Malachi to Christ
JUDAS MACCABAEUS

Grecian Period (175-163 B.C.)
The close connection between the Jews of Palestine and the Ptolemean dynasty received a rude shock in the outrage of Ptolemy; Philopator; and, as at the same time they had been on friendly terms with Antiochus III from the time of his victory over the Egyptian forces by the source of the Jordan at Paneas, their allegiance was gradually transferred to the Syrian kingdom. Therefore, at this point we turn from Alexandria to Antioch; from Egypt to Syria.

Antioch
In the northern extremity of Syria, where "the fourth river" of the Lebanon ranges, after having risen  from its abundant fountain in the center of those hills, bends through the rich plains to escape into the Mediterranean out of the pressure of the ridges of Mount Casius and Mount Amanus, the first Seleucus founded the city to which, after his father Antiochus, he gave the name of Antioch – a city destined to owe its chief celebrity not to its Grecian, but its Semitic surroundings by a sacred association which in one sense will outshine Jerusalem itself.

It would almost seem as if Alexandria and Antioch had divided between them the two characteristics of the old metropolis of the primeval world. If Alexandria represented the learning and commerce of Babylon (the nobler elements of ancient civilization), Antioch represented its splendor, luxury, and vanities. And, accordingly, while the relations of the Ptolemies to Israel are almost all pacific and beneficent, the relations of the Seleucide towards it are almost all antagonistic and repulsive.

Antigonus of Socho (198 B.C.)
Sometimes this thought occurs: was it possible for the Judaism of Palestine to have absorbed the genial and artistic side of the Grecian polytheism, as, to a large extent, the Judaism of Alexandria absorbed the speculative and spiritual side of the Grecian Philosophy? An honored name appears at the opening of the struggle on which we are now entering – Antigonus of Socho, who was regarded as the founder of some such attempt to combine a broader view of religion with the Judaic austerity handed down from Ezra. Only one saying of his remains, but it is full of significance and shows how a seed of a future faith had already borne fruit in that dark and troubled time: "Be not like those servants who busy themselves to serve their masters in the hope of reward, but be like those servants who busy themselves to serve their masters without expectation of recompense, and the favor of Heaven be over you".

Conflict of Hellenists and the Chasidim
But whatever was the higher aspect of the Grecian party in Judea was speedily cast into the shade by the deadly struggle which was now to be waged between the accursed "kingdom of Javan", as the Syrian dynasty was called, and the stern patriots who saw in its policy the attempt to suppress all that had sanctified and ennobled their national existence. In this struggle only two parties were recognized by its historian, the "Chasidim" or "pious" (a name already familiar in the Psalter) and their opponents, to whom was given the opprobrious designation, also borrowed from the Psalter, "sinners", "lawless", "impious".

188 B.C.
The aggression on the part of the Syrian kings had already begun in the reign of Seleucus IV, with the encouragement of the Hellenising party, for the moment headed by one of the mischievous clan known as the sons of Tobias. The first attempt was on the Temple treasures, including the private deposits, which as in a bank had been laid up for the widows and orphans under the shelter of the sanctuary.

Heliodorus
Then occurred the scene portrayed in the liveliest colors in the traditions of the next century, when Heliodorus the king's treasurer came with an armed guard to seize it. It is a complete representation of what must have been the general aspect of a panic in Jerusalem. The Priests in their official costume are prostrate before the altar. The High Priest is in such an inward agony of mind that whoso had looked at his countenance and changing color, it would have wounded his heart. The Temple courts are crowded with supplicants; the matrons, with bare bosoms, running frantically through the street; the maidens, unable to break their seclusion, yet peering over walls, and through windows, and at every door to catch the news; the pitiless officer bent on discharging his mission. The scene now changes. A horse with a terrible rider in golden armor dashes into the Temple precinct and tramples Heliodorus under foot, while on either side stood two magnificent youths who lash the prostrate intruder to the very verge of death, from which he is only rescued by the prayers of Onias. The story lives only in the legends of the time, and was passed over by both contemporary and later historians. But when Raffaelle wished to depict the triumph of Pope Julius II over the enemies of the Pontificate he could find no fitter scene to adorn the Vatican walls than that which represents the celestial champions, with the vigor of immortal youth, trampling on the prostrate robber.

Whatever may have been the actual incident thus enshrined, it was the natural prelude to the undoubted history which followed. It was reserved for the successor of Seleucus IV to precipitate the crisis which had been long expected.

Antiochus Epiphanes (175 B.C.)
Antiochus IV was one of those strange characters in whom an eccentricity touching insanity on the left and genius on the right combined with absolute power and lawless passion to produce a portentous result, thus bearing out the two names by which he was known – Epiphanes, "the Brilliant" and Epimanes, "the Madman". On the one hand, even through the terrible picture drawn by the Jewish historians, traits of generosity and even kindness transpire. And in his splendid buildings – his enlargement and almost creation of Antioch as a magnificent capital; his plans for joining it with the bay of Scanderoon and thus making it a maritime emporium; his munificence throughout the Grecian world; his determination, however mischievous in its results, of consolidating a homogeneous Eastern Empire against the aggressions of the newly‑rising Empire of the West – there is a grandeur of conception which corresponds to the contemporary Prophetic delineation of "the king of an invincible countenance, understanding dark sentences, and full of high swelling words". On the other hand, there was an extravagance, a littleness in all his demeanor which agrees with the unintelligible madman of the Gentile writers, "the vile person" of the Hebrew poets and historians. Instead of the godlike Alexander or the literary Ptolemies, they saw a fantastic creature without dignity or self‑control, caricaturing in a public masquerade the manners and dress of the august Roman magistrates, playing practical jokes in the public streets and baths of Antioch, startling a group of young revelers by bursting in upon them with pipe and horn; tumbling with the bathers on the slippery marble pavement, as they ran to receive the shower of precious ointment which he had prepared for himself. The contradiction of the two sides of his character was wound up to its climax in the splendor of the procession which he organized at Daphne, in the most stately style, to outshine the most magnificent of the Roman triumphs, but in which he himself appeared riding in and out on a hack pony, playing the part of chief waiter, mountebank, and jester.

It was a union of lofty policy and petty buffoonery, of high aspirations and small vexations, which reminds us of the attempts of Peter the Great to occidentalize Russia: as in the opposition of the old Muscovite party and of the Rascolniks we have a resemblance of the determined antagonism of the "Chasidim" to the Hellenization of their race. But Peter's attempt was founded on a far‑seeing principle – that of Antiochus on a short‑sighted fancy. The resistance of the Russian Dissenters was the mere tenacity of ancient prejudice. The resistance of the Jewish patriots was the determination of a superior faith.

The Grecian Party
To bring into a uniform submission to himself and the gods of Greece, among whom he claimed to be reckoned, the various creeds and usages which he found under his sway, became his fixed idea, fostered in part by his own personal vanity, partly by the desire to imitate the Roman policy, which he had studied while a hostage in Italy. In this design he was assisted by the Grecian party, of which we have spoken, in Palestine itself. The passion for Grecian connections showed itself in the desire to establish a claim of kindred with the Lacedemonians, among whom a Jewish colony seems to have been established and with whom a correspondence was alleged, as if Sparta too, in her fallen state, was eager to cultivate friendly relations with them. The names of the Macedonian months, hitherto unknown, were adopted either beside or instead of those in the Hebrew or Chaldean calendar.

The fever of The Grecian fashions manifested itself in the Grecian nomenclature by which the ancient Hebrew names were superseded or corrupted. We have already seen how the central Judaic settlement had been surrounded by a fringe of Grecian towns. We now encounter the same tendency in the heart of every Jewish family. Jehoiakim becomes Alcimus; Solomon, from supposed analogy between the great Jewish and the great Gentile King, becomes Alexander; Salome, Alexandra; Onias, or Joseph, is transformed into Menelaus; Judas becomes Aristobulus; Mattathias, Antigonus; John or Jonathan, Hyrcanus or Jannaeus; Joshua sometimes becomes Jesus, sometimes the Argonautic hero Jason, sometimes (in the etymological sense of Champion) Alexander. The era observed by the Jews in their civil contracts, even till 1040 A.D., was the era of the Seleucidae, still observed by Eastern Christians as the era of Alexander and adopted by the Syrian kingdom from October, 312 B.C. – when the world seemed to begin again from the victory by which Seleucus wrested from Antigonus the ancient capital of Chaldea, which even in its ruin was the prize of the East.

The High Priesthood, like the modern Patriarchates of the Eastern Church, was, in the needy condition of the Syrian finances, sold by the Government to the highest bidder and among the various rivals Jason succeeded, adding to his bribes the attempt to win the favor of Antiochus by adopting the Gentile usages. It is startling to think of the sudden influx of Grecian manners into the very center of Palestine. The modesty of the sons and daughters of Abraham was shocked by the establishment of the Greek palestra, under the very citadel of David, where, in defiance of some of the most sensitive feelings of their countrymen, the most active of the Jewish youths completely stripped themselves and ran, wrestled, leaped in the public sports, like the Grecian athletes, wearing only the broad‑brimmed hat, in imitation of the headgear of the god Hermes, guardian of the gymnastic festivals. Even the priests in the Temple caught the infection, left their sacrificial duties unfinished, and ran down from the Temple court to take part in the spectacle as soon as they heard the signal for throwing the quoit, which was to lead off the games. The sacred names of Jerusalem and Judaea were laid aside in favor of the title of "citizens of Antioch". A deputation of these would‑be Greeks was sent by "the hateful Jason" to a likeness of the Olympian festival celebrated in the presence of the King at Tyre, in honor of the ancient sanctuary of Moloch or Melcarth, now transformed into the Grecian Hercules; though here, with a curious scruple which withheld the pilgrims from going the whole length with their chief, they satisfied their consciences by spending the money intended for the sacrifice in the building of the war-galleys of the Syrian navy. With these lax imitations of the Pagan worship, the corruptions of the Priesthood became more and more scandalous.

