Who can demoralized God in His effort to achieve victory? Nothing a man can do it’s enough to force God giving up His pretensions of building His Kingdom upon the Rock of the Saint Spirit of Wisdom. Beyond the Ignorance of men God keep His path to glory with a mercy hand for those who dream with Power they knowing not that Death is the source of their ambitions.

So it came to happen when the sons of the Maccabees made their claim to the throne of King David, that the civil war between Pharisees and Sadducees had its beginning. The Sadducees, as history records, were the Priest Party ruling the Treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem, final destination of the religious taxes by the Aaronic clans set upon all the Jews communities spread around the world. Again, you can figure out the structure of this system of religious taxes projecting the Roman Church of the  first quarter of the Second Millennia to the Jewess Religion, the Sanhedrin  the Vatican of those days. The war for the control of the treasure of the Temple among the Aaronic clans was at the root of the Seleucid War against the Nation of the Jews, a War determined by the  repugnance which caused in a foreigner mind the vision of that criminal fighting for the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem between brothers and sisters, supposedly all holy people, whose fights are recorded in the Bible for those who are faithful to the Index of His Author, the Maccabees a fundamental chapter leading to the Messianic Explosion.

Once the war for freedom was won, the Pharisees came to take the control of the Temple revenues. The Maccabees were enemies of the Sadducees, who all the time of their War were for the Empire. The Pharisees, the Syndicate of the Doctors of the Law, chiefs of the synagogues of the Jews all around the Ancient World, and accordingly the ones upon whose work rested the duty of leading to the Temple of Jerusalem the religious Taxes due to the Law of Moses, when the Maccabees raised in arms against the Empire they led those world revenues to pay the army of the Maccabees. But not only with gold a war is fought. The need of soldiers was supplied by the Synagogues of the entire world at the call of the Syndicate of the Pharisees, who by their work at the service of the Sadducee Party received a certain amount of the tax collection.

The fratricide behavior of the Aaronic Clans during the days before the Final Solution of Antiochus the Fourth, followed by their taking side with the Empire, caused between the Party and the Syndicate an extreme hate. At the end of the War the Pharisees were to have supreme control of the Treasure of the Temple. The high influence of the Pharisees among the Jews and their labor for levying soldiers throughout the world it was seen in the abandonment of Judas the Maccabee in the field of that battle in which he and his 800 hundred heroes lost their lives. The glory of the hero had raised in the Syndicate a fear about the day after. Upon the wings of victory would not the Maccabee claim the throne of David for himself and his family? The suspicions gave way and the Pharisees determined that the Hero had to die in the name of the salvation of the Nation. Following their instructions the soldiers obeyed the order of their religious leaders to retreat, leaving alone the Hero and his 800 men to face the Death Penalty upon them laid by the Pharisees. This wound remained so deep that when Alexander Jannaeus came to the throne it was the source of the continual massacre of the Pharisees, which finally led to the Civil War by Pompey ended.

The Sadducees profited of this wound to tempt the sons of the last of the Maccabees with the crown, this way gaining back the control of the Treasure they had lost because their belief that Maccabees could not free the Jews from the yoke of the Empire. Anyway, Jonathan and Simon, had learned the lesson and the Pharisees lost lot of ground under their rules. They becoming high priests tore apart in pieces the old alliance of the first of the Maccabees with the Pharisees. The bringing back of the Sadducees to the stage, by the elevation of Jonathan and Simon to the high-priesthood, carried to the front of the battle going on the need of the coronation of the house of the Maccabees as a definitive blow against the aspiration on the control of the Temple’s Treasure of the Temple by the Pharisees. The tension was on the air. You could feel it. The elevation to the throne of David by a house no Davidic it would mean an Abomination. The Lord of Moses and Abraham, the God of David would punish the Nation with total destruction. Civil War was advisable in that matter.

