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Pompey Entered the Holy of Holies and Found Silence

Two Hasmonean brothers open Jerusalem to Rome through their own civil war, and Pompey walks into the most sacred room and finds it empty.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Brothers Who Opened the Gate
  2. Jerusalem Besieged From Within
  3. The Room No Foreign General Was Supposed to Enter
  4. Antipater Rose Through the Wreckage

The Brothers Who Opened the Gate

Hyrcanus was the older brother and high priest. Aristobulus was the fighter. When they faced each other near Jericho, Hyrcanus's army defected to his brother and the older man lost. That could have been the end of it, a family dispute settled by force, the loser accepting the outcome and the kingdom remaining intact.

But Antipater the Idumean saw a different future. He told Hyrcanus that weakness did not have to be permanent if the right help could be obtained from outside. He pointed to Rome, which was extending its authority eastward and looking for opportunities to demonstrate that authority as arbiter. Hyrcanus, convinced that his claim was just and his cause recoverable, agreed to seek Pompey's judgment.

Aristobulus also went to Pompey. Both brothers showed up at the Roman general's headquarters with delegations, arguments, and gifts, each trying to use Rome as a lever against the other.

Rome came in as arbiter. It stayed as master.

Jerusalem Besieged From Within

Pompey sided with Hyrcanus. Aristobulus agreed, then withdrew, then agreed again, then withdrew again, oscillating between acceptance and defiance in a way that made him look both weak and unreliable. Pompey lost patience and moved on Jerusalem.

The city divided itself. Hyrcanus's supporters opened the gates. Aristobulus's supporters barricaded the Temple mount and prepared to hold it. The Roman siege of the Temple complex lasted three months. On the day the walls were finally breached, Josephus records that it was the Sabbath, and that Pompey's forces took advantage of the Jewish practice of not fighting defensively on the Sabbath to press the assault.

Twelve thousand Jews died in the final battle for the Temple. The priests who were in the middle of their sacrificial duties kept performing the rites even as the fighting came to them. They finished the service. Then they were killed.

The Room No Foreign General Was Supposed to Enter

Pompey walked through the outer courts and into the Temple. He looked at the golden table, the sacred candelabrum, the vessels, and the treasury, great wealth that he left untouched. Then he went through the curtain and entered the Holy of Holies.

He found nothing.

The room was empty of the kind of things a general expects to find when he conquers a religious center. No statue. No image. No figure of the god the people had been fighting to protect. In a world where every temple held a representation of its deity, the innermost chamber of the Jewish sanctuary held only space, the ark of the covenant by tradition, and whatever presence had rested there and now did not.

Josephus notes that Pompey respected what he found. He did not destroy the Temple. He did not remove the sacred vessels. He ordered the Temple servants to resume their service the next day. The Roman general who had just killed thousands of Jews and penetrated the most sacred space in the world behaved, in the moment of conquest, with a caution that he may not entirely have been able to explain.

Antipater Rose Through the Wreckage

After the conquest, it was Antipater the Idumean who benefited most. He had engineered Hyrcanus's appeal to Rome. He had made himself indispensable in the diplomatic negotiations. Now, with Roman authority established over Judea and Hyrcanus restored as a Roman client, Antipater was positioned to accumulate the actual power behind a weakened throne.

His son would be Herod.

The story of Pompey and the Holy of Holies is also the story of how the Hasmonean dynasty that had once liberated the Temple ended by handing Rome the keys to it, and how a family from outside the Jewish aristocracy used that Roman connection to eventually seize the throne entirely.

PompeyTempleHoly Of HoliesRome
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From the tradition

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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 XIV.1-3Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

In 63 BCE, two brothers tore Judea apart. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, both sons of the Hasmonean queen Alexandra, fought each other for the throne. Hyrcanus was the elder and the high priest. Aristobulus was the fighter. When their armies clashed at Jericho, Hyrcanus's soldiers switched sides mid-battle. The elder brother fled. The younger one took the crown.

That should have ended it. But a wealthy Idumean named Antipater saw opportunity in Hyrcanus's weakness. He convinced the deposed brother to seek help from Aretas, king of the Nabateans, who marched on Jerusalem with fifty thousand men. Aristobulus retreated into the Temple compound.

Then Rome arrived.

Pompey the Great, fresh from his eastern conquests, sent his general Scaurus to settle the dispute. Both brothers offered bribes. Aristobulus offered four hundred talents. Pompey initially sided with him, but Aristobulus kept stalling, retreating to fortresses, promising submission and then refusing it. Pompey lost patience.

He besieged Jerusalem. Hyrcanus's faction opened the city gates, but Aristobulus's supporters barricaded themselves inside the Temple. They cut the bridge connecting the Temple to the city and prepared for a fight. The siege lasted three months. Josephus, writing in his Antiquities around 93 CE, records that the Romans exploited the Sabbath, advancing their siege works on days when the Jewish defenders would only fight back if directly attacked.

When the walls finally fell, twelve thousand Jews died. Roman soldiers poured into the sacred precincts. And then Pompey did the unthinkable. He walked into the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Temple where only the High Priest could enter once a year. He saw the golden table, the sacred lampstand, the vessels of spice. He touched nothing. He took nothing. But the violation was complete. A pagan general had stood in the most sacred space in Judaism.

Pompey restored Hyrcanus as high priest but stripped him of the title of king. Judea became a Roman tributary. The Hasmonean kingdom, won by the Maccabees a century earlier, was effectively over. As Josephus makes clear, the brothers' civil war invited the very catastrophe they should have feared most: the loss of Jewish sovereignty itself.

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Antiquities XIV.4-7Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

The real power behind the Jewish throne in the first century BCE was not a Jew at all. Antipater, an Idumean whose family had converted to Judaism only a generation or two earlier, maneuvered himself into a position that would reshape Jewish history forever.

After Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE, he carved up the Hasmonean kingdom. Judea shrank. Hyrcanus kept the high priesthood but lost the title of king. His brother Aristobulus was dragged off to Rome in chains, paraded through the streets as a trophy of Roman conquest. But Aristobulus's sons refused to accept defeat. His son Alexander escaped captivity and raised a rebellion, gathering ten thousand infantry and fifteen hundred cavalry before the Roman general Gabinius crushed him.

Through all of this chaos, Antipater thrived. Josephus describes him in the Antiquities as "active and seditious" by nature, a man who understood that real power in this new era belonged to whoever Rome trusted most. When Aristobulus escaped from Rome and tried to reclaim Judea, Antipater helped the Romans hunt him down. When Gabinius reorganized the country into five administrative districts, Antipater positioned himself as the indispensable intermediary.

His greatest gamble came during the Roman civil war. When Julius Caesar fought Pompey, Antipater immediately switched his allegiance. He marched three thousand Jewish soldiers to Egypt to support Caesar's campaign, personally breaching the walls of Pelusium. He persuaded the Egyptian Jewish community to support Caesar. He fought and bled for Rome's new master.

Caesar rewarded him generously. Antipater was named procurator of all Judea, granted Roman citizenship, and given tax exemptions. He had become, as Josephus records, the effective ruler of the Jewish homeland, while Hyrcanus held the title in name only. Antipater then installed his sons in positions of power. Phasael governed Jerusalem. His younger son, a twenty-five-year-old named Herod, received Galilee.

Nobody knew it yet, but the dynasty that would dominate Jewish life for the next century had just begun.

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