372 B.C.
Menelaus outbid Jason for the office. Their brother Onias took refuge from his violence in the sanctuary of Apollo at Daphne, near Antioch, and was thence dragged forth and killed, with a sacrilegious perfidy which shocked Jew and heathen alike, and called out almost the only sign of human feeling which the Jewish annalist allows to the Syrian King. Like a Becket or Stanislaus, Onias himself was transformed by a popular apotheosis into the celestial champion of his nation; and a long‑standing monument of the horror created by his murder was the rival temple at Heliopolis, built by his son Onias, who fled from Palestine on hearing of his father's death, as though there were no longer a home or a sanctuary for him in Palestine. After a momentary victory over his brother Menelaus in Jerusalem, Jason himself was expelled and closed a wandering exile by dying among the Spartan mountains. "And he that had cast out many unburied had none to mourn for him, nor any solemn funerals at all, nor sepulchre 'with his fathers'".

In the midst of this dissolution of Jewish society it is no wonder that to the tension of imagination which such a time produces, portents should have appeared – such as we find not only in the final siege of Jerusalem, but in the Gothic invasion of ancient Rome, in the plague of Papal Rome, in the fall of the Empire of Montezuma in Mexico, in the Plague of London, in the French war of 1870. It happened that "through all the city, for the space almost of forty days, there were seen horsemen galloping through the air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances like a band of soldiers, and squadrons of cavalry in array, and charges, and encounters, and shaking of shields, and multitude of pikes, and drawing of swords, and glittering of golden ornaments, and harness of all sorts".

The prayer, that this apparition might turn for good was presently answered by the approach of the most startling catastrophe which the Jewish colony bad experienced since its return from Babylon, and which yet, with a fine moral sense of a deserved Nemesis, the nobler spirits among them acknowledged to be the just retribution for their crimes.

Attack on Jerusalem
It was after completing his conquest of Egypt that Antiochus, in pursuit at once of his political and religious ambition, seized upon Jerusalem. The terrified population fled before him. They were hewn down in the streets and pursued to the roofs of their houses. But that which even more than this widespread massacre thrilled the city with consternation was the sight of the King, in all the pomp of royalty, led by the apostate Menelaus into the sanctuary itself. It was believed by the Greek world that he reached the innermost recess and there found (as they imagined) the statue of the founder of the nation, the great lawgiver Moses, with the long flowing beard which tradition assigned to him, and seated on the Egyptian ass, which from the Exodus down to the second century of our era the Gentile world regarded as the inseparable accompaniment of the Israelite. With charac­teristic rapacity he laid hands on the sacred furniture which the wealthy Babylonian Jews had contributed through the hands of Ezra – the golden altar of incense, the golden candlestick, the table of consecrated bread, and all the lesser ornaments and utensils. The golden candlestick, which was an object of special interest from its containing the perpetual light, was traditionally believed to have fallen to the share of the renegade High Priest Menelaus. The great deposits which had escaped the grasp of Heliodorus, and which, but for the national de­pravity, would, it was thought, have been again defended by celestial champions, were seized by the king himself.

Then came another sudden attack under Apollonius the tax‑gatherer, successor of Heliodorus, who took occasion to attack them on their day of weekly rest, scattering them or dragging them off to the slave‑market from the midst of their festivities. It is a stratagem which occurs so often at this time as to lose its point, but which shows how rigidly since Nehemiah's time the observance of the Sabbath had set in. The rest, both of the seventh day and of the seventh year, had now become a fixed institution, guarded with the utmost tenacity and carried into the most trivial and, at times, impracticable details.

There was a short pause, during which consternation spread through the country. In every home there was desolation as if for a personal sorrow. The grief of the women was even more affecting than the indignant sorrow of the men; and showed how completely they shared the misfortunes of their country. The Holy City was transformed into the likeness of a Grecian garrison. The walls that Nehemiah had built with so much care were dismantled; the houses in their neighbor­hood were burnt; another massacre and captivity followed. Blood ran through the streets and even in the Temple courts. The hill on which the Palace of David had stood was fortified with a separate wall, took the name of "The Height" (Acra), and was occupied with the Greek or Grecian party, the more irritating to those who still adhered to their country and their faith because it overlooked the Temple itself. It was regarded as a perpetual tempter, a personal enemy, an adversary or devil in stone. Over this fortress presided Philip, of rough Phrygian manners, and, more odious than all, the High Priest Menelaus, "who bore a heavy hand over all the citizens, having a malicious hatred against his countrymen the Jews".

168 B.C.
But the worst was still to come. As soon as the entanglements in his Egyptian war allowed him a respite for his Syrian projects, Antiochus determined that he would carry out his fixed plans of a rigid uniformity throughout the land – "that all should be one people and that everyone should hear his laws". There was not a corner of Judaea which was not now invaded by the emissaries of Polytheism, rendered yet more hateful by the assistance received from renegade Israelites. A special commissioner was sent to preside over this forced conversion; it is uncertain whether from Antioch, or, as if to introduce the new worship from its most genuine seat, from Athens. Under him, adopting the existing framework of the Jewish constitution for the purpose, "overseers" (as we have already seen expressed in the Greek original by the word which has passed into "Bishops") were sent throughout the several districts both of Judaea and Samaria. The Divinity to whom the Holy Mount of Jerusalem was to be dedicated was the Father of Gods and men – Jupiter Olympius, in whose honor Antiochus had already begun at Athens the stately temple, even in his own age a wonder of the world, of which the magnificent ruins still stand on the banks of the Ilissus. On Mount Gerizim – apparently because the Samaritans gave the new worship a more hospitable welcome – was planted the sanctuary of Jupiter Xenius, the patron of hospitality.

The Dionysiac festival was also established, and the grave Israelites were compelled to join in the Bacchanalian processions with wreaths of ivy round their heads – sometimes with the mark of the ivy‑leaf branded into their skins. The King's own special deity was not of his Grecian ancestry, but one borrowed from Rome – whether the War‑God Mars, Father of the Roman people, or Jupiter of the Capitoline Rock, to whom he began to build a splendid temple at Antioch – in either case, filling even the Jews, to whom all these divinities might have been thought equally repugnant, with a new thrill of sorrow, as indicating a disrespect even of the religions of his own race; and introducing a strange and terrible name. "He regarded not the God of his fathers, he honored the God of forces, a God whom his fathers knew not" – a God whose temples were fortresses.

In every town and village of the country were erected altars at which the inhabitants were compelled to offer sacrifices in the heathen form, and on the King's birthday to join in the sacrificial feast. The two chief external marks of Judaism the repose of the Sabbath and the proud badge of ancient civilization, the rite of circumcision – were strictly forbidden on pain of death. And at last the crowning misery of all, which sent a shock through the whole community, was the deliberate desecration of the Temple, not only by adapting it to Grecian worship, but by every species of outrage and dishonor, the great gates were burned. The name of the officer who had charge of setting fire to them was known and marked out – Callisthenes. Its smooth and well‑kept courts were left to be overgrown by rank vegetation, in the shelter of which, as in the groves of Daphne, the licentious rites of Antioch were carried on.

The Abomination of Desolation
Now came the culminating horror. It was the 23rd of the month Marchesvan (November) that the enclosure was broken between the outer and inner court; in after days the breaches were pointed out in thirteen places.

December (168 B.C.)
On the 15th of the next month (Chisleu – December) a small Grecian altar was planted on the huge platform of the altar of Zerubbabel in honor of the Olympian Jupiter. On the 25th the profanation was consummated by introducing a herd of swine and slaughtering them in the sacred precincts. One huge sow was chosen from the rest. Her blood was poured on the altar before the Temple and on the Holy of Holies within. A mess of broth was prepared from the flesh, and sprinkled on the copies of the Law. This was the "abomination of desolation" – the horror which made the whole place a desert. From that moment the daily offerings ceased, the perpetual light of the great candlestick was extinguished – the faithful Israelites fled from the precincts. When in the last great pollution of Jerusalem under the Romans, a like desecration was attempted, no other words could be found more solemn than those already used in regard to the Syrian distress. But this persecution was not confined to the extirpation of the national worship. Every Jew was constrained to conform to the new system. The children were no longer to receive the initiatory right of circumcision. The swine's flesh was forced into the mouths of the reluctant worshippers, who were compelled to offer the unclean animal on altars erected at every door and in every street. The books of the Law, multiplied and treasured with so much care from the days of Ezra, were burnt. Many assisted and bowed before the oppressor. One example was long held in horror, which shows that there were some who welcomed the intrusion with delight. There was a daughter of the priestly order of Bilgah, Miriam, who had married a Syrian officer, and with him entered the Temple, and, as they approached the altar, she struck the altar with her shoe, exclaiming, "Thou insatiable wolf, how much longer art thou to consume the wealth of Israel, though thou canst not help them in their hour of need?" It was the remembrance of the rapacity of her family, so it was said, that drove her into this fierce reaction.

