Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum
Aton M. Holzer
Aton.holzer@gmail.com
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9852-3958
28 Binyamin, Beit Shemesh, Israel 9952200
The Mishnah in Ta’anit (4:6) puts forth a series of lists of five calamities that befell the Jews on each of two major fast days, the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, beginning in the days of Moses in the Wilderness and culminating after Bar Kochba:
חמשה דברים ארעו את אבותינו בשבעה-עשר בתמוז (וב) וחמשה בתשעה באב. בשבעה-עשר בתמוז נשתברו הלוחות ובטל התמיד והובקעה העיר ושרף אפיסטמוס את התורה והעמיד צלם בהיכל. בתשעה באב נגזר על אבותינו שלא יכנסו לארץ וחרב (את) הבית בראשונה ובשנייה [ו]נילכדה בית-תר ונחרשה העיר
Five matters occurred to our forefathers on the seventeenth of Tammuz, and five on the Ninth of Av. On the seventeenth of Tammuz the tablets were broken; the daily offering was nullified; the city was breached; Apistemos[1] burned a Torah scroll; and placed a statue in the hall (heikhal). On the Ninth of Av it was decreed upon our ancestors that they would not enter the Land; and the Temple was destroyed the first time, and the second time; and Beitar was captured; and the city was plowed.[2]
There is little mystery surrounding the five events of the ninth of Av; all of the events – the decree of the death of the generation after the return of the spies in Numbers 14, the destructions of the First and Second temples, the defeat of Bar Kochba at Beitar and the plowing of the city limits by Tineius Rufus in the founding of Aelia are well-documented events, even if some did not precisely occur on the ninth of the month.[3] All share a theme: the final stage of catastrophe, the coup de grâce to a generation’s hopes.
In contrast, the list for the seventeenth of Tammuz is shrouded in mystery.
1. While the date of Moses’ descent from Sinai with the Law (Exodus 32) is not given in Scripture, the Rabbinic calculation assigning it to the seventeenth of Tammuz, forty days after revelation on the seventh of Sivan – itself extrapolated from the text – is straightforward enough. Still, it is somewhat curious that the Mishnah selects the breaking of the Tablets, rather than the other dire events of that day – the crime of the creation of the Golden Calf, its immediate punishment in the execution of three thousand of its Israelite worshippers, or the removal of the peoples’ mysterious ‘adornments’ from Horeb, for example.
The nullification of the daily offering is mentioned in Josephus:
2. Titus now ordered the troops with him to raze Antonia to its foundations and create an easy way up for the whole of his army, while he himself brought Josephus into service. He had learnt that on this day — it was the seventeenth of Panemus (Tammuz) — the so-called ‘continual sacrifice’ had ceased to be offered to God for lack of officiants, and that this was causing great distress to the people. (The Jewish War 6:93-94).
At first glance, this seems clearly the referent of the Mishnah. However, examination of evidence internal to Rabbinic sources – the Talmuds, early Rabbinic treatments of Daniel 12:11 and medieval commentators on both – yield five possible occasions for the cancellation of the tamid, beginning from the reign of Manasseh and spread over the subsequent seven centuries.[4] To be sure, the events surrounding the Second Temple’s destruction do constitute the fifth possibility, but that is a minor view, resting primarily on the evidence of yBerakhot 4:1 and yTa’anit 4:5. Vered Noam (pace Tal Ilan)[5] reads the Talmudic passages carefully and against Josephus and argues that those Yerushalmi sources are derivative from the parallel narrative in Bavli, which clearly reference an earlier period, and was only secondarily adapted to the context of the destruction of the Second Temple. The Bavli passage (bSotah 49b, bBava Kamma 82b, bMenahot 64b) reads:
The Sages taught: When the kings of the Hasmonean monarchy besieged each other, Hyrcanus was outside, and Aristobulus was inside. On each and every day they would lower dinars in a box, and [they] would send up daily offerings. A certain Elder was there who was familiar with Greek wisdom. He communicated to [them] by Greek wisdom. He said to them: As long as they are engaged in the service, they will not be delivered into your hands. On the following day, they lowered dinars in a box and they sent up a pig to them. Once it reached halfway up the wall, it inserted its hooves [and] Eretz Yisrael shuddered four hundred parasangs. They said at that time: Cursed is the person who raises pigs, and cursed is the person who teaches his son Greek wisdom. And with regard to that year, we learned: An incident in which the omer came from Gaggot Tzerifim, and the two loaves from the valley of Ein Sokher.
