Onias

Onias († 63 BC) was - as the Jewish historian Flavius ​​Josephus reports - a "just and God-pleasing" Jew living near Jerusalem , who had successfully wished for rain through his prayer during a period of drought and who has been with his since then Compatriots were considered a man who had a special ear to God.

This reputation became his undoing, however, when during the fratricidal war between the Jewish king Aristobulus and the high priest Hyrcanus (both of the Maccabees ) in the days before the Passover festival in 63 BC. The troops of the Nabatean king Aretas III. , who supported Hyrcanus, advanced in front of the fortified Jerusalem to besiege Aristobulus, who was entrenched there. While many other noble Jews had already fled to Egypt , where there was a large Jewish colony, because of the rampant war events, Onias had stayed in the country and hid there. However, he was seized by soldiers of Hyrcanus and led into the camp. There they asked him to curse Aristobulus and his followers. Onias, on the other hand, asked God that he would not allow either side to succeed in what they wanted to do against the other side. He was then stoned by the bystanders.

Flavius ​​Josephus reports that this atrocity against a “righteous man” did not go unpunished, as a storm soon arose which destroyed all the crops in the area and made it difficult for the besiegers to find supplies.

The martyrdom of Onias, described by Flavius ​​Josephus, is an example of the fate of a “righteous God”, of which the Talmudic literature also contains various. The American religious historian Robert Eisenman puts Onias in a row with John the Baptist and the (also stoned) James , the brother of Jesus .

Remarks

1. ↑ Compare: Balaam .
2. ↑ Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 14, 22-24.
3. ↑ Robert Eisenman: James the brother of Jesus . C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 1998, in particular pp. 467-473.