Severer measures were to follow. In b.c. 168 there had been a rising in Jerusalem, which was [pg 157] thereupon captured on a Sabbath-day by the Syrian general, the greater part of it being sacked and burned, and a portion of the city wall thrown down. A garrison was established on Mount Zion, which at that time overlooked the Temple-hill, and a fierce persecution of the Jews commenced. Every effort was made to compel them to forsake their religion, to eat swine's flesh, and to worship the gods of the Greeks. It was then that “the abomination of desolation” was seen in the Holy of Holies, the temples of Samaria and Jerusalem being re-dedicated to Zeus Xenios and Zeus Olympios, and that at Jerusalem befouled with the rites of the Syrian Ashtoreth.
Thousands of the orthodox Jews fled to Egypt, where they found shelter and welcome. Among them was Onias, the eldest son of Onias iii. Philomêtor granted him land in the nome of Heliopolis, and allowed him to build there a temple in which the worship of the Hebrew God should be carried on as it had been at Jerusalem. Excavation goes to show that the temple was erected at the spot now called Tel el-Yehudîyeh, “the Mound of the Jewess,” not far from Shibîn el-Kanâtir. Here was an old deserted palace and temple of Ramses iii., and here the Jews were permitted to establish themselves and found a city, which they called Onion.
According to Josephus, its older name had been Leontopolis. The temple, which was destroyed by Vespasian after the Jewish war, was fortified like that at Jerusalem, and the porcelain plaques enamelled with rosettes and lotus-buds, which had been made for Ramses iii., were employed once more to ornament it. Long ago the fellahin discovered among its ruins, and then broke up, a marble bath, such as is used to-day by the Jewish women for the purpose of purification, and in the adjoining necropolis Dr. Naville found the tombs of persons who bore Jewish names. Onias was not allowed to build his new temple without a protest from the stricter adherents of the Law that it was forbidden to raise one elsewhere than in the sacred city of David. But he was a man of ready resource, and all opposition was overcome when he pointed to the prophecy of Isaiah (xix. 19): “In that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.” The Egyptian Jews had already secured their own version of the Scriptures; they now had their own temple, their own priesthood, and their own high-priest. True, their co-religionists in Judæa never ceased to protest against this rival centre of their religious faith, and to denounce Onias as the first schismatic; but their brethren in Egypt paid no attention to their words, and the temple [pg 159] of Onion continued to exist as long as that of Jerusalem.
Onias exercised an influence not only over his own countrymen, but over the mind of the king as well. Philomêtor, like Euergetês, had Jewish leanings, and the high-priest of Onion was admitted to high offices of state. So also was Dositheus, “the priest and Levite,” who, in “The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther” (x. 1), tells us that in the fourth year of Philomêtor, he and his son Ptolemy had brought to Egypt “this epistle of Phurim,” which had been translated into Greek at Jerusalem by Lysimachus, the son of Ptolemy. Philomêtor even acted as a judge in the great religious controversy which raged between the Jews and the Samaritans. They called upon him to decide whether the temple should have been built on Mount Moriah or Mount Gerizim, and which of them had altered the text of Deuteronomy xxvii. 12, 13. Philomêtor decided in favour of the Jews, as his duty towards his numerous Jewish subjects perhaps compelled him to do, and his religious zeal even carried him so far as to order the two unsuccessful advocates of the Samaritan cause to be put to death.
While the king of Egypt was thus acting like a Jew, the king of Syria was engaged in a fierce struggle with the Jewish people. The national party [pg 160] had risen under Mattathias, the priest of Modin, and his five sons, of whom the third, Judas Maccabæus, was the ablest and best-known. One after another the Syrian armies were overthrown, and in b.c. 165 the Temple was purified and repaired, and a new altar dedicated in it to the Lord of Hosts. Two years later Antiochus Epiphanês died while on the march against Judæa, and with him died also the power of Syria. Rival claimants for the throne, internal and external discord, treachery and murder, sapped the foundations of its strength, and in spite of assassinations and religious quarrels, of Edomite hostility and the efforts of the Hellenising party among the Jews themselves, the power of the Maccabees went on increasing. The high-priesthood passed to them from the last of the sympathisers with the Greeks, and Jonathan, the brother and successor of Judas, was treated by the king of Syria with royal honours. Treaties were made with Sparta and Rome, and his successor, Simon, struck coins of his own. After his murder his son John Hyrcanus extended the Jewish dominion as far north as Damascus, annihilating Samaria and its temples and conquering the Edomites, whom he compelled to accept the Jewish faith. Aristobulus, who followed him, took the title of king, and added Ituræa to his kingdom, while his brother Alexander Jannæus [pg 161] attacked Egypt and annexed the cities of the Phœnician coast. But with royal dignity had come royal crimes. Both Aristobulus and Alexander had murdered their brothers, and their Greek names show how the champions of Jewish orthodoxy were passing over into the camp of the foe.
