A Kingdom That Made Its Neighbors Jewish By Law

Hasmonean rule combined the high priesthood with royal power in a single dynasty, an arrangement that had no real precedent in earlier Judean history and that generated real religious controversy of its own. A study of the period from the Maccabees to the rabbinic era describes the Pharisee and Sadducee parties crystallizing specifically as rival positions on how a priestly dynasty should exercise political authority, with the historian Josephus recording that John Hyrcanus, an early Hasmonean ruler, broke publicly with the Pharisees over exactly this question after having favored them earlier in his reign.

Hyrcanus and his son Aristobulus I also expanded Hasmonean territory by conquest and imposed Judaism on the conquered populations, most notably requiring the Idumeans of the south and later the Itureans of the Galilee to accept circumcision and Jewish law as a condition of remaining in their homelands, an expansion of Jewish religious identity by state compulsion that has few real parallels in the ancient Mediterranean world. The dynasty's own succession disputes eventually invited Roman intervention: Pompey took Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and a final Hasmonean civil war gave Rome the opening to install the Idumean convert Herod as king in 37 BCE, ending a century of Jewish sovereignty that had itself begun as an act of religious resistance.