Original subtitles

(STIRRING MUSIC)

In the 6th century BC,

Judean captives in Babylon wrote the first edition of the Hebrew Bible.

After they returned to Jerusalem,

this new book would define the Judean people,

giving them a sense of what was right and what was wrong.

But then they would be faced with a choice...

give up their faith or fight to defend it.

No threat would prove more dire

than when Alexander the Great and the Greeks

swept through the Middle East,

bringing with them the most exciting culture the world had ever seen.

But Judaism would not die.

It would instead be transformed by the new belief

that the Bible was not just a book

but a divine testament authored by God himself,

and that those who were faithful to God

would be rewarded in an afterlife.

Faith in this new Judaism would become so strong

that the Jews would become the first people in history

willing to fight...

and die for their religion and their God.

(PLAINTIVE MUSIC)

In 538 BC, the Persians conquered Babylon.

Then the Persian king freed all of the Babylonians' captives.

One people he encouraged to return home

were the Judeans.

"Cyrus, King of Persia, says this:

'Yahweh, the God of Heaven,

'has given me all the kingdoms of the earth

'and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem in Judah.

'Whoever among you belongs to the full tally of his people,

'may his God be with him.

'Let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah

'and build the Temple of Yahweh, God of Israel. '

But returning to a land their grandparents had left decades before

was a daunting challenge.

And many Jews who had made successful lives for themselves

remained in Babylon.

It was the adventurous and the deeply religious

who were drawn to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple.

As soon as the exiles arrived in Jerusalem,

work on the Second Temple began.

The Book of Ezra described the excitement that filled the air.

"The people contributed money for the masons and carpenters,

"and food, drink and oil for the men from Sidon and Tyre

"who brought cedar wood from Lebanon by sea,

"for which Cyrus, King of Persia, had given permission.

"The priests in their robes stood forward with trumpets,

"and the Levites with symbols, to praise Yahweh.

"Then all the people raised a mighty shout of praise

"since the foundations of the Temple had now been laid.

"Many of the older priests and heads of families,

"who had seen the First Temple, wept.

"But many others shouted aloud for joy! "

But the Temple was the only source of joy for the returnees.

The rest of their world was grim.

The only Judeans the Babylonians had left behind

were the poorest of the peasants.

Now their descendants were on the verge of starvation

as they struggled to eke out a living from the land.

The only others living nearby

were peoples who had been forcibly resettled in lsrael

after the northern tribes were exiled.

These foreigners would do all they could

to keep the returnees from gaining a foothold in Jerusalem...

for they viewed them as rivals for control of the region.

(WIND BLOWS, SHEEP BLEAT)

But the worst burden for the returnees to bear

was that their ancestral home, Jerusalem, was a wasteland.

MAN: The city of Jerusalem is still in ruins.

The people who come back to live in the area of Jerusalem

go and inhabit those stone buildings

that were left standing from the time of the Babyblonian destruction.

So you have half of the city where people are living in ruined homes,

and then another half of the city

where nobody is living and the buildings are still standing empty.

It would have been... something depressing.

And, after a while, all hope would have gone out of the people,

and people would have settled down to a life of discontent.

(GLOOMY MUSIC)

Soon, even the building of the Temple slowed to a crawl,

crippled by conflict between the returnees and the foreigners.

The ruthless uprooting of groups like the Judeans,

who were then resettled with peoples of entirely different ethnicity and religion,

had led to turmoil throughout the Middle East.

In Judea, law and order had completely broken down.

By convincing the Persians that the Jews were planning to rebel,

the foreigners won an order suspending the rebuilding of the Temple.

Eventually, the Jews received permission to continue,

but were too poor and too apathetic to finish the work.

Eighty years after they arrived,

the return home of the exiles seemed like a horrible mistake.

But then a remarkable man arrived in Jerusalem.

His name was Ezra,

and he had been sent by the Persian king

to restore order to Jerusalem.

"Artaxerxes, king of kings, to the priest Ezra.

"Greetings.

"Now, here are my orders.

"You are being sent to Judah and Jerusalem.

"You are to appoint magistrates and scribes

"to administer justice for all who know the law of your God.

