Institutions, Ideology, and Power in the Hasmonean State

Institutions, Ideology, and Power in the Hasmonean State offers a bold reappraisal of one of the most consequential and understudied polities of the ancient Mediterranean. Drawing on a rich and varied corpus of evidence, including the historical testimony of Flavius Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, contemporary religious literature, and archaeological data, it argues that the Hasmonean State was one of the Hellenistic world’s most radical and innovative political experiments.Through in-depth analysis of the State’s political architecture, elite networks, and religious ideology from the mid-second to the first century BCE, this monograph traces how a small vassal state centred on Jerusalem and its hinterland evolved into a multiethnic kingdom extending across much of the southern Levant. It further explores how the Hasmonean State’s ethical, strategic, and cultural priorities were embedded in the daily lives of its subjects through a dramatic transformation of material culture, and inscribed onto the landscape through the development of a network of monumental fortresses and palaces. Finally, the Hasmonean State is situated within broader regional patterns of statecraft and iconography shared by a constellation of priest-states operating amid the turbulence of post-Seleucid Asia.