Story

Pompey Enters the Holy of Holies

63 BCE

Biblical Narrative

When the sons of Salome Alexandra contended for the kingdom — Hyrcanus the elder, who was High Priest, and Aristobulus the younger, who was a man of war — there was great division in Israel. Aristobulus seized Jerusalem and made himself king; Hyrcanus fled to Aretas the Arab and gathered an army; brother fought brother in the holy city, and the priests went up to offer the daily sacrifice over the heads of the besieged. Then both sent ambassadors to Pompey the Roman, who was then at Damascus subduing Syria, that he should judge between them.

And Pompey, who had broken Mithridates of Pontus, and Tigranes of Armenia, and the pirates of Cilicia, and was returning to Rome with the wealth of the East, came down to Jerusalem in the third year of the hundred and seventy and seventh Olympiad. He came up against the city; and Aristobulus and his men shut themselves into the Temple Mount, while Hyrcanus and the Pharisees opened the gates of the lower city to the Roman.

Three months Pompey besieged the Temple. He raised earthworks against the northern wall, where the great valley made attack possible, and he attacked, as the Romans had observed, on the Sabbath, when the besieged would not raise their swords to throw down his earthworks. The wall fell; the legions poured into the courts; twelve thousand were slain; and the priests, ministering at the altar even as the soldiers came in, did not break off the daily sacrifice but were cut down beside it.

Then Pompey did what no Gentile had done before, nor would do again until the Romans burned the Temple a hundred and thirty years later: he and his officers entered the Holy of Holies. He saw the seven-branched candlestick, and the table of shewbread, and the libation vessels, and two thousand talents of sacred money — and he saw, says the witness, that the chamber was empty: no statue, no idol, no image of the God of Israel. And he marvelled, and touched nothing, and on the morrow commanded the Temple to be cleansed, and the daily sacrifice to be resumed.

Of all the calamities that befell us at that time none so deeply affected the nation as the exposure to alien eyes of the Holy of Holies, hitherto screened from view. Pompey, indeed, with his staff, penetrated to the sanctuary, entry to which was permitted to none but the High Priest.Josephus, Jewish War I.152

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Pompey's intervention in the Hasmonean civil war of 67–63 BCE is documented in three primary sources of remarkable agreement: Josephus's Jewish War (I.131–158) and Antiquities (XIV.29–79), which draw on the lost universal history of Nicolaus of Damascus; Tacitus's Histories (V.9), part of his Jewish excursus; and the Greek Psalms of Solomon, a Pharisaic poetic response composed within years of the events. Pompey himself appears in his own dispatches, summarised by Plutarch (Life of Pompey 39) and by Cassius Dio (Roman History XXXVII.15–17).

The siege itself, conducted between June and October 63 BCE, was a three-month assault on the Temple Mount from the north. Pompey constructed siege-ramps in the Tyropoeon valley, exploiting the discovery (according to Strabo XVI.2.40) that the besieged would not work to repair fortifications on the Sabbath — although whether the Sabbath rule extended to defensive labour was already a matter of internal Jewish debate, and Hasmonean predecessors had already allowed defensive military action on the Sabbath since the Maccabean period.

The empty Holy of Holies that Pompey reportedly entered is one of the most-cited motifs in classical Jewish-Roman ethnography. Tacitus (Histories V.9) records the visit with prudent neutrality. The story made an impression on Roman pagans: Cicero (Pro Flacco 67–69), defending a Roman governor accused of pilfering Jewish Temple gold, sneered at Jewish religion as superstition unworthy of Rome's gods, but he could not deny the Temple's wealth. Pompey took no plunder; this is a striking detail, given Roman conquest custom.

The political consequences were immense. Pompey deposed Aristobulus and made Hyrcanus II High Priest and Ethnarch — but no longer king. He severed the coastal cities, the Decapolis, and the Samarian highlands from Hasmonean control, attaching them to the new Roman province of Syria under Aulus Gabinius. Judea became a Roman client state; within forty years it would be a procuratorial province. The death of Hasmonean independence in 63 BCE is the formal beginning of Roman rule in Palestine, and the indirect cause of every subsequent crisis from Herod to the Great Revolt.

Of the Temple's interior Pompey had heard much; he insisted on entering. He found, said the Roman astonishment, no idol, no image — only an empty room, an altar, and the silence of an unimaged God.Tacitus, Histories V.9, paraphrased