the majority in the Sanhedrin, and there was nothing he could do about that. And Aristobulus was married to a Pharisee, a common linen merchant's daughter named Alexandra bat Shetach. So he gave in. he was nearing the end of his life and things were going well. So to appease the political order, he willed the High Priesthood to Aristosbulus and the Principality to his wife. This compromise fell apart the moment Hyrcanus died in 104. As soon as the Prince's body was buried, Aristobulus had his mother thrown in prison and ordered the guards to let her starve to death. Charming! He then imprisoned three of his four brothers and crowned himself Aristobulus I, King of the Jews. The first crowning of a Jewish king in in almost five centuries should have been cause for celebration. Instead it was a constitutional crisis. Later that year, Aristobulus conquered [the] Galilee. As this was already a majority-Jewish region, the campaign was not terribly difficult, and this would be Aristobulus' sole accomplishment as King, for as soon as he returned to Jerusalem for the festival of Sukkot, he was felled by appendicitis, which back then was an unquestionable death sentence. Without any children, Aristobulus had planned to name Antigonus, the one brother he hadn't thrown in prison, as heir to the throne. This presented a huge problem for the Queen. Alexandra was 38 years old and had been married to Aristobulus for nearly 20 of those years, but in all that time had never become pregnant. Aristobulus was likely sterile, but there was no way of knowing that at the time, and Alexandra was suspected of being infertile. As a childless widow, Jewish law would compel Alexandra to marry Antigonus, who was seven years her junior and almost certainly wanted her dead in order to find a new, younger Queen. So Alexandra made a plan: First, she visited the King's younger brother Jonathan in prison, told him the news, and promised that she would make him King so long as he agreed to marry her. They had a deal. Meanwhile, Aristobulus had prepared a message urging Antigonus to come to the palace and receive the crown. But Alexandra bribed the messenger to add an additional caveat to the message: Antigonus was to appear before the King in full armor. When Antigonus arrived, this display of naked militarism made Aristobulus believe his brother had come to preemptively assassinate him, and had him executed. Aristobulus died later that week. As next in line to the throne, Jonathan was freed, and took the throne as King Alexander Yanai before marrying Alexandra. In time, one of them would plunge Judea into civil war. The other would transform Judea, for a brief, shining moment, into an Empire.