Queen Shlomtzion: nine years of peace
After Yannai's war on his own people his widow brings the sages back; the Talmud remembers those years as a time when the land bore double.
Yannai left his wife a country split in two and one piece of advice: fear neither the Pharisees nor their opponents, but the hypocrites. Shlomtzion brought the Pharisees back into the Sanhedrin, headed by her brother Shimon ben Shetach, and for nine years fought no war.
The Talmud gave those years a place it gave to no other Hasmonean reign: "In the days of Shimon ben Shetach the rains fell on the nights after the Sabbath, so that grains of wheat grew like kidneys, of barley like olive pits, of lentils like golden dinars; and the sages gathered them and left them for coming generations, to show that sin holds back the good."
In those years too, the Jerusalem Talmud says, it was decreed that children should go to school. It all ended the moment she died: her two sons, the High Priest and the commander, went to war with each other—and four years later Pompey entered Jerusalem.
Sources
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Taanit 23a — the rains after the Sabbath and the grains like kidneys
- Yerushalmi Ketubot 8:11 — schools for children
Documents of the period
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13:405–432 — the return of the Pharisees and the split between her sons
Basis: tradition.
People and places
Salome Alexandra (Shlomtzion) · Alexander Yannai · Shimon ben Shetach · Hyrcanus II · Aristobulus II