"And you are to teach it to all who do not know it. "

ZEVIT:. Ezra is a scribe and a priest.

One didn't become a scribe because he was born a scribe.

One became a scribe by dint of talent,

intelligence, literacy and creativity.

So now comes back to Jerusalem a man of rank

and privilege and political power.

(PERCUSSION & HORN)

Ezra had come from Babylon

where Jewish scribes had written the first edition of the Hebrew Bible.

But the mostly illiterate returnees

knew nothing about the book or its stories or its laws.

Now Ezra had a surprise for them.

MAN: Ezra didn't come to Jerusalem empty-handed.

He came with a book.

And that book was almost certainly the Torah,

the first five books of the Bible,

in the form that we have it today.

And he said to the people

"This is what we're about and this is how you must live. "

In what would prove to be one of the most important events in history,

Ezra gathered all of the people of Judea together

in a square near the Temple

and read them the first five books of the Bible,

the Torah.

(Man reads in Hebrew)

FRIEDMAN: That makes Ezra kind of a new Moses.

He's the law giver, he's the one who stands up and tells the people

"Well, you haven't known exactly the right thing to do until now

"but from this day forward you will always know the right thing to do.

"And it's in this scroll, right here. "

"You are the children of Yahweh, your God.

"You must take all the tithes of your harvest for the year

"and gather them together in your community.

"Then the foreigner, the orphan and the widow

"living in your community will come and eat.

"I'm giving you this command.

"Always be open-handed with your brother

"and with anyone in your country who is in need and poor.

"Remember that you were once a slave in Egypt

"and Yahweh, your God, redeemed you.

"That is why I am giving you this order. "

(GENTLE MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

FRIEDMAN: The central possession of the Jews is the Torah

and it became the central possession of the Jews THAT day,

the day that Ezra had it read in Jerusalem.

Before that, they had parts of the Torah

but that day they had the whole thing.

And for the 2500 years since then,

that's been the governing force of the Jews,

the highest ideal.

All of it, the history, the laws, the principles of Torah,

all come out of that moment in history.

After the ceremony in which Ezra read the Torah,

the people of Judea were asked to sign a contract

agreeing to live according to the laws of the Bible.

The document they signed was revolutionary...

proof that the lsraelites' God cared not just about kings and priests,

but about farmers and weavers, mothers and fathers.

MAN: This is a profoundly democratic religious revolution.

What Ezra declared that day

is there is no secret knowledge in Israel.

In traditions all over the world, there were always mystery priests

and rites that other people couldn't know,

but the Torah is full of the exact rites that the priests follow in the Temple,

and what that means is every Israelite can know

what the priests know, what the teachers know.

God's revelation is for anyone who chooses to understand it.

Not one revelation to the prophet and one to the priest,

and then a lower order of revelation to the average person in the street,

but rather, everyone can seek God,

everyone can understand God's teachings.

Ezra's call for all Jews to participate in the covenant

revitalised Jerusalem.

The Temple, especially, was transformed.

The Torah required that the Temple play a central role in Jewish life.

"You must not put the firstborn of your herd to work

"or shear the firstborn of your flock.

"You must eat it...

"you and your household, each year,

"in the presence of Yahweh, your God. "

MAN: During the time of the Second Temple,

there was only one place

where sacred time and sacred space came together.

And it was the whole spectacle and structure and ritual of the sacrifices

that was the vehicle by which people came close to God.

So if you lived in the north of Israel, and it came time to celebrate Passover,

you wanted to bring an animal- one of your animals-to the Temple

and you would sell your animal, take that money,

make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,

buy another animal and bring it to the Temple.

And you can imagine, with all of that preparation,

what that moment must have been like for a penitent

who came all that distance, went to all that trouble.

That moment finally came when he laid his hands on this animal

and established it as 'This is my gift to God.

'This is what I'm going to eat along with God, in God's presence. '

Imagine the power of that!

In addition to its laws about how human beings should treat God,

the Bible had a great deal to say

about how human beings should treat each other,

making it one of the most sophisticated law books

in the ancient world.

And yet, for a man to administer laws that were written centuries earlier

was not an easy task.

One law forbid Jews to marry foreigners,

to keep them from worshipping foreign gods.

