Second Book of Maccabees 8

¹ Judas Maccabaeus and his companions made their way secretly among the villages, rallying their kinsfolk; they recruited those who remained loyal to Judaism, and assembled about six thousand.

² They called upon the Lord to have regard for the people oppressed on all sides, to take pity on the Temple profaned by the godless,

³ to have mercy on the city falling into ruin and nearly levelled to the ground, to hear the blood of the victims that cried aloud to him,

⁴ to remember the criminal slaughter of innocent babies and to avenge the blasphemies perpetrated against his name.

⁵ As soon as Maccabaeus had an organised force he at once proved invincible to the pagans, the Lord’s anger having turned into compassion.

⁶ Making surprise attacks on towns and villages, he fired them; he captured favourable positions and inflicted a number of reverses on the enemy,

⁷ generally availing himself of the cover of night for such enterprises. The fame of his valour spread far and wide.

⁸ When Philip saw Judas was making steady progress and winning more and more frequent successes, he wrote to Ptolemy, the military commissioner for Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, asking for reinforcements in the royal interest.

⁹ Ptolemy appointed Nicanor son of Patroclus, one of the king’s First Friends, and sent him without delay at the head of an international force of at least twenty thousand men, to exterminate the entire Jewish race. As his associate he appointed Gorgias, a professional general of wide military experience.

¹⁰ Nicanor determined to raise the two thousand talents of tribute money owed by the king to the Romans, by the sale of Jewish prisoners of war.

¹¹ He lost no time in sending the seaboard towns an invitation to come and buy Jewish manpower, promising delivery of ninety head for one talent; but he did not reckon on the judgement from the Almighty that was soon to overtake him.

¹² When news reached Judas of Nicanor’s advance, he warned his men of the enemy’s approach,

¹³ whereupon the fainthearted and those who lacked confidence in the justice of God took to their heels and ran away.

¹⁴ The rest sold all their remaining possessions, at the same time praying the Lord to deliver them from the godless Nicanor, who had sold them even in advance of any encounter –

¹⁵ if not for their own sakes, then at least out of consideration for the covenants made with their ancestors, and because they themselves bore his sacred and majestic name.

¹⁶ Maccabaeus marshalled his men, who numbered about six thousand, and exhorted them not to be dismayed at the enemy or discouraged at the vast horde of pagans wickedly advancing against them, but to fight bravely,

¹⁷ keeping before their eyes the criminal outrage inflicted by these men on the Holy Place, and the agony of the humiliated city, not to mention the destruction of their traditional way of life.

¹⁸ ‘They may put their trust in their weapons and their exploits,’ he said ‘but our confidence is in almighty God, who is able with a nod to overthrow both those marching on us and the whole world with them.’

¹⁹ He reminded them of the occasions on which their forbears had received help: that time when, under Sennacherib, a hundred and eighty-five thousand men had perished;

²⁰ that time in Babylonia when in the battle with the Galatians the Jewish combatants numbered only eight thousand and four thousand Macedonians, yet when the Macedonians were hard pressed, the eight thousand wiped out a hundred and twenty thousand because of the help they received from heaven, and won incalculable gains.

²¹ Having so roused their courage by these words that they were ready to die for the laws and their country, he then divided his army roughly into four,

²² putting his brothers, Simon, Joseph and Jonathan in command of one division each, and assigning them fifteen hundred men apiece.

²³ Next, he ordered Esdrias[*a], to read the sacred book aloud, and gave them their watchword ‘Help from God’; then he put himself at the head of the first division and joined battle with Nicanor.

²⁴ With the Almighty for their ally, they slaughtered over nine thousand of the enemy, wounded and crippled the greater part of Nicanor’s army and put them all to flight.

²⁵ The money of their prospective purchasers fell into their hands. After pursuing them for a good while, they turned back, since time was pressing:

²⁶ it was the eve of the sabbath, and for that reason they did not prolong their pursuit.

²⁷ They collected the enemy’s weapons and stripped them of their spoils, and then celebrated the sabbath with heartfelt praise and thanks to the Lord, who had reserved that day for distilling on them the first dew of his mercy.

²⁸ when the sabbath was over they distributed some of the booty among the victims of the persecution and the widows and orphans; the rest they divided among themselves and their children.

²⁹ They then joined in public supplication, imploring the merciful Lord to be fully reconciled with his servants.

³⁰ They also challenged the forces of Timotheus and Bacchides and wiped out over twenty thousand of them, gaining possession of several high fortresses. They divided their enormous booty into two equal shares, one for themselves, the other for the victims of the persecution and the orphans and widows, not forgetting the aged.

³¹ They carefully collected the enemy’s weapons and stored them in convenient places. The rest of the spoils they took to Jerusalem.

³² They killed the officer commanding Timotheus’ bodyguard, an extremely wicked man who had done great harm to the Jews.

³³ In the course of their victory celebrations in Jerusalem they burned the men that had fired the holy gates, who with Callisthenes had taken refuge in one small house; so these received a fitting reward for the sacrilege.

³⁴ The triple-dyed scoundrel Nicanor, who had brought the thousand merchants to buy the Jews,

³⁵ finding himself humbled, with the Lord’s help, by men he had himself reckoned as of very little account, stripped off his robes of state, and made his way across country unaccompanied, like a runaway slave, reaching Antioch by a singular stroke of fortune, considering that his army was destroyed.

³⁶ Thus the man who had promised the Romans to make good their tribute money by selling the prisoners from Jerusalem testified that the Jews had a defender, and that on this account the Jews were invulnerable, because they followed the laws which that defender had ordained.