The Temple of Onias Closed

After Masada had been taken in this way, the general left a garrison in the fortress and went off with his army to Caesarea. No enemy was left anywhere in the country; it had all been subdued by the long war, which had brought the alarm and the danger of disorder even to many who lived far away. After this, too, many Jews were killed around Alexandria in Egypt. Those of the Sicarii’s faction who had managed to escape there were not content with being safe. Again they set about new revolutionary schemes, persuading many of those who had taken them in to claim their freedom, to consider the Romans no better than themselves, and to regard God alone as their Master. When some Jews of note opposed them, they murdered them, and they kept pressing the rest, urging them to revolt. [a]

Seeing their madness, the leading men of the council of elders thought it no longer safe to overlook them. They gathered all the Jews into an assembly and exposed the madness of the Sicarii, showing that they were the cause of all their troubles. And now, they said, since these men had no sure hope of safety even as fugitives, because the Romans would kill them as soon as they were recognized, they were filling with the calamity that belonged to them people who had had no share in any of their crimes. So they urged the people to guard against the ruin these men would bring on them, and to clear themselves before the Romans by handing them over. The people saw the size of the danger and were persuaded. They rushed on the Sicarii in force and seized them. Six hundred were caught at once, and those who escaped into Egypt and to Thebes there were soon arrested and brought back. There was no one who was not amazed at their endurance, and at what one should call either madness or strength of conviction. Every kind of torture and bodily torment was devised against them for this one purpose only, to make them acknowledge Caesar as their master; and not one of them gave in, or even came near saying it. All of them held their resolve above the compulsion, receiving the tortures and the fire as though with bodies that felt nothing and a soul all but rejoicing. Most of all the onlookers were astounded by the children, for not one of them could be forced to call Caesar master. So far did the strength of their daring prevail over the weakness of their bodies.

Lupus was then governing Alexandria, and he quickly wrote to Caesar about this disturbance. Caesar, suspicious of the Jews’ endless appetite for revolution, and afraid that they might gather together again in a body and draw others in with them, ordered Lupus to tear down the Jewish temple in the district called Onias’s. It is in Egypt, and it was founded and got its name for the following reason. Onias son of Simon, one of the high priests at Jerusalem, fled from Antiochus king of Syria when he was at war with the Jews, and came to Alexandria. Ptolemy received him kindly because of his hatred of Antiochus, and Onias said he would make the Jewish nation Ptolemy’s ally if he would agree to what he proposed. When the king said he would do what he could, Onias asked him for permission to build a temple somewhere in Egypt and to worship God by the customs of his fathers. In this way, he said, the Jews would be even more set on war with Antiochus, who had plundered the temple in Jerusalem, and better disposed toward Ptolemy himself, and many would gather to him for the freedom to practice their religion without fear. [d]

Ptolemy agreed to his proposals and gave him a tract of land about twenty-two miles from Memphis; the district is called the Heliopolite nome. There Onias built a fortress, and he built the temple, not like the one in Jerusalem, but like a tower, of great stones, rising ninety feet high. He modeled the altar on the one in his own country and adorned the place with offerings in the same way, except for the lampstand. For he did not make a lampstand; instead he hammered out a golden lamp that shed a bright light and hung it from a golden chain. The whole sacred precinct was walled around with baked brick, with gates of stone. The king also granted him a great deal of land for revenue, so that the priests might have plenty and God might have abundance of what his worship required. Yet Onias did not do this from honest motives. He was in rivalry with the Jews in Jerusalem, for he nursed his anger over his exile, and he thought that by building this sanctuary he would draw the people away from them to it. There had also been an ancient prediction, made some six hundred years before: the man who foretold that this temple would be built in Egypt by a Jew was named Isaiah. That, then, is how the temple came to be built. [e]

Lupus, the governor of Alexandria, on receiving Caesar’s letter, came to the temple, carried out some of the offerings, and shut the temple up. Lupus died soon afterward, and Paulinus, who succeeded him in the governorship, left none of the offerings there, for he threatened the priests severely if they did not bring them all out. Nor did he let those who wished to worship come near the precinct. He shut the gates and made it wholly inaccessible, so that not a trace of the worship of God was left in the place. The time from the building of the temple to its closing was three hundred and forty-three years.