Onias IV

Origins and early life

Onias IV was a Jew of the house of Zadok, the priestly line that had held the high priesthood of Jerusalem since the days of Solomon; he was the son of Onias III, the high priest murdered at Antioch about 170 BCE during the crisis that led to the Maccabean revolt.

Work and career

When the office passed first to hellenizing appointees of the Seleucid kings and then permanently to the Hasmonean family, Onias IV, the legitimate heir by descent, was displaced. He went to Ptolemaic Egypt, where a large Jewish population already lived, entered the service of Ptolemy VI Philometor and Cleopatra II — Josephus reports that he and another Jew, Dositheus, commanded Egyptian armies — and obtained from the king permission to build a Jewish temple at Leontopolis in the nome of Heliopolis, on the site of a ruined Egyptian shrine.

Built about 160-145 BCE on the model of the Jerusalem Temple though smaller and with a tower rather than a house, it had an altar, priests of Zadokite descent and the sacrificial service, and it functioned for more than two centuries, until the Romans closed it in 73 CE after the fall of Jerusalem. Onias justified it by a verse of Isaiah promising an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt. This fiche states plainly that the sources are almost entirely Josephus, who gives two partly inconsistent accounts, that a few ancient texts confuse him with his father, and that the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud debated the temple's legitimacy without ever equating it with idolatry.

Its existence matters because it shows a Jewish diaspora large and confident enough to maintain its own temple, and a priestly family that took its legitimacy with it into exile.