The Apocryphal Books of the Maccabees

our presentation this evening is on the apocryphal books of The Maccabees and there's actually lots and lots of books of Maccabees and so we're going to have the ones I'm sorry the two of them that are actually in what Protestants call the Apocrypha so this will be first and second Maccabees but I'll talk about the other books of Maccabees a little bit too and then we're going to talk about the history underlying history of The Maccabees so that we can kind of evaluate the quality and historicity of the books of Maccabees first and second Maccabees so Apocrypha what is this word it's a medieval Latin word or our word Apocrypha comes from apocryphos which means hidden and that is just a pretty quick easy borrow word from apocryphos which is a Greek word which means obscure it's kind of very similar meaning and Apocrypha sounds really cool it sounds a lot like apocalypse even though it's not the same word and so um uh it's a great title however the reality is is that the biblical books that we call the Apocrypha actually never really hidden or I mean I guess they could be obscure books but they were not lost books so these are not the same as Lost Books of the Bible despite their title um just by way of overall context if we think of the Hebrew Bible or for Christians we think of the Old Testament of the Bible whereas it's published altogether in one book and often it's published all together with the Old and New Testaments in one big long extended volume and for many English speakers if they are reading the Old King James translation of that it also sort of all sounds the same has kind of a uh old-timey Shakespeare style talk it can allow people to sort of think of it as being all one book and maybe even as if it was written together and in fact when you get to the end of the book of Revelation it says nothing should be added or taken away from this book A lot of people imagine that means from the whole Bible but in fact that just is talking about that one book Revelation which was not written with any idea in mind that it would ever be part of this larger book that we would call the Bible and indeed of the all the books that came into the Bible which are indicated here in this diagram with all these Scrolls in fact there were many very similar texts that were not included both in the New Testament and the Old Testament time period when these were written so the extended set of bible-like books you know the ones that did not make it into anyone's Canon of scripture so in other words they're not in the Jewish Bible and they are not in Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant Bibles this larger collection of texts is sometimes called pseudopigrapha and that means text or writings that are falsely attributed so the idea here is that these books that we talked about books of an Enoch that those books are um attributed to the anti-diluvian character a character that lived between Adam and Noah Before the Flood even though they're supposedly written by that character in fact they are written much more recently they are not written by Enoch Enoch is not a historical person he's a mythological biblical character and and so therefore these writings are falsely attributed nevertheless um even though we call these writings of pseudopigrapha some of them aren't pseudopigraphics so in some cases there will be a Bible like um text that will be written by somebody who just wasn't important enough to make make it into the Canon so like a letter of Clement a very important early Christian writer and his text doesn't make it in but it's not actually falsely attributed likewise many of the books that do make it into the Bible have actually been shown to be pseudopographic so for example um books like the gospels that are attributed to writers like Mark and Matthew Matthew one of Jesus's apostles according to the gospels anyway um is not the writer it's not the author of The Gospel of Matthew as we've seen it's an anonymous text that was attributed to one of Jesus Apostles in the case of Matthew likewise the five texts of the pentateuch or the Jewish Torah are attributed to Moses but they were not written by Moses and so in other words there are a lot of pseudopographic texts within the Canon so these this is also just like the word Apocrypha it doesn't really isn't really meaningful even though we use that as kind of a blanket term so um for Catholics and Orthodox Christians because what Protestants call the Apocrypha is actually part of their canons in other words it's actually these books are actually in not the pseudopigraphy but the Apocrypha are actually in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and as a result they call these texts the deuterocanonical texts and deutero is just Greek here for second Canon so deuterocanonical and so when we take a look at these books this kind of collection of books Judith Tobit additions to Esther the book wisdom of Solomon ecclesiasticus Baruch the letter of Jeremiah additions to the Book of Daniel First Maccabees second Maccabees first estrus the prayer of Manasseh the 151st Psalm 3rd Maccabees second estrus and fourth Maccabees so a lot of Maccabees books you can see in there this is kind of the question of whether or not they make it into the Canon and so we see all the way down through second Maccabees those are all considered to be deuterocanonical or in other words part of the Bible as far as Catholics are concerned uh the Greek Church the Greek Orthodox church has it all the way to third Maccabees the Russians apparently have second address in in there as well putting some of these Stars here because there are the Protestants again call the Apocrypha they'll still be translated in the King James version and they'll be in a lot of people's Bibles Under The Heading Apocrypha and so it's not that Protestants are unaware of these books or that they're hidden or obscure but um they aren't technically part of the Canon and none of them are part of the Jewish canon in rabbitic Judaism just want to start with a little bit of context since I made this chart of chronology of the second temple period of Judaism which runs from the destruction of the first temple Solomon's Temple the destruction of the original independent Kingdom of Judah in 586 when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and destroy the temple and take the Exiles uh Jewish Elite the Judean Elite off to um Babylon and that's called the period of the Babylonian captivity um the temple is then destroyed during that captivity period when the Persians conquer the Babylonian Empire Cyrus the Persian Emperor proclaims uh the right to return for the uh the judeans who can go back now to a province within the Persian Empire Judea or yehud in Persian and he gives them funds and helps them rebuild the Temple and so by 516 BCE the second temple is complete and in that time period it's continued to be worked on and jerusalems continue to be worked on as kind of a minor Province and poorer Province within the Persian Empire and during that time one of the great um leaders in in Jerusalem Ezra is known to have read the Torah kind of for the first time and so a lot of and it's part of a celebration that is had out loud and people hear in it things that they'd never heard before and so as a result many scholars kind of think that Ezra might had been the redactor that put the Torah together into its present form in other words edited earlier texts to bring them all together into the what we now have as the Torah or pentateuch uh shortly thereafter the last Old Testament book that is sort of not pseudopigraphic Malachi is is written and then we just think biblically it's many centuries later uh the during the Maccabee period that the Book of Daniel is actually written although Daniel pretends to be written four centuries before it was and so in other words it's by a person who was living at the time of the Babylonian captivity but it's written much much later and then again like I say it's between the Testaments the early Christian earliest Christians writings are in the 50s of the of the first century of the Common Era the Christian era so in between all of these things what ends up happening is Alexander the Great invades the Persian Empire and overthrows the Persian Empire and so suddenly from being a relatively uh Happy Province within Persia where the judeans and the Persians are getting along pretty well they're now they um the judeans find themselves uh under the control or under the rule of the a new Greek or Hellenistic Empire after Alexander dies his Empire is split into pieces initially the area around Jerusalem Judea falls into the Egyptian realm so that's the period of ptolemaic rule where the ptolemies these Macedonian pharaohs that are descended from Alexander's General Ptolemy rule over both Egypt and Judea and then around the year 200 BCE 198 the leader of the cellucids who had been another one of these great successors of Alexander Antiochus III seizes Jerusalem and Judea from the ptolemies and thereafter it becomes into the sphere of the seleucids during the seleucid rule there is a an incident where Antiochus is a successor attack is the fourth sacks Jerusalem this leads to a Revolt known as the maccabean Revolt which leads to kind of a autonomous kind of Rebel group of a Jewish free Kingdom which eventually as the sale you Sid Empire further collapses achieves actual Independence but that Independence is happening in the backdrop of the emerging power of Rome as Rome slowly conquers and annexes all of the Hellenistic period kingdoms and so forth and so by the end of the hasmonian Kingdom