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It is an ancient royal communiqué that details the appointment of a new tax collector. And its text, newly deciphered after four recent archeological finds were put together, brings demonstrable veracity to the events that precipitated the Maccabean Revolt in 167-164 BCE and the story of Hanukka.
The significance of the communiqué, sent from the Syrian-Greek King Seleucus IV (187-175 BCE) to the ruling leadership in Judea, emerged when it was realized that three inscribed pieces of stone found at Beit Guvrin's Tel Maresha between 2005 and 2006 belonged together with a larger stele piece that was donated to the Israel Museum in 2007.
The reconstituted stele, or inscribed tablet, yielded a text from the king dated 178 BCE - 11 years before the Maccabean Revolt. It set out instructions to his chief minister Heliodorus concerning the appointment of one Olympiodorus to begin collecting money from all of the temples in the region, marking the start of a significant, negative shift in Seleucid policy on Jewish autonomy. That shift culminated in a vicious Seleucid crackdown on the Jews of Judea and the looting of the Temple in 168-167 BCE, which prompted the Maccabean Revolt as memorialized in the Hanukka story.
The three smaller pieces, which come from the base of the stele, were unearthed under the aegis of Dr. Ian Stern's Archaeological Seminars Institute program "Dig for a Day."
For 25 years, Stern has brought amateur volunteers to participate in his excavations at Tel Maresha in the Beit Guvrin National Park. During a "Dig for a Day" seminar in December 2005, lucky participants found a broken stone artifact in a cave in the area which bore a Greek inscription. Although the find was exceptional, its full historical significance was not apparent at the time.
"The inscription contained 13 lines, many of them broken. The find was distinctive because it was written not on local, chalky kirton stone, but on higher-quality Hebron limestone," Stern told The Jerusalem Post.
The following June and July, two more pieces with Greek text were found at the same Maresha site, and excitement about the potential significance of the finds mounted.
Then, in early 2007, a large stele with sections missing at its base was provided on extended loan to the Israel Museum by birthright israel co-founder Michael Steinhardt and his wife Judy, of New York. Considered one of the most important ancestral inscriptions ever found in Israel, and exhibited at the museum that May and June, the stele has not been on display since because the museum's archeological section has been undergoing a comprehensive overhaul.
Purchased by the Steinhardts on the antiquities market from a collector in early 2007, the 178 BCE stele contains 28 lines of Greek text, outlining the royal instructions to Heliodorus.
In March 2007, shortly before the stele was displayed at the Israel Museum, Dr. Hannah M. Cotton-Paltiel, a specialist in classical languages from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Michael Wöerrle of the Commission for Ancient History and Epigraphy at the German Archaeological Institute in Munich, published a translation and a research analysis of the stele text.
That same year, unaware of any possible connection to the stele, Stern consulted with Dr. Dov Gera, a Ben-Gurion University specialist in Second Temple Jewish history and Greek Epigraphy, over the three pieces found at Maresha. Gera, who then set to work deciphering the inscriptions on the first Stern piece only, told the Post that initially he hadn't made "much headway at all."
"It was only later, in the fall of 2008 at the warehouses of the Israel Antiquities Authority, that I managed to see all of the pieces Stern had found at his site together, and I began to recognize their similarity to the Israel Museum piece, which I'd seen during its exhibition," Gera continued.
"Working with the three pieces at the warehouse, spending time at the library and time at home, there was one particular moment when I just realized that the three [Stern] pieces belonged to the same inscription" as the one on the stele he'd seen the previous year at the Israel Museum.
When the stele was placed together for the first time - in February of this year - with the three fragments found by Stern's volunteer diggers, Stern proudly recalled, "They were a perfect match."
Another researcher who has worked with Stern, Tel Aviv University Prof. Yuval Goren, is certain, on the basis of its patina and the soil remnants attached to it, that the Steinhardt-purchased stele must have come from the same chalky cave area where the other three pieces were found. Together, the stele and its fragments constitute the largest inscription of its kind ever discovered in Israel.
The stele's deciphered text, from Seleucus IV to chief minister Heliodorus and two other Seleucid officials, Dorymenes and Diophanes, dovetails neatly with the second book of Maccabees. Seleucus IV was the elder brother of Antiochus IV, who succeeded him and whose persecution of the Jews is cited in Maccabees II as having sparked the Maccabean Revolt. Heliodorus is described in the same book as having caused the first open conflict between Seleucids and Jews by attempting to seize funds from the Temple of Jerusalem in the same year as the communiqué, 178 BCE.
In the message, which was presumably meant to have been seen by the residents of Maresha - one of the centers of the Jewish community in that era - Heliodorus is formally informed that Olympiodorus has been appointed, among other responsibilities, to oversee the collection of taxes with "moderation" from all of the major sanctuaries within the satrapies, or provinces, of Coele-Syria (later Palestine and Israel) and Phoenecia (along the Mediterranean coast of modern day Lebanon). It is presumed that this new appointment was necessitated by the death or dismissal of a former governor.
Olympiodorus's appointment as an overseer of all of the sanctuaries in Coele-Syria and Phoenecia - emphatically including the Temple in Jerusalem - was intended to expand the Seleucid Empire's financial jurisdiction, according to Gera.
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