MURDER OF SIMON AND HIS SONS.

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those of a free prince, desirous of being numbered among the allies of the republic.

Simon's reign extended over thirteen years, and proved upon the whole to be a prosperous one. He wrested from the Syrians the citadel of Acra, by means of which they still kept Jerusalem in check. He took the field, though rather as an ally than a tributory to the Syrian crown, against the Parthians. When a dispute between Demetrius the king of Syria, and his brother Antiochus, arose, Simon, as the price of the recognition of Judah's independence, took part with the latter; and by and by when Antiochus, victorious over his brother endeavoured to violate the treaty into which he had entered with Judah, Simon resisted and defeated him. But private treason did what open violence could not effect. Simon had given one of his daughters in marriage to Ptolemy, whom he appointed to be governor of Jericho. This man, ambitious of wearing the crown, invited Simon and his sons to a banquet; and letting loose upon them a band of assassins while they sat at meat, slew them there. It happened that one of Simon's sons, John, surnamed Hyrcanus, did not arrive from his post at Gaza in time to share the fate of the rest. And a servant having escaped from the slaughter, rode post to meet him and warn him of his danger. John retired immediately to Jerusalem, of which he closed the gates. A civil war ensued, which was fed by Antiochus king of Syria; but Hyrcanus kept his place. He defeated Ptolemy in the field, maintained Jerusalem against the Syrians many days, and showed so bold a front that the Syrians were glad at last to come to terms. Hyrcanus paid a fine of 500 talents, and consented to have the walls of Jerusalem broken down ; where

upon Antiochus withdrew his troops, and the land had rest.

B. C. 106. Hyrcanus filled the royal chair nineteen years. The latter portion of his reign was much more prosperous than its commencement; for on the death of Antiochus he rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and delivered Judea from all the Syrian garrisons which kept it in check. He made war, likewise, upon many of his neighbours, and considerably enlarged the limits of his country. The Edomites, or Idumæans, in particular, he so entirely conquered, that he forced them to accept both the religion and the laws of the Jews; and he destroyed the temple of the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim, though he could not prevail upon that people to worship at Jerusalem, or otherwise lay aside their peculiarities of doctrine and of worship. For it is worthy of remark that the Samaritans, while they embraced the great article of the unity of the Godhead, refused to recognise as of Divine authority any other than the five first books in the Old Testament.

Hyrcanus maintained friendly relations with Rome all his days, and died at last to the great regret of his own people.

CHAP. XLI.

JEWISH SECTS. THE SANHEDRIM. END OF THE REIGN OF HEROD THE GREAT.

ASMONEAN LINE.

ONE of the main difficulties with which Hyrcanus had to contend, in his efforts to give consistency to the government, had its root in the hostility of the Pharisees, a party with whom his father Simon had

quarrelled, and with whom he himself never succeeded in being reconciled.

It will be necessary, before I go on with my narrative, to give a short account of this and the rival religious sects which sprang up in the Jewish Church; as well as to explain the constitution and powers of the Sanhedrim, an institution which played no inconsiderable part in the management of the civil affairs of the Jewish people.

There seem to have been no sects, properly so called, in the Jewish Church, till after the return from Babylon and the completion of the canon of the Old Testament by Ezra. Content to walk by the law as it was read and explained to them, the religious portion of the community did not inquire further; while the irreligious neglected the law itself, and in doing so ceased to be members of the church of the temple. But when Ezra set himself to revise the Scriptures, after a long interval of disuse and neglect, he found it necessary to take to his council one hundred and twenty elders, distinguished above the rest for their general intelligence and knowledge of the laws and customs of their fathers. To these he applied for information, not on points of doctrine, but on matters of ceremony and form; and they repeated to him faithfully the traditions which had been delivered to them by their ancestors. Ezra made use

of them, and of their information, in the re-establishment of practices which had fallen into disuse, and caused the more valuable of the traditions to be committed to writing.

Out of this beginning arose the sect of the Pharisees. Its members held that there had been from the beginning both a written and an unwritten covenant in Israel, and that wherever the unwritten

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seemed to contradict the written law the former was to be preferred. They took the name of Pharisee (a word which signifies separatist), because they claimed to be more holy than the rest of the community; and by affecting excessive zeal and austerity of life, they soon acquired great ascendancy over the masses. In points of abstract faith the Pharisees came, perhaps, nearer to the truths which we now receive than any other party in the Jewish Church; but they were hypocritical as well as vicious in their private lives, and as subjects turbulent and restless.

The rivals of the Pharisees in the Jewish Church were the Sadducees, a sect which originated with one Sadoc, a good and humble-minded man, and a scholar of Antigonus Sacho, one of Ezra's fellowlabourers. Sadoc's opinions seem to have been these, - that God is infinite in goodness, power, and mercy, and ought therefore to be worshipped because he is worthy of worship, without any consideration on the part of the worshipper of reward either here or hereafter. The disciples of Sadoc, perverting this sublime doctrine, drew from it the inferences that there could be no future state, either of reward or punishment, beyond the grave; that the soul of man perished with the body; and that the only pure spirit in the universe was the Great Cause of all things. It cannot with any reason be said that the notions of the Pharisees on these heads were sound or clear; for besides that, they restricted the resurrection to the descendants of Abraham, they were believers in the doctrine of a transmigration of souls, and attributed all manner of diseases and misfortunes to the agency of evil spirits. But wild as many of their views were, they certainly came nearer to the truth than their rivals. The

Sadducees appear to have been in private life at least as pure as the Pharisees. As judges they were far more rigid, as well as more just; for they held that in the present life virtue and vice always bring their proper rewards, and that any attempt on the part of man to screen vice or oppress virtue is execrable.

The Sadducees were never a numerous body. Their opinions prevailed chiefly among the higher classes; but they were as ambitious as their rivals to give the law to the community; and Simon, when persecuted by the Pharisees, sought their support and obtained it.

The Sanhedrim was a council consisting of seventy members, a president, or prince, a deputy, and a sub-deputy. It advised with the king or chief magistrate on affairs of state. It acted as a court of appeal from inferior tribunals; indeed in all cases where life and death were at issue, it alone had power to adjudge a capital punishment. The Jews say that it had existed ever since the selection by Moses of seventy elders to assist him in judging the people in the wilderness. But as we hear nothing of it in the times either of the Judges or of the Kings, it seems more probable that, as a national institution, it came into active operation only after the return from the Babylonish captivity.

The Sanhedrim met in a hall, of which one half stood within the precincts of the temple, one half lay without. In the latter portion the judges sat, all parties attending being required to stand in the former. The qualifications necessary to become a member of the Sanhedrim were, untainted birth, a knowledge of the law, and the traditions; some acquaintance with languages, arithmetic, astrology, divination, magic, fortune-telling, physic.