2 Maccabees
before you read
Before you start. This is the hardest book in this volume to read, and it helps to know why before you begin. It is not a sequel to 1 Maccabees. It is a separate account of some of the same events, written in Greek by someone who says he is condensing a five-volume history by a man named Jason of Cyrene. He tells you that himself, and he apologizes for the work it cost him.
The politics in one paragraph. Judea is a small province caught between two Greek empires left over from Alexander the Great. The one that matters here is the Seleucid empire, ruled from Antioch in Syria. Its kings appear throughout: Seleucus, then Antiochus Epiphanes, then Antiochus Eupator, then Demetrius. The Jewish high priesthood has become a job the king sells to the highest bidder, which is what starts the trouble. Jason buys it from his brother Onias. Menelaus then outbids Jason. Each of them is willing to make Jerusalem more Greek to keep the post.
What happens. The temple treasury is raided. The high priesthood is bought and sold. Antiochus loots the temple, bans the Jewish religion, and turns the sanctuary over to another god. People are tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork or to break the sabbath — including an old scribe named Eleazar, and a mother with seven sons, whose deaths take up two of the most famous chapters in the book. Judas Maccabeus raises a revolt, wins a string of battles, and cleanses the temple. The book ends with the defeat of a general named Nicanor, and a holiday to mark it.
How it is written. The author is not writing plain chronicle. He is writing to move you, and he uses every tool he has: heavenly horsemen in gold armor, villains who die of worms, speeches at the point of death. Sentences run long because that was considered good Greek. If you lose the thread of one, the trick is to read to the next full stop and keep going; the story does not depend on catching every clause.
What to watch for. Two ideas appear here that appear nowhere earlier in the Bible, and they are why this book mattered so much later: the resurrection of the body, said plainly by the dying brothers, and prayer and offerings for the dead, at the very end.