(STIRRING MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

But in the tumultuous years since the return,

many Judeans had married foreign women.

After great deliberation,

Ezra decided he had no choice

but to order these men to divorce their wives.

"You have committed treason by marrying foreign women.

"You have added to the sin of Israel.

"But now, give thanks to Yahweh, the God of your ancestors,

"and do his will by separating from your foreign wives. "

MAN: Ezra's conception of the Jewish people

was as a holy people... 'zera hakodesh', he called them.

And that was important to him

precisely because they lived not alone, but among other peoples.

So it was very, very important to create a kind of religious state,

um, apart from the actual physical state.

The religious state would be the Jewish people...

marrying their own kind and constituting, therefore, the holy seed.

The divorcing of foreign wives,

with which some Jews bitterly disagreed,

was a sign of the challenges to come.

The Bible often spoke in metaphors,

and from the time Ezra made it public,

people would argue fiercely about its true meaning.

KUGEL: There are all kinds of societies that have disagreements

and certainly that is likely to be the case

with a group of people returning from exile.

They all have their vision of what society ought to be

once we get back there.

But precisely because it happened among people

whose eyes were focused on the past, who were in this mode of return,

meant that their disagreements would quickly become

disagreements about the text that talked about that past,

disagreements about scripture.

And this tradition, as it were, of disagreeing about scripture

really became the kind of leitmotiv of the entire post-exilic period.

One of the most important disagreements

was triggered by a book that dared to challenge the message

put forth by the scribes who edited the Bible.

The scribes' explanation of Jewish history

was based on their belief that God was fair

and he rewarded the good and punished the evil.

But a new book, written after the return,

argued that God did not work that way at all.

(HAUNTlNG FLUTE MUSIC)

The hero of the book, a wealthy and upright man named Job,

suffered a series of catastrophes.

Job's crops were destroyed by drought,

his flocks killed by disease

and all ten of his children died.

Then Job's own body was racked by illness.

As he sat by the roadside mourning the loss of all he held dear,

in sackcloth and ashes,

Job posed one of life's great questions.

Why is it that bad people often prosper

while good people often suffer?

"Why are the wicked allowed to live, grow old and win prosperity?

"Yet they had said to God

'Away from us. We do not want to know your ways. '

"I rescued poor men when they cried, and orphans,

"people none would help.

"Desperate ruined men would bless me

"and I brought song to the widow's heart.

"Yet horror has rode over me...

"and driven off my dignity like wind.

"My wealth has vanished like a cloud

"and now my life is spilling out of me.

"I hoped for good, got only wrong.

"I hoped for light, got only darkness.

"I go about in the sunless gloom. "

MAN: Job seems to be reacting to the view

that there is basically one powerful good god in the world

who can be counted on to reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

This is the central idea of most of the biblical books

and certainly of all the biblical histories.

And Job is reacting against this by saying simply that this is not the case.

This is just not reality as we know it.

Reality doesn't bear out the thesis

that God consistently rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.

Job did not expect to receive his reward for being a good man

after he died.

Into the 4th century BC,

Judeans viewed the Bible as a book about their past,

not their future,

and few believed in an afterlife.

"Even a tree has hope.

"If you cut it, it sprouts again.

"But man, when he wearies and dies,

"when a human gives out,

"where is he, then?

"Water vanishes from a lake.

"Rivers dry up, parched.

"And man lies down and does not rise. "

The philosophy of Job would become a critical challenge to Judaism.

If there was no reward for being good,

no punishment for being bad,

then why bother obeying God's laws?

It was a question that would prove even more difficult for Jews to answer

when the chance arose to embrace an entirely new and exciting way of life.

In the 4th century BC,

a remarkable people invaded the Middle East.

They were the Greeks.

Led by one of the greatest generals in history,

Alexander the Great,

the Greeks would conquer the world from Greece to lndia.

But there was far more to the Greeks than military prowess.

The Greeks had created the most sophisticated civilisation

the world had ever seen.

Their magnificent art was inspired by a reverence for the human body,

which also found its expression in the athletic feats on display

in their Olympic Games.

But the Greeks also revered the mind.

And their greatest thinkers were responsible

for the flowering of philosophy, science and mathematics.

