Judas Maccabaeus

2 Maccabees tells how Judas Maccabaeus and the men with him slipped secretly into the villages and called their relatives together. They signed up those who had held on to the Jews’ religion, until they had gathered about six thousand.

They called on the Lord to look at his people, who were being crushed by everyone. They asked him to have compassion on the sanctuary that ungodly men had made unholy. They begged him to pity the city that was being ruined and was about to be leveled to the ground, and to listen to the spilled blood that cried out to him. They asked him to remember the innocent babies who had been lawlessly killed, and the insults spoken against his name, and to show how he hates wickedness.

Once Maccabaeus had trained his men for war, the Gentiles found at once that they could not hold out against him, because the Lord’s anger had turned to mercy. He came without warning and set fire to cities and villages. He won back the most important places and made many of the enemy run, and he made special use of the nights for these attacks. Everywhere, people talked about his courage.

Seron, the commander of the army of Syria, heard that Judas had brought together a large crowd. Among them was a band of faithful men who stayed with him and went out to war. “I will make a name for myself,” Seron said, “and win glory in the kingdom. I will fight against Judas and the men with him, who despise the king’s command.”

A mighty army of ungodly men went up with him to help him take revenge on the people of Israel. When he came near the road that climbs to Bethhoron, Judas went out to meet him with a small band of men.

But when Judas’s men saw the army coming to meet them, they said to him, “What? How can we fight such a great, strong crowd, when there are so few of us? And we’re faint. We haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“It’s easy for many to be trapped by a few,” Judas said. “Heaven can save by many or by few. It’s all the same to heaven. Winning a battle doesn’t depend on how big the army is. Strength comes from heaven. They are coming against us full of arrogance and lawlessness, to destroy us and our wives and our children, and to rob us. But we fight for our lives and our laws. He himself will crush them in front of us. As for you, don’t be afraid of them.”

As soon as he finished speaking, he suddenly charged at Seron and his army and beat them. Judas’s men chased them down the road from Bethhoron to the plain. About eight hundred of their men fell. The others escaped into the land of the Philistines.

The nations around them began to be afraid of Judas and his family, and to dread them. His fame reached the king, and every nation told stories of the battles of Judas.

Then he saw that the money in his treasuries had run out, and that the taxes from the land were small. That was because of the unrest and the disaster he himself had brought on the land in order to take away the laws that had been there from the first days. He was afraid that this time he wouldn’t have enough to pay his costs and the gifts he used to hand out so freely, more generously than the kings before him. He didn’t know what to do. So he decided to go into Persia, to collect the taxes of those countries and gather a great deal of money.

He left Lysias, an honorable man of royal birth, to run the king’s business from the river Euphrates all the way to the borders of Egypt. He also left him to bring up his son, who was named Antiochus too, until the king came back.

The king handed over to Lysias half his forces and the elephants. He put him in charge of everything he wanted done, and told him what to do about the people who lived in Judea and Jerusalem. Lysias was to send an army against them to root out and destroy the strength of Israel and what was left of Jerusalem, and to wipe out the memory of them from that place. He was to settle foreigners in all their territory and divide up their land among them by drawing lots.

With the other half of his forces, the king left Antioch, his royal city, in the one hundred forty-seventh year. He crossed the river Euphrates and went on through the upper countries.

The traders of the region heard how famous the army was. They came into the camp with a great deal of silver and gold, and with chains, to take the Israelites as slaves. Forces from Syria and from the land of the Philistines joined them.

2 Maccabees tells it differently. There, it was Philip who saw Judas gaining ground little by little and winning more and more. So he wrote to Ptolemy, who governed Coelesyria and Phoenicia, and asked him to support the king’s cause. Ptolemy quickly appointed Nicanor the son of Patroclus, one of the king’s chief friends. He sent him to lead no fewer than twenty thousand men from all nations, to wipe out the whole people of Judea. With him he sent Gorgias, a captain who had experience in war.

