Description:
During a period of turmoil in Jerusalem, c. ?175–145 BCE, Antiochus IV and his successors repeatedly sold the Jewish high priesthood rather than observing the customary hereditary succession. According to 2 Macc. 11:1–3, the Seleucid governor intended to institute an annual sale, so that the temple would generate revenue ‘like the sacred enclosures of the other peoples’. In Egypt and Babylonia it was common since the sixth century BCE to farm out to wealthy notables the financial management of large temples, whose administrative structure was not unlike that of the Jerusalem temple. The Ptolemies inherited the Egyptian practice, modifying the annual appointment of high priests with Greek tax-farming procedures, while the Seleucids probably adopted tax farming on Babylonian temple estates as well. This article suggests that Antiochus IV attempted similar reforms of the Jerusalem temple in response to fiscal pressure, exploiting intra-elite competition for the high priesthood.