As a result, Hellenic architecture, politics and economics

were centuries ahead of the other peoples of the world.

For the Jews, the takeover of most of the known world by the Greeks

was a threat more dire than any a mere army could pose.

MAN: When the Greek world expanded ever eastward,

ultimately the Jews of the land of Israel

found themselves almost literally

smack in the middle of the Hellenistic Empire.

We were surrounded by Hellenistic culture

and, willy-nilly, we found ourselves becoming Hellenists.

This triggered both a great advance and a great struggle

within the Jewish people

for how we would identify.

Would we simply succumb to Hellenism?

Or would we somehow maintain our unique identity as a people?

The Greeks brought brilliant innovations to Judea

that would completely transform daily life.

For thousands of years, the people of the Middle East

had survived through barter.

But the Greeks encouraged the widespread use of money.

Suddenly, merchants throughout the region

could sell their goods to anyone, anywhere.

MAN: Economically, the world was now open.

People started leaving their villages, leaving their towns.

For the first time in world history, we find large numbers of people

moving more than 20 or 30 miles from their village.

And Jews were no different from others.

This, I think, was the great innovation of the Hellenistic world...

mass movement.

Greek culture offered Jews exciting new opportunities.

The many farmers who produced olive oil

could now sell their oil in cities from Alexandria to Athens.

As this trade flourished,

Jewish communities were established in cities throughout the Greek Empire...

and new Greek cities were built in Judea.

But as the Greek influence in Jewish life grew,

more and more Jews worried

that their own culture was about to be crushed.

MAN: We can understand how the ancient Jews regarded Hellenism

simply by reminding ourselves

how traditional societies around the world

have regarded the coming of American culture...

movies, Western styles of dress, Western technology.

In our own times, we have seen

how violently the more traditional elements

of Islam and Judaism and Christianity

have regarded the materialistic, secular culture of the Western world.

As this remarkable new culture

swept from its cradle in Greece across the Middle East,

devout Jews faced a monumental challenge.

How could Judaism, with its focus simply on being good,

compete with the vibrant and exciting way of life the Greeks had to offer?

(WIND WHlSTLES)

But then, Judaism underwent a revolutionary transformation.

(Man talks in Hebrew)

It began with a teacher who lived in the 2nd century BC,

named Ben Sira.

Ben Sira was deeply influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition

of Socrates and Plato.

"Happy the man who meditates on wisdom

"and reasons with good sense...

"who studies her ways in his heart and ponders her secrets. "

GAFNI: One can almost categorise Ben Sira

as being one of the first Jewish philosophers,

that is to say, a lover of wisdom.

And much of the Book of Ben Sira

is devoted to this great respect for wisdom, for learning wisdom,

for institutionalising wisdom within an academy,

and this is something uniquely Greek.

Ben Sira's brilliant innovation

was to apply the Greek tradition of study and debate to the Bible.

He believed that if his students studied the Bible as a story,

they would learn more about how to live from Moses

than from Socrates.

"FROM Moses, he produced a generous man

"who found favour in the eyes of all mankind.

"Beloved by God and man, Moses of blessed memory.

"God allowed him to hear his voice,

"gave him the Commandments face to face,

"the law of life and knowledge. "

KUGEL: Ben Sira looks at the stories of Abraham and Moses

and for him, they're not stories about the past.

Their lives embodied eternal lessons. He really has the mentality of a sage.

But at the same time, he did something that no previous sage had ever done.

He talked about scripture.

He regarded the Torah as nothing less than the great book of divine wisdom.

And so his job as a sage,

in order to know as much as a person can know about God's will,

wasn't what other sages had done or had seen as their job-

namely, to look at the world and draw lessons from it -

but to read the book.

It was a new approach to Judaism.

Ezra had given the people the Torah to live by its laws.

But thanks to Ben Sira and others like him,

Jews eager for an alternative to Greek culture

began studying the lives of the Bible's heroes,

searching for the divine wisdom their stories revealed.

As this practice became more and more widespread,

a new idea arose...

that the writers of the Bible were divinely inspired

and, therefore, everything in the Bible was true.

KUGEL: The idea of divine inspiration of scripture

seems to have emerged actually rather slowly and piecemeal.

