Sylvie Honigman - Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochos IV

I was first introduced to 1 and 2 Maccabees when, as a visiting student, I attended Daniel R. Schwartzs advanced seminars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I remember the charisma of a great scholar, amazing teacher, and immensely generous man, who with his dry humor welcomed foreign students to his classes, inviting us to comment on the Greek of the ancient sources in our hesitant Hebrew. Daniel Schwartz related to all of us as though we were formal research students of his, sharing his knowledge and encouraging personal investigation. This book is greatly indebted to him, and I am glad to pay homage to him hereespecially as I suspect he will strongly disagree with most of its arguments. These were also the years when I came to know Noah Hacham, who as a fellow student was always there to help, either with Hebrew or with such unfamiliar material as Jewish Halakhah; and Katell Berthelot, who by then was another visiting student from France. In time, both were to become friends and colleagues, and numerous strands of our ongoing intellectual conversations have found their way into this book in one form or another.

The intellectual encounters that proved most decisive for this book were those I had with biblical scholars working on Persian times. I first heard of Victor Hurowitzs book on the central place of the narrative pattern of temple foundation in the royal ideologies of the ancient Near East and the Bible from Arnaud Srandour, when the two of us spent one year in Jerusalem as PhD students and shared our working pauses. When thereafter I discovered 1 and 2 Maccabees, I was intrigued by what by then struck me as vague similarities between the Hanukkah narrative and ancient Near Eastern stories of kings and temple foundations. However, it took several years for that issue to crystallize into a proper research project, and eventually the present book. And as it did, I benefited from more encounters with biblical scholars whose help was invaluable. First and foremost among these are Christophe Nihan and Ehud Ben Zvi, who generously shared with me their knowledge of biblical texts of Persian times and were open to discuss ideas.

My project also led to a close collaboration with Gilles Gorre, which gave us the opportunity time and again to share views about Hellenistic kings and Judean and Egyptian priests. Laetitia Graslin-Thom and Philippe Clancier were open to discussions about Jerusalem and Seleukid Babylonia, and Hannah Cotton about the Olympiodoros inscription. I also benefited from conversations with John Ma, Maurice Sartre, and Erich Gruen on 2 Maccabees and Antiochos IV, as well as with Gali Shapira on structural semiotics, and Frank Pollack on ethnopoetics. In the framework of a common research group I could share more conversations on Qumran with Jonathan Ben Dov and on Bickerman with Albert Baumgarten. On a less formal front, my many conversations over coffee with Susan Weingarten at Tel Aviv University were both delightful and intellectually rewarding.

Gilles Gorre, Erich Gruen, Christophe Nihan, Frank Pollack, Maurice Sartre, and Gali Shapira read earlier drafts of chapters, and Katell Berthelot and John Ma the entire manuscript. Their comments and corrections have been invaluable in helping me improve the book, and I warmly thank them for their time and interest. Ehud Ben Zvi kindly prepared a detailed list of intertextual references to biblical texts in 1 Maccabees, for which I am most grateful. This document helped me to substantially improve the literary analyses expounded in Chapters 3 and 4; my commentary on Simons Eulogy in 1 Maccabees 14, in particular, is heavily indebted to this document. All remaining errors are mine alone. I also wish to thank U.C. Presss referees and committee reader, whose comments have been most helpful.

I wish to thank the scholars who offered me the opportunity to present aspects of my investigation on 1 and 2 Maccabees in academic forums: Claire Clivaz and Sabrina Inowlocki; Lester L. Grabbe and Oded Lipschits; Jonathan Ben Dov and Albert Baumgarten; Yuval Rotman; Noah Hacham; Marie-Franoise Baslez and Olivier Munnich; Silvia Bussi; and Laetitia Graslin-Thom and Christophe Feyel.

My thanks also go to scholars who shared unpublished papers and bibliographical references with me: Damien Agut, Marie-Franoise Baslez, Laurent Capdetrey, Philippe Clancier, Tobias Funke, Gilles Gorre, Laetitia Graslin-Thom, Christophe Michels, Julien Monerie, Olivier Munnich, Christophe Nihan, Andrea Rotstein, Maurice Sartre, Loren Stuckenbruck, Rolf Strootman, Daniel R. Schwartz, and Caroline Waerzeggers, with special thanks to Ehud Ben Zvi, who made available to me his unpublished draft of a book of collected papers.

Andrew Ellis and Jonathan Orr-Stav edited the final manuscript, while Doron Narkiss and Susan Weingarten edited earlier drafts of various chapters. Rotem Avineri Mer, Roii Ball, Michal Molcho, and Kristjan Sinkec provided most useful technical help. I warmly thank them for their aid. My thanks go also to Paul Psoinos, who copyedited the manuscript.

Finally, I thank Avital, Melvyn, Daniel, Nittay and Maor, Aryeh, Taly, Colette, and Danile for their presence and support.