enerals and
successors. In 321 B.C., Ptolemy I, King of Egypt, advanced against
Jerusalem, and, assaulting it on the Sabbath, the Jew's day of rest, met
with no resistance. He is said to have carried away 100,000 captives,
whom he settled in Alexandria and Cyrene. The founding of a Syro-Grecian
kingdom in Northern Syria brought Judaea again into the unfortunate
situation of a buffer state. Jerusalem seemed doomed to be among the
prizes of an interminable warfare between the Ptolemies of Egypt and the
Seleucidae of Syria and in turns vassal to each.

At the commencement of the second century B.C. Judaea passed into the
hands of the Syrian King Antiochus the Great, who at once proceeded to
ingratiate himself with the whole nation. It was not the tyranny of
foreign sovereigns, but the unprincipled ambition of their own native
rulers, that led to calamities little less dreadful than the Babylonian
captivity. Jason, the High Priest, had been dispossessed by his brother
Menelaus, by double dealing with the Syrian King, who at this time was
Antiochus Epiphanes. A rumour of the King's death having reached
Palestine in 170 B.C., Jason seized the opportunity and revolted against
his brother Menelaus. But the rumour was false.

"The intelligence of the insurrection, magnified into a deliberate
revolt of the whole nation, reached Antiochus. He marched without delay
against Jerusalem, put to death in three days' time 40,000 of the
inhabitants, and seized as many more to be sold as slaves. He entered
every court of the Temple, pillaged the treasury, and seized all the
sacred utensils. He then commanded a great sow to be sacrificed on the
altar of burnt offerings, part of the flesh to be boiled, and the liquor
from the unclean animal to be sprinkled over every part of the Temple;
and thus desecrated with the most odious defilement the sacred place
which the Jews had considered for centuries the one holy spot in all the
Universe."[3]

Two years afterwards, Antiochus determined to exterminate the Hebrew
race from the face of the earth. This produced the revolt of the Jews
under Mattathias, whose illustrious son, Judas Maccabaeus, founded the
Maccabaean dynasty. By 128 B.C., the Jews, under John Hyrcanus, recovered
their complete independence, which they maintained until compelled to
acknowledge the dominion of Rome.

But the native rulers could not govern for long without dissension. Soon
were two more competitors, Aristobulus and H