The volcanic 'triple event' of the 160s BCE and the causes of famine in Judaea during the Maccabaean Revolt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ongoing research shows an association between volcanic eruptions, the resulting disruption of climatic and hydrological patterns, and socio-economic disturbance in ancient Egypt during the final three centuries BCE (Manning, Ludlow et al. 2017). The present paper explores how this paradigm can extend our understanding of Judaea in the 160s BCE, a decade marked by consecutive famines amid intense political and social upheaval, particularly the so-called Maccabaean Revolt against Seleucid rule. Making use of state-of-the-art ice-core evidence that identifies three substantial volcanic eruptions within that timespan, as well as modelling that sheds light on the likely climatic impacts of the eruptions, this paper puts forward explanations to supplement those based upon the ancient (literary) sources alone, suggesting that volcanic forcing was a critical factor in these significant events in Judaean history. The Maccabaean rebellion and its aftereffects on Jewish identity politics in posterity cannot be overstated, yet heretofore the contribution of famine conditions (now plausibly linked to external climatic forcing) to this watershed period have hardly been taken into account. Mindful that studies claiming climatic pressures as primary catalysts of important human historical events have often proved overly simplistic, the interaction of other contemporaneous stressors is also examined. Correspondences with the Egyptian and Chinese data are observed here too, especially in relation to conditions surrounding the onset and cessation of military action, and interference in religious matters in order to control a predominantly Temple-managed resource management and taxation system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".