Rome, Hannibal, and the Alliance With Judah Maccabee

The alliance between Judah Maccabee and Rome is one of the most consequential diplomatic decisions in Jewish history, and it was made almost entirely on the basis of reputation. The Maccabean sources, preserved in the apocryphal tradition and retold in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews (1909-1938), record that Rome had come to Judah's attention not through direct contact but through the accumulated reports of travelers and merchants who had watched Rome defeat every power it encountered. What those reports described was something new in the world: a nation that won every war, refused to wear crowns, dressed its leaders in plain clothes, and then systematically dismantled every other empire on earth.

The account begins with Rome defeating Antiochus III of Greece, his 120 war elephants, and "a strong and powerful army of infantry and cavalry." Tribute was extracted. Then came Hannibal, King of Carthage, who entered the field with an army "as numerous as the sand upon the seashore" -- Ethiopian, African, and Libyan troops, the armies of the Goths, forces gathered from across the known world. He crossed from Africa to Spain, through the Goths, through Germania, and into Italy, where he engaged the Romans in eighteen battles over ten years, destroying 90,000 Roman soldiers at Cannae in a single engagement, including the commander Aemilius. By any rational accounting, Rome should have been finished.

Instead, a young man named Scipio stood before the 320 Roman counselors and refused to negotiate surrender. "Far be it from us to subject ourselves to Hannibal." He asked for five legions and sailed for Africa. He burned Hannibal's home territory, killed Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal, and sent the severed head to Hannibal outside Rome with the message: why do you want our land when I am destroying yours? Hannibal broke the siege and went home. Three pitched battles later, he was conquered, fled to Egypt, was handed over by Ptolemy to Scipio, returned to Africa, and drank poison. Rome captured all of North Africa.

This is the power that Judah Maccabee decided to approach. But the Legends read that decision through a prophetic lens that the historical books of Maccabees state only implicitly. "In those days the Lord began to render the fourth kingdom more powerful than the third." The fourth animal that Daniel had seen in his vision -- the one that devoured and crushed and trampled -- was Rome. The rise of Rome was not an accident of military history. It was the ordained sequence of empires that the prophets had foreseen: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Each empire in its turn received dominion, abused it, and was replaced. Judah was allying not merely with a powerful nation but with the power God had appointed to break the Greek empire that was currently trying to destroy the Jewish people.

The letter the Romans sent to Judah has an extraordinary tone for a superpower addressing a small provincial guerrilla movement: "We have heard of your power and of your battles, and are glad." They called him "Judah the Anointed one of battle." They asked him to become their "associates and friends, but not the friends of the Greeks, who have afflicted you." The treaty they drew up was entirely reciprocal: if war came against Rome, the Jews would assist. If war came against the Jews, Rome would assist. Neither party would supply the other's enemies with weapons, food, or money. The text emphasizes: "according as the time shall be appointed them" -- each party would respond when the other was in need. It was a mutual defense pact between a world empire and a people who had been fighting barefoot in the Judean hills.

What followed the treaty was not peace but its immediate violation. The land had rest for about eight months, and then the cities of Joppa and Jabneh lured Jewish residents onto ships "to go and have sports on the sea" and drowned two hundred of them in the middle of the ocean. Judah besieged Joppa, burned the city to the ground, and burned the ships. The fire was visible from Jerusalem, 240 stadia away. Then he marched into Arabia, besieged fortified cities, invoked the memory of Joshua at Jericho outside the walls of Kaspon, and prayed -- as he always prayed, specifically and immediately before combat -- "O Almighty God, at the sound of the trumpet Thou didst deliver the city of Jericho by the hands of Thy servant Joshua; now deliver this city into our hands."

The pool of blood that flowed from Kaspon was two stadia long and two stadia wide. This is the texture of the Maccabean campaign as the apocryphal tradition presents it: a Roman alliance at the diplomatic level, and at the ground level, one man with a dead general's sword and a prayer specific enough to cite the chapter and verse of the divine precedent he was invoking. The battles against four generals that preceded the treaty had established his credibility with Rome. The treaty then gave the Hasmonean revolt a place in the prophetic arc that Daniel had sketched centuries earlier: the small nation that God had preserved at the edge of every empire, still standing when each empire in turn fell.