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THE MACCABEES in RABBINIC TRADITION G. Stemberger One Of

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THE MACCABEES in RABBINIC TRADITION G. Stemberger One Of THE MACCABEES IN RABBINIC TRADITION BY G. Stemberger Vienna, Austria One of the perennial problems of research in rabbinic literature is its reliability for historical purposes. Traditional studies tend to consider rabbinic texts, whatever their age, as arepository of earlier traditions, transmitted orally through the ages. The rabbis, normally seen as the direct successors to the Pharisees and bound up with them by the com­ mon name 'the Sages', are thought to have received from them a large store of traditions from the period of the Second Temple. According to this school of thought, at least a kernel of historical truth is to be found in almost any rabbinic text. In this paper, I do not intend to enter direct1y into this vast and complex problem, although I think to throw some light on it by studying the small corpus of rabbinic texts about the Maccabees: no new information on the Maccabees, not yet known from earlier sources, is to be gained from these texts; but for the very reason that nothing is at stake, they may serve as a test-case for the ways historical memories are dealt with in rabbinic tradition. I shall proceed in two steps. In a first part, I shall present all the (very few) rabbinic texts in which the Maccabees are mentioned, in - as far as possible - historical sequence; the second part of this paper will deal with so me of the problems arising from this evidence. I. THE RABBINIC EVIDENCE Nowhere in classical rabbinic literature do we find the name 'Maccabee'. The family is always called the 'sons of Hashmonay' or 'the house of Hashmonay'. This name includes, of course, the whole dynasty down to Herod's wife Mariamne. Here, I do not consider rabbinic texts dealing with lohn Hyrcan, Alexander Yannay, Hyrcan 11 and Aristobul 11 or 194 G. STEMBERGER Mariamne, but only those that speak of Hashmonay or collectively of the betlbne Hashmonay. a) The only text of the Mishnah which mentions the Hasmoneans, is Middot 1,6, part of adescription of the Temple: There were four offices in the mom of the hearth ... In the one to the north-east the Hasmoneans (bne Hashmonay) put away the stones of the altar wbich bad been defiled by the kings of Greece. This corresponds to the information of 1 Macc 4,44-46 that under the direction of Judah priests tore down the altar polluted by the nations and stored away its stones in a fitting place on the Temple Mount. Josephus (Al XII,318) mentions the destruction of the polluted altar, but not that its stones were put away on the Temple Mount. It is difficult to evaluate this text since Middot is quite a particular tractate without parallel in the Mishnah. In our context it does not matter whether the precise indication where the polluted stones were deposited relies on an older description of the Temple or not; at any rate, Middot knows of the purification of the Temple by the Maccabees. The main concern of the text is topographie and not historical. The only other text which may be considered Tannaitic is a saying attributed to R.Yose in Seder Olam Rabbah 30: The kingdom of Persia (ruled) during the time of the Temple thirty-four years; the king dom of Greece one hundred and eighty; the kingdom of the House of the Hasmoneans (bef Hashmonay) one hundred and three; the king dom of Hemd one hundred and three. Fmm here and on go and count according to the destruction of the Temple. Seder Olam, too, is unique, being the only chronography in early Rab­ binic literature. If CJ. MILIKOWSKY is right that R. Yose has only redacted an earlier texe, then this text might go back to the early second century or even earlier. I am not sure if we can date Seder Olam so early. The number of years indicated for the Hasmonean dynasty would be rather exact: the other dates, however, are fraught with such problems that we should not make too much of this number. The memory of the 1 C.l. MILIKOWSKY, Seder Olam: A Rabbinie Chronography (PhD. thesis, Yale University, 1981), 15ff. .
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