Long before all this happened, many changes had fallen upon Egypt. Philomêtor died in b.c. 145. He had been weak enough to forgive his rebellious and ungrateful brother twice when he had had him in his power. Once he had been compelled to go to Rome to plead his cause before the senate, and there be indebted to an Alexandrine painter for food and lodging; on the second occasion Physkôn had endeavoured to rob him of Cyprus by a combination of mean treachery and intrigue.
The reward of his brotherly forbearance was the murder by Physkôn of Philomêtor's young son Ptolemy Philopator ii. immediately after his death. Onias, the Jewish high-priest, held Alexandria for Philopator, but his uncle Physkôn was favoured by the Romans, whose word was now law. Physkôn accordingly began his long reign of vice and cruelty, interrupted only by temporary banishment to Cyprus. Then followed his widow, Cleopatra Kokkê, a woman stained with every possible and impossible crime. She held her own, however, against all opponents, [pg 162] including her own son Ptolemy Lathyrus, thanks to her two Jewish generals, Khelkias and Ananias, the sons of the high-priest Onias. Palestine and Syria again became a battle-field where the fate of Egypt was decided, and while Cleopatra was aided by the Jews, Lathyrus found his allies among the Samaritans.
It was in the midst of these wars and rumours of wars, when men had lost faith in one another and themselves, and when the Jews after struggling for bare existence were beginning to treat on equal terms with the great monarchies of the world, that that curious Apocalypse, the Book of Enoch, seems to have been composed, at all events in its original form. It is a vision of the end of all things and the judgment of mankind, and it embodies the fully developed doctrine of the angelic hierarchy to which reference is made in the Book of Daniel.
Cleopatra was murdered by her younger and favourite son, and Lathyrus succeeded after all in obtaining the throne of Egypt, which he ascended under the title of Sôtêr ii. (b.c. 87). His short reign of six years was signalised by the destruction of Thebes. Upper Egypt was still in a state of effervescing discontent, and the crimes of the last reign caused it to break into open rebellion. The government was weak and wicked; the Greeks had lost [pg 163] their vigour and power to rule, and their armies were now mere bodies of unruly mercenaries. But the Thebans were not wealthy or strong enough to withstand Alexandria when helped by the resources of the Mediterranean. The revolt was at last suppressed, Thebes taken by storm, and its temples, which had been used as fortresses, battered and destroyed. The population was put to the sword or carried into slavery, and the capital of the conquering Pharaohs of the past ceased to exist. Its place was taken by a few squalid villages which clustered round the ruins of its ancient shrines. Karnak and Luxor, Medinêt Habu and Qurnah, were all that remained of the former city. Under the earlier Ptolemies it had been known as Diospolis, “the city of Zeus” Amon, the metropolis of Upper Egypt; from this time forward, in the receipts of the tax-gatherers, it is nothing more than a collection of “villages.” Its priests were scattered, its ruined temples left to decay. What the Assyrian had failed to destroy and the Persian had spared was overthrown by a Ptolemy who called himself a king of Egypt.
After the death of Lathyrus the internal decay of the monarchy went on rapidly. A prey to civil war and usurpation, it was allowed to exist a little longer by the contemptuous forbearance of the Romans, who waited to put an end to it until they had drained it [pg 164] of its treasures. The kingdom of the Asmonæans at Jerusalem also had tottered to its fall. Family murders and civil feuds had become almost as common among them as among the Ptolemies, and as in Egypt, so too in Palestine, Rome was called in to mediate between the rival claimants for the crown. In b.c. 63 Jerusalem was captured by Pompey after a three months' siege, its defenders massacred, its fortifications destroyed, and its royal house abolished. The Roman victor entered the Holy of Holies, and Palestine was annexed to the Roman empire.