הרב יוחנן כהן גדול

Yochanan Hyrcanus, called in the words of Chazal Yochanan Kohen Gadol, was the son of Shimon the Chashmonai and a grandson of Matityahu the kohen. His father, the last of the sons of Matityahu left alive, had been made kohen gadol and nasi by the assembly of the people, with the office to pass by inheritance. In Shevat of 134 BCE, Shimon and two of his sons were murdered at a feast in Yericho by his son-in-law Talmai ben Chavuv, who ruled the city; Yochanan was away with the army at Gezer and escaped the plot. He hurried to Yerushalayim, was proclaimed nasi in his father’s place, and held both the nesiut and the kehunah gedolah for thirty-one years.

Antiochus Sidetes besieged Yerushalayim for close to two years, and the siege ended in a settlement: hostages, silver, the return of Yafo and the towns lying between it and Yehudah, the pulling down of the city walls, and Judean troops for the Seleucid war in the east. To raise the silver, and afterward to fund an army of his own, Yochanan drew on the treasure of the tomb of David HaMelech. Josephus relates that the whole Seleucid camp halted two days so that the Jewish soldiers could keep Shavuot. When Antiochus fell to the Parthians the pressure lifted, and in 127 BCE Yochanan struck the first coins ever minted by an independent Jewish state — bearing the words Yochanan the Kohen Gadol and Chever HaYehudim, and carrying no image of man or beast.

From about 112 BCE he went out to war. He took Edom with its two chief cities, Maresha and Adora, and brought the Edomites in under the mitzvot rather than driving them out; in a later generation Hordos, of Edomite descent, would sit on the throne of Yehudah. In 107 BCE he captured and destroyed Shomron after a siege of a full year, and the twenty-fifth of Marcheshvan was fixed in Megillat Taanit as a yom tov. He also destroyed the temple that stood on Har Gerizim, and took Medeba, Beit She’an, the Yizrael valley and the lower Galil. Chazal preserve that while he was serving in the Beit HaMikdash he heard a bat kol come from the Kodesh HaKodashim announcing that the young men who had gone out to battle had won.

His later years brought a break with the Perushim, after which he drew close to the Tzedukim and annulled the enactments the Perushim had given the people. He left five sons, among them Yehudah Aristobulus, Antigonus, Alexander Yannai and Avshalom; before his passing he appointed his wife to govern and Aristobulus as kohen gadol, though Aristobulus took both offices for himself and imprisoned his mother and brothers. He was niftar in 104 BCE, the first Chashmonai ruler to be niftar without violence.