The son of Simon, John Hyrcanus I, held this title “the First” as High Priest, and though he actually had the power of a king, he never gave way to the pretension of the Sadducees. With the coronation of the Hasmonean family the rise of the Aaronic clans would be absolute, and the Pharisees, once the servant of the Holy Party, would get back to their old function of the Temple State Functionaries, preaching the Law of Sin and Retribution, selling Absolution for gold. In the Middle Ages the Roman Church, taking this old system as model, brought the Indulgences to the scene.

Yet, Simon knew how to maintain both enemies, the Holy Party, and the Syndicate of the Doctors of Law under control. But it was evident that soon or later the temptation would run over his defenses and his son would, inevitably, proclaim himself king. As this was an Abomination, the son of John Hyrcanus, Aristobulus I the Mad had to kill all the opponents against his coronation, beginning with his own brothers and sisters, no excluding his own mother. He left his younger brother alive but when his star began to rise, imagining a plot against his crown, in which this Valiant Prince would be the champion of the Pharisee’s revolt, Aristobulus ordered his brother to be killed. And killed he was. The death of her younger son caused the death of his mother, down there in prison. The repulsion against this crime was so high that even the Sadducees felt the necessity of sending away the king. If the Pharisees won the day  they could lose their ascendancy. The plot was simple : The would kill the king, freed the only survivor of the House, Alexander Jannaeus, bury in the darkest prison, marry him to the Widow they would make him king. This way the Pharisees would be condemned to a perpetual struggle against the King, because the question of the Abomination.

And so it was done. Aristobulus was murdered cold blood, Alexander was freed, married to Queen Alexandra, and the Abomination was instituted. God said it long time before : “The decree of destruction is written”, and the Abomination of the usurpation of the Throne of the son of David by a family not born of Davidic stock did seal it. The only way they had to avoid Destruction was by the dethronement  of the Hasmonean King. The Sadducees had the gold, but the Pharisees had the people. Is stronger gold than blood?

That the tension between the Pharisees and the Hasmoneans came from the retreat of the soldiers which caused the death of the Hero it was visibly shown in the next episode. Alexander had finished a rite as high priest when coming out of the Temple the people began to throw him all things they could find. A massacre followed, which ended in the assassination of the 800 principals among the Pharisees. Eight Hundred, a number the Hasmoneans had never forgot. Man by man, is the Law. When they ordered the retreat of the battlefield, condemning Judas the Maccabee to death, a man of his own, a hero of no equal among the sons of women of the Earth, they signed the death penalty they were now receiving for the murder of the Hero and his Eight Hundred Men.  To add horror to the scene, while alive in their crosses, Alexander Jannaeus ordered the families of the Eight Hundred Pharisees to be led at their feet, where they were butchered in the eyes of the whole nation.

Never had Israel assisted to a show so monstrous and horrendous. Even Antiochus the Fourth, a Hitler as he was to the Jews, did never attained a point of cruelty so high and malignant. You may imagine the cry heard around all the synagogues of the  word. There was a single song sang in the synagogues of the entire world :  “The Hasmonean got to die”.

The Pharisees, chiefs of the synagogues of the world, did not spare word and time singing one more time their song :  “The Hasmonean got to die”. And many were the Jews leaving their houses and countries to come to Judah and put their daggers at the service of the cause. Among them it was found a rich young man from Seleucia on the Tigris. Flavius Josephus corrupted the name of this Babylonian young man who came in the days of Alexander Jannaeus with the only intention to plot against the King and free the Nation from the Hasmonean Abomination.  The real name of this young man was Simeon. Flavius Josephus corrupted the name of this Babylonian calling him Abtalion, a barbarian name, from the point of view of the Jews, les fitted to a Jews as the more Abrahamic was his roots. We see this Abtalion with the father of Zachariah, Abijah, which name Flavius Josephus again corrupted, calling him Abdias, another pagan name. The reason why Flavius Josephus corrupted the name of the two men by whose intercession was Jerusalem spared of the anger of young Herod we will see it later on. It is understood, anyway, that having Flavius Josephus discovered the transcendental relation of these two men with the Birth of Christ, he was his duty as historian of the Jews to rise a wall between the Past and the Future, for no man to find the Plot who led the sons of these two men to find the Legal heir of the House of Solomon.