The Persecution
When the worship was restored, the disgrace which she had brought on the order was perpetuated, and they alone of the priestly courses had no separate store‑room, or separate rings for their victims. But others dared the worst rather than submit. Some concealed themselves in the huge caverns in the neighboring hills, and were there suffocated by fires lighted at the mouth. Two mothers were hanged on the wall, with their dead babes at their breasts, whom they had circumcised. A venerable scribe of ninety years of age, Eleazar, steadily refused to retain the hated swine's flesh in his mouth; stripped of his clothes, but, as the latest version finely expresses it, wrapped in the dignity of old age and piety, like a fine athlete in the Grecian games, he walked boldly to the rack, on which he was scourged to death. "I will show myself such an one as mine age requireth, and leave a notable example to such as be young to die willingly and courageously for the honourable and holy laws". Most memorable was the slow torture by which the mother and her seven sons expired. It was told in a narrative couched, like the martyrologies of Christian times, in exaggerated language, and disfiguring the noble protestations of the sufferers by the invocations of curses on the persecutors, but still forcibly expressing the living testimony of conscience against the interference of power, the triumph of the spirit over outward suffering. The very implements of torture are the same which have lived on through all the centuries in which theological hatred and insane cruelty have overborne the natural affections of the human heart. The rack, the wheel, the scourge and the flame have been handed on from Antiochus; to Diocletian, to the Council of Constance, to Philip II., to Calvin, to Louis XIV.

These are the first of the noble army of martyrs to whom history has given a voice. "Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona". Those who were slain by Jezebel or Manasseh may in their deaths have nourished a courage as high and a faith as firm. But they passed to their reward in silence. In the earlier account even of those who fell under the tyranny of Antiochus, their end is described with a severe brevity, which for solemn impressiveness leaves nothing to be desired, "So then they died". But the later account places in the mouths of the sufferers the words destined to animate the long succession of the victims of religious intolerance, whether heathen against Christian, Christian against Jew, Catholic against Protestant, or Protestant against Protestant.

"What wouldst thou ask or learn? We are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers. It is manifest unto the Lord that hath the holy knowledge that whereas I might have been delivered from death, I now endure grievous pains in body, but in soul I am well content to suffer these things because I fear Him".

In this sense Eleazar was justly honored in the ancient Church as the Proto‑Martyr. The seven brothers were, by a bold fiction of ecclesiastical law, entitled "Christian Martyrs" – Christianum nomen, postea divulgatum, factis antecesserunt.

The Maccabaean Psalms
In this terrible crisis it is not surprising that whatever sparks of the spirit of the Psalmist and the Prophet still lingered should once more have been evoked from the depths of the national heart. There are at least two Psalms (74 and 79) which can hardly be the expressions of any period but this. They describe with passionate grief details of the profanation of the sanctuary, the gates in flames, savage soldiers with axe and hatchet hewing down the delicate carved work like woodmen in a forest, the roar of an irreverent multitude, and erection of heathen emblems. They sigh over the indignity of the corpses slain in the successive massacres, left outside of the walls of the city to be devoured by vulture and jackal. They look in vain for a Prophet to arise. They console themselves with the recollection of the overthrow of huge monsters of earlier empires, and with the hope that in like manner this crisis will pass.

The Psalter of Solomon
Another burst of anguish was in the eighteen Psalms ascribed to Solomon, but probably of this epoch. In them we see the battering‑ram beating down the walls, the proud heathens stalking through the Temple courts, not so much as taking off their shoes; we hear the bitter curses on those who endeavor to please men, and who, dissemble their own convictions; we see those who frequented the synagogues wandering in the deserts; we watch the expectation of some anointed of the Lord who should, like David, deliver them from their enemies.

The Book of Daniel
But there was a yet more important addition to the sacred literature of this period. Even those who would place the composition of the Book of Daniel at an earlier time will not deny that this was the exact date – to be measured almost by the year and month – when as a whole or piecemeal it made its appearance and significance felt throughout the suffering nation.

Antiochus was on his way northward from Egypt. The complete suppression of the Temple sacrifices might then have lasted a twelvemonth, and everything had reached that state of extreme tension when the ancient religion upon its sacred soil must either disappear from view completely for long ages, or must rise in fresh strength and outward power against enemies thus immoderately embittered. It was at this crisis, in the sultry heat of an age thus frightfully oppressive, that this book appeared with its sword‑edge utterance, its piercing exhortation to endure in face of the despot, and its promise, full of Divine joy, of near and sure salvation. No dew of heaven could fall with more refreshing coolness on the parched ground, no spark from above alight with a more kindling power on the surface so long heated with a hidden glow. With winged brevity the book gives a complete survey of the history of the kingdom of God upon earth, showing the relations which it had hitherto sustained in Israel to the successive great heathen empires of the Chaldæans, Medo‑Persians, and Greeks – in a word, towards the heathenism which ruled the world; and with the finest perception it describes the nature and individual career of Antiochus Epiphanes and his immediate predecessors so far as was possible in view of the great events which had just occurred. Rarely does it happen that a book appears as this did, in the very crisis of the times, and in a form most suited to such an age, artificially reserved, close and severe, and yet shedding so clear a light through obscurity, and so marvelously captivating. It was natural that it should soon achieve a success entirely corresponding to its inner truth and glory. And so, for the last time in the literature of the Old Testament, we have in this book an example of a work which, having sprung from the deepest necessities of the noblest impulses of the age, can render to that age the purest service; and which by the development of events immediately after, receives with such power the stamp of Divine witness that it subsequently attains imperishable sanctity.

Whether the narrative of the faithful Israelites in the court of Nebuchadnezzar and of Darius had been handed down from the Exile, or whether they were then produced for the first time, the practical result must have been the same. As the seven sons are the first examples of the heroic testimony of martyrs' words, so the narrative of the Three Children in the Fire and of Daniel in the Lions' Den is the first glorification, the first canonization, so to speak, of the martyr spirit. And accordingly at this time we find them first cited as encouragements and consolations.

The Asmonean family
At this stage of its history, when Israel rises once more, even though but for a brief period, to the pure elevation of its noblest days, it was fitting that the first beginning of a serious resistance should come about involuntarily, as it were by a higher necessity, almost without the co‑operation of human self‑will and human passion; still less with any aid of human calculation, yet, by the force of human courage, skill and perseverance, working as if without any Divine interposition.

The Psalter of Solomon had expressed its hope that an anointed or priestly hero should arise to save the people. The expectation of Daniel was that, after the monster forms of Empires, tearing and rending each other to pieces, there should rise a Deliverer in human form, "A son of man", with all the gentle and noble qualities of man. They were not deceived. Such a one was at hand.

There was a priestly family known by the unusual name of its chief of four generations back, Chasmon or Asmon, "The Magnate". Its present head, Mattathias, was advanced in years with five sons in the prime of life. At the beginning of the persecution the whole family retired from Jerusalem to their country residence in the town of Modin or Modein, on the slope of the hills which descend from the passes of Judaea into the plains of Philistia or Sharon.

"Who can encounter the sun at midsummer? Everyone escapes and seeks a shelter. So everyone fled from the Grecian kingdom and its armies. Only the Priest Mattathias and his sons remained faithful to God, and the armies of Antiochus were dispersed before them, and were exterminated".

Such is almost the sole notice in the later Talmudic literature of this return of the heroic age of Israel. But the vacancy is amply filled by the treble account which the three generations immediately near the time supplied.

The war of independence began, as often, from a special incident. At Modin, as elsewhere through Palestine, an altar had been erected on which the inhabitants were expected to join in the Greek sacrifices. Mattathias, who had indignantly refused to take part, was so enraged at the sight of the compliance of one of his countrymen that "his reins trembled; neither could he forbear to show his anger according to judgment". Both sacrificer and royal officer fell victims to this sudden outburst of indignation, which the historian compares to that of the ancient Phinehas. The die was cast. It was like the story of Tell in Switzerland, or of the Sicilian Vespers. Mattathias raised his war‑cry of "Zeal" and of "the Covenant", and dashed with his whole family into the adjacent mountains. There they herded like wild animals in the limestone caverns, protected against the weather by the rough clothing of the Syrian peasants, taken off the backs of the white sheep or black goats on which they fed, together with such roots and vegetables as they could find, so as to avoid the chance of the polluted heathen food.

Whenever they encountered a heathen altar they destroyed it. Whenever they found a neglected child they circumcised it. Their spirit rose with the emergency. "The venerable leader felt his soul lifted by the higher need above the minute precepts of the Scribes", and determined to break the sabbatical repose which had so often exposed them to ruin.

"If we all do as our brethren have done, and fight not for our lives and laws against the heathen, they will now quickly root us out of the earth. Whosoever shall come to make battle with us on the Sabbath day, we will fight against him; neither will we all die as our brethren that were murdered".

For a moment even the rigid party of "the Chasidim" threw in their lot with the loftier patriotism of Mattathias; and in the first year of the revolt when he sank under the weight of age and care, the whole nation joined in interring him in the ancestral tomb at Modin, which henceforth became a sacred place, to which child after child of that renowned family was borne.

If it was a stroke of rare fortune that the insurrection thus broke out undesignedly and was set on foot by such a blameless character, it was no less fortunate that he left behind him a heroic band of five sons, who were ready to carry on the contest without an instant's delay. Seldom has the world seen an instance of five brothers animated by the same spirit, and without mutual jealousy sacrificing themselves for the same cause, of whom one only survived another in order to carry it on, if possible, with more zeal and success, while not one had anything in view but the great object for which his father had fallen.

