Yannai was ambitious and self-aggrandizing, but Salome prevented him from persecuting the Pharisees (the popular group which was loyal to both the Written and Spoken Torah), for a short while, and excessivly oppressingĪs king he battled against Egyptian Prince Ptolemy (Lathyrus) and signed a treaty with the latter's mother and arch-enemy Cleopatra III. Yannai was imprisoned by his elder brother Aristobulus but released by the latter's young widow Salome Alexandra, on Aristobulus' death. It is set against the backdrop of the spectacular conquests and the humiliating defeat of Judea's Hasmonean kings, bitter strife between the Pharisees and Sadduccees, and the clash between Greek and Hebrew civilization. This book has been acclaimed as one of the greatest historical novels in modern Hebrew literature. This dramatic novelization of the first five years of the reign of Hasmonean King of Judea, Alexander Yannai (106-73 BCE), was originally written in Hebrew in 1954, and translated into English in 1957 by David Patterson, Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew at the University of Oxford.
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