Nor were the fears of the heathen altogether without foundation. When the Jews recovered a temporary independence under the Maccabees, their intolerance, now able to vent itself in acts of conquest, became a source of serious danger. Thus, John Hyrcanus destroyed the temple of the Samaritans (who also worshiped Jehovah) on Mount Gerizim, and the Jews actually commemorated the event by a semi-festival. Alexander Jannasus, too, carried on wars of conquest against his neighbors. In one of these he took the town of Gaza, and evinced the treatment to be expected from him by letting loose his army on the inhabitants and utterly destroying their city. It was no doubt their unsocial and proud behavior towards all who were not Jews that provoked the heathens to try their temper by so many insults directed to the sensitive point—their religion. Culpable as this was, it must be admitted that it was in some degree the excessive scrupulosity of the Jews in regard to things indifferent in themselves that exposed them to so much annoyance. Had they been content to permit the existence of Hellenic or Roman customs side by side with theirs, they might have been spared the miseries which they subsequently endured. But the Scriptures, from beginning to end, breathed a spirit of fierce and exclusive attachment to Jehovah; he was the only deity; all other objects of adoration were an abomination in his sight. Penetrated with this spirit, the Jews patiently submitted to the yoke of every succeeding authority—Chaldeans, Syrians, Egyptians, Romans—until the stranger presumed to tamper with the national religion. Then their resistance was fierce and obstinate. The great rebellion which broke out in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, under the leadership of Mattathias, was provoked by the attempt of that monarch to force Greek institutions on the Jewish people. The glorious dynasty of the Asmoneans were priests as well as kings, and the royal office, indeed, was only assumed by them in the generation after that in which they had borne the priestly office, and as a consequence of the authority derived therefrom. Under the semi-foreign family of the Herods, who supplanted the Asmoneans, and ruled under Roman patronage, as afterwards under the direct government of Rome, it was nothing but actual or suspected aggressions against the national faith that provoked