In turn each of the five sons succeeded to the chieftainship of the family, and each had a separate surname to distinguish him from the many who bore like names among the Jewish people. The eldest, John, was "the Holy" or "the Lucky"; the second, Simon, was "the Burst of Spring", or "the Jewel"; the fourth, Eleazar, was "the Beast‑sticker"; the fifth, Jonathan, was "the Cunning". But of all these surnames, whether given in their lifetimes or afterwards from their exploits, the only one which has survived to later times and covered the whole clan with glory, is that of the third brother Judas, who received the name of the "Hammer", Maccab, possibly connected with the name of the ancestor of the family Asmon,possibly also commemorated in the original Hebrew name of the book which described his fame – "The Avenging Rod of the Prince of the Sons of God".

Judas Maccabaeus
He it was whom Mattathias in his last moments recommended as the military leader – "as mighty and strong from his youth up. Let him be your captain and fight the battle of the people". At once he took the vacant place. At once he became the Jewish ideal of "The Happy Warrior". There was "a cheerfulness" diffused through the whole army when he appeared. His countrymen delighted to remember the stately appearance, as of an ancient giant, when he fastened on his breast‑plate, or tightened his military sash around him, or waved his protecting sword (a sword itself renowned, as we shall see, both in history and legend) over the camp of his faithful followers. They listened with delight for the loud cheer, the roar as of a young lion – the race not yet extinct in the Jordan valley – with which he scented out the Israelite renegades, chasing them into their recesses, and smoking or burning them out. They exulted in his victory over the three, "the many", kings. But the lasting honor which they pathetically regarded as the climax of all was that with a true chivalry "he received such as were ready to perish".

Battle of Samaria (166 B.C.)
Three decisive victories in the first two years of the campaign secured his fame and success. The first was against the Syrian general Apollonius, apparently near Samaria. The trophy which Judas retained of the battle was the sword of the distinguished general, which he carried, as David did that of the Philistine giant, to the end of his life.

Battle of Bethhoron
The second was in the mountains near his native place, and on the spot already ennobled by the overthrow of the Canaanite kings by Joshua in the Pass of Bethhoron.

Battle of Emmaus
The third and most decisive struggle brings before us in a lively form the various elements of the war. The King was absent on an expedition into Persia, but no less than three generals, Ptolemy, Nicanor, and Gorgias, are mentioned by name under Lysias (Governor of the whole Syrian province), and the young Antiochus (heir of the throne). Both Lysias and Antiochus were head‑quartered at Emmaus – "the hot baths" in the Philistine plain. The interest of the merchants in the seaport towns of Philistia was engaged by the hope of the sale of Israelite insurgents for slaves. In this crisis Judas led his scanty host over the mountains to the ridge of Mizpeh, the spot where Alexander had met Jaddua, where, after the Chaldaean capture of Jerusalem the pilgrims had come to wail over the holy city. It was a mournful scene. From that high, rocky platform they could see the deserted streets, the walls and gates closed as if of a besieged town, the silent precincts of the Temple, and the Greek garrison in the fortress.

Before that distant presence of the holy place, to which they could gain no nearer access, the mourners come wrapped in tatters of black hair‑cloth, with ashes on their heads. They spread out copies of the Law, on which in mockery the Greeks had painted pictures of heathen deities. They waved the sacerdotal vestments, for which there was now no use. They showed the animals and vegetables due for first-fruits and tithes. In long procession they passed the Nazarites with their flowing tresses, who were unable to dedicate themselves in the sanctuary. And at the close of this sorrowful ceremony there was a blast of trumpets, and the army was sifted of its timid or pre‑engaged members. Judas addressed his stirring harangue to the gallant remainder. He reminded them of their ancient and recent deliverances among those same hills and vales – in ancient days of the overthrow of Sennacherib; in recent days of the battle in which the comparative prowess of the Israelite and Macedonian troops was tested by an encounter with the Celtic invaders of Asia in which the Jews turned the fortunes of the day when the Greeks fled. The army was placed in four parts under himself and his three brothers Simon, John, and Jonathan, while the fifth, Eleazar, was commissioned to recite "the Holy Book" and proclaim his own name as the watchword – Eleazar, "the help of God". After these preparations, Judas descended from the hills by night and leaving his empty camp as a prey to Gorgias, the commander of the garrison at Jerusalem suddenly attacked the forces of Nicanor at Emmaus. Once more was heard the well known trumpet‑blast of the Israelite host, and a complete rout followed. Nothing could stand the enthusiastic ardor of the insurgents, slightly armed as they were.

It was a Friday afternoon, and Judas gave the command to halt from pursuing the fleeing enemy. From the ridge of the mountain which overlooked the plain, the Grecian army saw the columns of smoke rising from the plains, announcing that their countrymen's camp had been stormed. The Sabbath, on whose eve the battle closed, had now set in; and as the gorgeous spoils of gold, silver, blue silk, and Tyrian purple were spread out, they sang the hundred and thirty‑sixth Psalm – the national anthem, it may be called, of the Jewish race which enumerates the examples of God's never‑ending goodness. It would hardly have been in keeping with the national character if this day had passed without some terrible vengeance. One of the subordinate officers was caught and slain. They forced Callisthenes, who had set fire to the gateways of the Temple, into a village hut and burned him alive.

Battle of Beth-zur (165 B.C.)
Yet another victory was needed to secure their entrance into Jerusalem. It was won in the course of the next year over Lysias himself, in the immediate vicinity of the capital, at Beth‑zur, "the House of the Rock" – a fort which commanded the Idumaean border, possibly represented by the lonely tower which now overhangs the stony passes on the way to Hebron. From that moment they were masters of Jerusalem. The desolation, which before could only be seen from the height of Mizpeh, they now were able to approach without impediment. The Greek garrison was still in the fortress, but the Temple was left open. They entered and found the scene of havoc which the Syrian occupation had left. The corridors of the Priests' chambers which encircled the Temple were torn down; the gates were in ashes, the altar was disfigured, and the whole platform was overgrown as if with a mountain jungle or forest glade. It was a heart‑rending spectacle. Their first impulse was to cast themselves headlong on the pavement and blow the loud horns which accompanied all mournful as well as all joyous occasions – the tocsin as well as the chimes of the nation. Then, while the foreign garrison was kept at bay, the warriors first began the elaborate process of cleansing the polluted place. Out of the sacerdotal tribe those were chosen who had not been compromised with the Greeks.

The Dedication
The first object was to clear away every particle which had been touched by unclean animals. On the 22nd of Marchesvan they removed the portable altar which had been erected. On the 3rd of Chisleu they removed the smaller altars from the court in front of the Temple and the various Pagan statues. Lest its stones should have been polluted and with utmost care they pulled down, as it would seem, the great platform of the altar itself. But, with the scrupulosity which marked the period, they considered that stones once consecrated could never be entirely desecrated and accordingly hid them away in a corner of the Temple (it was believed in one of the four closets of the fireroom of the Priest at the north‑west corner), there to remain till the Prophet (it may be Elijah, the solver of riddles) should come and tell what was to be done with them. How many stones of spiritual or intellectual edifices excite a like perplexed fear lest they have been so misused that they cannot be employed again – at least till some prophet comes to tell how and when.

For the interior of the Temple everything had to be furnished afresh – vessels, candlesticks, tables, curtains, and incense altar. At last all was completed, and on the 25th of Chisleu, the same day that three years before the profanation had occurred, the Temple was re‑dedicated – the time either predicted or commemorated in the Book of Daniel. Three and a half years from the time the first beginning of the sacrilege was over, and the rebound of the national sentiment was in proportion. "It was the feast of the dedication and it was winter", but the depth of the winter could not restrain the burst of joy. From the first dawn of that day and throughout the following week there were songs of joy sung with cymbals and harps. In the Psalms ascribed to Solomon there are exulting strains which echo the words of the Evangelical Prophet and welcome the return into Jerusalem. The smoke once more went up from the altar; the gates and even the priestly chambers were fumigated. The building itself was studded with golden crowns and shields, imitating the golden shields which in the first Temple had adorned the porch. What most lived in the recollection of the time was that the perpetual light blazed again. The golden candlestick was no longer to be had. Its place was taken by an iron chandelier cased in wood. But this sufficed.

It was a solemn moment when the sacred fire was once again kindled on the new altar, and from it the flame communicated to the rest of the building. As in the modern ceremony of the "Sacred Fire" in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so this incident was wrapped in mystery and legend. The simple historical account is that they procured the light by striking the fresh unpolluted stones against each other. But later representations, going back to the like events of Nehemiah's life, imagined some preternatural origin of the fire itself. It was further supposed that one unpolluted cruse was found which furnished the oil for the lighting of the Temple during the whole week of the festival; in remembrance of which every private house was illuminated, beginning, according to one usage, with eight candles and decreasing as the week went on; according to the other usage, beginning with one and advancing to eight. Partly, no doubt, from these traditions or (as Josephus thinks) from the returning joy of the whole nation, the festival in after days bore the name "Feast of Lights". This would receive yet a fuller significance in connection with another aspect of this great day.

Though latest of all the Jewish festivals, still, it took rank at once with the earlier holy days. It won for itself a sanctity which neither the dedication of Solomon nor Zerubbabel had acquired. Both of these consecrations bad been arranged to coincide with the great autumnal Feast of the Tabernacles, the most festive of the Jewish solemnities. While the patriots were hiding in the mountains that season passed. Therefore, if celebrated at all, it had been shorn of its general gaiety or defiled by an attempted combination with the Bacchanalian festival to which its peculiarities lent themselves. However, now it was determined to make this new solemnity a repetition, as it were, of the Feast of Tabernacles. It was called in later days "The Tabernacle Feast of the Winter"; and on this, its first occasion, there were blended with it the usual processions of that joyful autumnal holiday, brandishing their woven branches of the palm and other trees whose evergreen foliage cheered the dull aspect of a Syrian December. And we can hardly doubt that in accordance with the name of the "Feast of Lights", they would add to its celebration that further characteristic of the Feast of Tabernacles, i.e., the illumination of the whole precincts of the Temple by two great chandeliers placed in the court, by the fight of which festive dances were kept up throughout the night.