Nicanor made up his mind to sell the Jews he captured as slaves. That way he would raise for the king the two thousand talents the king had to pay the Romans as tribute. A talent was a weight of about 66 pounds. At once he sent to the coastal cities and invited them to buy Jewish slaves. He promised them seventy slaves for one talent. He did not expect that the Almighty’s judgment was about to catch up with him.

Jerusalem lay empty like a wilderness, with no one living in it. None of her own people went in or out. The sanctuary had been trampled. Foreigners’ children were in the citadel, and Gentiles lived there. Joy had been taken away from Jacob’s people, and the flute and the harp were silent.

They gathered and came to Mizpeh, near Jerusalem, because in Mizpeh there had once been a place of prayer for Israel. That day they fasted. They put on sackcloth, put ashes on their heads and tore their clothes. They opened the book of the law to learn about the things the Gentiles asked the images of their idols about. They brought the priests’ clothes, the first fruits of the harvest and the tithes. They stirred up the Nazarites who had completed the days of their vows.

They cried out toward heaven, “What should we do with these men? Where should we take them? Your holy place is trampled and made unholy. Your priests mourn in shame. Look, the Gentiles have gathered against us to destroy us. You know what they are planning against us. How can we stand up to them, unless you help us?”

Then they blew the trumpets and gave a loud shout.

After this Judas appointed leaders over the people: commanders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens. Some men were building houses, or were about to marry, or were planting vineyards, or were afraid. Judas told them to go back, each man to his own house, as the law says.

2 Maccabees says that when news of Nicanor’s invasion reached Judas, he told the men with him that the army had come. Those who were cowardly and did not trust God’s judgment ran away and left the country.

Others sold everything they had left. At the same time they begged the Lord to rescue the people the wicked Nicanor had sold as slaves before he had even met them. They asked this, if not for their own sakes, then for the covenants made with their ancestors, and because he had called them by his holy and glorious name.

“Arm yourselves and be brave!” Judas said. “Be ready in the morning to fight these Gentiles who have gathered against us to destroy us and our holy place. It is better for us to die in battle than to watch the disasters of our nation and of the holy place. But he will do whatever heaven wills.”

2 Maccabees says that Maccabaeus gathered his men together, six thousand of them. He urged them not to be frightened by the enemy or afraid of the huge crowd of Gentiles coming against them unjustly. He told them to fight nobly. He told them to keep in mind the lawless wrong done to the holy place and the torment of the city that had been mocked. And he told them to remember how the way of life their ancestors had handed down to them had been overthrown.

“They trust their weapons and their bold deeds,” he said, “but our trust is in the almighty God. With just a nod he can throw down those who are coming against us, and even the whole world.”

He reminded them how help had come, time and again, in their ancestors’ days. In the days of Sennacherib, a hundred eighty-five thousand died. And in the land of Babylon, in the battle against the Gauls, eight thousand of them in all went into the fight, with four thousand Macedonians. When the Macedonians were in trouble, the six thousand destroyed the hundred twenty thousand, because of the help they had from heaven, and they took a great deal of plunder.

His words filled them with courage and made them ready to die for the laws and for their country. Next, he divided the army into four parts. He put his brothers Simon, Joseph and Jonathan in charge of the divisions with him, giving each of them fifteen hundred men.

Judas heard about it. He and his brave men moved out, so that he could strike the king’s army at Emmaus while its forces were still scattered away from the camp.

Gorgias came into Judas’s camp in the night and found no one there. He went looking for them in the mountains. “These men are running away from us,” he said.

As soon as day came, Judas appeared in the plain with three thousand men. They didn’t have the armor and swords they wanted. They saw the Gentiles’ camp, strong and fortified, with horsemen all around it, and these were men who knew war well.

“Don’t be afraid of their numbers,” Judas told the men with him, “or of their charge. Remember how our ancestors were saved in the Red Sea, when Pharaoh pursued them with an army. Now let’s cry out to heaven, to see whether he will accept us, remember the covenant with our ancestors and destroy this army in front of us today. Then all the Gentiles will know that there is one who frees and saves Israel.”

