(57) "Conciliate the Pharisees"—Alexander’s dying advice to Alexandra
Alexander Jannæus (of the Hasmonæan dynasty; reigned 104-78 B.C.), on his last campaign, lies dying during the siege of Ragaba, near Gerasa on the east of Jordan.
78 B.C.
The Queen, seeing him to be near his end and now past hope of recovery, wept and lamented for her impending desolation and poured out her grief for herself and her children. “To whom are you thus leaving me,” so she spoke to him, “and our children who need others to help them, knowing as you do the ill-will which the nation bears you?”
Alexander advised her, if she wished to secure both the throne and their children, to comply with his suggestions. She was to conceal his death from the soldiers until she had taken the town.[[376]] She was then to enter Jerusalem in triumph after her victory and to concede a measure of authority to the Pharisees; for they would commend her for the honour paid them and dispose the nation in her favour. The Pharisees, he told her, had great influence with the Jews (and could use it) to the injury of any who hated them, or to the advantage of those who were on friendly terms with them; above all they had the confidence of the common people in any harsh criticism which they might pronounce on others, even though prompted by mere malice; the offence which he himself had given to the nation arose from his insulting the Pharisees. “Do you accordingly,” he said, “when you reach Jerusalem, send for such of them as are factious,[[377]] display my dead body, and with absolute sincerity allow them to use me as they will, whether they prefer to do despite to my corpse by refusing it burial in revenge for all they have suffered from me, or to gratify their anger by any other form of outrage to it. Promise them, moreover, that you will take no action in the exercise of your royal authority without consulting them. If you thus address them, I shall obtain a more splendid funeral from them than I should have had from you—for with the power to misuse my dead body they will lack the will—and you will be secure in your rule.” With this advice to his wife, he died, having reigned seven and twenty years and lived one and fifty.[[378]]
Alexandra took the fortress and, in accordance with her husband’s suggestions, had a colloquy with the Pharisees, leaving the disposal of the corpse and of the affairs of the kingdom entirely in their hands, and so pacified their anger against Alexander and won their good-will and friendship for herself. The Pharisees then went and harangued the multitude, rehearsing Alexander’s achievements, and telling them that they had lost a righteous king; and by their encomiums elicited from the people such lamentation and dejection on his behalf that they gave him a more splendid funeral than to any of the kings that had been before him.
Alexander left two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, but he bequeathed the kingdom to Alexandra. Of the sons, Hyrcanus was a weak administrator and preferred a quiet life; the younger, Aristobulus, was a man of action and courage. Their mother was beloved of the multitude because she appeared to take her husband’s errors to heart.
Hyrcanus she appointed high priest, because he was the elder, but still more on account of his temperamental inaction. She allowed the Pharisees complete freedom, and ordered the people to obey their behests. She also reinstated the customs which the Pharisees had introduced in accordance with ancestral tradition and her father-in-law, Hyrcanus, had abrogated.[[379]] She was thus nominally Queen, but the real power was in the hands of the Pharisees.—Ant. XIII. 15. 5-16. 2 (399-409)