1. Antipater began his reign by insisting to Cleopatra III on repatriation of the rich Jerusalemites who fled to Egypt during the first Siege of Jerusalem, much to Cleopatra's distress. His purpose was to tax them the side of penury to keep Pompey in lavish gifts, just as Cleopatra did. Antipater drafted every poor Judean man into army service to fight for Rome to conquer Nabateah, the very kingdom with whom Antipater once so closely conspired. Meanwhile, Aristobulus son, Alexander Eliezer, was kidnapped into slavery in Thrace, yet with the help of Thrace's Jewish community, he escaped to Judea, where he amassed a force of ten thousand soldiers and a cavalry of fifteen-hundred. Many Thracian Jews died in the effort to scurry their prince to safety.
2. Pompey, through his newly appointed Syrian governor, Aulus Gabinius, welched on his promised support to Antipater, and let it be known that whomever gives him the most lavish gifts will be the governor of Judea. As Governor of Judea, Antipater had so taxed the wealth of the country that he had few gifts left to give, whereas Alexander had the support of an unknown source (which was of course Cleopatra) that arrives with enormous numbers of gifts. Antipater, however, had one trick left. When it came time for the arbitration to determine who would be governor of Judea, he brought with him a one-of-a-kind coin he minted of Alexander. He showed this coin to Gabinius, claiming that it demonstrated that Alexander means to promote himself not only as governor but as King of an independent Judea. Gabinius, expected to rule in favor of Alexander, took him prisoner with the expectation that he would be shortly crucified.
3. In response, Alexander's mother fell upon the governor's knees to beg for her son's life. Gabinus granted clemency, but then sprang his own trick on Antipater: Gabinus announced that Rome wills it to break up Judea into five provinces: Jerusalem, Gazara, Emmaus, Jericho, and Sephoris. Meanwhile, the Sanhedrin would be supervised by a Roman viceroy who can veto any ruling. Alexander was marched up from prison to the Syrian court, and Gabinus announced he was to be the new Governor of Jerusalem, while Antipater was to go back and run his ancestral home province, the much less prosperous Gazara.
4. There were two Sanhedrin elders: Shemaya of the Pharisees, and Abtalyon of Sadducees, who differed in every ruling but eventually united in the agony of their consciences, who formed an alliance to shift the purpose of the Sanhedrin to education. Together, they wrote an educative book, Sepher Perush oo'Tzeduk, lost in an Alexandrine fire, which purported to tell the history of the Sanhedrin, its purpose through its generations, and how future deliberative bodies should work in the Jewish world.
5. Rome taxed everyone into poverty, their soldiers requisitioned all of Judea for their own uses: property confiscated, wives and daughters raped, those who resist killed in a hundred ways the world ought forget. Aristobulus, however, escaped from the Roman galleys along with another son, Antigonus Simon, who absconded to Alexandria, where Cleopatra provided him with a garrison of 8000 soldiers. Aristobulus revealed himself in Jerusalem at the court of Alexander to publicly denounce his son and the mess he made of Judea. Directly after his envenomed discourse at his son, Alexander disappeared, his peroration promising guerrilla warfare that picks apart Roman soldiers one by one.
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