The foreigners looked up and saw Judas’s men coming near. They came out of their camp to fight. Those with Judas blew their trumpets and attacked. The Gentiles were beaten and fled into the plain. All those at the back fell by the sword. Judas’s men chased them as far as Gazara and the plains of Idumaea, Azotus and Jamnia. About three thousand of them fell.

2 Maccabees says that Eleazer also read aloud from the sacred book and gave “The help of God!” as the watchword, a password for the battle. Leading the first band himself, he went into battle against Nicanor.

Because the Almighty fought on their side, they killed more than nine thousand of the enemy. They wounded and crippled most of Nicanor’s army and made every one of them run away.

While Judas was still finishing this speech, some of Gorgias’s men appeared, looking down from the mountain. They saw that their army had been forced to run and that the Jews were burning the camp, because the smoke they could see told them what had happened. When they understood this, they were very afraid. And when they also saw Judas’s army in the plain, ready for battle, they all fled into the land of the Philistines.

Judas went back to plunder the camp, and they took a great deal of gold and silver, cloth of blue and of sea purple, and great riches. Then they went home singing a song of thanks, and gave praise to heaven, “because he is good, because his mercy endures forever.” It was a great rescue for Israel that day.

2 Maccabees says they took the money of the men who had come to buy them as slaves. They chased the enemy for some distance, then turned back because of the time of day. It was the day before the Sabbath, and so they made no effort to chase them far.

They gathered up the enemy’s weapons and took the spoils. Then they kept the Sabbath. They greatly praised and thanked the Lord, who had saved them to this day, because he had begun to show them mercy.

When the Sabbath was over, they gave part of the spoils to the maimed, people who had been badly hurt, and to the widows and the orphans. They shared the rest among themselves and their children. When all this was done, they prayed together, begging the merciful Lord to be fully at peace with his servants.

They gathered the enemy’s weapons and stored them all carefully in the most important places, and they carried the rest of the spoils to Jerusalem. They killed the phylarch, a captain in Timotheus’s forces. He was a deeply unholy man who had done the Jews great harm.

As they held the feast of victory in the city of their ancestors, they burned the men who had set the sacred gates on fire. Among them was a man named Callisthenes, who had run into a little house. So those men got what they deserved for their ungodliness.

Then there was Nicanor, that man cursed three times over. He had brought the thousand merchants to buy the Jews as slaves. Now, with the Lord’s help, he was brought down by the people he had thought least of. He took off his fine clothes and went across the country alone, keeping away from everyone like a runaway slave, until he came to Antioch. He thought he had been as lucky as anyone could be, even though his army had been destroyed.

He had taken it on himself to pay the Romans their tribute by capturing the people of Jerusalem. Now he spread the news everywhere that the Jews had One who fought for them. Because of this, he said, the Jews could not be harmed, since they followed the laws that this One had laid down.

The next year he gathered sixty thousand chosen foot soldiers and five thousand horsemen to conquer them. They came into Idumaea and camped at Bethsura, and Judas met them with ten thousand men.

When Judas saw how strong the army was, he prayed, “Praise to you, Savior of Israel! You stopped the mighty warrior’s attack through your servant David. You handed the army of the Philistines over to Jonathan the son of Saul and to the man who carried Jonathan’s armor. Trap this army in the hands of your people Israel. Let them be ashamed of their army and their horsemen. Make their hearts weak. Make their bold strength melt away, and let them tremble at their destruction. Strike them down with the sword of those who love you, and let everyone who knows your name praise you and give you thanks.”

They met in battle, and about five thousand men of Lysias’s army fell. They fell down near them.

Lysias saw his troops forced to run. He saw the boldness that had come over Judas’s men, and that they were ready either to live or to die nobly. So he went back to Antioch and gathered hired soldiers, so that he could come into Judea again with an even greater army.