Yes, the question of the Hasmonean brought to the table the question of the son of David. Now that they had got the Independence it would be the right time to conquer the lost kingdom. But where was the True Heir of the house of Solomon?

 You may well understand why that the Sadducees and the King would have killed anybody claiming to be the heir of the throne of king David. Davidians, so to call them, were by hundreds all around Judah. One thing was to say “my father was told by his father that his father was a son of David” and another put on the table the corresponding genealogical tree. And a genealogical tree to be by the Temple approved.

As time passed by the Temple of Jerusalem became a Birth Register National Office. We see in the Presentation in the Temple of Jesus his parents paying a tribute, this tribute registered as any commercial transaction became a Birth certificate. We can imagine the Certificate : Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary. But every birth Certificate was individual. There was not a scroll for every family of the nation. Every family preserved his genealogical tree, of course. But the Temple was a State in the State and acted as such. If you wanted to know who was the ancestor of Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary, for example, you had to search the birth certificates of his parents. And so forth. As the families of the Jews had been going in and out of the Country the birth certificates of a single genealogical tree were dispersed here and there, and this made impossible to track the real root of a common man. One could say he was of Davidic stock as well as of Samson’s, who cared?

However the question was on the table. A thousand years had gone since king David. The Nation was free again, at the same time at the edge of destruction because the Hasmonean Abomination. Could not they profit of this interregnum to find the True Heir of King Solomon and proclaim the Kingdom of the son of David?

Of course Alexander Jannaeus was in the secret aspiration of the Pharisees and he could not spare occasion to kill them by the hundred. He put the Sanhedrin entirely under the control of the Sadducees, he surrounded himself with a corps of soldier of fortunes, dogs of war entirely devoted to their master, of arab stock, ready to devour Jews at anytime anywhere.

So it came to happen that the cry for the extermination of the Hasmonean Abomination found a heart in the Mother of all the Synagogues, the Great Synagogue of Babylon. It was a long time ago that Babylon existed no more, but the Synagogue held its ancient name in honor of its founder, the Prophet Daniel. After the destruction of Babylon by Alexander the Great his successor in Asia, Seleucus I, found New Babylon, Seleucia on the Tigris, where all the ancient population moved their businesses. Seleucia on the Tigris became soon the New York of the East, the city connecting both part of the world, West and East. Obviously the Great Synagogue founded by the Prophet Daniel moved on too, with it the Jews Community, at this time, always under the protection of the kings, a very wealthy people. The industrious capacity of the Jews it is beyond discussion. We see them under the Persian Kings serving in the highest post of the imperial administration. Under the Seleucid kings we see them serving in the imperial armies, school of war where the First of the Maccabees made his practices following the Great of the Antiochus in his campaign of the East. God is Omnipotent and All-Powerful but He cannot transform Himself in atoms; but the way He created the most wonderful diamond from the brutest stone it is absolutely marvelous. When talking about Judas the divines paint in the air a man coming from nowhere, and suddenly turned into the most terrible warrior. There is no need of a great man to understand that predicting what was next God forged the Hero in the heart of that same Empire ready to devour Israel.

We see the fame of the Jews one more time in full power running to free the greatest general had ever Rome, Julius Caesar. And we saw them before too at the service of the Ptolemaic king and Queens, leading their armies to war. To picture the Jews as the reckless people by the writers of the Early Modern Age used to depict them it is nonsense. As a matter of fact we have seen them not long ago fighting all by themselves a bunch of nations. This does not mean that they are always as good, neither always as bad as the generation we are seen in motion during the days of the Hasmonean Jannaeus and the later days after the Resurrection.

