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. It belongs to the literature of Second Temple Judaism, and it carries, more plainly than almost any text of its age, two convictions that the centuries after it made central: that the dead will rise, and that the living may pray for them.

An abridgment of a lost history

The book presents itself, openly, as a condensation. After two prefatory letters its narrative proper opens with a statement of method: the whole of what follows is an abridgment of a five-volume history written by one Jason of Cyrene, a Hellenistic Jew of the mid-second century BCE whose larger work is entirely lost, surviving only inside the shorter book made from it. The anonymous writer who performed that reduction — the epitomist — is candid about his labor and his aim. He calls the toil of abbreviating no light matter, a thing that costs sweat and loss of sleep; he assigns the responsibility for exact detail to the original historian and reserves for himself the outline and the telling; and he says he has worked to make the book pleasant rather than exhaustive, to move and to edify his reader rather than to record everything. He closes the preface with a small joke against his own kind, that it would be foolish to lengthen the introduction while cutting short the history itself. The relationship is unusual in ancient literature: a work that announces itself as the residue of another work, naming the author it has digested and describing the act of digestion as it begins. How much of the present Greek is Jason’s phrasing and how much the epitomist’s own is a question the text does not let the reader settle, since the larger book against which it might be measured does not survive and is quoted by no later writer.

The Greek itself is part of the evidence. Where 1 Maccabees reads like a translation from Hebrew, full of biblical idiom rendered stiffly into Greek, 2 Maccabees is composed in a polished literary Koine, the work of a writer at home in the conventions of Hellenistic prose. It was written in Greek from the first, not translated into it — which already sets the two books apart at the level of language before any question of content arises.

The two festal letters

In front of the abridgment stand two letters addressed to the Jews of Egypt, urging them to keep the feast of the temple’s rededication. The first, dated to 124 BCE, is brief: a greeting from the Jews of Judea and Jerusalem inviting their brethren in Egypt to observe the days of the purified sanctuary, which it calls, strikingly, a Booths-feast kept in the month of Kislev rather than at its proper autumn season. The second is longer and undated, framed as a message to Aristobulus, a teacher said to be of priestly stock, and to the Jews of Egypt; it gathers legends of the temple fire preserved by the prophet Jeremiah and of the hidden tabernacle furnishings, and it too presses the observance of the feast. These letters were prefixed to the epitome to recruit the Egyptian diaspora into a Jerusalem festival — a piece of liturgical diplomacy that turns a local commemoration into a claim on the whole Jewish world. Their dating, their authenticity, and the moment of their joining to Jason’s epitome are among the most worked-over problems the book poses; one influential reconstruction places the final assembly of letters and narrative around the achievement of Judean independence in 143–142 BCE, with the festival material shaped to make the book serve as an explanation of the feast’s origin.

Two books, one revolt

The independence of 2 Maccabees from 1 Maccabees is real and instructive. They are not author and sequel but two separate retellings of overlapping years, and where they touch they often diverge. The plainest case is the death of Antiochus IV: 1 Maccabees places it after the rededication of the temple, 2 Maccabees before it — a discrepancy in the order of the two events most central to the whole story. Their tempers differ as sharply as their facts. 1 Maccabees is a dynastic chronicle that credits Hasmonean success to faithful arms under an unnamed providence and reaches no further than the founding of the priest-kingship; 2 Maccabees is a moral and martyrological history, overtly theological, crowded with heavenly horsemen, miraculous epiphanies, an explicit doctrine of sin and chastisement, and the conviction of resurrection. Read together they are the classic contrast within the period — the sober chronicle beside the heightened sacred drama — and 2 Maccabees ends far earlier than its companion, closing not with a dynasty secured but with a single battle won.

The martyrs

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 taste it, refusing the pretense that might have saved his life because of the example a false compliance would set the young. And it tells, at greater length, of a mother and her seven sons, arrested together and tortured and killed one by one for refusing the same unclean food, each declaring his trust as he died and the mother exhorting each in turn in the ancestral tongue. These passages are among the earliest sustained literature of religious martyrdom anywhere — death embraced not as defeat but as testimony, the body given up rather than the law betrayed. The Greek word for the practice of the ancestral religion that the martyrs die to keep, Ioudaismos, “Judaism,” appears here for the first time in any surviving text, coined to name the very thing the persecution attacked.

The martyr cycle carries the book’s most consequential claim. The brothers go to their deaths confident that the God who shaped the human frame will give their bodies back. One stretches out his hands and his tongue to the fire, saying he received them from Heaven and from Heaven hopes to have them again; the mother, urging her youngest, tells him that the Maker of the world who formed the beginning of man will in mercy give back to her sons their breath and life. Her exhortation reaches further still: she bids him look at heaven and earth and understand that God made them not out of things that were — a verse later generations read as the earliest scriptural anchor of creation out of nothing. The hope here is bodily resurrection, plainly stated, in Jewish writing of the period — a hope by no means universally held then. The temple priesthood and the party that would become the Sadducees did not teach it; the apocalyptic stream and the proto-Pharisaic milieu did, and 2 Maccabees stands among its clearest early witnesses, joining the resurrection to the endurance of the martyr so that the one becomes the reward of the other.

