John Maccabee Drove Cendebeus to the Towers and Burned Them

Simon Maccabeus was murdered at a banquet. His own son-in-law Ptolemy invited him to Jericho with his two sons, got them drunk, and killed all three. It was 135 BCE. Simon had been high priest and governor for eight years. He had ended Seleucid sovereignty over Judea on paper, begun a new calendar, rebuilt Jerusalem's walls, and given his people a decade of breathing room after thirty years of war. Then he died at a table.

His third son, John, was not at the banquet. He was in Gazara when he heard the news. Ptolemy sent assassins to kill him too. John was warned in time. He seized the assassins and had them executed, and then - as the Book of Maccabees I records with the matter-of-fact tone it uses for all such transitions - he became high priest in his father's place.

The Seleucid king Antiochus VII saw his opportunity. With Simon dead and the Hasmonean succession unsettled, he sent his general Cendebeus to rebuild Seleucid military power in the coastal plain. Cendebeus fortified Kedron, stationed cavalry and infantry there, and began raiding into Judea. The raids were not simply military harassment. They were a message: the period of Maccabean independence had been an interruption. The empire was returning.

John Hyrcanus - John, son of Simon, grandson of Mattathias - gathered his army. His brother Judas came with him. The Book of Maccabees I, composed in Hebrew and drawing on eyewitness accounts from this period, follows them to a watercourse. On one side was John's force. On the other was Cendebeus and the Seleucid cavalry. They camped through the night and crossed in the morning.

Judas was wounded crossing. The text does not specify where or how badly - only that it happened, and that John kept going. The holy trumpets sounded. This is the detail that the First Book of Maccabees returns to in every major engagement: the trumpets that belong to the Temple, taken to the field, announcing that this is not merely a political struggle. The enemy host was put to flight. Many were slain. The remnant ran for the stronghold.

John followed them to Kedron, the city Cendebeus had built and fortified. The fleeing soldiers kept running, past Kedron, all the way to the towers in the fields of Azotus. John burned the towers. Two thousand of the enemy died in the pursuit. Then, the Book of Maccabees I says simply, he returned to the land of Judea in peace.

The phrase is almost shocking in its understatement. He went out against the general of an empire, drove him from the coast, burned his fortifications, killed two thousand men, and came home. In peace. The Maccabean battle narratives share this tonal quality throughout - they are not written by men who did not understand violence. They are written by men who had seen enough of it that they were most interested in what came after. The young men went to war. The old men sat in the streets. The land rested. That was the thing worth recording.

John Hyrcanus would go on to reign for thirty years, expanding Hasmonean territory further than any of his predecessors, conquering Idumea and forcing the Idumeans to convert or leave. He would eventually break with the Pharisees and align himself with the Sadducees. His legacy would become contested. But on the morning he crossed the watercourse with his wounded brother beside him and heard the holy trumpets sound, he was still simply the son of the murdered man, going to fight the general who thought Simon's death had made the empire safe again.

There is a moment in the account - easy to pass over - when the text notes that after the trumpets sounded, the Seleucid host was put to flight so that many of them were slain and the remnant fled to the stronghold. The word "remnant" is not accidental in this context. The whole war, from Mattathias onward, had been about who would be the remnant. The Seleucids had assumed it would be them. They had assumed they could outlast a family of priests from Modin. John Maccabee, riding toward Azotus with his brother bleeding beside him, was demonstrating otherwise.

He burned the towers. He came home. The land was in peace for a season. And the Apocrypha records it without triumph, in the same register it uses for harvests and calendars and the long work of keeping a people alive in the world.

What the First Book of Maccabees understood, writing from within a generation that had survived both the revolt and its aftermath, was that every Maccabean victory was also a statement about succession. Mattathias had passed the fight to Judah. Judah had passed it, dying, to Jonathan. Jonathan, captured and killed, had left it to Simon. Simon, murdered at a banquet, had left it to John. Each handoff was violent. Each son carried the weight of the dead ones before him. When John crossed the watercourse with his brother bleeding at his side, he was crossing every handoff at once: the accumulated weight of a family that had been fighting for fifty years, crossing together toward one more enemy who thought the last death had ended it. John Hyrcanus would reign for thirty years. He was not done.