Judah Maccabee Sent Envoys to the Fourth Kingdom

The Reputation That Arrived Before the Romans Did

Judah Maccabee had never met a Roman. What he knew about Rome he knew through reports, and the reports described something new in the world: a city that had defeated every empire it encountered, refused to wear crowns, dressed its leaders in the clothes of ordinary men, and then systematically dismantled every rival power on earth. Nobody fought Rome twice. That was the summary the travelers brought back.

The account begins with Antiochus III, who had brought 120 war elephants and a massive combined force against Rome and lost everything. Tribute was extracted. Then came Hannibal of Carthage, who crossed from Africa into Spain, through the Goths, through Germania, and into Italy, and fought the Romans in eighteen battles over ten years. He destroyed 90,000 Roman soldiers at Cannae in a single day, including the Roman commander Aemilius. By any rational accounting, Rome should have been finished after Cannae.

Rome was not finished. Rome came back, drove Hannibal out of Italy, chased him to Carthage, and destroyed his army there. Then Rome destroyed Carthage itself.

What the Alliance Meant to Send

Judah Maccabee sent two men, Eupolemus son of Johanan and Jason son of Eleazar, to Rome with a letter proposing a treaty of mutual friendship and assistance. The letter named the situation plainly: Antiochus had come against the Jewish people with his army, intending to take the land and exterminate the nation; the Jewish people had resisted with unexpected force; they wanted Rome to know this, and they wanted Rome's alliance documented on bronze tablets in the public record.

The Senate heard them. The Romans passed their decree: to the nation of the Jews, friends. If any should come against them in war, Rome would come to their aid with all the power at its disposal. The Maccabeans had obtained a promise from the most powerful force on earth, documented in bronze, in exchange for recognition.

The Prophecy That Named This Kingdom

The Maccabean envoys understood what they were walking into, because the Jewish prophetic tradition had already named it. The vision of the four kingdoms, the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the four beasts of Daniel's vision, all pointed to the same sequence: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and a fourth kingdom of iron that would shatter everything. The fourth kingdom was Rome. The rabbis read Daniel's iron empire as Rome and never questioned the identification.

The Maccabean alliance with Rome was therefore not merely a diplomatic decision. It was, from inside the tradition, an alliance with the final empire before the end of history. Judah Maccabee signed a treaty with the beast of iron. He did it because he needed to survive the present, and because the Seleucid Empire, which was threatening to erase his people, was a third-kingdom power being consumed by the fourth. Rome would outlast Antiochus. It would outlast the Maccabees too, in time. But in 161 BCE, it was the strongest thing available to ally with, and Judah Maccabee was a practical man.

What Rome Told the Seleucids

The Senate sent a letter to Demetrius of Syria the same year. It told him to stop oppressing his Jewish subjects. The letter carried the weight of everything the travelers' reports had described: a power that had destroyed Carthage and driven Hannibal from Italy and extracted tribute from Antiochus's elephants and armies. Demetrius read the letter and considered his options.

The bronze tablets recording the Maccabean alliance were inscribed and sent to Jerusalem. Judah Maccabee died in battle later that same year, at Elasa, outnumbered by Bacchides' army. He had not lived to see whether Rome would actually come. His brothers carried the treaty on.

The Treaty That Outlived Its Signatories

Judah's brothers Jonathan and Simon continued the alliance with Rome after his death. The bronze tablets were not ceremonial. They were referenced, renewed, and appealed to in subsequent Maccabean diplomacy throughout the second century BCE. The alliance did not save the Maccabees from internal collapse or from the eventual absorption of Judea into the Roman sphere, but it survived long enough to create the political space in which the Hasmonean dynasty consolidated its hold on Judea. Judah had bought time. His brothers used the time. The fourth kingdom, which he had identified and allied with, eventually became the power that destroyed the Temple his family had rededicated, which is the kind of irony that the prophetic tradition had, in a sense, already anticipated.