There are many, many biblical prophets

who say what they say in the name of God...

"God told me to say this and here's what he said. "

But gradually, as time went on,

this notion of the divine inspiration of scripture,

or the divine authorisation of scripture,

came to be spread rather uniformly to all parts of the Bible.

The Greeks might be the richest and mightiest people in the world,

but devout Jews now had a powerful weapon of their own...

a book they believed was authored by God himself

that revealed how he wanted them to live.

But exactly what God was revealing

in any particular passage of the Bible

was often hard to figure out.

For now, many centuries after it was written,

the Bible's meaning was open to interpretation.

KUGEL: People like to think of the Jews as the people of the book

but they were the people of the interpretation of the book.

I guess there are very few texts nowadays

that you could say unambiguously just mean one thing.

But when it comes to a text that was very old,

that, in some cases, used words that were no longer understood

or used them in a way that was quite different

from the way those words are used nowadays,

people needed on that most basic level

to be helped to understand what the text meant.

(Man reads in Hebrew)

The uncertainty over what the Bible was saying

gave its interpreters tremendous freedom.

Soon, new beliefs were arising

that would shape Judaism and Christianity

for the next two millennia.

(GENTLE RELlGlOUS SlNGlNG)

The most important new belief was an answer to the great question

of why human beings should be good.

For in the 2nd century BC, some Jews began to believe

that the dead would one day be resurrected and judged,

with the good sent to heaven and the evil, to hell.

Those who embraced this belief

pointed to the brief hints in the Bible about an afterlife as proof.

KUGEL: At this point in Jewish history,

I think people began to look more and more to the afterlife

as a kind of place of final reckoning.

It will be in the world to come that these accounts will be settled.

And so they turned to scripture in order to find support for this idea

and, of course, support was not lacking.

(TRADITIONAL MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

The belief that the Bible was inspired by God

also gave rise to great interest in its prophecies about earthly events.

The most influential prophecy of all

was that a time of turmoil was coming,

and during it, God would stand by those

who, like the patriarchs of old, stood by the covenant.

These new ways of understanding the Bible

not only transformed Judaism,

they prepared it for a war of survival.

After the death of Alexander the Great,

a new Greek dynasty called the Seleucids seized control of the Middle East.

The first of the Seleucid kings were content to let Greek culture

gradually transform their subjects into Greeks.

But in 185 BC,

a very unusual man ascended to the Seleucid throne.

He was Antiochus lV

but he was known to his subjects as Antiochus the Madman.

One of Antiochus' first decrees, recorded in the book of Maccabees,

demanded that all his subjects

replace their ancestral traditions with Greek ones.

"The king issued a proclamation to his whole kingdom

"that all were to become a single people,

"each renouncing his particular customs. "

Many peoples of the region

had already adopted the Greek way of life,

but not devout Jews.

Now they would be faced with a choice...

give up their faith or fight to defend it.

Antiochus relied at first

on a faction of Jews who had embraced all things Greek.

To increase their influence,

he sold one such Jew the most important job in Jerusalem...

high priest of the Temple.

"Jason usurped the high priesthood

"by giving Antiochus a promise of 360 talents of silver.

"As soon as he was in power,

"Jason set about converting his fellow countrymen

"to the Greek way of life. "

GAFNI: For a high priest in Jerusalem in the 2nd century,

the question was quite simple- do I jump on the Greek bandwagon or not?

Do I remain separate or do I throw my lot in with a social process

that had taken over all of the Middle East at this time?

We find high priests that were willing to take that extra step

and to throw their lot in with the lot of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

This would create a reaction, a violent reaction,

because there were Jews who considered this

to be nothing less than heresy.

(TRADITIONAL MIDDLE-EASTERN MUSIC)

Circumcision was the ultimate symbol marking a man as a Jew.

But under the new high priest,

many Temple priests began having cosmetic surgery

to disguise their circumcisions

so they could take part naked in the Greek games.

"The Hellenising process reached such a pitch

"that the priests ceased to show any interest in the services of the altar.

"They would hurry to take part

"as soon as the signal was given for the games. "

MAN: There were certain things about Greek culture and civilisation

that were totally unacceptable to the Jews.

