The Wicked Hasmonean Priest

by Eliezer Segal

We have all learned to admire them as supreme Jewish heroes: The five sons of Mattathias the Hasmonean, the freedom fighters whose heroic exploits against religious persecution brought about the celebration of Hanukkah.

The leader of the revolt, Judah Maccabee, was the first of the brothers to fall in battle before the goals of the rebellion had been accomplished. It was left to his brother Jonathan to complete the job, removing the last Greek garrison from the city of Jerusalem and initiating a century of Jewish independence. Jonathan assumed the High Priesthood, beginning an unbroken line of Hasmonean High Priests that continued from 163 B.C.E. until 37 B.C.E. 

And yet, to judge from contemporary documents, many Jews were less than appreciative of this Hanukkah hero, and saw him as an enemy of Judaism and the Jewish people.

This hostility is most evident in an ancient commentary to the book of Habakkuk that was included among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran. The work in question belongs to a special genre known as Pesher, in which the words of the biblical prophets were applied to events in recent history.

The Habakkuk Pesher has a great deal to say about a figure that it calls the “Wicked Priest.” This villainous character, according to the author,

was called in the name of truth when he first arose. But when he ruled over Israel his heart became proud, and he forsook God and betrayed the precepts for the sake of riches.

The Pesher accuses the Wicked Priest of corruption and oppressing the poor, and generally violating God’s law. He profaned the holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple with terrible abominations.

But the gravest of his crimes was his persecution of the person known as the “Teacher of Righteousness.” As described in the Qumran scrolls, this figure was a revered individual, endowed with a special spiritual wisdom and revelation, who instructed his devoted disciples in the true meaning of the Torah.

The author of Pesher Habakkuk relates that the Wicked Priest became arrogant in his power, leading him to violate God’s laws and to cause unspecified suffering to the Teacher and his followers. 

Ultimately the Wicked Priest met his deserved retribution. He fell into the hands of enemies who inflicted bitter suffering upon him.

Who were the Wicked Priest and the Teacher of Righteousness? These questions are crucial to any proper evaluation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and their message.

The history of the Second Jewish Commonwealth provides us with a number of candidates for the role of Wicked Priest. Several figures of priestly lineage were counted among the leading proponents of the Hellenistic reforms that sparked the Maccabean uprising. 

Thus, for example, an individual named Jason (originally Joshua), scion of a respected priestly family, purchased the High Priesthood from Antiochus Epiphanes, and used his three-year term of office to enforce pagan practices in Judea. He was eventually deposed, and ended his days as a rootless exile who perished miserably at Sparta. 

His rival and successor, Menelaus (known formerly by his Hebrew name Honio or Onias) was even more resolute in his campaign against Judaism. A virtual civil war erupted during his reign, until Antiochus determined that the only way to restore peace among the rival factions was by deposing Menelaus and exiling him to the Syrian town of Berea, where he was put to death in his tenth year of office. 

The next infamous figure in the series was Alcimus, a stubborn and ruthless opponent of the Hasmoneans who served as High Priest under the pro-Greek regime, and came to a sordid end, stricken with a painful and debilitating paralysis.

Although some of the details mentioned in the Pesher Habakkuk–such as the allusion to the priest’s righteous beginnings– remain unexplained by the known facts of these priests’ biographies, it is not entirely inconceivable that one of these wretched figures could have been the Wicked Priest. 

However, a virtual consensus has developed among interpreters of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the most likely identity for the Wicked Priest of Pesher Habakkuk was the Hasmonean ruler Jonathan, the brother of Judah Maccabee. Almost all the expressions in the document, after we have made allowances for their flowery and cryptic style, can be readily linked to known episodes in Jonathan’s life. 

Jonathan’s initial appearance on the stage of history, as a champion of traditional Judaism against pagan reforms and Seleucid oppression, was applauded by loyal Jews. However, once the revolt had elevated him to a position of leader ship, his activities began to provoke criticism from many circles. 

We know from other sources that Jonathan’s most harshly condemned act was when he appointed himself High Priest, an office that had previously been the exclusive birthright of the ancient dynasty of the Zadokites. It is probable that the origin of the Sadducee sect is to be traced to this event. Some contemporaries, who might otherwise have tolerated Jonathan’s High Priestly status, were nevertheless dismayed that he and his successors laid claim to the monarchy as well. The concentration of so much authority in the hands of a single individual was exceptional in Jewish history.

