The Maccabees and the Gymnasium

This paper focuses on the fate of the gymnasium in the wake of the Maccabean Revolt. While the vast majority of scholars postulate that the gymnasium was destroyed by the Maccabees, no such statement is made by any of the sources. The gymnasium’s fate is not mentioned in the narration of Judah’s conquest of Jerusalem, nor in the description of Jonathan or Simon’s successive sieges and eventually conquest the Acra, the fortress where the Seleucid garrison and the Hellenists took refuge. The main key to understand the successive fate of the gymnasium is that this term indicates an institution as well as a building. First it is necessary to figure out its location, a key element to understand its successive destiny. Furthermore, the narration of the various sieges of the Accra could provide with a perspective on the evolution of the attitude of the Maccabees and their followers towards the Hellenists, who would have included the members of the team of the gymnasium. On the other hand, an analysis of the episode of embassy sent by Jonathan to Sparta and the claim of the Jews to kinship, or syngeneia, with Sparta, demonstrates that the benefits of Greek education, acquired only in a gymnasium, were not lost to the Maccabees. Thus, the paper argues that this institution, the symbol par excellence of the Greco-Roman world that was introduced into Jerusalem in the second century BCE, was in fact never destroyed but instead died of natural causes, which is why its demise is not mentioned in the sources.