A wealthy and powerful community were the Jews of Seleucia on the Tigris. Their Synagogue, the mother of all the Synagogues, the Synagogue of the Magi as was still called in honor of the Master of the Magi of the New Chaldean Empire, Daniel the Prophet, was the richest among them, much more than the Alexandria Synagogue. The annual caravan coming from the Synagogue of the Magi, from Seleucia on the Tigris bringing to the Temple the religious tax ordered by Moses Law, used to raise a great expectation in Jerusalem in the name of the wealthy number in gold and other products of exchanging value in the International Market. Sometimes this annual caravan had to be postponed because international wars.  In the days of the King Herod the tension between the two empires, the Roman and the Parthian, made difficult the passing the borders without a commercial safe-pass. The expectation raised by the Caravan of the Magi of the year of the Birth of the Lord was high due to the rivalry lately raised between Romans and Parthians. In the days of the Seleucid kings the communication between Jerusalem and Seleucia on the Tigris was fluid. The news did not take long to travel from the source to the end of the line. In a matter of days the Jews of Seleucia on the Tigris received the news of the Massacre of the Eight Hundred Pharisees. The anger provoked by this horror caused Simeon, heir of a wealthy pharisaic family, to come to Jerusalem, bringing with him gold to sustain the Pharisees and a will as hard as iron to fight back the Abomination.

It was here, in Jerusalem, where Simeon the Babylonian met Abijah, of the Aaronic clans, servant of the Temple and a Prophet of peace to his people, from the Temple preaching the need of putting down the weapons and resolve the Question by means of national unity. While Abijah was preaching peace to the people, and facing the King with the voice of a prophet declare him the future of his family, born to be razed, Simeon the Babylonian was plotting against Alexander following the doctrine of the Babylonian Master, that Daniel who while with one hand was serving the King of the Chaldeans with the other was plotting the ruin of his empire by bringing to power first the Assyrian Nabonidus, and finally  Cyrus the Persian. Simeon the Babylonian financed many secret plots against the King, and all ended in nothing. Many blood was shed before Simeon was won to the cause of Abijah, the search of the True Heir of the Crown of Solomon.

The influence of these two men in the Sanhedrin and the final conscience of the King about the future of his dynasty brought to the stage, at his death, the interregnum of Queen Alexandra. She knew she had no much time. She was old. The time the two men had to find the True Heir of the throne of David was short. If the Heir of David was found she would abdicate in his favor, the crown would pass from her family to the family of King David. Jerusalem would see her abomination cleansed and the destruction of Israel erased from the future. It was a good and holy cause to live and to die for. But the time was running. Her son Aristobulus was a young man soon to be a man, and he would claim at the dead of her mother what was his, the crown. If the Sadducees came to know why she had elevated to the Sanhedrin the Pharisees, they would pressure his son and used him as they used Alexander, his father. It was up to them; she could do no more.

It is said, the find the needle in the barn without magnetic device you need eternity. There were sons of David everywhere. Everybody was in fact a son of David. It did not matter if you were or not. The thing was to be reckon a Jew. And if the men was real, what they wanted from him, to get killed by the Hasmoneans? At the end the answer was “yes, my father said so, and so his grandfather, who knows”. No one could prove to be a true heir of King Solomon.  It was all in vain.

Queen Alexandra died and it came to happen that what was predicted. Hyrcanus, the elder son of the Queen, succeeded her mother, and yet he was in preserving the crown for the son of David. Obviously his younger brother felt dismissed and conspired with the Sadducees to put him out of the way. Civil war came, and as Pompey was around he was invited to play the Solomon, which he failed to do, and instead he declared the end of the kingdom of the Jews. The Abomination had been put down, not by men but by God.