Pesher Habakkuk’s description of the Wicked Priest’s dreadful demise also dovetails nicely with the known facts of Jonathan’s life. The Hasmonean ruler met an ignominious end when he was treacherously imprisoned by the Syrian general Tryphon who kept him in a dungeon until his execution. In the eyes of Pesher Habakkuk’s author, this pathetic end of a heroic Jewish freedom fighter was a just settling of accounts.

The one detail in this account that remains obscure is the dispute that arose between Jonathan and the Teacher of Righteousness. The Second Temple era was replete with sectarian controversies over the correct interpretation of the Torah, but our sources do not yet allow us to identify with any certainty the specific issue that brought about the schism between the Wicked Priest and the Teacher of Righteousness, a schism that may have led to the founding of the Essene community by the shores of the Dead Sea.

If this theory is correct, then Jonathan the Hasmonean can join the ranks of many other war heroes and liberators who found it easier to rally their followers against a common enemy than to maintain their loyalty through the obstacles of day-to-day politics.

• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, December 21, 2000, pp. 24-5.
• For further reading:
  • Avi-Yonah, Michael, and Zvi Baras, eds. Society and Religion in the Second Temple Period, World History of the Jewish People: First Series: Ancient Time. Jerusalem: Massada Publishing, 1977.
  • Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. London: Penguin, 1995.
  • Vermès, Géza. Discovery in the Judean Desert. New York: Desclee, 1956.

My email address is: [email protected]

This article is included in the collection: In Those Days, At This Time: Holiness and History in the Jewish Calendar,
University of Calgary Press, 2007.

Stincus, Scincus Shmincus–But Is It Kosher?

by Eliezer Segal

All in all, it would appear that questions about the kosher status of fish should be among the least problematic areas of the Jewish dietary laws. The Torah offers very clear rules for identifying the permissible sea creatures: “whatever in the water has fins and scales.” The Mishnah simplifies the process even more by observing that, while some species might have fins but no scales, all those with scales also have fins. This assumption allows for leniency in cases where the fins are not visible, either because they are too small or because they were removed before the Jewish consumer had a chance to examine the creature.

The halakhic waters got muddied, as it were, one day in the seventeenth century while Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller was occupying a rabbinical post in Vienna. A Jewish physician named Aaron Lucerna approached him bearing a creature with the charming name “stincus marinus” that inhabited the “Spanish Sea” (the southwest Mediterranean). Like the Japanese fugu puffer-fish, the stincus was said to be lethally poisonous until its toxin was removed by qualified experts, after which the leftovers could be utilized for assorted pharmaceutical purposes.

The main reason Dr. Lucerna thought the creature would be of interest to Rabbi Heller was because it had scales but no fins, thereby presenting an ostensible contradiction to the Mishnah’s rule. How would the rabbi account for this contradiction between science and religious teachings?

An easy solution suggested by the doctor was that the stincus marinus did in fact have “fins” if one were allowed to employ a broad enough definition. For it had four little legs to propel itself, and perhaps those could be counted as fins for purposes of the halakhic classification.

However, Dr. Lucerna had another problem with the stincus marinus. Even if it technically passed the scales-and-fins test, there was something theologically disturbing about declaring it kosher. The fact that it was poisonous and, if improperly prepared, could kill a person who ingested it, seemed incongruous with the overriding spirit of Judaism. In this connection he quoted passages from the Talmud in which the rabbis insisted that all the precepts of the Torah were subject to the condition “her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace.” Now the doctor argued, that principle should also preclude consuming an unpleasantly poisonous sea creature. How, then, could the stincus marinus  be permissible according to the Torah’s values?

Rabbi Heller related that he was initially disconcerted by Dr. Lucerna’s query and he was unable to come up with a satisfying retort. He suggested feebly that perhaps the Torah did not have this particular species in mind because it was not yet in existence in the days of Moses or of the talmudic rabbis, but was genetically engineered at a later date through cross-breeding. Even though he was able to adduce some midrashic statements about changes that had occurred in nature since the original creation, he was clearly not comfortable with that unlikely explanation.

Eventually the rabbi was able to come up with a more satisfactory solution, one that was rooted in the biblical text rather than in dubious scientific conjectures. His careful reading of the relevant scriptural passages led him to the conclusion that the Torah distinguished between fish and other aquatic creatures, and that the generalization about all scaled species having fins was only true with reference to fish. The stincus marinus, on the other hand, as a non-fish water animal, might well have scales and not fins.

