Hasmonean losses

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From the Jewish Encyclopedia.

 

Weighing evidence of sources from antiquity is always a tricky business. Was it possible for Alexander to raise an army of 50,000, much less lose that many men? (Josephus puts Alexander's force at 50,000, or up to 80,000 according to his sources.) The 50,000 figure for casualties, BTW, is from Timagenes (as found in Josephus); apparently Josephus' quotation of 30,000 follows Nicolaus of Damascus (which Josephus frequently does).

On the plus side, Nicolaus had reason to have good information, having been a member of Herod's court and not all that far removed from the actual events. Whether he embellished Alexander's cruelties is a matter of speculation; Josephus criticized Nicolaus for downplaying Herod's atrocities. Was Nicolaus burnishing Herod's reputation at the expense of the Hasmoneans?

Josephus, at any rate, certainly believed the stories of Alexander's violence and, having lived through the civil wars and Roman suppression under Vespasian and Titus wouldn't blink at the number of casualties and the extent of the violence he was relating.

Numbers should always be approached with caution in ancient sources. Did Xerxes really have an army of a million men when he invaded Greece? (Modern scholars consider 10 to 15 percent of that number much more likely, but even that fraction would have been a huge army for the time.)

 

It had been practiced earlier by the Persians and the Greeks, so it was a form of execution that the post-exile Jews would have been familiar with. (There is some speculation, in fact, that Haman in the Book of Esther was actually "crucified," not hanged.) The Romans, of course, as they did with other borrowed technologies, developed it into an efficient means of instilling terror into subject peoples and slaves.