the hasmonians are in fact actually subjects of Rome and at a certain point the Roman senate decrees that essentially that the kingdom was now going to be ruled instead of hasmonians by one of the Maccabees in other words is ruled instead by the son of one of their great Nobles Herod the Great we've had a whole um lecture already on on Herod the Great but essentially the the Romans are so powerful that they can decide whether for example this Kingdom will just become a province or whether it's going to continue to be a kingdom but they can decide who's the king of it and so forth okay so let's uh go back into this era this Hellenistic era post uh Alexander so one of the things that Alexander the Great did was go around spreading uh Greek ideas Greek culture Greek philosophy Greek literature language and so forth and and part of the agenda because uh Greek society was inherently around the polis from the whole idea of politics and everything like that means life in the polis was going around and founding Greek cities and so in some cases these are foundations that are made from scratch like Alexandria and Egypt there's lots and lots of other cities that Alexander founds and he names them all after himself Alexandria but in some cases an existing City will be refounded and renamed and so it might have been um you know so a city it might have been named uh you know I'm not going to say which one it would be like so like if it was a name Damascus originally and then if it's refounded they'll call it you know Alexandria you know damaskeen Alexandria or something like that and that's not an example of one that actually happened but essentially the um uh first Alexander and then his successors the ptolemies the antigonids the cellucids and so forth create cities that are named Alexandria ptolemaeus Antioch and salukia and so forth and within Egypt actually um Alexandria becomes the greatest the center of the largest Judean community in the world so under the ptolemies who are the Pharaohs of Egypt but who are in fact a Macedonian or Greek Northern Greek Dynasty they create a new capital of Egypt it becomes the largest most Cosmopolitan city in the whole Greek speaking world and the greatest Center of Greek culture and teachings famous for its library and Museum and schools and so forth like I say it's also the center of the largest Judean community and the alexandrian judeans are very busily engaging in Hellenistic culture and so one of the things that they do is they take this text that is so important to them the Hebrew Bible and they begin to translate it into Greek and so the Septuagint translation as it is called is the early Greek translation and we get the name subtu again from the Greek word for 70. it's a translation into Greek beginning in the third Century traditionally by 70 or 72 Scholars and so there's a lot of Mythology about this that the scholars all gather together and are more or less inspired by God and come up with the same translation and so forth so in other words that we know that the it's uh the idea of it is it's word for word it turns out that the textual analysis shows that that's not how it was done that these in fact were translated over time there's a similar story about the King James Bible translators as well because this is just a kind of a good story to have when you are worrying about the authority of scripture but in both cases these are mythological stories but essentially the Septuagint Drew from a large body of Hebrew writings some of which are in Aramaic but mostly all Hebrew that included books of the law so that's the the pentateuch the Torah Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy then there are books of history and so this is the deuteronomic history so Joshua Judges versus second Samuels first and second Kings but then also books set in that time period like Ruth um books like versus second chronicles which are a later redaction of the deuteronomic history Ezra Nehemiah which are a two-part history of the kind of second temple period the rebuilding of the Temple and so forth and then these books that have become Apocrypha uh in the for the Protestants and outside of the Canon uh for for Jews Tobit Judith The Maccabees books and so forth on top of that then in addition to the law and history books are the wisdom books which include Psalms The Book of Job Proverbs The Song of Solomon then ecclesiasticus wisdom of Solomon sirach and so forth so in other words on here you can kind of see earlier and later is the different color scheme and then prophets the book of the Minor Prophets Isaiah Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations letter of Jeremiah Ecclesiastes Daniel and so forth so even though we have all of those that are included in the Septuagint I just want to point out that there are many more ancient Jewish texts that are scripture like and were considered scripture to some ancient Jews so in other words they were not um included in this Canon and they weren't translated and so forth but they were still nevertheless um some group that might that revered them and used them and so forth there were many first century Hellenistic Jews in the diaspora which is to say people who were not living in the area around Jerusalem but who were living instead in around the Hellenistic World especially like I said in Alexandria and they did not know Hebrew um even in even in Judea they mostly now it starts have spoken start speaking Aramaic and so forth which is a related language but different language and the ones in the uh the Greek speaking ones use the Septuagint as their scripture and so they that included obviously these deuteron canonical books the apocryphal books however even in Aramaic speaking Judea some Jews considered some of these texts to be part of their Canon so for example we look at the Dead Sea Scrolls so there is a Jewish sect known as the essenes and they have a kind of a quasi monastic Retreat area in qumran where they have been keeping a lot of texts which were buried away in in uh became buried away and and stored and preserved and those are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls so three of these texts Tobit sirak and Bissell Jeremiah are included among the Dead Sea Scrolls so even though they do not fit into the later Jewish Canon meanwhile also Christians also consider the satua get to be Canon so the Christian Bible the new test of it it's written in Greek even though the spoken language of Jesus was Aramaic so we don't have any of Jesus speaking in the word speaking words in his original I mean his original words that he would have said because any Aramaic versions or Syriac versions that we have of gospel texts are actually translated into Aramaic or Syriac from Greek so the earliest we have is Greek when the texts have Jesus quote the Old Testament so often when Jesus is walking around in the gospels he will open a scroll up and he'll quote from the Torah or something like that when he's does that they are not recalling him quoting the Hebrew which they then translate to the Greek so in other words it's not that the gospel writer is themselves thinking oh he would have said this in in Hebrew and I'm just going to now translate that off the top of my head into Greek while I'm writing this Greek text what the authors of Matthew Mark Luke and John do is they go to the place in the Septuagint they look up how it goes in in that and they simply quote it directly which is not what Jesus would have been doing so the point of it is is that the New Testament texts are actually dependent on uh the Greek Bible the Greek Old Testament the Septuagint so like I say the Septuagint is then also the basis for what becomes the Old Testament for the Christians uh the Old Testament Canon so uh say Jerome who did a translation in the 4th Century of the Common Era and made a Latin version The Vulgate retained most of the septuagint's contents and organization even though Jerome called attention to the fact that some of the books and uh were not even originally in Hebrew and so ultimately some Septuagint books then were excluded from the Latin Canon but in general the Septuagint was ends up being what the original Christian Canon is in part I think especially because of the reaction to Greek Christianity so so Christianity begins as a second temple Jewish sect and Judaism understood itself to be a universal religion at the time and still does and so the Jewish Christians went around evangelizing other people who were not Jewish and so they end up converting lots and lots of Gentiles Greek Gentiles and so forth and fairly quickly Christianity becomes a non-jewish majority religion and it then becomes its own separate religion from the rest of Judaism after the destruction of the temple at the end of the second temple period the rabbis reform their non-Christian component of Judaism as rabbinic Judaism and in a lot of cases because that Christianity has become so Greek focused and is using the Septuagint as its um text rabbinic Judaism I think ceases to use the subdu again and much of the other second temple Jewish texts that were written in Greek so when they assembled their Canon the rabbis eliminated most of the texts that were written in the later second temple period and the exception to that is the Book of Daniel which I already mentioned it kind of squeaks in because the people thought it was written much earlier even though it's it's even though it's a much later book than it um it pretends to be a much earlier book than it is so for the Hebrew Canon it's much smaller so it consists specifically of the law the prophets and the writings and so it's organized very