Monumental Tombs from Maussollos to the Maccabees - The BAS Library
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Monumental Tombs from Maussollos to the Maccabees

Heroes of Hanukkah Open Era of Jewish Display Tombs

Modi’in was nothing but a hick town in the second century B.C., about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem. But it was the ancestral home of the Maccabee family who led the successful revolt against the Seleucid tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes after he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple and forbade circumcision and Sabbath observance. Mattathias, the family patriarch, and his five sons have earned an indelible chapter in Jewish history, still remembered annually in the festival of Hanukkah. The Maccabean forces were led by Mattathias’s eldest son, Judas, known as the Hammer because of his military prowess. When he was killed, […]

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Endnotes

1.

Antiquities 13.6.6.

2.

Among the inspirations from the original Mausoleum is the third-century B.C. (280–246) Belevi Monument near Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor north of Halicarnassus. It was likely begun for King Lysimachus (died 280 B.C.) but was used instead for the Seleucid ruler Antiochus II (died 246 B.C.). It consisted of a rock-cut socle 33 feet high, an upper story encircled by columns and a pyramidal roof. See Andrea M. Berlin, “Power and Its Afterlife: Tombs in Hellenistic Palestine,” Near Eastern Archaeology, vol. 62, June 2002, p. 145. See in general, J. Fedak, Monumental Tombs of the Hellenistic Age (Toronto, 1990).

3.

Pliny, Natural History 36.30.

4.

Geoffrey B. Waywell, “The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,” in Peter A. Clayton and Martin J. Price, eds., The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 104.