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Alexander Jannaeus Executed Eight Hundred Pharisees

Alexander Jannaeus comes home from civil war, arranges a banquet, and has eight hundred Pharisees crucified while he watches from the table.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The King His Father Hated
  2. The Banquet Beside the Executions
  3. The Scale the Rabbis Imagined
  4. What Josephus Intended

The King His Father Hated

Alexander Jannaeus entered the world already marked. Josephus records that his father, the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus, hated him from birth, a hostility explained in different versions by a dream, by family jealousy, by the political arithmetic of which son seemed most dangerous to trust. Jannaeus spent part of his early life imprisoned. A dream told Hyrcanus that his imprisoned son would one day rule, which made the hostility worse rather than better.

He ruled anyway. He inherited both the kingship and the priesthood, the Hasmonean combination that had already fractured by the time it came to him. He expanded territory aggressively. He fought wars on multiple fronts. He also made enemies inside Jerusalem with every step he took at the altar.

The Pharisees, who held the loyalty of the common people, regarded his priesthood as illegitimate. At one festival, the crowd pelted him with etrogim, the citrus fruit carried during Sukkot, while he stood at the altar. He had the crowd killed. The number Josephus gives is six thousand. The civil war that followed cost another fifty thousand Jewish lives over six years.

The Banquet Beside the Executions

When Jannaeus returned to Jerusalem after the civil war ended, he had eight hundred prisoners. They were Pharisees and their allies, men who had fought against him or supported those who did.

He prepared a public banquet. He reclined at the table with his concubines. While he ate and drank, he had the eight hundred crucified.

While they were still alive on the crosses, he had their wives and children brought out and killed before them. Josephus says this was done while Jannaeus watched from the banquet table. The tradition preserves the detail with the horror it deserves. This was not battlefield killing. This was performance. The feast, the concubines, the watching, these are the elements of a demonstration designed to be remembered by everyone who saw it.

The rabbis gave the event a name: the crucified ones. The memory lodged in the tradition as evidence of what priestly kingship could become when it separated entirely from the obligations of justice.

The Scale the Rabbis Imagined

The rabbinic tradition adds its own numbers to the Jannaeus era. Where Josephus counts losses in the tens of thousands, midrashic sources imagine crowds of unimaginable size, villages that doubled Israel's population, assemblies measured in hundreds of thousands. These numbers are not meant as census data. They are a different kind of testimony, measuring the weight of the catastrophe by the size of the population that experienced it.

When the rabbis say that three villages produced double the number of people who had left Egypt, they are not counting bodies. They are saying: we were many, and what was done to us was done to a multitude. The scale of the suffering requires a scale of the people who suffered. History measured in official body counts can accidentally minimize what was lost. The midrashic imagination resisted that minimization.

What Josephus Intended

Josephus tells the Jannaeus story with the clarity of someone who wants it to serve as a warning. He cares about the way factional violence consumes a nation from within. The fight between Pharisees and Sadducees, between interpretive traditions and priestly legitimacy, between the people's loyalty and the king's claim, all of this had been building since the Maccabean victory. Jannaeus is what it produced when it reached its extreme.

A dynasty that had liberated the Temple from foreign desecration ended by desecrating it with its own hands. A king who bore the priestly title used that title to justify executions conducted for his own entertainment. Josephus holds the mirror up without blinking.

ViolenceWarJannaeusPhariseesHasmoneans
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Antiquities XIII.12-14Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

When Aristobulus I died after just one year on the throne, his widow Salome Alexandra did something audacious. She released Aristobulus's brothers from prison, where he had kept them in chains, and placed the crown on the head of Alexander Jannaeus, the eldest survivor. Josephus records a strange detail: Jannaeus had been hated by his father John Hyrcanus from birth and was never even permitted to appear in his presence. The reason, according to Josephus, was that God had appeared to Hyrcanus in a dream and revealed that Alexander would be his successor, and this grieved the old king, who preferred his other sons.

Alexander Jannaeus inherited the throne and immediately began expanding Hasmonean territory. He besieged Ptolemais on the Mediterranean coast, but his ambitions drew the attention of Ptolemy Lathyrus, the exiled king of Egypt who now ruled Cyprus. Ptolemy landed with a large army, and the two sides met at the Jordan River. The battle was devastating. Ptolemy's forces slaughtered 30,000 Jewish soldiers, then swept through Judean villages committing atrocities, dismembering women and children and boiling their body parts in cauldrons. Josephus writes that this was done deliberately to spread terror.

Alexander was saved only because Ptolemy's own mother, Cleopatra III, sent an Egyptian army to drive her son out of the region. She had no love for her exiled son, and she had no intention of letting him build a new empire in Syria. One of her generals, a Jew named Ananias, warned her against betraying Alexander, arguing that turning on a Jewish ally would make her an enemy of the entire Jewish people. Cleopatra listened and instead made an alliance with Jannaeus.

