David Jacobson
David Jacobson (Ph.D. London University) is a scholar of classical archaeology and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. For the past five years, he has served as Editor of the prestigious Palestine Exploration Quarterly (PEQ), now in its 146th year. David has published widely on the history, art, architecture and numismatics of Judaea and the southern Levant, including Below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (with Shimon Gibson, 1996), The Hellenistic Paintings of Marisa (2007), Herod and Augustus (co-editor, 2009), Judaea and Rome in Coins(co-editor, 2013), Antioch and Jerusalem: the Seleucids and Maccabees in Coins (in press), and Distant Views of the Holy Land: A Volume of Early Photographs, Watercolours and Drawings (with Felicity Cobbing, in press). He has taught courses and lectured to a wide range of audiences in the United Kingdom, Ireland and U.S.A., and is presently engaged in a project researching and cataloguing the ancient coins found in excavations on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, with financial support from the Royal Numismatic Society, London.
Presenter at
Bible & Archaeology Fest XVII, November 21 – 23, 2014
The Seleucids and the Beginning of Hasmonaean Coinage
This lecture begins with a historical overview from Alexander the Great through the Maccabaean Revolt against the Seleucid kings. This provides the context for understanding the coins by John Hyrcanus I and his Hasmonaean successors. The motifs chosen for these coins will be examined, their sources identified and certain aspects of the political and religious ideology of the Hasmonaeans will be deduced. In parallel the coin evidence will be compared with the information provided by the main literary sources, 1 and 2 Maccabees and the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus.