For this source, which appears thrice in Bavli, the dramatic event of cancellation of the tamid-offering is firmly linked with the waning days of Hasmonean rule. The placement of the event as second in the Mishnah’s list supports the contention that the identified event preceded those associated with the Great Revolt.
3. The linkage of the ‘breach of the city’ to the seventeenth of Tammuz is more problematic. With regard to the first commonwealth, Jeremiah (39:2) dates the breach of the walls of Jerusalem during the Babylonian conquest to the ninth of Tammuz. With regard to the second, Josephus describes various stages of conquest of the various walls of Jerusalem during the Roman siege under Titus, beginning with the seventh of Artemisius/Iyyar (War 5:302) and culminating near the end of Tammuz, with none actually occurring on the seventeenth of Tammuz.[6]
4. Rabbinic sources never elaborate upon details of the reported incident of the burning of ha-torah, ‘the Torah,’ by the mysterious Apistemos, who appears in Talmud manuscripts as Apostomos or occasionally Postomos (?posthumous). Yerushalmi (Ta’anit 4:5) attempts to clarify its whereabouts:
“Apostomos burned the Torah.” Where did he burn it? Rebbi Aḥa said, at the ford of Lydda. But the rabbis are saying, at the ford of Tarlosa.
In non-Rabbinic sources, the burning of Torah scrolls is recorded as early as the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes; in 1 Maccabees, it is a widespread phenomenon.
On the fifteenth day of Kislev in the 145th year he built an abomination of desolation on the altar, and they built pagan altars in the cities of Judah roundabout and offered up sacrifices at the doors of their houses and in the streets. They tore up and burnt the books of the Law that they found, and wherever they found someone with a book of the covenant, or if anyone insisted upon (observing) the Law, the royal judgment killed him. (1:54-57)
Josephus records the burning of a Torah during the procuratorship of Ventidius Cumanus (48-52 CE):
…This disaster was followed by another disturbance, this time caused by bandits. On the road up to Beth-horon an imperial servant called Stephen was set upon by bandits and robbed of the baggage he was carrying. Cumanus sent troops out round the neighbouring villages to arrest the inhabitants and bring them in to him, to be charged with failure to pursue and capture the robbers. In the course of this, a soldier found in one of the villages a copy of the book of sacred law, which he tore in pieces and threw into the fire. The Jews reacted with horror, as if it were their whole country which had gone up in flames. As soon as the word went out, religious fervour drew them together like a magnet, and they converged in a mass on Caesarea, insistent that Cumanus should not let this insult to their God and their law go unpunished. He could see that the crowd would not stop agitating until they received satisfaction, and thought it best to produce the offending soldier and order him to be led through the ranks of the complainants on his way to execution. (War 2.228-231)
The ancient city of Beth Horon (today Beit Ur al-Fauqa and Beit Ur al-Tahta) is about twenty-six kilometers east of Lod (Lydda), and the ‘road up to Beth Horon’ generally refers to the road running north from Jerusalem, not east from Lydda – so the if the referent of the Jerusalem Talmud is historical, the ‘ford’ (or straits, or passages) of Lydda (or of the mysterious ‘Tarlosa’[7]) is not a good match for this incident.
Rabbinic literature omits all of these, but records several other events at which a Torah scroll was burned; none involve a villain named Apostomos. In a list of sins committed by the Judean kings deemed wicked, some manuscripts of bSanhedrin 103b include:
Amon burned the Torah and sacrificed a gecko upon the altar.
A passage in bYevamot 16b describes:
And Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥmani said Rabbi Yonatan said: What is which is written: “The adversary has spread out his hand upon all her treasures (Lamentations 1:10)? This is Ammon and Moab. When the gentiles entered the Sanctuary, all turned to the silver and the gold, and they turned to the scrolls of Torah. They said: this in which it is written: “An Ammonite and a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord” (Deuteronomy 23:4)? Let it be burnt by fire.