With his southern border secure, Alexander turned east and north, conquering cities across the Golan and Transjordan. But his own people turned against him. During the festival of Sukkot, the crowd pelted him with citrons and accused him of being unfit for the priesthood, claiming his mother had been a war captive. Alexander responded with massacres. He hired foreign mercenaries to slaughter six thousand of his own citizens at the festival.

This atrocity ignited a full-scale civil war that lasted six years. The Pharisees led a popular uprising against the king, and the fighting killed 50,000 Jews on both sides. When the rebels grew desperate, they committed the ultimate betrayal: they invited Demetrius III, a Seleucid prince, to invade Judea and help them overthrow their own king. Demetrius defeated Alexander in battle, but then 6,000 Jewish rebels switched sides, unable to stomach fighting alongside a foreign conqueror against a Jewish king. Demetrius withdrew, and Alexander had his revenge.

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Antiquities XIII.15-16Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

After defeating the rebellion, Alexander Jannaeus returned to Jerusalem and made his enemies pay in the most horrifying way possible. Josephus records the scene: Alexander captured 800 of the leading Pharisee rebels and had them nailed to Roman execution stakes in the middle of the city. While they hung dying on their execution stakes, he ordered their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes. And he watched it all while feasting and drinking with his concubines in full view of the condemned men.

This act earned Alexander Jannaeus a grim nickname. The Jews called him "the Thracian," after the notoriously savage warriors of the Balkans. The cruelty was so extreme that 8,000 of his remaining opponents fled Judea in the middle of the night and lived as exiles for the rest of Alexander's life.

With his domestic enemies crushed or scattered, Alexander resumed his military campaigns. He conquered the coastal city of Gaza after a brutal siege, then swept through Transjordan and the Golan, capturing fortress after fortress. Josephus lists an extraordinary catalogue of cities under Hasmonean control by this point: from Strato's Tower and Joppa on the coast to Gadara and Seleucia in the Golan, from Heshbon and Medaba in Moab to Idumean cities in the south. The Hasmonean kingdom had reached its greatest territorial extent, rivaling the domains of David and Solomon.

Alexander's body was failing him. He developed a quartan fever, a recurring illness that consumed him for three years. Still, he refused to stop fighting, campaigning in Transjordan even as the disease ate away at him. He finally died during the siege of Ragaba, a fortress beyond the Jordan.

Josephus records that on his deathbed, Alexander gave his wife Salome Alexandra one final piece of advice that revealed just how deeply the civil war had scarred him. He told her to make peace with the Pharisees. Give them a share of power, he said. They control the hearts of the people, and they can turn public opinion for or against a ruler with a single word. He told her to hand his body over to the Pharisees and let them decide how to honor or dishonor it, predicting that if she showed them respect, they would give him a more magnificent funeral than she could arrange on her own.

Alexandra followed his counsel exactly. She made the Pharisees the dominant political force in the kingdom, restored their religious ordinances, and ruled for nine peaceful years. The woman who inherited a blood-soaked throne became, in Josephus's telling, the most successful Hasmonean ruler of them all.

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Gittin 57a (Harris, Hebraic Literature, 1901)Hebraic Literature (1901)

Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a population equal to the number of Israelites who left Egypt at the Exodus, roughly six hundred thousand adult men and their families. Three of those cities held double that number, and each bore a name that explained its character.

The first was Caphar Bish, the Village of Evil. It earned the name because it had no hospice, no inn, no open table for the stranger who arrived after dark. Hebrew tradition measures a town's goodness by how it treats travelers, and this town failed the test by simply closing its doors. The second was Caphar Shichlaiim, the Village of Water-cresses, so called because its inhabitants lived mostly on this humble herb from the streams. And the third was Caphar Dichraya, the Village of Male Children, because, the tradition explains, its women first bore only boys, then later bore only girls, and then ceased bearing altogether, as if the village had completed its allotted work in a single surge.

Ulla, the Babylonian sage, heard these claims and snorted. I have seen that place, he said. It could not hold sixty myriads of sticks, let alone sixty myriads of cities. A Sadducee, hearing this, took it as proof that the Rabbis lied. Rabbi Chanina answered with a verse. The inheritance of a deer (Jeremiah 3:19), the verse calls the land of Israel. And just as the skin of a deer, after the body is removed, shrinks and contracts, so too the Land of Israel, when emptied of its people, contracts. The numbers were honest. The land itself had shrunk. This passage, preserved in Harris's 1901 Hebraic Literature, offers a mystical geography in which exile is not just a loss of population but a literal shriveling of the ground.

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