Judas Maccabeus Sent Two Men West to Find Rome

The Victory That Made Him Careful

Judas Maccabeus had won. The Temple was purified. The altar was rededicated. The lamps were burning in a sanctuary that Antiochus's men had spent years trying to erase. By any measure of the previous three years, this was the ending.

Judas looked at the ending and saw the beginning of something harder.

The Seleucid crown had not been destroyed. It had been embarrassed, which is more dangerous. A defeated empire with the resources of the entire eastern Mediterranean behind it would eventually reassemble its armies, replace its humiliated generals, and return to Judea with a different strategy. The Temple's lamps could be extinguished again. The walls Judas had rebuilt could be torn down again. Victory in the hills against an overconfident column was not the same as security against the full weight of a determined empire.

Judas needed something his men's courage could not provide.

The Republic Judas Had Heard About

First Maccabees preserves the Hasmonean account of how Judas first heard about Rome. He had learned that the Romans were powerful. He had heard that they were valued as friends and feared as enemies. He had heard that they practiced government by senate rather than by king, and that this strange arrangement had proved stronger than monarchy after monarchy.

He had heard specifically what the Romans had done to the kingdoms they encountered. He had heard about the Gauls, defeated and contained. He had heard about the kings of Spain and their silver mines, brought under Roman control. He had heard about the Macedonian king Perseus, who had faced Rome at Pydna in 168 BCE, less than a decade before the Maccabean revolt, and been broken completely, not just defeated in battle but stripped of his kingdom, paraded through Rome, and imprisoned until he died.

That last detail was the one that mattered. The same empire that had armed and patronized Antiochus had itself been humbled by Rome. The superpower threatening Judea was afraid of something.

The Two Men Who Crossed the Sea

Judas chose two envoys, Eupolemus son of John and Jason son of Eleazar. He gave them authority to negotiate a treaty of friendship and mutual aid. They crossed the sea and came to Rome, arriving at the senate as representatives of a people who had just fought their way out of near-extinction against one of Rome's own client powers.

The senate received them. First Maccabees records the treaty that resulted, and it is surprisingly direct. The Romans would be friends of Judea. If war came against Judea from anyone, Rome would send support. If war came against Rome from anyone, Judea would send support as appropriate to their capacity. Neither side would enter into agreements with the enemies of the other.

It was a real treaty, registered in bronze tablets in Rome. Whether it had immediate practical effect is another question. Rome was not going to send legions to Judea the moment a Seleucid general crossed the border. But it was not nothing. It was a formal declaration that Judea existed as a political entity in Rome's accounting of the world, and that Rome had agreed on record to treat its enemies as enemies worth noticing.

The Calculation Judas Made

The treaty Judas negotiated was built on the recognition that Judea could not survive on heroism alone. The revolt had been won by men willing to die in the hills. The peace, if there was going to be one, would require something that men's willingness to die could not supply: the existence of a third party powerful enough to give the Seleucids pause.

Judas was not naive about Rome. First Maccabees presents him as a man who had studied what Rome did to the kingdoms it encountered. He chose the alliance anyway, because the alternative was isolation against an empire that had every reason to return. Better to be a small nation with a powerful treaty than a holy city that only its own fighters would defend.

The envoys came home with a document. Judas did not live long enough to see whether the document meant anything. He was killed the following year at Elasa, fighting a Seleucid army with less than a thousand men against several thousand. But the treaty existed. Jonathan would later use it. Simon would later use it. The policy of alliance with distant powers that Judas had established survived him.