Civil Wars are about as ugly and vicious as wars get because the combatants believe their enemies, their brothers and sisters nationally and often literally, are not simply political and ideological adversaries but traitors to fundamental, formerly shared ideals, to founding principles, to God. The United States Civil War saw the destruction of 600,000 American lives in some of the most intense, hand-to-hand fighting ever recorded and a lot of that can be ascribed to the feelings inherent in presumed betrayal.

[Israel under the Maccabees]

     And now it's Hanukkah. The Festival of Lights celebrates, as you almost certainly know, the Maccabee Brothers' successful revolt in Israel against Greek-Syrian rule and its leading figure, Antiochus-IV, a hudred sixty-some years before Jesus' birth. Jewish lore has it that the Miracle at Jerusalem is that God saw to it that the holy oil in the Temple lamps, running dangerously low to the point that numbers of Temple-related commandments might not be fulfilled, lasted a full eight days (until the revolutionaries could assume command there).

     That's the religious story. It fulfils a need, gracing history. Yet it's hardly all of it.

     What happened was that the Macabbean revolt led to several generations of an independent Jewish State before Rome and its front-men, the Herodian Kings, took over The Land. And then it led to disaster. One of those Herods was the Herod whom you know from Sunday School and from the even more instructive moments in The Robe, Demetrius and The Gladiators, King of Kings, Ben-Hur, and other must-sees. Herod's the fellow who had Jesus' cousin, the man the Gospels know as John The Baptiser, murdered, it was said, at the whim of the vixen, Salome.

     Far more likely is that John, known widely throughout Israel as The Baptiser, and first cousin to Jesus, James, his brother (and also later murdered), and Jesus himself, were continually under suspicion for John's Jordan River water rituals (along with all of their subversive Essene and Nazirite associates) because they...certainly John did...routinely called out from Jerusalem tens of thousands in an almost ongoing paroxysm of repeated, frenzied (and wholly Jewish) religious revival. Frenzied religious revival is what happens when (in this case, Roman) oppression gets to be routine:  the oppressed respond, sometimes in revolt but far more often in acts of religious ecstasy, acts nearly always wholly misconstrued as politically subversive by the state.

     If you are a Roman, or, like Herod, a nominal-Jew and a Roman puppet, you grow at best really weary of the potential for legions of inspired, whipped-up men and women who have just seen God and who have had it up to here with your routine oppression, angrily descending on Jerusalem. That's what Herod feared. Not Salome.

     But back to the Macabbees.

     Here's what scholars such as Elaine Paigels, John Dominic Crossan, and numbers of others conclude about Judah Maccabee and his civil war to make Israel (temporarily) free. Because it was a civil war it killed tens of thousands of Greek-Syrian soldiers; it also killed ten-to-twelve times as many Jews. That is to say, in addition to those Jews killed by Antiocus' forces, the Maccabees killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Jews believed to be in league with or indifferent to non-Jewish rule. Ten-to-twelve times as many.

     And this:

     When the revolutionaries had swept south to Jerusalem and had restored the Temple, the Maccabees had the then- High Priest, his wife, and all of their children killed as traitors, as Greek-Syrian puppets. And the High Priest, no doubt, was. All told, perhaps several hundred thousand killed in that civil war, far, far more Jews killed by Jews than non-Jews killed by Jews...and one last point...bringing us up to Jesus' time again. However brutal the Greeks, the Syrians, the Maccabees were--and they all were--no one beats the Romans for routine brutality (up until the Nazis, of course--although they barely lasted twelve years).

          In the fifty years from the year Jesus

          was born until the year 50 of the Common

          Era, Romans crucified over 50,000 in Judea

          (southern Israel) alone. That's roughly twenty

          each week.

    Happy Hanukkah...(and an early) Merry Christmas!