There was an additional propriety in the transference of the natural festival of the vintage to this new feast because it coincided with the natural solemnity of welcoming the first light kindled in the New Year. The 25th of December was at Tyre, as at Rome in later times, celebrated as the birthday of the Sun, Hercules, and the Melcarth of the Phoenician theology dying on his funeral pyre and reviving, phoenix‑like, from his own ashes. It was the revival, the renewal, the Encaenia of man and nature.

The Temple was the kernel of Judaea, and having won that, the Maccabaeans might be said to have won everything. Still, it was surrounded by a circle of enemies. Close at hand was the fortress occupied by the Syrian garrison. Against this and apparently for the first time in Jewish history, Judas took the precaution of surrounding the entire Temple mount with high walls and strong towers, which remained as a permanent feature of the place. The two hostile parties stood entrenched in their respective positions, without mutual interference, like the rival factions in Jerusalem during the siege of Titus or in Paris during its great insurrections.

Campaign against Edom (164 B.C.)
But on the further circumference there were three distinct sources of alarm. On the south was Edom, whose territory now reached within a few miles of Jerusalem. On the east were the malignant tribes of Ammon and Moab. And on the north and west was that fringe of Grecian colonies which had been established chiefly in the ancient Canaanite or Philistine cities, by the Ptolemaean or Syrian kings. The year following on the dedication of the Temple it was entirely occupied with repelling the intrusion of these hereditary enemies. The first effort of Judas was in the south against the old hereditary foe, the race of Esau. On the frontier of that territory was the craggy fortress commanding the pass and, from its situation called the House of the Rock (Beth‑zur), already contested in the battle with Lysias. This was occupied by Judas as an outpost against Edom and from this he attacked the entire hostile race. Now the hope expressed in the bitterness of the Babylonian Exile that a conqueror should return from those bated fastnesses, wading knee‑deep in the blood of Edom, and with his garments stained as if from the red winepress of the battle‑fields of Bozra began to be fulfilled. From their entrenchments at the bead or foot of the Pass of Akrabbim he swept eastward and drove a tribe, terrible then, unnamed before or since, "the children of Bean", into their "towers" or "peels", which, in the savage spirit of Jewish retaliation, he burned with all their occupants. Thus, still pressing onward in skirmish after skirmish routed the Ammonites, under their Greek commander Timotheus, and returned in triumph. But the campaign was only half completed. The widespread magic of the name Judas is wonderfully attested by the entreaties for succor that pursued him into his brief repose at Jerusalem.

Beyond Jordan
One came from the Transjordanic district which he had just left, announcing that Timotheus had rallied his forces and driven the Israelites of the district into the fortress of Dathema (site now unknown); another, borne by messengers with torn clothes in expression of the extremity of their distress, to announce that the Grecian settlers in the north and west had risen against the inhabitants of Galilee. Instantly, Judas made his arrangements. To the north he sent his eldest brother Simon, whose exploits are briefly told, but who succeeded in driving back the Grecian armies across the Plain of Esdraelon to the very gates of Ptolemais. He himself took the ground, already familiar to him, in the Transjordanic forests reserving for his assistance his brother "Jonathan the Cunning". As travelers now, so then, he gained the alliance of a friendly Arabian tribe. Throughout the district inhabitants had shut themselves up for refuge in the numerous towns which of old had been renowned for the high walls which acted as defenses against the Bedouins of the adjacent desert. The Greek leader had laid his plans for a simultaneous attack on all those fortresses on the same day. But at the very moment when at early dawn the scaling‑ladders were planted and the battering‑rams prepared against one of the most important, there broke through the stillness of the morning the well‑known trumpet‑blast which the Grecian general recognized as the signal that the Hammer of the Gentiles was at hand, and the siege was raised, and the besiegers fled.

Another fight followed on the banks of one of the mountain torrents that descend from the hills of Gilead to the Jordan. While his adversaries wavered, Judas dashed across the stream and down the way before him to the great sanctuary of Atargatis with the Two Horns and there destroyed them. This was the crowning act of his series of victories, gained, as we are assured, without the loss of a single Israelite, and the victor returned laden with spoil, followed by vast masses of the Transjordanic population. On his way, in the pride of conquest he destroyed the tower of Ephron which refused them admittance. He crossed the Jordan, at the ford by which Gideon had returned from a like victorious expedition, to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost in triumph at Jerusalem. And now that all was thus secured he completed his successes by one more sally into Edom, reducing the ancient Hebron, since the Exile converted into an Idumaean fortress, and destroying the last stronghold of the old Philistine worship at Ashdod.

Death of Antiochus Epiphanes (164 B.C.)
In this climax of Israel's resistance there came the tidings that King Antiochus was suddenly dead. Alike in Greek and Jewish records, fable gathered round the end of this splendid but wayward prince. Even to his own co‑religionists there was a strange significance in his sudden disappearance. It seemed to them as if it was a judgment for his reckless attack on the Temple of Nanea or the Moon‑Goddess, in Persia; and one of the Jewish accounts represented him as having perished in his assault on the shrine. But not unnaturally the Hebrew historians connected the unexpected close of their persecutor's career with his mortification at the reception of the tidings of their hero's victories; and it agrees with their occasional recognition of some sparks of generous feeling in his capricious courses that they give him the credit of a death‑bed repentance for his misdeeds – in the latest account even a complete revocation of his tyrannical edicts. It was, no doubt, the crisis of the contest. Whether the mysterious counselor, who, under the name of the Babylonian seer had sketched in such minute detail the fortunes of the Struggle till the moment of the desecration of the Temple, saw or foresaw the death of the persecutor is doubtful. In the Book of Daniel there are dim anticipations of his end; but none of the frightful details with which the historians of the next generation abound.

Although it still continued, from this moment the struggle becomes more complicated, and its fluctuating results more difficult to follow, more so as the ultimate success of the insurgents was now assured. On both sides there was the entanglement of a civil war. With a large body of adherents, Alcimus, Eliakim, or Jehoiakim maintained his position in Jerusalem as High Priest, by the influence of the Syrian Court against the Maccabaean warrior. Antiochus, the young prince, with Lysias as his guardian, had to fight for his crown against his uncle, Demetrius. But, leaving the details which obscure the main thread of events, we may fix our attention on the conflict which raged in the closest quarters between the two rival fortresses in Jerusalem itself. The Temple mount was occupied by the insurgents; the ancient citadel of David was occupied by the Greeks.

Second Battle of Beth-zur
To secure this position a vast army was sent by Lysias down the Jordan valley, which then besieged the Judean outpost of Beth‑zur, already taken and retaken. It was here that a battle took place of which the unprecedented circumstances left a deep impression on the Jewish mind. It was one of the peculiarities of Alexander's remote conquests that, during this century, for the first and last time in Western history, the Indian and African elephants were brought into play in military achievements. The Syrian and Alexandrian kings especially prided themselves on their display of these vast creatures. As a result of this passion, one of them had been known as "the elephant‑master", and had given five hundred as a wedding‑present to his daughter. On this occasion the elephants were distributed among the army and in Macedonian fashion ranged in phalanxes or columns. Each animal rose like a mountain from a troop of 1,000 infantry and 500 cavalry, of which it was the center. The animals were roused to fury by showing them the red juice of grapes and mulberries. Their advance was magnificent. The attendant soldiers were dressed in chain armor, their helmets were of bright brass, their shields of brass or gold. Huge wooden towers rose on the backs of the elephants, fastened on by vast trappings. The black Indian driver was conspicuous on the neck of each animal, with a group of two or three soldiers round him, which the Israelites magnified into a whole troop. Those who have seen the effect of even an ordinary military escort defiling through the grey hills and tufted valleys of Judaea can imagine the effect of this vast array of splendor – when "the sun shone on the shields and helmets of gold and brass", the whole range of the rocky ridges and winding glens "glistened therewith around, and shined like blazing torches". The noise of the multitude, the tramp of huge beasts, the rattling of armor and caparisons was portentous. Fantastic traditions of this fight lingered in various forms; a heavenly champion in white and gold – a charge like the spring of lions against walls of steel, the watchword "Victory is of God". But the sober fact was that for once the small band of Judas's indomitable infantry failed in the face of such tremendous odds; however, not before the achievement of one memorable deed. Eleazar, the fourth of the illustrious brothers, singling out an elephant which, from its towering howdah he imagined to bear the young Prince, determined to sacrifice his life. He found his way through the hostile ranks, crept under the elephant and by one thrust brought down the enormous beast upon himself – perishing, but by his daring act winning the perpetual name which he desired. He was known to the next generation as Avaran, "the Beast sticker".

Nicanor (162 B.C.)
The next decisive move was the victory over Nicanor, who, was chosen to make an attack on Jerusalem from the fanatical hatred he bore against the insurgents, and whose name accordingly long survived the memory of Lysias, Bacchides, Timotheus, and the rest, who come and pass like shadows.

He had already taken part in the conflict at the time of the battle of Emmaus and a peculiar pathos is given to his history by the circumstance that among all their opponents at this period, of him alone there remained a tradition, difficult to reconcile with the hard language in which he is generally described, but quite consistent with human character – that whatever might be his animosity against the Jewish nation, he had, perhaps from admiration of the earlier prowess displayed in their first encounter, conceived a strong personal admiration and affection for Judas Maccabaeus. The momentary consternation by which his sudden appearance checked His meeting the insurgents under Simon, gave him the opportunity of opening friendly communications with Judas himself. There was a natural suspicion.