We now know that the whole dilemma was based on a case of mistaken identity. The animal in question was mislabeled. Its real name was “scincus marinus” and it was a member of the skink family. As Rabbi Moses Schreiber (the “Hassam Sofer”) would later report in the name of up-to-date scientific evidence, it was not a water-dweller at all, but a landlubber. In English too it is known misleadingly as a “sandfish,” a name that it likely acquired by virtue of its remarkable talent for propelling itself under the sands by means of swimming-like strokes. These facts were unknown to the earlier Jewish scholars who participated in an animated debate that persisted for centuries. At any rate, what provoked this discussion was not the actual biological organism so much as the intriguing hypothetical concept of a poisonous, scaled and finless organism.  

Rabbi Heller’s discussion was revisited a generation or so later by Rabbi Hezekiah da Silva, a scholar known for his contentious mindset. He was veritably fuming with righteous indignation at both of Heller’s explanations of the stincus marinus: “Lord help him for publishing such foreign notions that all but uproot the boundaries and limits that were established by the ancients, thereby creating opportunities for people to succumb to errors and doubts with regard to the holy and true words of our blessed sages.” 

Da Silva was convinced that if we were to concede the possibility that new species had come into existence since the days of the Bible and Talmud, then the eternal laws of Judaism would completely lose their validity. It was therefore preferable to suppose that Heller’s stincus did originally have fins, but they had somehow dropped off before it was caught, or they had not yet reached their full maturity. Whatever biological objections might be implied in such a theory (and some later rabbis were quick to point these out), “it behooves us to seek after arguments that uphold the words of our revered sages rather than proposing theories that cast doubts on the rabbis’ received traditions.”

In a similar vein, Rabbi da Silva objected to Heller’s hypothesis that the presence of scales without fins was not a sufficient criterion for permitting consumption of aquatic creatures other than fish. He therefore declared the stincus marinus to be kosher. As for the argument that the Torah would never allow us to eat a species that is potentially deadly, that factor was surely offset here by its pharmaceutical benefits. He noted that there are many medicinal products that are permitted by the Torah in spite of their potentially hazardous side-effects. His pious confidence in divine providence reassured him that the no innocent people would ever come to harm from ingesting stincus, as stated in Proverbs: “no harm befalls the righteous, but the wicked have their fill of trouble.” (It seems to me that it would still be prudent to read the fine print on the label.)

The disagreement between Heller and da Silva defined the frame of reference for much subsequent discussion of these issues: Does piety demand a belief that the rabbis of yore possessed infallible expertise in ichthyology, knowledge that originated in divine inspiration rather than in academic scientific study? And do the Jewish dietary laws take into account health factors, or other moral and aesthetic considerations?

Some scholars, like Rabbis Jonathan Eybeschutz and Jacob Zvi Mecklenburg, resolved the problem quite simply by noting that it is virtually impossible to speak of invariable laws among the infinite varieties of biological phenomena; whereas the Torah concerns itself only with the most common situations. The Talmud itself declares that its generalizations are subject to exceptions. As Eybeschutz put it, “if you should discover a creature without fins, this does not disprove the general rule, because it is an exception, and the talmudic sages were speaking about the majority of fish.”

I may be wrong, but I find something quintessentially Jewish in the way that this skirmish between science and religion came to focus not on broad cosmic questions like Evolution or the Big Bang, but on an unpretentiously practical problem about a seafood option on the dinner menu.

• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 15, 2010, p. 10.
• For further reading:
  • Davis, Joseph M. “Ashkenazic Rationalism and Midrashic Natural History: Responses to the New Science in the Works of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1878-1654).” Science in Context 10 (1997): 605-626.
  • —. “Philosphy and the Law in the Writings of R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller.” In Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, edited by Isadore Twersky and Jay Harris, 249-280. Harvard Judaic monographs 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979.
  • —. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.
  • Eisikivits, Eliezer. “Fish Story.” Mishpacha, 2009.
  • Slifkin, Nosson. The Camel, the Hare & the Hyrax: A Study of the Laws of Animals with One Kosher Sign in Light of Modern Zoology. Southfield, MI: Zoo Torah in association with Targum/Feldhei

My email address is: [email protected]

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This article is included in the collection: On the Trails of Tradition: Explorations of Jewish Life and Learning, the Alberta Judaic Library, 2011