This chapter examines the story of the internecine struggle between the two Hasmonean brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, which brought the Hasmonean commonwealth to its end. Only in Josephus is the story of the murder of a righteous man, Onias, juxtaposed to the central tradition regarding the siege of the temple during this war, although this too was clearly an early Jewish tradition. In the rabbinic sources, the story of the siege and the sacrificial animals underwent multiple reworkings, and it is the Babylonian Talmud that reflects the more original version and message of the story. If in Chapter 2, we saw the “rabbinization” of the figure of John Hyrcanus, here the story itself underwent this process and its original moral message was replaced by multiple halakhic implications. In both corpora, this dissension between brothers is seen as the leading cause of the downfall of the Hasmonean dynasty. This was in contradistinction to the political stance represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which interpreted the Roman occupation as proof of the sinfulness of the Hasmonean state from its very inception.