“When the gentiles entered the sanctuary” can refer to any of at least four events: the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE, the defilement of the sanctuary by Antiochus in 156 BCE, its destruction by Titus’s legions in 70 CE, or, the incursion of Pompey in 63 BCE:
the disappearance of a golden vine from the Temple when ‘the gentiles entered the sanctum’ (bYoma 21b, 39b) parallels Josephus’s report (Ant. 14.34-36) of Aristobulus’s gift of this particular Temple adornment to Pompey, right around the time that this gentile and his men indeed entered the sanctum.[8]
Other events recorded in Talmud and Midrash include the martyrdom of R. Hanina ben Teradyon, burned alive while wrapped in a Torah scroll, recorded in bAvodah Zarah 18a; and yTa’anit 4:5 records R. Simeon b. Gamaliel reporting precisely the same fate for the children in five hundred schools in the city of Betar, subsequent to its conquest under Hadrian.
Traditional commentators struggle to identify Apostomos – Antiochus? Hadrian? Some unknown Greek soldier? – and why the destruction of a Torah scroll – lamentable as it may be, but something rather common throughout Jewish history, even in Second Temple and Rabbinic sources, as we have seen – would rank among five reasons to establish a fast for all generations. Tif’eret Yisrael fixates upon the hey ha-yedi’a, the definite article, and suggest that the Torah scroll was a special one — the Torah of Ezra, which he suggests, based on Tractate Soferim 6:4, was in the sanctuary and served as the urtext for further copies; or else that Apostomos destroyed many Torahs, in an effort to eradicate Torah from the Jewish people. The 19th-century commentary Divrei Yirmiyahu (R. Jeremiah Löw) on Rambam (Hilkhot Ta’anit chap. 5) avers that the referent is the Torah of Moses, or Ezra. Imrei Da’at on the Mishnah (R. Nathan Lieberman) argues that regarding the Torah of Moses, this is impossible, as bSotah 9b writes of Moses and David that their enemies never exerted power over their handiwork.
5. The most prominent narrative in both Rabbinic sources and Josephus regarding the placing of an idol in the sanctuary refer to an event that almost did, but ultimately did not, occur: the emplacement of statues of the emperor in the Temple by Gaius Caligula, against the strenuous protest of the Jews – which was not implemented before his assassination. (War 2.184-203, Antiquities 18.256-309; Megillat Ta’anit 22 Shevat with Scholia, tSotah 13:6, et al.)
Given the violent reaction of the people to this initiative, and the record of the celebration of its thwarting with a holiday, it is unlikely that the actual emplacement of a statue in the Temple would be forgotten and thus absent from the historical record.[9] It thus remains to identify the incident with those actually documented to have installed an idol in the sanctuary precincts – the Judahite King Manasseh (II Kings 21:7), Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Maccabees 1:34), and probably Hadrian.[10] Complicating this is that some texts link this event to Apostomos (ve-he’emid, and he emplaced, rather than ve-hu’amad, and there was placed), including the best early Mishnah manuscript – MS Kaufmann A50 – which would necessarily restrict the identity of Apostomos to one of those three personalities. But Rabbinic literature elsewhere refers to each of those three by their proper names! And Antiochus, who appears rarely in early Rabbinic literature, in any case had a different Greek nickname — ἐπιμανής, epimanus, “the madman.”
Pompey and Circumstances
An innovative approach[11] was suggested some fifty years ago in an obscure Hebrew journal by Eliyahu Katz (1916-2004), a Rabbinic judge, poet and polymath who served as Chief Rabbi of pre-war Nitra, postwar Bratislava and from 1968 forward, Beersheba – but it received little attention, and suffers from some problems.
His theory focuses upon the incursion of Pompey into the Temple, mentioned earlier in brief. In greater detail: in 63 BCE, the armies under the command of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – Pompey the Great, finished his Senate-authorized task of pacifying belligerent Asia minor and Syria, and swung south and handily (and completely illegally) consumed civil war-torn Judea, killing thousands, abrogating the Roman Republic’s alliance with Hasmonean Judea. Josephus describes the events in his Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews; in the latter, which relies mostly on pro-Roman sources1[12] (and in this passage, particularly the Pontic Greek geographer Strabo of Cappadocia[13]), he writes: (Ant. 14.4.3-5, Marcus translation)
And indeed when the city was taken, in the third month, on the Fast Day, in the hundred and seventy-ninth Olympiad, in the consulship of Gaius Antonius and Marcus Tullius Cicero, and the enemy rushed in and were slaughtering the Jews in the temple, those who were busied with the sacrifices none the less continued to perform the sacred ceremonies; nor were they compelled, either by fear for their lives or by the great number of those already slain, to run away, but thought it better to endure whatever they might have to suffer there beside the altars than to neglect any of the ordinances. And that this is not merely a story to set forth the praises of a fictitious piety, but the truth, is attested by all those who have narrated the exploits of Pompey, among them Strabo and Nicolas [of Damascus] and, in addition, Titus Livius, the author of a History of Rome.
