Ancient beheading site found in Jerusalem, evidence of ‘holy’ king’s bloody rule

Alexander Jannaeus by Guillaume Rouille, 1518?-1589

Amanda Boeschel-Dan writes in Times of Israel, “Evidence of a mass slaying, including cruel beheadings, committed during the bloody reign of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE) was recently uncovered in a courtyard next to the Jerusalem municipality during excavations of an ancient water cistern. ‘We removed from the pit more than 20 neck vertebrae which were cut by a sword,’ said Dr. Yossi Nagar, an anthropologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). ‘We discovered in the pit, bodies and body parts of infants and adult individuals, women and men, who were probably victims of a brutal slaughter.’ Embryonic bones discovered in the excavation indicate that among victims were even pregnant women.”…

“As the son of John Hyrcanus, Alexander Jannaeus, known in Hebrew as Alexander Yannai, also served as the High Priest of the Second Temple during his 27-year reign. The era of the ‘holy man’ was marked by court intrigue and seemingly endless war campaigns in which he conquered — and lost — swaths of territory. It was a time of violent power struggles between the Jewish Sadducees and Pharisees, which led to a six-year Judaean Civil War that, according to historical sources such as the Pharisaic historian Josephus, left some 50,000 Jews dead. During the war, the Judaeans engineered a failed intervention by the Seleucid king, which, while eventually uniting the Jewish people against a common enemy, backfired mightily against those who had enlisted him.” (more…)