Eight Days That Became a Century

The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes provoked the revolt that created the Hasmonean Kingdom when he moved, in the 160s BCE, to suppress traditional Jewish religious practice in Judea, banning circumcision and Sabbath observance and rededicating the Jerusalem Temple's altar to Greek worship. A study of the revolt's origins argues the crisis was as much a Judean civil conflict, between Hellenizing and traditionalist Jewish factions contesting the high priesthood, as it was a straightforward foreign persecution, with Antiochus's decrees escalating an internal dispute he had been drawn into rather than starting one from outside.

Judah Maccabee led the military resistance that followed, and the recapture and rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE, commemorated ever since in the eight day festival of Hanukkah, marked the moment the revolt turned from resistance into the foundation of an independent state. Judah's brothers Jonathan and Simon consolidated that independence over the following two decades, and Simon's recognition as high priest and ethnarch by Rome and by a Judean assembly in 140 BCE is usually taken as the formal founding of Hasmonean self-rule, the first sustained period of Jewish political sovereignty since the Babylonian conquest nearly four and a half centuries earlier.