Now when the siege-engine was brought up, the largest of the towers was shaken and fell, making a breach through which the enemy poured in; first among them was Cornelius Faustus, the son of Sulla, who with his soldiers mounted the wall, and after him the centurion Furius, with those who followed him, on the other side, and between them Fabius, another centurion, with a strong and compact body of men. And there was slaughter everywhere. For some of the Jews were slain by the Romans, and others by their fellows; and there were some who hurled themselves down the precipices, and setting fire to their houses, burned themselves within them, for they could not bear to accept their fate. And so of the Jews there fell some twelve thousand, but of the Romans only a very few. One of those taken captive was Absalom, the uncle and at the same time father-in-law of Aristobulus. And not light was the sin committed against the sanctuary, which before that time had never been entered or seen. For Pompey and not a few of his men went into it and saw what it was unlawful for any but the high priests to see. But though the golden table was there and the sacred lampstand and the libation vessels and a great quantity of spices, and beside these, in the treasury, the sacred moneys amounting to two thousand talents, he touched none of these because of piety, and in this respect also he acted in a manner worthy of his virtuous character. And on the morrow he instructed the temple servants to cleanse the temple and to offer the customary sacrifice to God, and he restored the high priesthood to Hyrcanus because in various ways he had been useful to him and particularly because he had prevented the Jews throughout the country from fighting on Aristobulus’ side; and those responsible for the war he executed by beheading. He also bestowed on Faustus and the others who had mounted the wall with alacrity fitting rewards for their bravery. And he made Jerusalem tributary to the Romans, and took from its inhabitants the cities of Coele-Syria which they had formerly subdued, and placed them under his own governor; and the entire nation, which before had raised itself so high, he confined within its own borders. He also rebuilt Gadara, which had been demolished a little while before, to please Demetrius the Gadarene, his freedman; and the other cities, Hippus, Scythopolis, Pella, Dium, Samaria, as well as Marisa, Azotus, Jamneia and Arethusa, he restored to their own inhabitants. And not only these cities in the interior, in addition to those that had been demolished, but also the coast cities of Gaza, Joppa, Dora and Straton’s Tower—this last city, which Herod refounded magnificently and adorned with harbours and temples, was later renamed Caesarea – all these Pompey set free and annexed them to the province.
For this misfortune which befell Jerusalem Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were responsible, because of their dissension, for we lost our freedom and became subject to the Romans, and the territory which we had gained by our arms and taken from the Syrians we were compelled to give back to them, and in addition the Romans exacted of us in a short space of time more than ten thousand talents and the royal power which had formerly been bestowed on those who were high priests by birth became the privilege of commoners.
Rabbi Katz identifies Apostomos with Pompey, on the basis of his replacement of Jewish law with Roman law after his conquest of Jerusalem, thus ‘burning the Torah’, figuratively speaking – and renders Apostomos as efes (Hebrew for null) tomus (Latin for book). He argues that Josephus’ “in the third month, on the Fast Day” refers the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz. Tammuz is the fourth Jewish month – but he suggests that Josephus’ use of an ancient Judean numeral for ‘four,’ in boustrophedon, was mistaken for a Greek gamma. Josephus records Herod’s conquest of Jerusalem as occurring on the same day as Pompey’s (Ant. 14:16:4), and so Herod’s erection of a golden eagle on the great gate of the Temple (War 1:648–655, Ant. 17:6:2) can also be linked to the seventeenth of Tammuz.
The theory is supported by Sefer Yosippon, a tenth-century Hebrew Italian-Jewish history of the second Temple period that draws upon Josephus, the books of Maccabees, Midrash and Christian and Latin sources; in chapter 36 and 43, which treat Pompey’s and Herod’s siege, respectively, the dates of conquest of the Temple are given as the seventeenth of the fourth month – i.e., the seventeenth of Tammuz.