His Meeting with Judas
But Judas came to Jerusalem, and for the first time the two foes came face to face, and in a moment each appreciated the other. They sat side by side on chairs of state, like the curule seats of Roman magistrates. The Syrian general was completely fascinated. He could not bear to have Judas out of his sight – "he loved the man from his heart". He entered into his future plans. He entreated him to lay aside this wandering course, to have a wife and children of his own. He held out the picture of marriage and a quiet and settled home. The High Priest's office was apparently suggested as the haven of the warrior's stormy career. If we may trust the brief sentence which follows, Judas accepted the advice so cordially that the long‑delayed event took place – he married, and for a time settled quietly and happily in domestic life. Suddenly all was changed. The jealous rival Alcimus, seeing in this friendship the ruin of his own hopes, denounced Nicanor to the King and procured an order that Judas should be sent as prisoner to Antioch. Nicanor was deeply hurt. He could not break his plighted troth to his friend, but he could not venture to disobey the royal order. His uneasy conscience showed itself in the fierceness of his temper and roughness of his manners. Judas boded no good and escaped. A skirmish took place between him and some of the royal troops at Capharsalama in the Plain of Sharon. The two friends parted to meet no more.

The excited tradition of the next generation represented the furious Greek as standing in the great outer court of the Temple – the priests and chiefs of the people vainly endeavoring to propitiate him by showing him the offering prepared on the altar for the welfare of the Syrian king. With an insulting gesture Nicanor stretched out his hand to the Temple and swore that unless Judas was given up to him he would level the building, break down the altar, and erect on its site a Temple to the Grecian Bacchus. The terrified hierarchy, as in the old days, took up their position between the altar and the Temple, invoking Divine aid for their sanctuary so recently purified. Among those who were especially obnoxious to Nicanor was Rhazis, a Jew conspicuous for his austere patriotism. He was determined not to give the enemy the chance of insulting him by capture, and, rather than yield, endeavored to destroy himself, first by falling on his sword in the tower where he had taken refuge, then springing from the tower to the ground, and then, despite his ghastly wounds, throwing himself headlong from one of the precipitous cliffs of the city. All this stamped the memory of Nicanor with additional horror.

Battle of Beth-horon (161 B.C.)
In the fitting place and from the fitting man, at last vengeance came. In that same memorable pass of Beth‑horon where Judas had gained his first victory, he was now to gain his last. There, among his native hills he was encamped at a village at the foot of the Pass. He felt that it was again one of the critical moments of his life; and his address (so it was believed in the next generation) partook of that strong historic enthusiasm which marked his character. He told his army that in his dreams he had seen Onias the last blameless High Priest before the disorders of the time began, whose intercessions had called down the ministers of Divine wrath on Heliodorus, and who had fallen victim to the sacrilegious jealousy of his rivals in the laurel groves of Daphne. As in life the venerable man with his reverend demeanor, his gentle manners, his gracious utterance, the model of virtuous training from his youth up‑ward had appeared the true dignified Priest, the true Israelite nobleman. As of old in the Temple, so had he seemed to be standing with his hands outstretched in prayer for the whole host of Judaea. Suddenly, in answer to the High Priest's supplication, there started into view the apparition of a magnificent, hoary‑headed figure of lofty stature and commanding presence. "This", said Onias "is the lover of our brethren, the intercessor for our people and our holy city. This is Jeremiah, the Prophet of God". In that age of silent expectation this welcome vision of the Suffering Servant of the Eternal, who had come to be regarded almost as the Patron Saint of Palestine, might well have presented itself to the devout warrior's sleeping thoughts. As if with a pledge of support, the Prophet seemed to stretch out his right hand and gave to Judas a golden sword. It was not merely like the short weapon which he had hitherto wielded from the day when he took it from the dead hand of his earliest foe Apollonius, but the huge broadsword of the Macedonian phalanxes. "Take this holy sword", said the Prophet, "and with it thou shalt crush thine enemies".

The battle was felt to be decisive, especially for the Temple, which ran the risk of another defilement or destruction that would undo all the labor and joy of the recent dedication. Alike in the mountain pass and in Jerusalem, from which the hills that encompass Beth‑horon are visible, the "agony" was intense. The intrepid chief with his small band saw the huge and variegated host approaching, furious elephants snorting in the center, the cavalry hovering on the wings. It was certainly a time and place to invoke Divine aid which supports the few against the many. It was not only the spot where Joshua had defeated the kings of Canaan, but where tradition fixed the more recent deliverance from Sennacherib. With these thoughts (and in this both the earlier and later narratives substantially agree) Judas raised his hands to heaven, and called on the All‑seeing, Wonder‑working God.

"Thou, O Lord, sentedst thine angel in the reign of Hezekiah and didst destroy from the camp of Sennacherib an hundred and fourscore and five thousand. Now, O Ruler of the Heavens, send a good angel before us and strike terror and trembling, and with Thy mighty arm may they be struck down, who have come with blasphemy against Thy Holy Temple!"

In accord with their triumphal heathen war‑songs, the army of Nicanor came on with trumpets sounding. The army of Judas advanced "fighting with their hands and praying with their hearts". The rout was complete.

161 B.C.
The neighboring villages and surrounding hills were roused by the horn of the Maccabee to intercept the passes and cut off the fugitives. There was a later tradition still, that when Judas encountered his former friend in the battle he called out, "Take care of thyself, Nicanor – it is to thee that I come!"

Death of Nicanor
But in the earlier version it was not by the hand of Judas that Nicanor was slain; he fell in the first onset of the battle, and it was only after its close that his corpse was found, recognized by his splendid armor. Wild was the exultation, loud the shout, with which in their own Hebrew tongue the Jewish army blessed their Divine Deliverer. Then (it is no unfitting conclusion) laden with spoil, they came in triumph to Jerusalem. Among the trophies the most conspicuous were the head of Nicanor, his right hand and arm from the shoulder downward which they had severed from the body as it lay on the battlefield. The Priests assembled before the altar to receive them. The head and hand (like Hasdrubal's in Hannibal's camp) were held up before the Greek garrison in the fortress. The head was fastened to the fortress itself. The hand, which had been so proudly stretched forth in defiance against the Temple, was nailed to the main eastern entrance of the inner court, known long after as the Gate Beautiful, but also as "the Gate of Nicanor" from this terrible reminiscence. The tongue with which the insults were spoken was cut into small pieces and thrown for the birds to devour. It was a savage revenge, so savage, and, in the sacred precincts, approaching so nearly to a profanation, that neither Josephus nor the earlier historian venture to mention it; but told in such detail and so confirmed by long tradition and by analogous usage in so many a Christian country, that there seems no reason to doubt it. One further honor was to be bestowed on the victory. It was a day already auspicious, the 13th of the month Adar, the eve of the Feast of Purim, or, as the historian calls it, the eve of "Mordecai's Day"; and the anniversary itself was to be hereafter called "Nicanor's Day".

Battle of Eleasa and Death of Judas (161 B.C.)
This was the crowning success of Judas. A wider sphere seemed opening before him; a new and powerful ally was on the point of joining his cause, when he was suddenly cut off. The Syrian army under Bacchides advanced down the Jordan valley to avenge the defeat of Nicanor. From a cause which the historian does not explain, but which incidental illustrations will enable us presently to indicate with fatal precision, Judas found a difficulty in mustering his forces. A veil, as it were, is drawn over his last effort. Even the place is uncertain. We cannot be sure whether he encountered the enemy in his old haunts in the valleys branching into the hills from his native village, or whether he had been decoyed away into the far north by the sources of Jordan, or by the caverned rocks which overhang the Lake of Gennesareth. In the latest traditions he is represented as advancing to the fight with the lion‑like port of his earlier days, and brandishing his sword, whether that which he had won from Apollonius or that which he had received from the Prophet in the vision at Beth‑horon. The famous trumpet sounded for the last time. From morning till night the conflict lasted. One wing of the Syrian army fled before the charge, but the other pursued the pursuers and the gallant champion was caught between the two. His watchword before the battle was cherished as his latest utterance. When he saw the odds against which he had to fight, "God forbid that I should do this thing and flee away from them; if our time be come, let us die manfully for our brethren, and let us not leave behind a stain upon our honour". His dead body was found by the two worthiest of his brothers; they laid him in the ancestral sepulcher at Modin and a dirge went up from the whole nation for him, like that of David over Saul and Jonathan: "How is the valiant man fallen, the deliverer of Israel!"

His Career
With the death of Judas ends the first stage of the struggle for independence. Hardly any character of the later days of Judaism so strikes the imagination as the hero who, of all military chiefs, accomplished the largest ends with the scantiest means, who from the brink of extermination raised his nation to a higher level of freedom than they had enjoyed since the fall of the Monarchy. "He had been ever the chief defender of his countrymen both in body and mind; he had maintained his early love for his people unbroken to the end". No conflict in their history has been more frequently recorded. Even David's story is told but twice; the story of the Maccabaean struggle is repeated at intervals of successive generations in no less than four separate versions. And around the struggle revolves the mysterious book which still exercises the critic, which still stirs the conscience, which filled the whole imagination of the coming centuries of the Jewish people. When some good men regard it as a disparagement of the Book of Daniel that it should have been evoked by the Maccabaean conflict, it is because they have not adequately conceived the grandeur of that crisis, nor recognized the fact that when, two centuries later, the final agony of the nation approached, there was no period which so naturally supplied the imagery for its hopes and fears as that which was covered by the blows and counterblows between Antiochus, the Brilliant Madman, and Judas, the Hammer of the Heathen. If in the visions of Daniel the anticipations of the deliverance are thought worthy of being announced by the Archangel Gabriel, if the hero who shall accomplish the deliverance is summoned to receive his reward by myriads of ministering spirits, not less in the poetic accounts of the Second Book of Maccabees does the valiant ruler with his little band appear surrounded by angelic champions. Sometimes, when he suddenly marches out of Jerusalem there starts up a horseman clothed in white, who heads the little band, brandishing his shield and spear of gold. Sometimes in the thick of the fray five splendid horsemen start as if from the sky, rattling their golden bridles, as if the celestial guardians of the five gallant brothers. One gallops before, and on each side of Maccabaeus ride, two and two, the other four, protecting him with shield and spear and sword and darting lightnings at their enemies.

