With Hanukkah having just ended, it seems appropriate to take a closer look at the years in Jewish history that followed Judah the Maccabee’s miraculous victory over the Greek-speaking Seleucid empire in 164 BCE. Lawrence Schiffman examines the wars fought by Judah and his successors—the Hasmonean dynasty—in the coastal territory known in the Bible as the land of the Philistines, and now known as the Gaza Strip:
From the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire in 311 BCE, Gaza and the other areas of [Israel’s] southern coastal plain had been dominated in turn by the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria, two of the empires that emerged in the years after his death. Some soldiers from the area still called Philistia had joined the Seleucids in their war against the Jews. By then, the city of Gaza and the other cities in this area had been Hellenized, and the population was now a mix of the earlier Philistines and Hellenized Egyptians and Syrians.
Yet, apparently, the old antagonism between Philistia and the Jews, [described in the book of Judges and Samuel], still smoldered. So it is easy to understand why, as part of his efforts to obliterate idolatry, [Judah’s brother and successor] Jonathan made forays into this territory, destroying the pagan altars in Ashdod, burning their idolatrous images, and plundering the city.
Read more on Ami Magazine: http://lawrenceschiffman.com/gaza-and-the-chashmonaim/