The Hasmonean Kings: Jewish or Hellenistic?

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The Jewish dynasty of Hasmoneans ruled Judea for more than a century in the Late Hellenistic period. Their palaces, excavated in Jericho, reveal a great deal about how they lived. But what do the palace architecture and pottery tell us about the delicate balance the Hasmonean rulers tried to strike when projecting the power, wealth, and authority—both secular and religious—of their independent Jewish state to their Jewish subjects and foreign dignitaries?

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Footnotes

1. See Suzanne F. Singer, “The Winter Palaces of Jericho,” BAR, 3:2; “Reviews,” BAR, 28:4.

Endnotes

1.
Ehud Netzer, Hasmonean and Herodian Palaces at Jericho. Final Reports of the 1973–1987 Excavations. Vol. I: Stratigraphy and Architecture (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 2–6, 301–310. The major Hasmonean palace in Jerusalem (probably referred to in Antiquities 13.411; 14.7) did not survive and is not described by Josephus or in any other ancient source.

2.
For a more detailed discussion, see Eyal Regev, “Royal Ideology in the Hasmonaean Palaces in Jericho,” BASOR 363 (2011), pp. 45–72; Eyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013).

3. See Rachel Bar-Nathan, Hasmonean and Herodian Palaces at Jericho. Final Reports of the 1973–1987 Excavations. Vol. III: The Pottery (Jerusalem, 2002), pp. 37, 46, 55–56, 95–96, 119–120, 122–124, 196–197.

4.
The exception being an outstanding red-slipped rhyton, an ancient Greek drinking vessel, found in a ritual bath in the Pool Complex that may have been used for “a religious or official ceremony”; see Bar-Nathan, The Pottery, p. 114.

5.
See Eyal Regev, “The Hellenization of the Hasmoneans Revisited: The Archaeological Evidence,” Advances in Anthropology 7.4 (2017), pp. 175–196.