2 Maccabees

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2 Maccabees is a Greek account of the Jewish struggle against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, covering roughly the years 180 to 161 BCE — the desecration of the Jerusalem temple, the resistance led by Judas Maccabeus, and the rededication of the sanctuary that Hanukkah commemorates. Despite the name, it is not a continuation of 1 Maccabees but a separate work treating much of the same period independently, and in many places it disagrees with the other book on detail and emphasis.

The text presents itself as an abridgment. A preface explains that the whole is a condensation of a lost five-volume history by one Jason of Cyrene, reduced by an anonymous epitomist who is candid about his method and his aim: to move and to edify rather than to exhaust. Two letters to the Jews of Egypt urging observance of the temple feast stand at the front. What follows is history written to a religious key — providence steers events, the temple is the moral center, and disaster is read as discipline rather than abandonment.

The book is remembered above all for its martyrs. It tells of the aged scribe Eleazar, who chose death over eating pork or even feigning to; and of a mother and her seven sons, tortured and killed one by one for refusing the same, each declaring his trust as he died. These passages are among the earliest sustained literature of religious martyrdom, and they carry the text’s most consequential claim: that the dead will be raised. The brothers go to their deaths confident that the God who shaped them will give their bodies back — a clear and early expression of bodily resurrection in Jewish writing of the period, a hope by no means universally held then.

One passage carried particular later weight. After a battle, Judas is said to have collected money and sent it to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of fallen soldiers, the narrator commenting that it is a holy thought to pray for the dead that they might be loosed from sin. Catholic theology came to cite this as scriptural warrant for prayer for the dead and, eventually, for purgatory — which is part of why the book’s canonical status divided later Christendom.

Here the registers separate. Jews did not receive the book into the Hebrew canon, and it survives only in Greek. The Catholic and Orthodox churches hold it deuterocanonical — authoritative scripture; the Reformers placed it among the Apocrypha, valued but not doctrinally binding, and Protestant Bibles came to print it separately or not at all. Historians treat it as a real if shaped source for the revolt, its rhetorical heightening and its miracles read as the conventions of Hellenistic historiography rather than as reportage. What the several traditions agree on is narrower: that the book preserves, early and plainly, two convictions — that the faithful dead are not lost, and that the living may still pray for them.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (1913)

→ Related: 1 Maccabees · Lefevre D Etaples