No one, it seems, wants to know what actually happened during the Maccabean period.

The introduction to this book proclaims loudly that the historian must start with the facts and interpret them only secondarily if at all ("To write a history one must collate all the facts, which must be accurate"; p. xvii). I entirely agree. He also claims that, to understand, the Judaism of the Second Temple period, one must study the later Jewish literature, the tannaitic writings (so p. xix). This is a lot more complicated -- the religious attitudes of writers who lived in the period after the destruction of the Temple, or indeed after the coming of the Romans, would surely differ from those of the Hellenistic Age. But I will agree that there is value in seeing what they say.

But the facts have to be possible! And Dr. Zeitlin has a very peculiar approach to what is possible. There are a number of examples that strike me as extraordinarily improbable (exactly what did the 40,000 people who returned to Jerusalem with Ezra eat along the way? And where did they fit in the tiny hole-in-the-corner province that was Judea in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E.? And why does he assume a Samaritan set of beliefs that correspond to Jewish slurs of the period are more to be relied upon than the known practices of the Samaritan sect?). But the one that really got me going was the claim that the Sanballat the Horonite who met Alexander the Great was the grandson of the Sanballat of the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Alexander the Great was fighting against Tyre in the 330s B.C.E. The first Sanballat was old enough to have a married daughter at the time when Nehemiah "chased [Sanballat or one of his relatives] away from me" (Nehemiah 13:28). This was, by Zeitlin's own reckoning, around 430 (p. 26). What are the odds that his grandson was still vigorously active in the 330s? Possible, yes -- barely -- but needing a lot of justification.

It just doesn't add up, to me. Zeitlin's weighing of authorities is simply too biased toward Jewish sources. Since we know, in many cases, that these sources are unreliable, it's a level of trust I just can't accept.

This is the third book on Maccabean history I've tried to read in the course of a month. Every one has had an axe to grind. Why events of 2200 years ago are the cause of so much bias and polemic is beyond me. But I would suggest that you keep hunting for something a little less sure of itself. I know I will. ( )