differently than how Christians organize the Old Testament which was organized like I said before according to the Septuagint so we have the five books of the law the profits including the Minor Prophets which are brought together in one book in in the Hebrew Bible and then the writings which include things like Psalms Proverbs job and so forth so in the west when um Latin Christendom breaks apart in the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation there was a lot more kind of the basis for a renewed interest in scholarship and so um and also getting back to original texts and so forth and so Protestants started going to synagogues and looking at the fact that their Jewish neighbors had a different set of books in the Bible than the Protestants had in the Latin Bible Protestants were interested in bringing the Bible texts into vernacular languages so the Catholic church at the time was continuing for example in the west to use Latin which nobody spoke except for as a a scholarly language and an ecclesiastical language and so the Bible is primarily experienced by um kind of that literate class that has to learn not only in you know to read but also has to learn Latin in order to access these texts so now in this early modern period of time the emphasis is on no we should bring that to everybody everybody should be you know able to read and have a Bible in every home and ultimately now that we have the advantage of the invention of the printing press and so forth and so Protestants start translating um Bibles into German and into English and so forth and in doing that they also went back and looked at the original texts that are written in Hebrew and Greek rather than simply translating directly from what they've been using Latin into those languages so in noting that the Catholic and Jewish canons differ Protestants ultimately reject the disputed texts from their new Canon so the deuterocanonical books from the Septuagint that are not being used by the Jews are now put into this Apocrypha category for Protestants and so that leaves us with a very particularly peculiar dividing line for the canons and so books that don't use the Apocrypha are rabbinic Judaism and Protestant Christianity whereas the ones that do include those same books which are now are called the second Canon for these other churches are the Orthodox and Catholic Christians that makes sense and I just bring all those back so you can kind of see again these are the books in that category and it's a little variation between whether they're in the Catholic or Greek you know versions not all of the books that the Greeks consider Canon or Canon to the Catholics and so forth okay so with that background let's look at the two books of Maccabees or the books of Maccabees that are in the Apocrypha and we'll zero in especially on the first two so the first book of Maccabees is set in the second century BCE it was composed a little later than that maybe into the first century BCE we're not exactly sure it is a Greek it's the text that we have it is in Greek and it seems to be a Greek translation from a lost Hebrew original however it's not entirely you know we don't have the original it's lost and so it's not entirely um sure that there was a Hebrew original however if it if if it was written in Greek it's written with all kinds of um deliberate hebreisms so it's like writing um in it's kind of written old-timey too and so it would be like deliberately writing a new story using let's say King James English so in other words you read the Bible a lot you want it to sound bible-like it so you write a new text using that same thing so most likely there's a Hebrew original here and that's why Hebrew grammar and format forms are being brought across into Greek but it's not entirely sure the author is unknown but it is because of the context of their perspective it's probably a very Pro hasmonian um when I'm using the word hasmonian here so the name Maccabee is one of the names for um the the Rebel Royal house that establishes this rebellion and then independent uh Judean Kingdom but um the the family is also known as the hasmmonians and so I'm just using those two words interchangeably here so there's a pro hasmonian Jewish writer probably operating in Judea itself probably somebody who is sponsored probably by the the hasmonian court because um it's almost kind of a propaganda piece for the hasmonians even though this one's called First Maccabees this is not like a situation like the book of first and second Kings which are just two parts of the same book the way those work things like first Chronicles and second chronicles or first and second Kings essentially a scroll can only be so long and so to make a convenient scroll and so if it's a long book you'll have First Kings and second Kings which are just essentially the first half and the second half and that's true for a lot of um books that have those kind of numbers but this is totally not true like we said for um for example the books of Enoch when it's not true for the books of Maccabees essentially we just have a lot of books that are attributed to Enoch and so then this as people started collecting them they numbered them well this is the first one that I found and this is the second one that I found and so forth and the books of Maccabees are sort of the same so all of the other books of Maccabees have different authors than this one which is the story of essentially the revolt and then the kind of immediate aftermath so the second book of Maccabees is another history of the Revolt that is also kind of very um well known for this very emblematic story of the martyrdom of a woman and Her Seven Sons or seven sons followed by her death um this is composed kind of in the same time period it's set just a little bit earlier and it only and it's shorter though so even though the First Maccabees is called First Maccabees second Maccabees actually the beginning of it takes place a little bit before first McAfee so this one is said to be a abridgement written in Greek but of a longer Greek original so there is an the text as we have it is probably an unknown Egyptian Jewish editor maybe somebody from Alexandria who is redacting or shortening bringing together just the highlights of a lost much longer original story by than otherwise unknown Jewish writer named Jason of cyrini so again somebody from the diaspora who is writing so not somebody from within Judea like I say it's unrelated to First Maccabees not a sequel of it at all So within the Apocrypha for um the Eastern Orthodox and also the Russian Orthodox um the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox is the third book of Maccabees so um this is specifically so even though it's called third Maccabees it's actually takes place before either of the two other books of Maccabees and so it's meant to be about the persecution of Jews uh in Judea under Ptolemy IV philippator of Egypts in other words the Macedonian um uh pharaoh who is in charge before the seleucids take Judea over so in other words like I said after the disintegration of Alexander's Empire the ptolemies in Egypt were the ones who were first in charge of Judea and then it switches right before the maccabean revolt and so this text is set just a little bit before the other ones it's composed much later though or composed around the same time but anyway much later than it's set written again in Greek it's very well written from a stylistic standpoint in terms of the Greek Jewish writer from Egypt uh however this one probably doesn't have much historicity to it at all it's more like a romance and in some ways it's a prequel for the character of Eleazar The Scribe who is martyred in the book of second Maccabees um a little bit before that woman and her seven sons and we'll look at that then there's a fourth book of Maccabees and this one is a kind of a a philosophical dialogue about the woman and her seven sons who were martyred in second Maccabees this one is also titled on the sovereignty of reason it's set then just at that time period when the woman is martyred and composed probably in the first century of the Common Era probably by a Greek speaking Jew who might be from Syria so not somebody maybe from Judea or Egypt in this case and then there's more books of Maccabees if you can imagine how many Maccabee books you need so these are unrelated books that aren't scripture for anybody so fifth Maccabees as it's titled again these weren't titled fifth Maccabees originally this is what has Scholars write them out fifth Maccabees is an Arabic text actually that follows hasmonian history you know from a later period so it's a continuation sixth Maccabees is a Syriac poem about the maccabean martyrs you know the the seven sons and their mother the seventh Maccabees is Syriac text of the speeches of those Martyrs so you can see that that's a theme that people come back to that they're very interested in and finally uh eighth Maccabees is essentially a brief Greek text of the Revolt that apparently draws on seleucid sources as opposed to the hasmonian sources like First Maccabees does okay so let's look at First Maccabees here's the plot in short the seleucid King Antiochus the fourth epiphanes so this is the Macedonian King who was an heir to the greatest of Alexander's kingdoms a kingdom that stretches from uh what's now turkey Anatolia across Syria and Iraq and all across Persia to bactria originally although by the time anti-autiacus gets a hold of it it's much diminished so the book of Maccabees right at the beginning he's this guy is the villain and he is described as a sinful root in his uh as he inherits Judea some