It was in those days that the son of Antipater, young Herod, jumped in the scene and massacred some Galileans bandits causing much trouble in the North. The Sanhedrin called the young future king to answer for his crime. He hit the road to Jerusalem at the head of his men, encamped them beyond the walls and went to meet his judges. No one dared to hold their anger at the face of the man, just two men were men enough to ask his death before that young Palestinian warrior became king of the Jews. A while after the Roman fell in the last of their Civil Wars and Herod was expelled from the Land, to come back with an army of the Caesar to win for himself a Kingdom. Jerusalem was ready to resist till the last man, and Herod ready to kill them all, when those same two men, Simeon the Babylonian and Abijah the prophet, Abtalion and Abdias according to Flavius Josephus, asked Herod to spare the population; they will make them put down the swords and accept the fate they had brought upon themselves. Herod favored them and Jerusalem was spared. But not their leaders. As Herod told them in response to the prophecy of these two men, “Remember, when am king I will massacre you all, excepting the only two men in here”. And so it was done.

Herod became king. He initiated his reign beheading the Sanhedrim, as he said, and spared the two men who prophesied his future, and had them always in high esteem. The Search of “the son of Solomon” was taken by the their sons, Simeon the Young and Zachariah. No need to tell that if under the crown of the Hasmonean the talking of the Kingdom of the son of David was punished with death, under the reign of Herod the sole thought meant death. Serving God without fear of men, Zachariah and Simeon the Younger began their search putting inside out the Birth Register Archives of the Temple. After all Zachariah was a priest, a Sadducee by birth, and being the son of the most influent priest under the king, to climb to the Direction of the Historical Archives of the Temple was the easiest part. To navigate through those thousands and thousands of Birth Certificates accumulated during the last five centuries was the real work. First of all he had to cut the system of corruption inaugurated by the precedents directors. Remember that Julius Caesar gave the Jews certain wonderful exemptions; to enjoy those benefits you had to be a Jews from Judah. It was not good enough to be a son of Abraham, you had to be a Jew born in Judah. You was born in Alexandria, Antioquia or wherever, but without a Birth Certificate saying you was born in Judah you were not free from military service for example. How could you buy yourself a Birth Certificate saying you are a Jew from Judah? Well, how much, this was the question. For a certain amount of gold the Temple would make you son of David, born in the house by where the king himself was playing his harp. Yes, how much. No wonder Jesus said that God could bring forth to Abraham sons out of the stones. In the days after Julius Caesar the sons of David  have become so numerous as the sand of the wilderness. The crusade against this corruption that the new director of the Archives of the Temple put in motion caused him many headaches and much hate among the priests. Whatever, Zachariah was firm in his Search and while he was well protected by his father’s reputation and his friend’s gold, he did not gave away ground.

It was during those days that Zachariah marry Elizabeth. The parents of Elizabeth did not agree with her daughter about marrying the most fool of the priest; with his love for decency Zachariah was undermining the treasure of the Temple. What was wrong in saving the sons of Abraham from the military service? Why this crusade of his worth nothing?

Zachariah and Simeon the Younger kept their Search in secret. Elizabeth, who was a friend of both young men, fell in love with the son of Abijah. Elizabeth’s parents had conceived the illusion of her beautiful daughter marrying Simeon the Younger. Simeon the Younger fed the illusion of Elizabeth’s parents till it was too late for them to impose on her a husband contrary to her heart. The partnership of her two friends caused Elizabeth to look higher. Of course, Simeon was her  twin soul, he adored in Elizabeth her beauty and her intelligence, and she adored in him the devotion to his friend and his coolness in dealing with the world. Elizabeth’s parents, the beauty of her daughter cause of much talking, seeing her daughter and the son of Simeon the Babylonian always together, talking and laughing, dreamt with them getting marry. The match could not be better, the son of Simeon the Babylonian! Dreamers keep dreaming until dawn. Elizabeth grew and she became free, under the Law, to choose husband of her heart. To the agony of her parents, Simeon married the woman of his heart, and Elizabeth pressed Zachariah to look at her and tell her that he was going to marry her. Of course he was going to marry her. Now, how could he maintain away the woman of his heart from his secret Search? She learnt what already she had seen in the eyes of her twin soul, Zachariah was looking for the son of king Solomon. Elizabeth’s parents tried to stop their getting marry. To not avail. True to say that when they were found childless the voice was heard : Punishment of God!