Such apparitions are the outward expressions of the deep moral significance of the Maccabaean struggle. The sober style of the contemporary account is content with the moral qualities of the human hearts and hands by which the victory is won. But the interest is not less vivid, nor the glory of that "Son of Man" less transparent in the solid prose than in the radiant poetry of the period. Let us consider some of the characteristics from which this interest is derived.

1 – Narrowness of Conflict
There may be a momentary disappointment when we reflect that the special objects which provoked the contention were of such a nature that the highest religious minds of subsequent times have regarded them as trivial or temporary. The rite of circumcision, for which the choicest spirits of the nation fled into the caverns and hills of Palestine, was, two centuries later, regarded by Saul of Tarsus as absolutely indifferent. The Sabbath and the sabbatical year, for the sake of which they exposed themselves to defeat and ruin, were pronounced by him to be among the beggarly elements of the world – shadows and not realities. One of them has been  abandoned altogether by the Jewish race itself, the other has been so modified in the Christian world as to have almost ceased to bear the same name or serve the same end. The distinctions of food, which to the martyrs of the Maccabaean age were the tests for which they endured the cruelest torments, were (in the vision to Peter by the seashore at Joppa) declared not to be of the slightest importance in the sight of God. The sacrifices, of which the sudden extinction under the pressure of Antiochus seemed to be the cessation of the very pulse of religion, have vanished, and the neglect which once seemed to be the most terrible of desolations now reigns through every church and synagogue. Even the hated statues and pictures of heathen divinities, which filled the mind of every pious Israelite at that time with horror, now stand unchallenged at the corners of streets and adorn the walls of houses in the capitals of Europe and elsewhere throughout the world. Doubtless, as was urged by the Alexandrian Jew Philo at a later epoch, these usages each contributed to the support of the Jewish nationality, so that (to use his own homely illustration) "if one brick were taken out the whole house would have fallen to pieces". Yet still the fact remains that there was a narrowness in the conflict which in time was destined to make itself felt. And even without looking further than the career of Judas Maccabaeus, we see that the true interest of the struggle rose above these external watchwords, and that the heroic family which fought for them had a wider and deeper insight than belonged to any mere ceremonial forms.

2 – Elevation of Spirit
In this instance the danger lay in the absorption of Judaism not into the higher spirit of Athens or Alexandria, but into that basest and most corrupt form of heathenism of which the very name "Syrus" or "Syrian" was the byword. And the stern resistance to it is a signal example of the "stubbornness and stiffness of neck" which, says the Rabbinical tradition, Moses mentioned as a fault, but knowing in a prophetic spirit that it would be not the ruin but the salvation of the people against force, fraud, and persecution.

Because of having such an excessive tenacity to these outward symbols, it might have been thought the nation would have felt that in their loss all was lost and resigned itself to despair. Not so. With that inextinguishable fire of spiritual faith which burned beneath the superficial crust, it was recognized, even in that contention for the framework of things which so soon were ready to wax old and vanish away, that there was something better and more enduring even than Temple or sacrifice. That strain which we hear at the moment of the profanation of the sanctuary is the prelude of a higher mood. "God did not choose the people for the place's sake, but the place for the people's sake". The calamities which befell them were felt to be the consequence of their having been "wrapped in many sins". The tendency, so natural at such moments, to throw the blame on others was kept in check by the genuine and generous sentiment of self‑accusation which breathes through the histories and devotions of this period.

Of this elevation of religion the Maccabaean family were the main representatives, and thus an insensible undercurrent of divergence sprang up between them and the more fanatical of their followers. "The Pious" or "the Chasidim" are constantly mentioned as a party on whom the true patriots were obliged to count for support, but on whom they could not securely reckon. The unreasoning abstinence from self-defense on the Sabbath was put aside by Mattathias with a disdainful impatience – according to one account, with a fine insight into the spirit of the ancient Law in which he seemed to see that its purpose was not to destroy life but to save it. On more than one occasion the Priests brought dishonor on the cause by a fanatical foolhardiness, which the wise leader of the insurgents vainly strove to check. There was a secret reluctance in the stricter party to break altogether with the legitimate successor of Aaron, as represented in the renegade Priest Alcimus, and, although it is not expressly mentioned, we can hardly doubt that the elevation of the Maccabaean family to the High Priesthood, of which the first attempt was discerned in the case of Judas, though not realized till after his death in the person of his brother, must have been a rude shock to many a cherished prejudice. The race of Joarib from which they sprang was studiously disparaged; the very names of Modin and Maccabee were twisted into words of ignominy, signifying "rebellion", or "revolt". It would almost seem as if the enlarged policy of Judas in seeking allies from the outside world was the object of suspicion to the Mucklewraths and Macbriars of this older Covenant, and thus one of the causes of that sudden defection of his troops which cost him his life at the close of his career.

Nor did this alienation of the narrow spirit of the religious world of Judaism from the heroic chief to whom was due the restoration of the sanctuary and the nation terminate with the disaffection against which he had to contend in his lifetime. Enshrined as his memory was in the popular histories which live in the successive books called after him, it is a striking fact which can hardly be accidental that it is almost entirely disregarded in the traditions of the Talmudic schools. Not one of his exploits, not even his name, occurs in the Mishna. In the annual thanksgiving which commemorates the deliverance from Antiochus, the name of Judas is not mentioned and even the intervention of the family is veiled under the unhistorical name of Mattathias the High Priest. As Columba in Ireland, Joan of Arc in France, Robert the Bruce in Scotland, Simon de Montfort in England, so Judas Maccabaeus, neglected or disparaged by the ecclesiastical authorities, received his canonization only from the popular voice and the judgment of posterity. Yet in a certain sense this disparagement was from their point of view more just than he or they could have discerned at the time; even as the real grandeur of his cause by a strange irony is derived in large measure from the nobler side of the Grecian influences which he devoted his life to oppose.

3 – Patriotism
That spirit of patriotism which had been developed by the longings of the Captivity and the joy of the Return assumed at this epoch a form and style which, more than any previous incidents of the Jewish history, recalls the maxims of Greek and Roman history.

"We fight for our lives and our laws. The jeopardizing of a gallant soldier is to the end that he might deliver his people and win himself a perpetual name. Let us die manfully for our brethren and not stain our honor. I will show myself such as mine old age requireth, and leave a notable example to such as be going to die courageously for the honourable and holy laws".

These are expressions which are Gentile rather than Jewish, reminding one of Leonidas and Horatius Cocles more than of Moses or David. The career of Judas exemplifies the profound truth of the Scottish poet's invocation, "The Patriot's God peculiarly Thou art, His Friend, Inspirer, Guardian, and Reward". It is precisely because the name of Maccabaeus has a national and warlike rather than a theological savor, that he has deserved a special place among the heroes of mankind, as combining in one, in a preeminent degree, the associations of the patriot and saint. For this reason the old mediaeval romancers and artists did well when they placed him, not in the exclusive circle of Jewish or Christian hagiology, but in the larger sphere of the Nine Worthies drawn from every nation and land, not only with Joshua and David, but with Alexander and Caesar, with Arthur and Charlemagne.

4 – Gentile Philosophy
But the broader aspect of the Maccabaean history is not confined to its patriotic fervor. In the very language of the descriptions the Greek rhetoric has mingled with the Hebrew simplicity so strongly as to show how the zeal against Hellenism failed to resist its subtle and penetrating influence. Indeed, on the whole the first book of Maccabees retains the ancient style. The lament and parting counsels of Mattathias are such as might have come from the life of Jeremiah or Ezra. But even then the military and geographical details have a tincture of Polybius; and when we read the second book, the speeches and conversations have all the flow of the orations which Greek and Latin historians place in the mouths of their heroes. And yet further, when we arrive at the fourth book (of uncertain date and probably the last native offshoot of the literary stimulus of the Maccabaean age) it is not merely the form but the substance of the philosophy of Aristotle and Zeno which reigns supreme. As Ewald says, "It is our only specimen of a Jewish sermon". But it is a sermon without a sacred text or rather its text is the government of the Passions by the supremacy of Reason or Principle. It is Butler's Discourse on Human Nature illustrated, with all the turgid eloquence of the Alexandrian school, by the story of Eleazar and the seven martyrs. The Four Cardinal Virtues figure in the place of the Mosaic Law, the Law itself is transfigured in the light of Greek Philosophy. The imagery is drawn, not from the mountains or forests of Palestine, but from the towers and reefs that guard the harbor of Alexandria, from the legends of the Dying Swan and of the voices of the Sirens.