local judeans uh described as the by the author of First Maccabees as being certain Renegades so this is not Renegades against seleucids this is Renegades against the uh Jewish people and the understanding of the book of McAfee's author they decide to make a covenant with the Gentiles in other words with foreigners with the Greek speaking people and they begin to participate in Hellenistic and Greek culture Antiochus the fourth as he's attempting to invade Egypt and take Borderlands between himself and Ptolemy and maybe even take Egypt he defeats Ptolemy but but is pushed back ultimately and on the way home he sacks uh Jerusalem and so here's what we read in First Maccabees about uh the forest hellenization of the Kingdom so Antiochus decrees a policy of hellenization or assimilation for his kingdom as we read in the text then the king wrote to his whole Kingdom that all should be one people that all should give up their particular customs and all the Gentiles accepted the command of the king many even in Israel gladly adopted his religion they sacrificed idols and profaned the Sabbath and the King sent Letters by Messengers to Jerusalem and all the towns of Judah and he directed them to follow Customs strange to the land to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary to profane sabbaths and festivals to defile the sanctuary and the priests to build altars and sacred prank sinks and shrines for idols to sacrifice swine and other clean animals and to leave their sons uncircumcised they were to make themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane so that they would forget the law and change all the ordinances he added the king added that is and whoever does not obey the command of the king shall die so this is essentially a full-on attack as you can see on on Jewish practice as described here anyway in First Maccabees and it is kind of presented as something that um Antiochus is is deciding to do for his entire Kingdom however we don't actually have any evidence for that for any other part of the Kingdom so in other words um in retrospect the author of First Maccabees is identifying this as a general suppression of everybody's local customs and the forced hellenization but in fact we don't have evidence for that anywhere else in the seleucid Empire and we'll see why maybe that is but essentially many of the judeans do follow this Royal Decree according to the book of First Maccabees and we know that they do actually from other sources they forsake Jewish law and what's called a desolating sacrifice sacrilege an idol is set up in the Jerusalem Temple altar the book describes that the books of Torah are burned and also non-conformists people who do not obey this new law as the king said they will die they are executed according to the text however some judeans it says chose to die rather than to profane the Holy Covenant and in the text here opposition emerges in the Country Town of Modine led by a priest named matatias who is said to be the son of John the son of Simon a priest of the family of jorib and mattitius has five Sons Judas called the maccabeus uh Jonathan uh it's not spelled right FPS Jonathan appius Simon thasse along with Simon's son John hercanus who begin a military campaign against the seleucids and against their fellow countrymen the Jews who have become hellenized so they found a relatively pragmatic Guerrilla Insurgency so because initially they are all very much committed to obeying Jewish law the Greeks and the hellenized Jews take advantage of that and they attack them on the Sabbath and that allows them to Massacre a thousand of the rebels and their families on a Saturday and so that leads matathias to decide quote in the book here of Maccabees let us fight against anyone who comes to attack us on the Sabbath let's not all die as our Kindred died in their hiding places so so during the whole insurgencies this kind of pragmatic Guerrilla Insurgency even though it's um fighting in order to preserve the law they kind of make the pragmatic decision yeah but we're still going to fight on the Sabbath because we don't want to get massacred we want to be able to win this thing so then they're United with a company of hasidians Mighty Warriors of Israel all who offered themselves willingly for the law and all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforce them so he starts Gathering up huge kind of Guerrilla Insurgency army they organized an army the text goes on to say and they struck down sinners in their anger and renegades in their wrath the survivals fled to the Gentiles for safety and matathias and his friends went around and tore down the altars they forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel they hunted down the arrogant and work the work prospered in their hands they rescued the law out of the hands of the Gentiles and kings and they never let a sinner gave the sinner gain the upper hand so in other words the rebels now in the same way that there was forced hellenization on the other side now there's forced adherence to Jewish law forced circumcisions and so forth and then on his deathbed in the text matathias compares the Revolt to his heroic stories that are in the Hebrew Bible so David and Abraham and other precedents and he passes command to his sons so the next to take charge is Judas maccabeas this means Judah the hammer and his brothers they lead Rebel Warriors into a number of battles against the seleucid armies of Antiochus IV and his hellenized Jewish allies their upset Victory is compared by the text to such precedence as David defeating Goliath and also God's destruction of the armies of pharaoh when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea so Judas maccabeus and his Rebels defeat the seleucids and they take Jerusalem for the rebels we read in the text then Judas and his brothers said see our enemies are crushed let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary of the temple and dedicate it so all the armies assembled and went up to Mount Zion there they saw the sanctuary desolate The Altar profaned and the gates burned he chose blameless priests devoted to the law and they cleansed the sanctuary and removed the defiled stones to an unclean place so then removing all the Pagan trappings the rebels build a new altar and reconsecrate the temple according to their understanding of Jewish law the text then goes on to describe the origins of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah so one of the few festivals that are in the Jewish calendar that is later from this later period as opposed to the biblical period within the rabbinic um uh Canon so then Judas and his brothers and all the army of Israel determined that every year at that season the days of dedication of the altar should be observed with joy and gladness for eight days beginning with the 25th day of the month of shislev so there's a that's the story from first McAfee's and there's a longer version of the Hanukkah story in second Maccabees so The Maccabees continued to fight against the seleucids and their hellenized Jewish allies so there's a civil war component to this but there's also a component of uh fighting against their overlords they're not independent yet but they have because of their Rebellion a degree of autonomy against the surrounding seleucid Kingdom meanwhile the rise of the Roman Republic as a power intervening in the whole Hellenistic East the Romans totally control the Western Mediterranean have now been conquering Macedonia Greece and into Anatolia and so forth and they're now putting pressure on the seleucids and the ptolemies as well that causes the Maccabees to get recognition look for recognition and Alliance from Rome the Romans are pretty open to that it's part of a a general policy of divide and conquer so the stronger powers like the seleucids and the ptolemies suffer because the Romans give legitimacy to smaller powers that are breaking off from them and so Judas maccabeas is followed by his brothers Jonathan and later Simon as again not King yet but great high priest Governor or ethnic leader of a people of the Judea so they're both high priest and kind of governor as you can kind of see in this little map originally under Judas maccabeas there's just a very tiny area around Jerusalem which is their sort of autonomous zone to which then his successor his brother Jonathan extends the conquests a little including uh Conquering the perea a little region across the Jordan River Jonathan gets captured and so then he's followed by Simon as leader Simon both fortifies Jerusalem and takes the port city of Joppa which is helpful that means that you can connect into the Mediterranean and the Roman world and so forth he institutes a period of relative peace and prosperity before being murdered by an agent of the seleucids Simon is succeeded as leader and high priest by his son who is in power as The Narrative of second Maccabees draws to a close so you can see it's kind of about the early phases of the Rebellion first book of Maccabees and some First Maccabees has sort of a sense of being a court-sponsored history so in other words something that's coming out of the hasmonian Court it upholds the claims of the Maccabee Dynasty the hasmonian dynasty comparing them all to past biblical leaders um and this is despite the fact that um the hasmonian family doesn't have any dissent from important um biblical lineages so they're neither of the line of the high priests uh David's high priest being zaduk and so those descendants of zaduk the zadakites or the Sadducees have a strong claim to be to the high priesthood which now the hasmoneans have without right of lineage