However, there are difficulties with this theory. For one thing, internal and external evidence points to the probability that the ‘third month’ properly refers to the third month of the siege, and that ‘the fast’ to which Josephus refers in the contexts of both Pompey and Herod is Yom Kippur.[14] In any case, observance of the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz seems to have crystallized during the second century CE, well after the events and most likely the historian reporting them.[15] While Katz’s interpretation of a ‘figurative’ destruction of the Torah scroll seems a bit forced, it is not impossible to see in Yevamot 16b a reflection of the destruction of an actual scroll by Pompey’s men. But recent work suggests that the report of Herod’s installation of a golden eagle in the Temple is legendary.[16]
But perhaps Rabbi Katz was on to something.
- If Pompey’s invasion of the Temple took place on Yom Kippur, in the third month of the siege, that would place the beginning of Pompey’s siege – which involved the ‘breach of the city’ from its very outset, by Hyrcanus’ men admitting Pompey’s forces into the city (War 1.143) – squarely in the latter part of the month of Tammuz. In that case, huvke’ah ha-ir refers not to the events of 586 BCE or 70 CE, but the initial incursion of Pompey’s army in Tammuz, maybe even 17 Tammuz, 63 BCE.
- As far as butal ha-tamid: as seen above, Josephus takes pains to indicate that at no time during Pompey’s siege and even invasion was any part of the Temple service interrupted – but in the Rabbinic account, interruption of the tamid did indeed occur around the same time as Pompey’s arrival with Hyrcanus’s (or Pompey’s?) betrayal of the besieged Temple by supplying a pig for the tamid sacrifice.[17]
- Admittedly, Heikhal in the Mishnah always refers to the sanctum of the Temple. But this is likely simply accidental; Heikhal properly refers to a kingly hall (cf. II Kings 20:18, Isaiah 39:7, Ezra 5:14, Psalms 45:9, 16, Proverbs 30:28, Daniel 1:4, II Chronicles 36:7), but the Mishnah has no interest in royal palaces. Pompey had built a world-famous Heikhal: the theater-temple complex constructed during his second consulship. The first permanent theater in Rome, Pompey’s theater was an imposing complex in which the Senate would sometimes meet, and where Caesar was assassinated. This hall, much like the heikhal melekh Bavel referenced in some of the aforementioned Biblical citations, included gardens, objects collected during Pompey’s campaigns, and fourteen statues commissioned of sculptor Coponius representing the populations (nationes) that Pompey had subdued;[18] these almost certainly included a statue representing Judea.[19] As such, the ‘emplacement of a statue in the hall’ may refer to Pompey’s concretization of the conquest of Judea.
Josephus has numerous Greek nicknames for various characters, particularly in his autobiography;[20] this is of a piece with his Greco-Roman milieu, in which proper names and surnames were often subjected to wordplay, and indeed Caesar himself puns on Pompey’s cognomen, magnus, in his writings.[21] Of Pompey’s conquest, Josephus writes in Against Apion,
One should also be particularly amazed at the great intelligence in what Apion goes on to say. For he says that it is evidence of the fact that we do not employ just laws or worship God as we should that [we do not govern,] but are subservient to other nations, one after another, and that we have experienced some misfortunes affecting our city… while we, being free, used to rule in addition over the surrounding cities for about 120 years up till the time of Pompey the Great; and when all the monarchs, on all sides, were hostile to the Romans, ours alone, because of their loyalty, were maintained as allies and friends. (2.11.125-134).[22]
One may detect here a complaint: Judea was unfailingly, singularly, loyal to Rome, and yet it took her freedom.
Pompeius, when encountered in a late Hellenistic milieu – where Semitic languages and Greek were spoken in equal measure – evokes the Aramaic ܦܘܼܡܵܐ (puma) and Hebrew פה, both words for mouth. Heinrich Ewald suggested that Apostomos be parsed αἰπύς στόμος, “big mouth,”[23] and this would fit Pompeius (mouth) Magnus (large) – the conqueror with a too-voracious appetite, who betrayed Judea’s loyalty by conquering and plundering it – כי אכל את יעקב ואת נוהו השמו.
