After defeating the rebellion, Alexander Jannaeus returned to Jerusalem and made his enemies pay in the most horrifying way possible. Josephus records the scene: Alexander captured 800 of the leading Pharisee rebels and had them crucified in the middle of the city. While they hung dying on their crosses, he ordered their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes. And he watched it all while feasting and drinking with his concubines in full view of the condemned men.
This act earned Alexander Jannaeus a grim nickname. The Jews called him "the Thracian," after the notoriously savage warriors of the Balkans. The cruelty was so extreme that 8,000 of his remaining opponents fled Judea in the middle of the night and lived as exiles for the rest of Alexander's life.
With his domestic enemies crushed or scattered, Alexander resumed his military campaigns. He conquered the coastal city of Gaza after a brutal siege, then swept through Transjordan and the Golan, capturing fortress after fortress. Josephus lists an extraordinary catalogue of cities under Hasmonean control by this point: from Strato's Tower and Joppa on the coast to Gadara and Seleucia in the Golan, from Heshbon and Medaba in Moab to Idumean cities in the south. The Hasmonean kingdom had reached its greatest territorial extent, rivaling the domains of David and Solomon.
But Alexander's body was failing him. He developed a quartan fever, a recurring illness that consumed him for three years. Still, he refused to stop fighting, campaigning in Transjordan even as the disease ate away at him. He finally died during the siege of Ragaba, a fortress beyond the Jordan.
Josephus records that on his deathbed, Alexander gave his wife Salome Alexandra one final piece of advice that revealed just how deeply the civil war had scarred him. He told her to make peace with the Pharisees. Give them a share of power, he said. They control the hearts of the people, and they can turn public opinion for or against a ruler with a single word. He told her to hand his body over to the Pharisees and let them decide how to honor or dishonor it, predicting that if she showed them respect, they would give him a more magnificent funeral than she could arrange on her own.
Alexandra followed his counsel exactly. She made the Pharisees the dominant political force in the kingdom, restored their religious ordinances, and ruled for nine peaceful years. The woman who inherited a blood-soaked throne became, in Josephus's telling, the most successful Hasmonean ruler of them all.