and they also are leaders of the people initially ethnox but later Kings despite the fact that they also don't have the davidic lineage that it be the Royal house of Judah prior to its destruction by the Babylonians the text is pretty highly partisan so it's very much against hellenized judeans who it sees as traitors and it sees the hasmonians as champions of traditionalism and that becomes ironic actually as the history goes on as we'll see when we look at the kind of context of the hasmonian Kingdom as it becomes an independent Hellenistic Kingdom ultimately and so ultimately um First Maccabees is an interesting and important book not only for getting a glimpse into Judaism and Judaism as it's existing in Judea as opposed to Babylon or Alexandria at this time but it's also um the this Revolt is actually the um the best documented Revolt that we have within the cellucid kingdom in general so as the seleucid kingdom is is falling apart there's all kinds of Rebel groups that are breaking off and and uh areas that are becoming autonomous or independent and we just simply don't have uh like con close to contemporary narratives that are detailed about how that process works so this is our best documented Revolt that's going on within the Hellenistic world not the least of which bees because we actually have a second contemporary book that is also discussing it that has a different perspective and so we have a very different book of Maccabees second Maccabees which as I say is unrelated to First Maccabees and it wasn't originally called second Maccabees The Narrative as I said also begins it actually begins chronologically before the start of First Maccabees but it covers a much shorter period of time uh in contrast to First Maccabees which was written from somebody inside Judea and probably somebody who is patronized by the um hasmonian Dynasty itself this is written by a Jew in Egypt probably in Exile another was part of the not actually in the diaspora Community somebody from uh outside the Judean Homeland so like first McAfee's second Maccabees gives us insight into the conflict as a civil war that is taking place between hellenized and traditionalist Jews but it's much more evident in second Maccabees that this is also a division between hellenized urban Jews that are living in Jerusalem and then the rural Jews in the countryside surround who are not participating in in the life of the polis they're not in the city life and they're therefore less less participating in Greek and Hellenistic culture so at the outset of the story which I like to say takes place before the maccabean Revolt the high priests in Jerusalem are from a Judean family a Jewish Family called the oniads who they already have been pretty hellenized they all have Greek names like Jason and Menelaus and they are already serving as officials under the seleucids and they are able to interact with the seleucid court and they know court procedures because they're continuously bribing the king of the seleucids in order to have themselves you know assert their candidacy having themselves be named high priest and deposing their brother and so forth so in second Maccabees we read when seleucus died and Antiochus IV who is called epiphanies succeeded to the kingdom Jason the brother of anias obtained the high priesthood by corruption promising the king at an interview 360 talents of silver and from another source of Revenue 80 talents it's a huge sum of money so in order to become high priest and therefore leader of the province still under the control of the seleucid king in addition to this uh he Jason the would-be high priest the Jewish guy uh hellenized Jewish guy here has promised to pay 150 more if the king gives permission to establish by his authority a gymnasium and a body of use for it and to enroll the people of Jerusalem as citizens of quote Antioch so when the king ascended and Jason came to office he had once shifted his compatriots over to the Greek way of life he set aside the existing Royal concessions to the Jews and he destroyed the lawful ways of living and introduced new Customs contrary to the law he took Delight in establishing in gymnasium right under the Citadel so write it by the Temple Mount and induce the noblest of the young men to wear the Greek hat there was such an extreme of hellenization and increase in the adoption of foreign ways because of the surpassing wickedness of Jason who was ungodly and no true high priest that the priests were no longer intent upon their service at the altar so they stopped doing all of the maintenance of Jewish law and they go start to participate in the gymnasium and the games and all these other kinds of Greek honors and so forth so in other words the high priest himself who already has taken a Greek name and is part of and is playing the life of a Hellenistic Noble um has a program of hellenization so Jason is the actually renames the city of Jerusalem Antioch so I was saying how in some cases the uh Hellenistic conquerors like Alexander would found a new city a name at Alexandria in other cases it would take an old city and they would refound it and they would call it Alexandria or in this case because it's a seleucid city it's being called Antioch after uh the general Antioch Antiochus and so Jerusalem now becomes a hellenized city and amongst it is a gymnasium which is to say a school and athletic campus where Judean youth can be taught Greek Athletics Warfare and so forth and also philosophy Greek learning and so forth so we also um have now moralizing or an understanding of the Theology of the author of second Maccabees so uh the author writes despising the temple sanctuary and neglecting the sacrifices the priests hurried to take part in the lawful proceedings in the wrestling Arena after the signal for The discus throwing dissane disdaining the honors prized by their ancestors and putting the highest value on Greek forms of prestige and for this reason heavy disaster overtook them and those whose ways of living they admired and wish to imitate completely became their enemies and punished them in other words even though they're sucking up to the Greeks or they admiring the Greeks or whatever they're ultimately going to be punished by the Greeks in war and it's because God is punishing them as in the in the mind here of the author of second Maccabees it is no light thing to show a reverence to the Divine laws so in other words the fact that they are forsaking Jewish law is a problem a fact that later events will make clear the author of second Maccabees promises us so second Maccabees gives a different context for King Antiochus the seleucid Kings raid on the temple so as we said that was sort of like just something that kind of happens in the first book and that Sparks the Revolt in this case there's some additional context ahead of time in second McAfee so Jason the high priest and his brothers have been bribing and counter bribing each other so that they're getting replaced who's going to be the high priest and so forth and when when they're out of power they take up arms against each other in order to try to seize the high priesthood from one another and so on his way back from Egypt Antiochus who's been leading an Army against Ptolemy he sees that there is this arm dispute going on between the brothers and he assumes that to be a Revolt in other words that's a fight and he assumes that they're revolting against his authority and so he responds by sending his army he's got his army marching anyway so they March back via Jerusalem which they storm they enter the temple and because like all ancient temples this is a source of where people have been giving alms and so forth this is a place where people store the local treasury it's where people store valuables ancient temples are banks and one of the reasons why Banks even today look like ancient Greek temples is because of the association of temples with banks anyway so the temple has a lot of treasure and um Antiochus then plunders the treasury after this then we read in second book of Maccabees that Antiochus decides to impose uh religious syncretism on the people so not long after this we read the King Antiochus IV sent an Athenian Senator Senator so he gets a a a sophisticated person from Athens a cultural leader here to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their ancestor and no longer to live by the laws of God also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and to call it the Temple of Olympian Zeus so in other words it has just been the Jerusalem Temple the temple to the god whose name is not um said by the people who were the adherents now that God is understood to also be Olympian Zeus and to call the one in Mount kazirim the Temple of Zeus the friend of strangers as did the people who lived in that place and so this other Temple at Mount kaziram this is the Samaritan Temple so it is also being identified the god who's worshiped there the god of Israel is being identified with Zeus so syncretism is part of a broader Trend in the Hellenistic period so local National Gods like Yahweh or Bale or Ammon in Egypt or Jupiter among the Romans are understood by this idea of syncretism as being simply a different understanding for the same Supreme Sky father God Zeus for the Greeks as the Greeks understood that God and so we got we've had a whole lecture on Roman mythology and how Roman religion or Roman the old gods of Roman religion differ from Greek mythology but how the stories get syncretized together to the point where um you know Venus we just think of Venus as being Aphrodite and Mars as being Aries and so forth even though uh in Hephaestus is