Among these, of course, was the religious concept of a multiplicity of gods.

You cannot possibly imagine such a thing as being acceptable to Jews.

Also, there were certain kinds of behaviour.

For example, the gymnasium, with naked athletics.

But really, behind that isn't so much the nakedness

as the virtual worship of the human body.

These types of concepts,

theological and, we might say, behavioural,

were just totally unacceptable to most Jews.

According to the book of Maccabees, the ultimate insult to the Jews

came when Antiochus ordered that the heart and soul of Judaism,

the Temple in Jerusalem,

be transformed into a Greek temple.

"The King sent a man to compel the Jews to profane the Temple in Jerusalem

"and dedicate it the Olympian Zeus.

"The Temple was filled with revelling and debauchery by the pagans,

"who took their pleasure with prostitutes

"and had intercourse with women in the sacred precincts. "

The uprising against Antiochus began in the countryside,

for the king had ordered his men to travel from village to village

with an idol of Zeus.

"The king's commissioners came to the town of Modein

"to make them sacrifice.

"Many Israelites gathered around them,

"but Mattathias and his sons drew apart.

"The king's commissioners then addressed Mattathias.

'You are a respected leader, a great man in this town.

'Be the first to step forward and obey the king's decree.

'You and your sons shall be honoured with gold and silver

'and many presents. '

"Raising his voice, Mattathias retorted

'Even if every nation living in the king's dominion obeys him,

'I, my sons and my brothers

'will still follow the covenant of our ancestors. '

"As he finished speaking,

"a Jew came forward in the sight of all

"to offer sacrifice on the altar.

"When Mattathias saw this, he was fired with zeal.

"He killed the king's commissioners and tore down the altar.

"Then he fled with his sons into the hills. "

Mattathias and his sons would soon become known as the Maccabees.

Their uprising was proof

that the Jews' commitment to the religion of the divine book

had become so strong they would die to defend it.

MAN: The Maccabees went to war

to put an end to the religious persecution,

to reclaim the Temple, to purify it.

In the history of the world, this is the very first war that we know of

that people went to war over religious freedom

or freedom of conscience.

It's the first time the state tampered with a religious tradition

which resulted in the people saying

"No, we will go to fight, we cannot tolerate this. "

That is the war of the Maccabees.

Many of the Maccabean rebels hid in caves in the countryside

to avoid Antiochus' army.

Not only were they greatly outnumbered,

they faced the serious handicap

of having to fight according to biblical law.

The Bible said it was illegal to fight on the Sabbath day.

So when the Greeks tried to smoke out a large group of rebels during Sabbath,

the rebels decided they would rather die and seek their reward in the next life

than break God's law.

"They offered no opposition. Not a stone was thrown.

"There was no barricading of the hiding places.

"They only said 'Let us all die innocent.

'Let heaven and earth bear witness

'that you are massacring us with no pretence of justice. '

"The attack was pressed home on the Sabbath itself.

"And they were slaughtered with their wives and children

"to the number of 1000 persons. "

GAFNI: This introduces the issue of martyrdom

for the first time in something of a systematic way.

We hear of Jews, for instance, refusing to fight on the Sabbath

and they are martyred.

The Maccabean uprising, then,

not only became the classic example of Jews fighting for their religion,

but it became the first classic example of Jews willing to die for their religion.

But after the massacres,

the surviving rebels decided to reconsider the matter of Sabbath observance.

And the uncertainty that existed over the Bible's meaning

gave them the freedom they needed.

"They said to one another

'If we all do as our brothers have done and refuse to fight,

'they will only destroy us the sooner from the earth. '

"So then and there, they came to this decision.

'If anyone attacks us on the Sabbath day,

'we will resist them.

'We must not all be killed

'as our brothers were in the hiding places. '

SCHIFFMAN: The Maccabees ruled,

and it seems to have been followed by Jewish tradition forever after,

that in a defensive war,

one not only was permitted to set aside Sabbath restrictions

but one was obligated to do so.

(DRAMATlC M USlC)

After the death of Mattathias,

his son Judah took over the leadership of the rebels.

Judah was both a brilliant military strategist and a charismatic leader

who used the stories of the Bible to inspire his followers.

