Second Book of Maccabees 5

¹ About this time Antiochus undertook his second expedition[*a] against Egypt.

² It then happened that all over the city for nearly forty days there were apparitions of horsemen galloping through the air, in cloth of gold, troops of lancers fully armed,

³ squadrons of cavalry in order of battle, attacks and charges this way and that, a flourish of shields, a forest of pikes, brandishing of swords, hurling of missiles, a glitter of golden accoutrements and armour of all kinds.

⁴ So everyone prayed that this manifestation might prove a good omen.

⁵ Then on the strength of a false report that Antiochus was dead, Jason took at least a thousand men and launched an unexpected attack on the city. The troops manning the wall were forced back, and Menelaus, with the city all but captured, took refuge in the Citadel.

⁶ Jason, however, was still making a pitiless slaughter of his own fellow citizens, not stopping to consider that success against his own countrymen was the greatest of disasters, but rather picturing himself as setting up trophies won from some enemy, not from his own flesh and blood.

⁷ Even so, he did not succeed in seizing power; in the end his conspiracy brought him nothing but disgrace, and once again he took refuge in Ammonite territory.

⁸ His career of wickedness was thus brought to a halt. Kept under restraint by Aretas the Arab despot, fleeing from town to town, the quarry of all men, hated as a rebel against the laws, abhorred as the butcher of his country and his countrymen, he drifted to Egypt,

⁹ and at last this man, who had exiled so many from their fatherland, himself perished on foreign soil, having travelled to Sparta in the hope that for kinship’s sake they might harbour him.

¹⁰ So many carcasses he had thrust out to lie unburied; now he himself had none to mourn him, no funeral rites, no place in the tomb of his ancestors.

¹¹ When the king came to hear of what had happened, he concluded that Judaea was in revolt. He therefore marched from Egypt, raging like a wild beast, and began by storming the city.

¹² He then ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy everyone they encountered, and to butcher all who took refuge in their houses.

¹³ It was a massacre of young and old, a slaughter of women and children, a butchery of virgins and infants.

¹⁴ There were eighty thousand victims in the course of those three days, forty thousand dying by violence and as many again being sold into slavery.

¹⁵ Not satisfied with this, he had the audacity to enter the holiest Temple in the entire world, Menelaus, that traitor to the laws and to his country as his guide;

¹⁶ with his unclean hands he seized the sacred vessels, and his impious hands swept away what other kings had presented for the advancement, the glory and the honour of the place.

¹⁷ Antiochus, so much above himself, did not realise that the Lord was angry for the moment at the sins of the inhabitants of the city, hence his unconcern for the Holy Place.

¹⁸ Had it not happened that they were entangled in many sins, Antiochus too, like Heliodorus when King Seleucus sent him to inspect the Treasury, would have been flogged the moment he arrived and checked in his presumption.

¹⁹ However, the Lord had not chosen the people for the sake of the place, but the place for the sake of the people;

²⁰ and so the place itself, having shared the disasters that befell the people, in due course also shared their good fortune; forsaken by the Almighty in the time of his anger, it was reinstated in all its glory, once the great Sovereign had been reconciled.

²¹ Antiochus went off with eighteen hundred talents he had stolen from the Temple, and hurried back to Antioch; in his arrogance he would have undertaken to make the dry land navigable and the sea passable on foot, so high his ambition soared.

²² But he left high commissioners to plague the nation: in Jerusalem, Philip, a Phrygian by race[*b], and by nature more barbarous than the man who appointed him; on Mount Gerizim, Andronicus;

²³ and besides these Menelaus, who lorded it over his countrymen worse than all the others. In his rooted hostility to the Jews,

²⁴ the king also sent the mysarch Apollonius at the head of an army twenty-two thousand strong, with orders to put to death all men in their prime and to sell the women and children.

²⁵ Arriving in Jerusalem and posing as a man of peace, this man waited until the holy day of the sabbath and then, taking advantage of the Jews as they rested from work, ordered his men to parade fully armed;

²⁶ all those who came out to watch he put to the sword; then, running through the city with his armed troops, he cut down an immense number of people.

²⁷ Judas called Maccabaeus, however, with about nine others, withdrew into the wilderness, and lived like wild animals in the hills with his companions, eating nothing but wild plants to avoid contracting defilement.