Vulcan even though that they had very different Origins originally and they got syncretized together so while some of the elite judeans conformed to Greek customs and welcomed them others refused and and second Maccabees they are said to be martyred including the Scribe Elias are who chooses death rather than to he's being called upon to eat unclean sacrificial animals uh you know or eat pork for example or um actually actually everybody around him kind of urges him just pretend to eat it you don't have to really eat it you know put in your hand and kind of you know spit it out and don't don't do that and so what eliasar says in response to that is look such pretense is not worthy of our time of life for many of the young might suppose that leas are in his 90th year had gone over to an alien religion and through my pretense for the sake of living a brief moment longer they would be led astray because of me while I defile and disgrace my old age and so so he refuses to do that and he is massacred um and that customers on and there are several other Martyrs that are listed in fact probably one of the most stirring and memorable uh certainly most remarked upon passages from second book of Maccabees is a group of seven brothers and their mother who are arrested and brought before King Antiochus IV he again orders them to eat pork in other words conformed to this law of hellenizing Law and an elimination of their customs and when they refuse one after another each in speeches he tortures them and he kills them until even there's only one left and the mother's saying urging him on to also be martyred and he's he is killed and then she dies so a bunch of Martyrs for the cause and in this book now then because of these kind of Martyrs that sets off outrage that sets off the Rebellion and so the action now shifts to the countryside where Judas maccabeus organized an army and he starts a rebellion he starts seizing territory the rebels have a lot of military success so they defeat local seleucid armies while the king is off away campaigning in Persia and after more fighting Judas maccabeus conquers Jerusalem purifies the temple and as we saw in the first book also establishes the Festival of Hanukkah and so this is the account in second Maccabees of the purification of the temple we read now maccabeas and his followers the Lord leading them on recovered the temple and the city they tore down the altars that had been built in the Public Square by the foreigners and also destroyed the sacred precincts they purified the sanctuary and made another altar of sacrifice then striking fire out of Flint they offered sacrifices after a lapse of two years and they offered incense and lighted lamps and set out the bread of the presence when they had done this they fell prostrate and implored the Lord that they might never again fall into such misfortunes but that if they should ever sin they might be disciplined by him with forbearance and not be handed over to Blasphemous and barbarous Nations so their Covenant here is sort of like we don't want this to happen to us again we don't want to you know be scattered or whatever but if you think of some other way to punish us as us next time as the anyway the theology both of the of the book of Maccabees here anyway um so it happened that on the same day on which the sanctuary had been profaned by the foreigners the purification of the sanctuary took place that is on the 25th day of the same month which was shizlev so they celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing therefore carrying Ivy ivy wreath wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm they offered hymns of Thanksgiving to him who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place they decreed by public edict ratified by vote that the whole nation of the Jews should observe these days every year so this is the establishment of the Festival of Hanukkah so from this there are more victories against the seleucids so although Antiochus IV has died and in fact in the text here he's cursed with illness and so forth by God so there's more intervention in the second book of mcavey's more divine intervention than the first book of Maccabees where the author is more writing it in the form of a a kind of a Greek history so it has less even though there's a little it's it's less like a Biblical model and more like a contemporary Greek history but in this case for a second Maccabees it's a little bit more divine intervention so antiochus's successors continue to send armies to subdue the rebels and so at the Battle of odassa in 161 BCE Judas Maccabees again defeats another seleucid Army who is under the command of a mccainer who is a nikonur who is the governor the seleucid governor who's supposed to be ruling Jerusalem and they also end up killing him and so this is where the book of second Maccabees ends while the Rebellion is still ongoing so to sum up the second book of Maccabees although hellenization is still Central to the narrative as we kind of saw already the story is more nuanced than in the first book of Maccabees so infighting among a hellenized Jewish Elite in Jerusalem is what actually leads to Antiochus sacking the temple on his way back from his invasion of Egypt and we also see that syncretization of religion was a general Trend in the Hellenistic World which was resonating with some of the Jewish Elite and obviously it was not resonating with others of them so second Maccabees then is a very interesting second version of the story which is more taking Bible as a model in the sense that it sees God as more directly intervening in all of the events so I want to um having kind of gone in detail about what the book said both of those two books say those two pictures I want to look a little bit um as we're concluding here in the chronology of the hasmonian period overall so I've created a an old timeline here that is going from uh this period when Antiochus uh the third takes Jerusalem in the first place which brings um the judeans from the orbit of the ptolemies and brings them into uh the seleucid orbit so that period begins actually a relatively um harmonious period so despite the fact that the books of Maccabees see Antiochus IV his successor as a person who is very much pushing Hellenism and persecuting Jews and outlawing uh their customs and law and everything like that his predecessor Antiochus III actually had a completely opposite policy so his policy involved including um included sending funds to help repair the temple after recent conflicts that they'd had in the war between himself and the ptolemies and also affirmed uh the rights of judeans throughout his Empire to be able to practice their own customs and laws and so forth and so his policy in general even though there was always a policy of promoting Hellenism so anybody who you know wanted to be in the cities to take part in speaking Greek being in Greek schools Greek Customs Greek learning and so forth there was nevertheless a pragmatism through the solicit Empire where locals are allowed to maintain their local laws and customs and so forth as well so the change of that as we kind of see happens in this Warfare that occurs between his successor Antiochus IV and the ptolemies when Antiochus sacks Jerusalem in 168 that sets off the maccabean revolt and kind of see the period of that Revolt from 161 to 141 BCE fairly soon into that is the rededication of the second temple in 164 and the establishment of Hanukkah and then you can see um uh after the um the other brothers so after Judas maccabias's death and his brother brothers it comes down to Simon thasse who's the last of the brothers and then his son takes over as the maccabean leader of the ethnic and high priest John hercanus the first so he has a good long reign his son aristibilis the first as a brief Reign and then it goes to his brother Alexander then their Widow Salome Alexandra and thence and then the dynasty starts to break down under her children uh in the 60s in other words in this in the sixth Century there so in the middle of that um it goes from being people that are in a bit of a bit of Revolt to in 141 as the seleucids Empire continues to collapse they have more autonomy as ethnics to the time when you get to like 110 and they achieve actual Independence by one four 104 they are claiming the title of basileos which is Greek for King so now at that point it's an independent Kingdom for a brief sort of 40 years because at that point in 63 BCE the Romans defeat the seleucids and eliminate the seleucid kingdom which they simply Annex as a province of the Roman Empire and at that very same moment in 63 Judea becomes a Roman protectorate and so although the um hasmonian Kingdom continues in name it is now not sovereign or independent it's a dependent Kingdom on the Romans and indeed as we've seen in our lecture on Herod the Great at a certain point um the Romans decide to replace the hasmonian dynasty with the dynasty of their one of their Chief Nobles the idemian leader Herod so just as by way of just going through that kind of context so although the seleucids they're initially the primary successor to Alexandria and you can kind of see their empire going across almost the whole course of the Persian Empire from the Aegean across uh Anatolia Syria Mesopotamia Babylon Persia and all the way into bactria Afghanistan their empire slowly collapsed and as it collapsed it left vacuums of power including ultimately in Judea on the frontier between the seleucids in Syria and ptolemaic Egypt so when we see the context of the maccabean Revolt from that giant Empire by the time we get down to 124 BCE seleucia is just a