Simon Took Gaza and Israel Began Counting From That Day

There is a moment in the First Book of Maccabees - written in Hebrew in the late second century BCE, translated into Greek for preservation - that is easy to miss if you are reading quickly. It comes after all the battles, after Mattathias dies, after Judah dies, after Jonathan is kidnapped and executed. It comes when Simon, the last of the five Maccabee brothers, is standing in front of a frightened assembly in Jerusalem and saying that he knows all his brothers are dead, and he is no better than they were, and he is going anyway.

The people listening to him had heard that speech before. They had heard versions of it from his father, from Judah, from Jonathan. Each time they heard it, the man giving it eventually died in the field. Simon was asking them to believe it one more time. He was fifty years old, roughly. He had been fighting since before most of the men in that assembly were born. He had fought at Kedesh, at Bethsura, in Galilee where he rescued the communities the Seleucids were trying to isolate. The assembly trembled when he spoke, and then they said: you shall be our leader.

What happened after Simon was confirmed as high priest and governor is recorded in the Book of Maccabees I with a precision that suggests the writer knew he was describing something new. Simon did not simply win more battles. He won a different kind of battle. He took the Citadel in Jerusalem - the Seleucid fortress that had sat inside the city for a generation, garrisoning enemy soldiers in the heart of the holy city - and he expelled the garrison without a massacre. He took Joppa and gave Israel a port. He marched on Gaza.

The siege of Gaza was not the largest battle of the Maccabean revolt. It was not the most dramatic. What made it significant was what happened when it ended. Simon had built a siege engine and moved it against one of Gaza's towers. When his soldiers leaped into the city from the engine, the townspeople climbed their own walls with their wives and children and cried out for peace. And Simon, who could have burned the city, granted it.

Then - and this is the sentence that the Book of Maccabees I 13:41 slows down to record with full formal weight - the people of Israel began to write in their instruments and contracts: “In the first year of Simon the high priest, the governor and leader of the Jews.”

They stopped dating documents from the Seleucid king. They started dating them from Simon. This was not a military event. It was a calendrical revolution. Time itself was being reoriented around an Israelite leader for the first time since the kings. The Kingdom of Simon texts in the Book of Maccabees I catalogue what followed: fortified walls, rebuilt Jerusalem, peace in the fields. The ancient men sat in the streets talking of good things. The young men wore warlike apparel. The text says the land was at rest all the days of Simon.

But the peace was not naivety. Simon knew what his brothers' fates had been. Judah had died in the field. Jonathan had been taken by treachery and killed. Simon himself would eventually be murdered at a banquet by his own son-in-law. The Hasmonean dynasty that followed him would become complicated, then compromised, then corrupt. The Book of Maccabees that records his glory also records his end, because it was written by people honest enough to know that a good beginning is not a guarantee.

What endures from Simon is the moment of the new calendar. A people who had been dating their contracts from a foreign king's reign - acknowledging, with every document they signed, that their sovereignty belonged to someone else - picked up their pens on one particular morning and wrote a different name. They wrote Simon's name. They wrote: this is year one. We are beginning again from here.

The Hasmonean dynasty would rule Israel for 206 years, from the rededication of the Temple until its destruction, according to Megillat Antiochus, the earliest account of the Hanukkah story composed in Aramaic during the Second Temple period. Two centuries of counting from their own names. The whole project started when Simon stood up in front of a frightened assembly and said he was no better than his dead brothers, and they said: lead us anyway. And then he took Gaza, and granted peace to its people, and came home, and the scribes picked up their pens.

There is one more thing the Book of Maccabees I records about Simon's reign that does not get enough attention. The text says the old men sat in the streets talking of good things. Not good things about the war. Not about the enemy, not about the battles, not about the dead. Good things. Simple conversation among people who had lived through a generation of terror and had arrived at a morning where the worst thing happening was that it was very hot and the market was crowded. That is what Simon built when he picked up his pen at Gaza. Not a dynasty. A morning where old men could sit in the street.