But while the Hellenistic priests who had been ousted from their positions of leadership in the Temple by the Maccabees no longer exercised their priestly duties, they never yielded their claim to primacy in the priesthood by virtue of what they considered to be the Divine Will as expressed in the Torah and in the Prophets. Their claim to legitimacy was grounded in the words of the Torah as recorded in Deuteronomy. There, they claimed, the Divine Will was expressed in the wor

Another family in the priestly line of descent from Aaron was that of the Kohanim of Modi'in, whose patriarch was Mattityahu. They too were barred from Temple duties and lived in Modi'in, some fifteen kilometers southwest of Jerusalem. The sons of Mattitahyu. led by Judah Maccabee, later played a prominent role in the history of the Jewish People, as we shall see. The High Priests of Jerusalem who served during the reign of the emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes had betrayed J

Let us examine the status of the Kohanim, the priests who functioned in the Temple and performed its rituals and ceremonies. All of this is described in detail in the Tannaitic literature. The priests who held the leading positions in the Temple and from whose number the High Priest was chosen, were descendants of the High Priest Tzadok who had been appointed Kohen Gadol by Solomon at the time of his coronation. All the Kohanim who served in the Temple since the time of Sol

The Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt during the reign of the Persian Emperors sometime between 500 and 450 B.C.E. Those who planned the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple and who served in it were all Jews from the exiled community which had been established in Babylonia at the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. Ezra, who is called Ha-Sofer, "The Scribe," was actually one of the higher authorities on Jewish Law; we might describe him as the chief ju

Now concerning the Pharisees, they live simply and have no desire for luxury. They follow the conduct of reason and respect their elders. They believe that a man,in his actions, must choose between good and evil, because they believe in reward and punishment. They believe in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees control the courts, therefore, when Sadducees are appointed to judicial positions, they resent their position, since they m