rump Kingdom it just consists essentially of of the kingdom of Syria along with Lebanon and Israel Palestine and so forth that sort of area as you can kind of see including cilicia in in Anatolia and so the autonomy and Independence of has Monet and Judea is set against this backdrop of that collapse um by the time the seleucids Lost Anatolia to Rome and her allies in 188 they lost Persia and Mesopotamia to the parthians by 129 and eventually like I say it's just a rump state which the Romans Annex in 63. so during that collapse um there is though some pretty impressive expansion so the last of Judas maccabeas Brothers to reign as high priest and ethnic as I mentioned is Simon thasse and so he had this um uh uh in this in this map here we have um in green the area uh under that you know that at the time of Simon thasse and then when his son takes over he conquers this purple region all around it so in the first year of his Reign Antioch is the seventh lay Siege to Jerusalem and exacted a very heavy tribute so the autonomy was sort of almost completely diminished he wasn't able to destroy Jerusalem so they continue to be autonomous but they nevertheless had to pay a very heavy tribute and John hercanus for example had to break open um King David's tomb and take all of the gold out as a tribute and so that was not popular a popular move but they preserved their autonomy but then as the seleucids collapse further into Civil War John regained his autonomy and like I say began conquering all of these territories so south of Judea the area called iduma and that's the area that Herod and his father were from and north of Judea the area of Samaria and then under his son aristibilis the first the hasmonians successfully asserted their independence and they assumed the title of basileos as I say king So In addition to being the high priest they're also the king and so after his death aristibilis is succeeded by his brother Alexander janaeus who expands the kingdom to his maximum extent so you can see that he inherited the green area and they add the purple areas around the frontier much more of the coast and further down into Southern idimea and more area across the Jordan and so like I say this is set against a backdrop where the seleucids and the ptolemies are both rapidly declining in the face of ever growing Roman power so simultaneously as this happens the hasmonians are also transforming their cultural Outlook so they began as rural traditional priests and they move into becoming Hellenistic Kings in just three generations um they kind of cease promote traditionalism and they start adopting even their names so their names as we've been reading here are things like aristibulus which means in Greek best advising and Alexander so it's just named obviously in after Alexander so opposition because of that to hasmonian high priesthood and kingship became organized in Judea in schools like the essenes and so the essenes wanted to purify the priesthood they wanted to um to have the kingdom be again not hellenized and so forth and so they withdraw to their kind of quasi-monastic place next to the Dead Sea in qumran where they anticipate that eventually God is going to cause there to be a restoration and then also more moderate reformers the scribes who organizes the Pharisees who seek Reformation by reinterpreting the law and so forth so meanwhile as we kind of even see in this map the Romans continue to encroach and so as the Romans continued to Annex territories the hasmanian kingdom is growing as ptolemies and the tall and the cellucids are are shrinking but all of these successor States including uh hasmonians become subject to the decrees of the Roman sentiment which is also expecting bribes from everybody and is also intervening um mostly in ways that support Roman interests as opposed to whatever the local interests are so the Roman Republic became the leading power in the Mediterranean in the second and first centuries of the BCE increasingly Rome intervened in the Affairs of Greeks and the Hellenistic kingdoms and Roman Senators competed for power within the Republic by raising loyal armies and conquering new territories and so Rome is not an Empire yet but one of the ways that the Nobles the Senators are able to make names for themselves and assume leadership and so forth is that they get named Governor like you're going to be named governor of Gaul like Caesar and then he goes and conquers all the surrounding Gaelic tribes in order to massively expand you know he gets reputation as a as a commander he has a reputation for victory and he also adds territory to Rome so likewise uh um Caesar's rival Pompey is made um governor of the East and he goes and takes over uh conkers for example the seleucids and adds Syria now to the Roman Empire as as a province and so forth and this is simply a way that Roman Nobles are competing for power and influence and also you get to plunder a lot of um treasuries and so forth when you when you conquer places so Pompey the great one of Rome's leading Senators the greatest General and one of its greatest generals conquered the seleucid kingdom they annexed it as the Roman province of Syria and and later that year Pompey head south to Jerusalem he sacks the city and the temple hasmonian King hercanus II is forced to agree to become a Roman client and that therefore ended the brief stint maybe 40 Years of uh the Tasmanian Kingdom of judea's Independence hasmoni and Judea instantly fell from its height back to kind of a poor rump Kingdom that now required Roman approval for important decisions ultimately the Romans decide to depose her canis II and they later allow him to resume his position as high priest but deny him the title King basileos and instead he goes back to being called Ethnic from 47 to 40. uh BCE in 40 the parthians so this Persian speaking Iranian language speaking successor to the Persians actually invade the Roman province of Syria and with parthian support the hasmonian prince antigonus II seizes the Throne of Judea and switches its Allegiance from Rome to Parthia however the very next year Mark Anthony Roman general drives the parthians out and Jerusalem's reconquered by the Romans and so in response to the hasimonian alliance with the parthians Anthony is persuaded to name one of their lieutenants essentially the head of a I do man Noble family who had been serving as procure procurator and so forth a lower Roman official he decided they need to decide to name him King and to gain legitimacy in his subject's eyes Herod does marry a hasmonian princess and with Roman help during a three years war he defeats the forces of antigonus II and he begins to rule as King of Judea and as a Roman client we've had like I say a whole lecture on Herod but this kind of brings the Maccabee story up to that lecture so to conclude um first and second Maccabees tell the restory of a revolt which is a political Revolt but it's also a cultural revolt against Hellenism but in both of those cases it's not only a revolt against the um the cellucid overlords but it's also a civil war between local hellenized Jews and traditionalist Jews the war in the books we only take it to the point where the Maccabees achieve essentially a limited autonomy for Judea but as we see from that the history continues on until there is a short-lived independent Kingdom all of that takes place in the context of the collapse of the seleucids and for in that way the hasmonians are able to gain independence after which Rome then assumes control of the entire Eastern Mediterranean and so that is our look at the apocryphal books of Maccabees and we'll see if Mike has been getting your guys questions and assembling them so that I can maybe take some of these questions foreign so Lorenzo Sleestak in Traverse City Michigan says I believe the Ethiopians and eritreans even have their own unique books of Maccabees in the geese language so yeah if they they do have a bunch of their own Bible books and so they could have additional Maccabee books um I I'm not aware of those if so there are like I say there are kind of eight at least eight books of Maccabees and there's a couple more but um but I'm not sure of any of those but anyway we'll have to look them up and I'll be interested to kind of find out about any of those there are a bunch of other books in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Canon though as you say Bob Garrison uh in Rancho Cucamonga says is rabbinic Judaism what is practice today yes so almost all of um the different modern expressions of Judaism that we will be aware of all Are all uh evolving out of and are all part of rabbinic Judaism so in North America you know we have Reform Judaism Orthodox Judaism conservative Judaism and Hasidic Judaism and so forth these are all coming out of um rabbinic Judaism so there is the main exception that um will have heard of uh you know that is still existing are the Samaritans and so that is coming out of an earlier you know expression of you know of israelitism so we were talking about how um in this book of Maccabees they also uh Samaria is in between Galilee and Judea and Samaria has its own temple on Mount jazeeram and that is one of the places where Antiochus IV also made the made that Temple a a temple to Zeus or syncretized the temple there with Jesus when The Maccabees take over Samaria they destroy that Temple so um it's not a um the um judeans and Sumerians Jews and Samaritans have not been always on good terms as a result of uh you know a lot of times we were um you are like your cousins least well and so uh in our church I'm from Community of Christ the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so