Crassus Robs the Temple

Crassus, about to march against the Parthians, came into Judea. He carried off the money in the temple that Pompey had left, two thousand talents, and was ready to strip the sanctuary of all its gold, which came to eight thousand talents. He also took a beam of solid beaten gold weighing about 540 pounds. It was the priest who guarded the treasures, Eleazar by name, who handed this beam over to him — not out of wickedness, for he was a good and just man. He had been entrusted with the care of the curtains of the sanctuary, which were wonderfully beautiful, of very costly workmanship, and hung from this beam. When he saw Crassus busy collecting the gold, he feared for all the sanctuary’s adornments, and gave him the golden beam as a ransom for everything, after taking oaths from him that he would move nothing else from the sanctuary but be content with this one gift, which was worth many tens of thousands. This beam was enclosed in a hollow wooden beam; no one else knew it, and Eleazar alone was aware of it. Crassus took this beam as though he would touch nothing else in the temple, and then broke his oaths and carried off all the gold in the sanctuary. [a]

Let no one wonder that there was so much wealth in our temple. For a very long time all the Jews throughout the inhabited world, and those who worshiped God, even those from Asia and Europe, had been bringing their contributions to it. Nor is the size of these sums unattested, or blown up to such a height by any boasting or idle talk of ours. Many other historians bear witness for us, and so does Strabo of Cappadocia, who says this: “Mithridates sent to Cos and took the money which Queen Cleopatra had deposited there, and the eight hundred talents of the Jews.” Now we have no public money except what belongs to God. Plainly it was the Jews of Asia who moved this money to Cos, out of fear of Mithridates. It is not likely that those in Judea, who had a strong city and the temple, would send money to Cos; nor is it believable that the Jews living in Alexandria would do it, since they had nothing to fear from Mithridates. The same Strabo bears witness in another place, too: when Sulla crossed into Greece to make war on Mithridates and sent Lucullus to put down the rebellion of our nation in Cyrene — the nation that had by then filled the inhabited world — he says this: “There were four classes in the city of Cyrene: the citizens, the farmers, the resident foreigners, and the fourth, the Jews. This people has already made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the inhabited world which has not received this race and is not dominated by it. And it has come about that Egypt and Cyrene, since they had the same rulers, and many other countries, have imitated them, and have given special support to the communities of the Jews, which have grown along with them, living by the ancestral laws of the Jews. In Egypt, at any rate, a settlement of the Jews has been set apart, and besides that a large part of the city of Alexandria has been assigned to this nation. An ethnarch is appointed over them, who governs the nation, decides lawsuits, and oversees contracts and ordinances, as though he were the ruler of an independent state. So in Egypt this nation grew strong, because the Jews were Egyptians to begin with, and because those who left settled close by; and they moved into Cyrene because it too bordered on the kingdom of Egypt, as Judea did — or rather, it had once belonged to that kingdom.” That is what Strabo says. [d]

When Crassus had arranged everything as he pleased, he set out for Parthia, and there he perished with his whole army, as has been told elsewhere. But Cassius escaped into Syria, secured it, and blocked the Parthians, who were raiding it after their victory over Crassus. Coming back to Tyre, he went up into Judea as well. He attacked Taricheae, took it at once, and sold about thirty thousand people into slavery. He also killed Pitholaus, who had taken over Aristobulus’s faction; it was Antipater who urged him to do it. Antipater had great influence with Cassius, and was held in the highest esteem at that time among the Jews as well. He had married a woman of a distinguished family from Arabia, named Cypros, and had by her four sons — Phasael; Herod, who later became king; Joseph; and Pheroras — and a daughter, Salome. This Antipater had also made friendships and ties of hospitality with the other princes, and especially with the king of the Arabians, to whom he entrusted his children while he was fighting Aristobulus. Cassius, meanwhile, broke camp and hurried to the Euphrates to meet those who were coming from there to attack him, as others have also related. [f]

Some time later Caesar, having seized Rome after Pompey and the senate fled across the Ionian Sea, released Aristobulus from his chains and decided to send him to Syria with two legions, so that he could put affairs there in order, as he was a man of power in that country. But Aristobulus never enjoyed the hopes on which he had received this power from Caesar. Pompey’s partisans got to him first and killed him with poison, and Caesar’s partisans buried him. His body lay a long time preserved in honey, until Antony later sent it to Judea and had it laid in the royal tombs. Pompey wrote to Scipio to put to death Alexander the son of Aristobulus. Scipio charged the young man with his first offenses against the Romans and beheaded him with the axe, and so he died at Antioch. His brother and sisters were taken in by Ptolemy son of Mennaeus, the ruler of Chalcis below Mount Lebanon. Ptolemy sent his son Philippion to Ashkelon, to Aristobulus’s widow, and told her to send back with him her son Antigonus and her daughters. Philippion fell in love with one of them, Alexandra, and married her. But afterward his father Ptolemy killed him, married Alexandra himself, and went on taking care of her brother and sister. [i]