"First light found Judah preparing for battle in the plain.

"Though his men lacked the armour and swords they could have wished,

"Judah said to his men, 'Do not be afraid of their numbers

'and do not flinch at their attack.

'Remember how our ancestors were delivered at the Red Sea

'when Pharaoh was pursuing them in force. '

(SOLEMN MUSIC)

"The foreigners looked up

"and, seeing the Jews advancing against them,

"came out of the camp to join battle.

"Judah's men sounded the trumpet and engaged them. "

(WEAPONS CLANG)

"The pagans were routed and fled toward the plain

"and all the stragglers fell by the sword. "

After a string of victories over the Greeks,

Judah's men began to call him Judah the Maccabee...

Judah the Hammer.

SCHIFFMAN: Judah Maccabee is some kind of amazing giant figure

in our historical tradition.

Here you've got this man who rises up

against the unbelievable power of the Seleucid empire,

who fights battles with massive armies

and who stands, on the one hand, for Torah and tradition

but, on the other hand, knows how to make deals with the Romans

and how to fight against the Seleucids.

So we are speaking here about someone

who must have been literally a giant in his own time.

In 1 64 BC, three years after the revolt began,

the Maccabees finally conquered Jerusalem.

Their first official act

was to remove all Greek influence from the Temple

and rededicate it to their one true God.

"Maccabeus and his companions restored the Temple and the city.

"They purified the sanctuary and built a new altar.

"Then, striking fire from flints,

"they offered the first sacrifice for two years...

"and burned incense and lit the lamps. "

GAFNI: Judah Maccabee will enter the city.

He will have to purify the Temple

because the Temple had gone through a process of Hellenisation,

pagan rites had been introduced into the Temple.

And Judah Maccabee would purify, rededicate the Temple,

this, of course, leading to the renowned festival of Hanukkah,

the dedication of the Jewish Temple anew.

(SOLEM N M USlC)

For all of the portrayal of Hanukkah as a triumphant moment of victory...

it was, unfortunately for the Maccabees,

not where the story ended.

Antiochus' troops soon counterattacked

and dealt the rebels a crushing blow by killing Judah Maccabee.

"All Israel wept and mourned him deeply.

"And for many days, they repeated this dirge...

'What a downfall for the strong man...

'the man who kept Israel safe. '

There are two ways of looking at this question of whether the Maccabees won

because the Seleucids came back and kicked them out.

So apparently, this thing that we celebrate on Hanukkah

is not really the final victory.

In the true story of the Maccabees,

it was not military might that ultimately won the day

but politics and negotiations.

After Judah's death,

his brother Johnathan took over leadership of the rebels.

By 1 52 BC, Jonathan had 1 0,000 soldiers under his command.

But instead of starting a new war,

Jonathan made a bargain with one of two Greek generals

who were fighting for control of the Seleucid empire.

There were two pretenders to the Seleucid throne

competing for the rule of Syria.

Jonathan shrewdly threw his weight, and his soldiers, behind the weaker,

getting in return an agreement

that he would be high priest and ruler of the Jewish people.

Jonathan's bargain was successful.

Judea was independent for the first time since the dynasty of King David.

The reign of the Maccabees brought a sense of renewal to Judea.

Those Jews who looked to their divine book to understand the world

drew particular encouragement.

For them, the Maccabees' victory against overwhelming odds

was proof of the Bible's promise

that God would come to the aid

of those who were willing to fight for their faith.

GAFNI: The meaning that was attached to Hanukkah was obvious...

that if one is fighting a righteous war,

the few can defeat the many,

the righteous can defeat the wicked.

This becomes a mainstay, not only in Jewish tradition, I would say,

but in Judeo-Christian tradition,

the idea that one ought to be willing to die for one's belief, martyrdom,

and clearly the steadfastness,

I think the word is almost 'zealotry'.

In fact, the Book of Maccabees almost plays on this idea

that one should be zealous for the law

and God comes to the aid of those who are.

This conviction -

that the fate of the Jews depended on defending God's laws at all costs-

would only grow in the years ahead.

And it would set the stage for a true cataclysm

when another great empire arrived in the Middle East...

the Romans.

(SOLEMN MUSIC)