- Even the Biblical reference, the breaking of the tablets, resonates for an identification with Pompey:
So Judas chose Eupolemus the son of John of the Haqqoz clan and Jason the son of Eleazar and sent them to Rome to establish friendship and alliance with them, and to remove the yoke from them, for they saw that the kingdom of the Greeks was subjugating Israel into slavery. They went to Rome—and the trip is very long!—and entered the council and declared: “Judas, also known as Maccabaeus, and his brothers and the community of the Judeans have sent us to you to establish alliance and peace with you, so that we may be listed among your allies and friends.” This found favor in their eyes. And this is the copy of the letter, which they wrote in response on bronze tablets and sent to Jerusalem, so as to be a memorial there, among them, of the peace and alliance: Let it be well for the Romans and the people of the Judeans on sea and on land forever, and let sword and enmity be far from them. But if war is made upon Rome, first of all, or upon any of its allies in its entire realm, the people of the Judeans will fight together with them wholeheartedly, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. And they will neither give nor supply their enemies wheat, weapons, money, or ships—as Rome decided, and they will observe their obligations without receiving anything. In the same way, if the people of the Judeans is attacked first, the Romans will fight enthusiastically as its allies, as far as opportunity prescribes to them. Nor will they give to the allies (of the partner’s enemies) wheat, weapons, money, or ships, as Rome decided, and they will observe these obligations without duplicity. (-I Maccabees 8:17-28)[24]
Pompey’s betrayal of the treaty between the Hasmoneans and Rome in devouring the Judean state was nothing short of a shattering of the bronze tablets, the physical testament to the pact. It seems no coincidence that all aggadic treatments of the Tablets of the Law dilate on Exodus 32:16, ‘harut al ha-luhot’ – inscribed on the tablets – homiletically rendering it herut, freedom (Kallah Rabbati 8:2, Avot de-Rabbi Natan 2:3, bEruvin 54a, Exodus Rabbah 41:7, Leviticus Rabbah 18:3, Numbers Rabbah 10:8, Song of Songs Rabbah 8:6, et al.). Judean freedom ended on the seventeenth of Tammuz, when Pompey ‘broke’ the bronze tablets promising cooperation and non-aggression in exchange for loyalty.
- The burning of the Torah – the definite article – indeed suggests a specific, known Torah scroll. In the Second Temple literature, outside of later Rabbinic sources, there is indeed one attestation of a known Torah scroll:
And they came with the gifts that had been sent and the remarkable parchments on which the legislation had been written in golden writing in Judean characters, the parchment being worked amazingly and the common joins constructed to be imperceptible. When the king saw the men, he inquired about the books. And when they uncovered them rolled up and they unrolled the parchments, pausing for a long time and prostrating himself about seven times, the king said, “I thank you, O Men, and even more the one who sent you, but mostly the God whose utterances these are.” (Letter of Aristeas 176-177)
The grand gold-lettered Sefer Torah from Elazar the high priest of Judea, from the Temple precincts, was the vorlage of the Septuagint, in this second Temple telling. The historicity of the Letter of Aristeas is, to be sure, problematic, to say the least; but the erstwhile existence of an urtext for the Septuagint is supported by most scholars,[25] and the ancient report that it was held in reverence is supported by writers centuries hence. Tertullian reports that in the library of Alexandria, the Septuagint was displayed along with the Hebrew original.[26] John Chrysostom writes that Ptolemy Philadelphus “deposited it [the Septuagint] in the Temple of Serapis . . . and even today the translated books of the prophets are still there.”[27]
The great library of Alexandria – the cultural crossroads of the ancient world – was destroyed when Caesar[28] set fire to the Egyptian fleet in the port at Alexandria, in the ‘straits of Lod’ – Lod, in Rabbinic parlance, also being a name for Egypt, after his son Ludim (Genesis 10:13).
Caesar was good to the Jews, and so even if the Rabbis knew that he was at fault – unlikely in the fog that surrounded the event in the historical record – they blamed the one who compelled Caesar’s stay in Egypt: Apostomos, Pompey. His ill-fated attempt to raise a force against Caesar in Ptolemaic Egypt set off a cascade of events resulting in the incineration of the Torah – the Pentateuch portion of the Septuagint and its vorlage, sent from the high priest of Judea in hoary antiquity, the crown jewel of the Egyptian Jewish community and potent symbol of its full integration and acceptance in the fabric of Ptolemaic Egyptian society from its outset. The subsequent century and a half of Alexandrian Jewish life was marked by anti-Semitic writings, pogroms and ultimately annihilation.
The destruction of the library was one of the most traumatic events in the history of the West, and highlights the manner in which the career of Pompey, the betrayal of an ally in the name of narrowly defined self-interest, was tragic both for the Jewish people, as well as Rome and Western civilization, to which the Hasmoneans had tethered their carriage.
