Studies on the Hasmonean Period.

• Author: Feldman, Louis H.

This stimulating collection of essays is (with some updating, to be sure) two removes from the original essays, all of which appeared in Hebrew at various times between 1963 and 1976 and which were collected in a Hebrew volume in 1980. No attempt is made at systematic coverage of the topic; rather, there are individual essays on the Hasmonean revolt, in modern historiography; holy war and visions of redemption in the Hasmonean period; Daniel and his friends in exile; the idea of the servant of G-d in the book of Daniel; Simeon ben Shetah and Alexander Jannaeus; the Psalms of Solomon, the Hasmonean decline and Christianity; and the Great Sanhedrin in vision and reality. Readers will be struck by Efron's extraordinary mastery of the history of scholarship on these questions, by the strident tone of the author in attacking contemporary solutions to these problems, and by the originality of his interpretation of key texts.

The main, and most controversial, thesis of this work is that the Hasidim and the Hasmoneans cooperated throughout their revolt against the Syrian Greeks, and that this cooperation continued with the later Pharisees. The reconstruction of this period often rests upon the Pseudepigrapha, notably the Psalms of Solomon. But Efron dismisses such evidence as betraying a hidden Christian viewpoint, though it would seem remarkable that a Christian work, even one with a hidden agenda, would not speak at all of Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the Psalms of Solomon apparently was compiled in the middle of the first century B.C.E., at least according to most scholars.

Efron is most vehement in denying that the Hasidim and the Hasmoneans had different goals and that their alliance was dissolved once the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes ended. In I Maccabees, which he agrees is the main source for the revolt, he finds no evidence of rifts between parties and sects. Strangely enough, it is in 2 Maccabees, the value of which Efron sharply downgrades as a Diaspora work, that we find the clearest evidence identifying the Hasidim with the cause of the Hasmoneans, in as much as there (14:6) we find Judah the Maccabee as the leader of the Hasidim. Efron, we may add, fails to note a major piece of evidence supporting his view that there was no division between the Hasidim and the Hasmoneans, namely that Josephus (whose value as a source Efron consistently downgrades), who closely paraphrases I Maccabees in books 12 and 13 of his Antiquities...