Pompey Conquers Jerusalem

The event

By the first century BC, the once-independent Hasmonean kingdom of Judea — the dynasty descended from the Maccabees who had thrown off Greek rule a century earlier — had collapsed into a civil war between two brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, each claiming the high priesthood and the throne. Both appealed to the rising Roman general Pompey, then campaigning in the East, to back their claim.

Pompey chose to intervene directly. When Aristobulus's supporters refused to surrender, Pompey laid siege to Jerusalem itself, and after several months his legions breached the Temple's defenses. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Pompey then walked into the Temple's Most Holy Place — a space only the high priest was permitted to enter, and only once a year — and was startled to find it empty of any statue or image, unlike every pagan temple he knew. To his credit, he did not plunder the Temple treasures, but the breach itself was a profound humiliation.

Pompey left Hyrcanus in place as high priest but stripped Judea of full independence, folding it into the Roman sphere as a client territory subject to Rome's oversight and taxation. This is the moment Rome first became entangled in the affairs of the Jewish homeland — an entanglement that would deepen through the rise of the Herod family as Roman-backed client kings, and that would still be firmly in place decades later when a Roman census under Caesar Augustus brought a young couple from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and later still when Jerusalem's fate would rest in the hands of a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate.

Other witnesses

• Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 14.4
• Josephus, Wars of the Jews 1.7