our our biggest fighting is with the Mormons right so our LDS cousins and so forth but yes almost all almost all of Judaism that you'd be aware of is is out of rabbinic Judaism now Andrew uh suriali and Indonesia says no I'm just going to thank you oh you know first off I'll thank you for your contribution and then he says given the centrality of both the Hanukkah miracle and the martyrdom of the brothers to rabbinic Judaism what canonical Source are the rabbis using if they are not including the Maccabees books so um so rabbinic Judaism includes um later writings of the rabbis in the Force form of um uh like the talmud and other other later writings which include some of these stories and so for example the Hanukkah story and also the um the story a version of the the story of the martyrs uh are in those sources which will have been based on the The Maccabees the books of Maccabees um the the my understanding of it is within the um the Jewish version it's it's the the martyrs are being not forced to eat pork but are being forced to worship an idol and so in other words there's a little bit different way of telling the story but it will have had the it will have had the same Source um so yes but without using um the books of Maccabees and in general rabbinic Judaism I think was trying to get away from sources that are Greek because of again the fact that the Christians had sort of grabbed all the Greek and Hellenistic stuff and uh and this is kind of a rejection of all of that and Andre Murray in northeastern Brazil writes I love history for the way it teaches us what is happening today uh did happen in the past um how would John link The Narrative of the Maccabee revolts in terms of modern revolts well um interesting so so one of the one of the links that seems obvious that people have have made several times is since this is a the last time for any um any any length of time has there been a uh you know more than a year or two anyway and during during active revolts this is the only time where in in the present day where there has been a um independent uh Jewish state in the land of Judea and so that is sometimes then compared to the maccabean Revolt since this is the last major time when some of those kind of things have existed um part part of the difference is that even though there is this tension between traditional Judaism and and Hellenism which involves um let's say imposing some of the syncretic practices of Hellenism in involves ending or prescribing uh some of the Jewish law and customs and so forth there is not a background of that um in the Greek for the Greeks of that era in what has become like sort of let's say the modern anti-Semitism so modern anti-Semitism in advance of the of the Holocaust um includes all kinds of like racist pseudoscience of um just just totally false but hateful theories that are denigrating um uh Jewish people racially and so forth that it was part of the justification for the atrocities and that does not exist in um in essentially Hellenistic or or or uh Greek philosophy at the time and so there are contemporary Greek philosophers who are looking at the history of the Jewish people and saying hey they have a very similar history to us we both they came out of Egypt we have uh ancient Greeks who also in our mythology came out of Egypt and learned from Egypt we have great law givers like Solon who established our customs and they have great Antiquity and so forth and and rationality behind them likewise the Jewish people have Moses great lawgiver and so forth and indeed from that kind of um understanding that again like a Greek philosopher had many hellenized Jewish thinkers kind of built on that as we've seen we had a whole lecture on Philo of Alexandria who sort of uh Builds on that and sees Moses as uh as a philosopher interprets Moses as a as a precursor to Greek philosophy and we've also we're going to have another whole lecture on um Josephus who is trying to do the same kind of things so I would say that in those cases that parallel which is often made isn't quite um doesn't quite match up because uh the this would be the very beginnings of a kind of persecution of Jews for religious Customs almost the first time that that happens and it's a much more elaborated obviously when we get to um 20th and 21st century uh anti-Semitism in terms of other kinds of revolts in modern times you know the I mean there there are everything is so very different now in terms of um the authority and capacity that states have there's so much control that everybody has over over information over economy and all these things in the ancient times um everything is is so there's so much less built environment and so it's easier to Simply protest and run off into the countryside and be Outlaws for a whole long time than it is for a whole kind of region to do that these days um so so in some sense there's it's harder to draw draw Parallels for how the Revolt kind of functioned with what can function in contemporary times Mike Harper Woods here at Center Place asks beyond the many books of The Maccabees that you discuss in this lecture are there other ancient sources which corroborate or conflict with these historical narratives about the period so yes we don't have um so we don't have as detailed uh sources outside of this kind of source but so for example I mentioned how in the first book of Maccabees uh it is describing the Antiochus the fourth as as having a decree a general policy he's going to hellenize everybody in his entire Kingdom and he's going to suppress all local Customs everywhere there are simply no ancient sources from anywhere else on the seleucid kingdom that suggests that any such thing happens so it's a so it does conflict with that you know and so there uh so in that sense always when we are reading these sources we have to read with the we have to remember that the author is writing with their own perspective they have their own biases there are are obviously they're writing after the fact and they are and when you're doing that you're in creating anachronisms and they're looking at it through their lens and so the the specific um lens of both of these authors which is to try to really emphasize uh the the forced hellenization um does seem to um belie what we see in the other sources where we are finding that actually there is a this is a civil conflict there are lots and lots of um uh Jewish people at the time especially including the elites who have helenize and who are wanting to hellenize and it's much less a um uh like the cause of an outside cause of rebellion than a civil war that's happening inter internally Daryl Scott and Wisconsin writes um how would Ordinary People in Judea have experienced hellenization and dehalinization would they have even cared much um so Ordinary People you say as opposed to the elites so it would be the elites that are taking that are probably learning Greek that are taking um Greek names and that are are in the gymnasium and studying and things like that and so in terms of the um the ordinary people um so a difference I guess with how they would be potentially experiencing it is that uh they're setting up new shrines so there would be maybe new religious shrines that are appearing um there are different taxes there would be um maybe suppression of uh of traditional festivals so you might have um always had a a activity where you you know don't work on the Sabbath you don't work on on uh Saturday but now suddenly um a new landlord says well we're not following that anymore so now you do have to work on Saturday you might win like that so so an ordinary person um might have had those kind of experiences with it and in general um I mean one of the reasons why we kind of kind of looked at this as maybe a um kind of a rural versus Urban uh conflict too is that it maybe isn't affecting you that much but you maybe are um always as a rural person you may might feel looked down upon by the the city people and have some resentments and so there might which is kind of a natural uh human nature throughout all of kind of human history so I want to I think that's the end of the questions but I want you guys to save the date for our upcoming lectures so on June 6 like I say we're going to look at the second Book of Enoch secrets of Enoch it's called on June 13th we're going to look at Josephus and so Josephus is one of our other sources for this period he's relying a little bit on these books of Maccabees or some of them but he also has access to other sources so it's going to cover some of the same period uh but he also talks a lot more and knows more about the first century of the Common Era the Christian era A.D uh June 13th that is on June 27th we're going to look at the emperor Constantine and how that changed all of history and then on July 4th we're going to look at why is Jesus from Galilee uh seems strange that that should be the case and also though the fact that he's from a strange Place may have had a bunch of interesting effects on the background of the historical Jesus so thank you so very much and we'll say goodbye and thanks Mike for being filling in for Leandro as our producer tonight

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 36,745

Keywords: community of christ, christianity lecture, christian education, biblicar scholar, judaism, christianity, history of israel, history of judaism, ancient history, history of christianity, early christianity, lost books, scripture, forbidden books, new testament, old testament, hebrew bible, catholic bible

Id: yd50--dynSY

Length: 93min 54sec (5634 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023