Prayer for the dead

One passage acquired a particular later weight. After a battle, the bodies of fallen Jewish soldiers were found to be wearing forbidden tokens taken from a pagan shrine, and Judas, the narrator relates, took up a collection — two thousand drachmas of silver — and sent it to Jerusalem to provide a sin offering on their behalf. The narrator reads the act as evidence of resurrection hope and commends it. In the older English of R. H. Charles’s translation the reasoning runs that, in doing so, Judas acted “very well and honestly, in that he was mindful of the resurrection,” for had he not hoped the slain would rise again “it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead,” and so he made atonement for the fallen “that they might be delivered from sin.” It is the narrator’s own judgment — a holy and pious thought, to pray for the dead — that gave the verse its afterlife. Catholic theology came to cite this passage as scriptural warrant for prayer on behalf of the dead and, in time, for purgatory, the state of cleansing in which the not-yet-ready saved are made fit for heaven. That a single sentence in a deuterocanonical history should anchor a whole doctrine is part of why the book’s canonical standing divided later Christendom: the Reformers, who did not receive the book, did not weigh its sentence the same way.

The end of the book

The narrative closes not on a dynasty but on a deliverance. Its final movement is the campaign against the Seleucid general Nicanor, who threatened the temple and blasphemed against it; Judas defeats and kills him, and the people decree that the day of the victory, the thirteenth of the month Adar, be kept yearly as Nicanor’s Day, the eve of the feast later called the Day of Mordecai. The epitomist then lays down his pen with a last flourish of self-deprecation, comparing his work to wine mixed with water and asking the reader’s indulgence if his telling has been poor or middling, since that was the best he could do. The book that began by announcing itself an abridgment ends by apologizing for being one.

Genre and historical reading

Historians read 2 Maccabees as a real but heavily shaped source for the revolt. Its register is that of a strand of Hellenistic historiography given to vivid emotion, divine intervention, and wonder — heavenly cavalry routing the temple’s plunderers, an apparition turning back the agent Heliodorus at the treasury — and the discipline reads these as the conventions of the genre rather than as reportage, much as the speeches and portents of Greek and Roman historians are read. The book has often been labeled “pathetic” or “tragic” history for its appeal to the reader’s feeling; Robert Doran, in his study of its purpose, pressed against that easy label and placed it instead within the sub-genre of the defense of a temple by its god — a literary form in which the sanctuary’s inviolability is vindicated by miracle against those who would profane it. On that reading the martyrdoms, the epiphanies, and the rededication are not decoration but the book’s argument: that the temple of the God of Israel is guarded by its God, and that the faithful who die for it are kept by the same power that keeps the house. This historians’ register sits among the traditions’ readings as one voice, not as a verdict over them.

Text, transmission, and scholarship

The book survives only in Greek, carried in the Septuagint tradition that underlies the Christian Old Testament and reaching the modern reader through the great uncial codices and their descendants; the five-volume original of Jason of Cyrene is wholly lost. The standard early-twentieth-century English apparatus, with introduction and notes, is the version in R. H. Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), where the much-cited prayer-for-the-dead passage may be read in the older idiom. The older critical introduction by W. O. E. Oesterley sets the book beside its companion and states the case for its independent Greek composition; his treatment is freely consultable online. The two full-scale modern commentaries that frame current debate are Jonathan A. Goldstein’s II Maccabees in the Anchor Bible (1983) and Daniel R. Schwartz’s 2 Maccabees (2008), the latter the more recent standard, which argues for a final editor who shaped the work into an etiology of the festival and bound the letters to the epitome. Robert Doran’s 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary (2012) develops the temple-defense reading at length; his earlier monograph Temple Propaganda (1981) first set out that case. The book’s distinctive theology — the coinage of “Judaism,” the resurrection of the martyred body, the sin offering for the dead — has drawn a steady literature of its own; a recent close study of the contested sin-offering passage, Nicholas Allen and Pierre Jordaan’s Counting half-shekels — Redeeming souls? (2018), reads its theology of payment for the dead as a departure from the older Israelite stress on individual repentance, and is one measure of how much weight a single sentence in the book still bears.

Canon

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, affirmed for Rome at the Council of Trent in 1546; the Reformers placed it among the Apocrypha, valued but not doctrinally binding, and Protestant Bibles came to print it separately or not at all. The French humanist Lefèvre d’Étaples, editing scripture into the vernacular on the eve of the confessional break, belonged to the last moment before that line through the Bible hardened. The parallel revolt narrative is told in its companion volume, and the parallel deuterocanonical witness to the immortality of the soul stands in the Book of Wisdom; this book keeps its own ground between them. What the several traditions agree on is narrower than what divides them: 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 · Second Temple Judaism · Book Of Wisdom · Apocrypha · Deuterocanonical Books · Purgatory · Old Testament · Bible · Hellenistic Period