Jewish legend has much that is miraculous to tell of Simon the Just, and connects him alike with events both long anterior and long posterior to his Pontificate. Many of these traditions read like the outcome of loving, longing remembrance of a happy past which was never to return. Such a venerable form would never again be seen in the Sanctuary (Ecclus. 1. 1-4), nor would such miraculous attestation be given to any other ministrations [6332] (Yoma 39 a and b; Jer. Yoma v. 2; vi. 3). All this seems to point to the close of a period when the High-Priesthood was purely Jewish in spirit, just as the hints about dissensions among his sons (Jer. Yoma 43 d, at top) sound like faint reminiscences of the family - and public troubles which followed. In point of fact he was succeeded not by his Onias [6333] who was under age, but by his brother Eleazar, and he, after a Ponficate of twenty years, by his brother Manasseh. It was only twenty-seven years later, after the death of Manasseh, that Onias II. became High-Priest. If Eleazar, and especially Manasseh, owned their position, or at least strengthened it, by courting the favour of the ruler of Egypt, it was almost natural that Onias should have taken the opposite or Syrian part. His refusal to pay the High-Priestly tribute to Egypt could scarcely have been wholly due to avarice, as Josephus suggests. The anger and threats of the king were appeased by the High-Priest's nephew Joseph, who claimed descent from the line of David. He knew how to ingratiate himself at the court of Alexandria, and obtained the lease of the taxes of Coele-Syria (which included Judæa), by offering for it double sum previously paid. The removal of the foreign tax-gatherer was very grateful to the Jews, but the authority obtained by Joseph became a new source of danger, especially in the hands of his ambitious son, Hyrcanus. Thus we already mark the existence of three parties: the Egyptian, the Syrian, and that of the sons of Tobias' (Ant. xii. 5. 1), as the adherents of Joseph were called, after his father. If the Egyptian party ceased when Palestine passed under Syrian rule in the reign of Antiochis III. the Great (223-187 b.c.), and ultimately became wholly subject to it under Seleucus IV. (187-173), the Syrian, and especially the Tobias-party, had already become Grecianised. In truth, the contest now became one for power and wealth in which each sought to outbid the other by bribery and subserviency to the foreigner. As the submission of the people could only be secured by the virtual extinction of Judaism, this aim was steadily kept in view by the degenerate priesthood.
The storm did not, indeed, break under the Pontificate of Simon II., the son and successor of Onias II., but the times were becoming more and more troublous. Although the Syrian rulers occasionally showed favour to the Jews, Palestine was now covered with a network of Syrian officials, into whose hands the temporal power mainly passed. The taxation also sensibly increased, and, besides crown-money, consisted of a poll-tax, the third of the field-crops, the half of the produce of trees, a royal monopoly of salt and of the forests, and even a tax on the Levitical tithes and on all revenues of the Temple. [6334] Matters became much more worse under the Pontificate of Onias II., the son and successor of Simon II. A dispute between him and one Simon, a priest, and captain of the temple-guard, [6335] apparently provoked by the unprincipled covetousness of the latter, induced Simon to appeal to the cupidity of the Syrians by referring to the untold treasures which he described as deposited in the Temple. His motive may have been partly a desire for revenge, partly the hope of attaining the office of Onias. It was ascribed to a super-natural apparition, but probably it was only superstition which arrested the Syrian general at that time. But a dangerous lesson had been learned alike by Jew and Gentile.