John Maccabee Drove Cendebeus to the Towers and Burned Them

The Banquet at Jericho

Simon Maccabeus died at a table. His son-in-law Ptolemy had invited him to a banquet at his fortress in Jericho, brought out the wine, waited for the right moment, and killed him along with two of his sons. It was 135 BCE. Simon had been high priest and governor for eight years. He had expelled the Seleucid garrison from the Citadel, rebuilt Jerusalem's walls, begun a new calendar, and given Judea the longest unbroken peace it had known in a generation. He died drunk at a table because the man who controlled the entry point to Judea from the east had decided that the Hasmoneans were more useful dead.

Ptolemy sent assassins to kill the third son too. John was in Gazara. He was warned in time.

The Empire Decides to Return

John seized the assassins. He had them executed. He became high priest in his father's place. These three facts take about thirty seconds to read and must have taken months of negotiation, intimidation, and careful management to accomplish. The Hasmonean succession was unsettled. Ptolemy controlled Jericho and was writing letters to the Seleucid king Antiochus VII explaining that the opportunity had arrived. Antiochus VII saw the same thing and sent his general Cendebeus to rebuild Seleucid military power on the coastal plain.

Cendebeus fortified Kedron, a town that commanded one of the main roads from the coast into the Judean heartland. He stationed cavalry and infantry there and began raiding into Judea. The raids were not simply harassment. They were a statement: the Maccabean independence had been a temporary interruption. The empire was back.

Two Brothers at the River

John gathered his army. His brother Judas came with him. They marched toward the coastal plain and camped for the night near a river. In the morning, the two brothers looked at the water and the enemy positions on the other bank and Judas said: let us get up and go. John crossed first. His cavalry led the way through the current. Cendebeus' forces fell back from the crossing point toward the fortified towns they controlled.

The battle that followed was the kind of engagement the Hasmoneans had been fighting for forty years: cavalry against infantry in open terrain, with the advantage shifting as the ground changed. Cendebeus' force was trained and well-equipped. John's force was motivated in a way that professional soldiers who are retreating tend not to be. Judas was wounded in the middle of the fighting. He did not stop.

The Towers That Burned

Cendebeus retreated to Kedron. John chased him. The soldiers who had held the fortified towers came out and tried to make a stand, and John pushed through them and into the town. The towers that Cendebeus had built at Kedron, the fortifications that were supposed to anchor the Seleucid return to the coastal plain, were burned. The cavalry fled into the fields and the infantry into the towers and the towers caught fire and those inside ran out into the open ground where the Hasmonean cavalry finished what the fire had started.

Cendebeus escaped, but the campaign was over. The force that Antiochus VII had sent to signal the empire's return had been destroyed, and the young man who had received news of his father's murder in the middle of the night and seized his father's assassins before dawn had demonstrated that the Hasmonean dynasty was not finished.