Admittedly, much of the above is conjecture, and some is more than a bit far-fetched. Perhaps it is fitting that for one key villain in Judaism, the villain of Shiva Asar be-Tammuz, be he Pompey or someone else, the imprecation yimah shemo ve-zikhro – may his name and remembrance be erased – indeed was fulfilled!
[1] As it is vocalized in the MS Kaufmann A50 manuscript.
[2] Koren-Steinsaltz translation, from Sefaria, with modifications.
[3] See Yuval Shahar, “Rabbi Akiba and the Destruction of the Temple: The Establishment of the Fast Days” (Heb.), Zion 68:2 (2003), 145-165.
[4] Itamar Warhaftig, “On the Seventeenth of Tammuz the Daily-Offering was Cancelled – in the First Temple or the Second?” (Hebrew) HaMa’ayan 33:4 (1993), 6-14.
[5] Vered Noam, “The Fratricidal Hasmonean Conflict,” Josephus and the Rabbis, Vol. 1 (Heb), 318-340.
[6] See discussion in Shahar, “Rabbi Akiba,” 159-165.
[7] Ben Zion Luria challenges the common scholarly assumption that the referent is the site of the village of Talluza (Tira Luzah) since this village had been Samaritan throughout the Roman period; instead he identifies it with Bethel. Both are a considerable distance from Beth Horon. See his “And Apostomos Burned the Torah” (Heb.), Beit Mikra 32:4 (1987), 293-295.
[8] Daphne Baratz, “A Golden Vine/Garden in The Temple,” in Josephus and the Rabbis, Vol. 1 (Heb), 341-348.
[9] See Steven Fine, “Caligula and the Jews: Some Historiographic Reflections Occasioned by Gaius in Polychrome.” New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Brill, 2020), 100-104.
[10] Étienne Nodet, “On the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple’.” Rethinking the Jewish war (Peeters, 2021), 236-248.
[11] Eliyahu Katz, “Who Knows Five” (Heb.), Niv ha-Midrashiyah 10 (1972), 122-125.
[12] Jane Bellemore, “Josephus, Pompey and the Jews,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte H. 48:1 (1999), 94-118.
[13] Alessandro Galimberti, “Josephus and Strabo: The reasons for a choice.” Making History: Josephus And Historical Method (Brill, 2007), 147-167.
[14] Nadav Sharon, “The Conquests of Jerusalem by Pompey and Herod: On Sabbath or ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’?.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21:3 (2014), 193-220. To be sure, there is some difficulty regarding placing the account to Yom Kippur, since the tamid-offering on Yom Kippur is offered exclusively by the high priest, and it is unclear why so many others would be involved in the sacrificial rites on that day.
[15] Shahar, “Rabbi Akiva.”
[16] Jonathan Bourgel, “Herod’s golden eagle on the Temple gate: a reconsideration.” Journal of Jewish studies 72:1 (2021), 23-44.
[17] For Josephus, the referent is the Paschal sacrifice, four months before Pompey’s incursion.
[18] Eleonora Zampieri, Politics in the Monuments of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, Routledge, 2022), 64-65.
[19] James M. Scott, Bacchius Iudaeus: a denarius commemorating Pompey’s victory over Judea, (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), 34.
[20] I am indebted to Prof. Kenneth Atkinson for this insight.
[21] Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, “Great Expectations: Wordplay as Warfare in caesar’s Bellvm Civile,” The Classical Quarterly 73:1 (2023), 184-197.
[22] Translation by Barclay, in Mason, Flavius Josephus, 233-238.
[23] Although he connected the nickname with Antiochus Epiphanes. See Georg Heinrich August von Ewald, The history of Israel, Vol. 5, Transl. J. Estlin Carpenter (Longmans, Green and Co., 1874), 293 note 2.
[24] Translation from Schwartz, 1 Maccabees, 284-285.
[25] Emanuel Tov, “The Septuagint.” The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud, Volume 1 Mikra. (Brill, 1988), 161-188.
[26] Christophe Rico, “The destruction of the Library of Alexandria: A reassessment.” The Library of Alexandria: A cultural crossroads of the Ancient world (Polis, 2017), 293-330.
[27] Thomas Hendrickson, “The Serapeum: Dreams of the Daughter Library,” Classical Philology 111:4 (2016), 453-464.
[28] Rico, “The Destruction.”