5 – Belief in Immortality
There was a still more definite connection between the faith of the Maccabees and that of the Gentile world against which they were contending. We can see the gradual growth of the hope of immortality along the progress of the Jewish race, enkindled by the aspirations of the Psalmists, deepened by the misfortunes of the Captivity, colored perchance by the contact with Zoroastrianism. We have seen its deliberate expression in the teaching, if not of Socrates, yet of his greatest disciple. Though at what date we know not, we have witnessed the clear and vivid statement of the Greek and Hebrew belief combined in the culminating revelation of Alexandrian Judaism, "the Wisdom of Solomon". Still, in Palestine the prospect of futurity had for the people at large remained under the veil that had rested on it from the time of Moses; though with occasional glimpses furnished in some of the bolder utterances of Psalmist or Prophet who for themselves, if not for others, claimed a share in the eternal communion with the Eternal. The one great teacher who had appeared in Judaea since Malachi – the son of Sirach – was entirely silent on the world beyond the grave.

"O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest in his possessions! . . . O death, how acceptable is thy sentence unto the needy and unto him whose strength faileth! . . . Fear not the sentence of death; remember them that have been before thee, and that come after; for this is the sentence of the Lord over all flesh".

In this calm but gloomy resignation is summed up the experience of the most gifted sage in Palestine twenty years before the Maccabæan insurrection. But in the course of that insurrection – or, at least, in the records of it – "the belief in immortality" which the Grecian philosophy had communicated to the Jewish schools of Alexandria started into a prominence which it had never achieved before, and which it never lost afterwards. "It is true that in the transfigured form in which they correspond to the true Religion these hopes had long been established in Israel as one of the highest and most enduring fruits which its thousand years' experience had brought forth upon its sacred soil. However, not till now can it be said that this fruit was so natural that it would never again disappear; and if the immovable hope of immortality and resurrection is the true and only weapon that cannot be wrested from us, by which in the spiritual struggles of humanity all the sufferings of the time can be victoriously endured, all the tyranny of the earth broken, and all imperishable happiness attained, it must be admitted that through the deep surging storm of the age there was sent from above, in this faith which nothing could take away, the only sword of salvation against whose edge the most fatal terrors would strike in vain.

It is not only that in the Book of Daniel, with a precision sharpened by the intensity of conflict, it is announced that "many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the blue sky, and they that help many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever". It is not only that in the Psalter of Solomon we are told that "whoso fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life, and their life is in the light of the Lord and shall no longer fail". It is into the very tissue of the history that the belief is interwoven, and in forms which, while they show its Western origin, show also that it had struck root in the Jewish heart with all the tenacity of an Eastern faith. Indeed, the earliest version of the story is still silent, like the Son of Sirach. But the traditions of the time, as handed down in the second and fourth books of the Maccabees, relate distinctly and firmly how the seven brothers and their mother trusted that "the King of the world would raise up them who had died for His laws unto everlasting life". And not only in the words but in the deeds recorded is the new doctrine exemplified. The desperate effort of Rhaziz to destroy himself "manfully" rather than be dishonorably treated by his enemies, in the very Paganism of its depreciation of life, implies in the mind of the historian a new form of contempt for death, evidently based on his confidence of another state.

Offerings for the Dead
And, yet further, an incident is recorded, too circumstantial to be set aside, which indicates that the belief not only existed but had already begun to run into those curious speculations which have themselves in turn darkened the hope that engendered them. After one of the battles of Judas in the plains of Philistia, when, according to custom, they rested on the following Sabbath and took up the corpses of their killed to lay them in their ancestral tombs, it was found that underneath the inner clothing of each dead man were amulets in the form of the small idols found in the Temple of Jamnia. It was the last lingering trace of the ancient Philistine practice of taking into battle figures of their divinities as charms against danger. With a superstition hardly less excusable than that of their unfortunate comrades, the victorious soldiers of the Maccabaean army sprang to the conclusion that these amulets had been the destruction of those who had worn them. After the first triumphant exultation that they had not fallen into the same snare as others, Judas, with the generous sympathy which characterized him was struck with the fear, still tinged with the same confusion of ideas, lest the gallant survivors should by the common partnership of war and nationality share the guilt of the crime of their fellow‑soldiers and accordingly caused a collection to be made, man by man, which amounted at least to the sum of 2,000 Greek coins for a sacrifice which should efface the memory of the sin of the fallen combatants. The act was regarded as one of peculiar significance; there was something in it "noble", "becoming", and "thoughtful", like a chief who felt that his soldiers were part of himself, and who cast his glance forward to their future in another world. The offering which they thus made, collecting for the whole army, might perhaps benefit even those who had perished with the idolatrous images on their bosoms; it would still more benefit those who had no direct share in the guilt; and if any such had fallen or might fall in the conflict, it might even be considered as an offering of thankful gratitude.

The whole incident is full of characteristic traits; the last flicker of the old Canaanitish idolatry, the inborn superstition of the Jewish race, the gracious act of the leader, rising above the transitory terror of the moment and endearing himself to the troops by his care that they should not, even unconsciously, have incurred the danger which he apprehended. But it is most remarkable as exhibiting what has been truly called "the earliest distinct assertion of a Jewish belief in the resurrection", and that belief, as it was derived in the first instance from the Greek world, so now expressed itself in a practice unknown before to Israel but common in Greece, of making offerings at the graves of the dead which should divert from them any glance of Divine displeasure that might rest upon them. In the Gentile usage it took the form of libations or sacrifices to the departed spirits themselves. In the Maccabaean practice this was modified in accordance with the nobler religious feeling of Judaism by addressing them not to the dead but for the dead to God. In this form it passed into the early Christian Church, but with the further change of substituting the simple aspirations of prayer for the cumbrous sacrifices of Jewish and Pagan rites. This innocent thought, based on the natural religious instinct alike of heathen and Jew, at last culminated in the elaborate system of buying and selling of prayers, regardless of the reasonable devotion alike of Jew or Christian. But the practice itself belongs to the earliest and simplest endeavor to unite the dead and living in one spiritual communion and the circumstance that this is the one solitary example of it in the whole range of the Greek or Hebrew Scriptures has in a large part of Christendom caused the name of "Maccabee" to pass into a synonym for funereal celebrations.

It will thus be seen what was the peculiarity of the superstitious dread which Judas sought to allay; what the beauty of his act as it seemed to his Cyrenian biographer, what its connection with the glorious doctrine of Grecian philosophy, which, in spite of his stubborn resistance to Grecian tyranny, he thus solemnly celebrated at the altar in Jerusalem. Never before had the existence of the departed in the unseen world assumed so tangible a form. "Resurrection", the great word of the New Testament, first comes prominently forward in the mouths of the Maccabaean martyrs and heroes. It was as though the resurrection of the nation gave a solid shape to the belief which henceforth was never to be lost.

6 – Attack on the Sacred Books
There is one more aspect of the Maccabaean struggle which has left a decisive mark on the religious history of the nation. For the first time the attack of their enemies was directed, not only (as in the invasions of the Assyrian or Babylonian kings) against the people, the city, and the Temple, but against the sacred books which – thanks to the exertions of Ezra and Nehemiah – had now taken their place among the treasures of the nation. It had been the object of Syrian persecutors to destroy copies of the Law whenever found or to render them valueless in the eyes of the nation by painting on their margins the figures of heathen divinities. Such an attempt, as in the parallel case of Diocletian's persecution of the Christians, must have had the natural effect of causing the Jews to cling more closely to these monuments of their faith and to gather up whatever fragments might be lost.

The Additions to the Canon
As we have seen, such a feeling had already manifested itself in the compilations of ancient documents during the Exile, and in the time of Nehemiah produced the first definite attempt at a complete collection. According to the earliest extant tradition, that collection consisted of the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the histories of the Kings, the writings of David (whatever may have been included under that term), and the royal letters or donatives of the Persian kings. The same tradition that ascribes this work to the great reformer of the fifth century, before the Christian era, records a corresponding work of the great hero of the second. As Nehemiah had agglomerated round the Law the works which had gradually taken form by his time, so, "in like manner" Judas Maccabaeus and his companions eagerly gathered round Nehemiah's group of sacred literature the scattered remains which had escaped, like fragments of a wreck or survivors of a battle or "brands plucked from the fire", out of the ruin of the Syrian war.

The Hagiographa
It was the last installment of the Hebrew Bible and was a work well worthy of the last leader who commanded the unchallenged reverence of the Hebrew race. On this single testimony, it may be too much to ascribe the collection to himself personally; though we would fain imagine the noble‑hearted warrior, in the days which followed the dedication of the Temple or in the brief interval of domestic peace during his friendship with Nicanor, recovering and rearranging the precious scrolls which, from broken vault or limestone cavern, were brought to his care to be lost no more. But in his time the work was no doubt done. The letters of the Persian kings, as having lost their interest, were now laid aside. And in their place, clinging to the skirts of "the things of David", were added those later writings which had either accumulated since Nehemiah's time, or by him, for whatever reason, had not been admitted. There was the historical work of the Chronicler completed shortly after the invasion of Alexander, which carried with it the Book of Ezra, not yet divided into its twofold parts of Ezra and Nehemiah; and the comparatively recent book of Esther, so especially needed for the Feast of Purim. There was the Book of Job already venerable, and the three Hebrew works bearing the name of Solomon, the latest probably composed between the time of Nehemiah and the Maccabees. Finally there were the Psalms which had sprung up in the Maccabaean struggle, and the great work of the period, almost the Gospel of the age, the Book of Daniel.

Other books were still floating to and fro, the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, the Psalter of Solomon. For reasons unknown to us, these were not accepted by the Maccabaean compiler. But the inestimable additions made by him were now secured to the sacred volume in a far more enduring sense than was thought of by the historian who described their annexation in the subsequent century. "They" do indeed "remain with us". Henceforth, the Hebrew Canon consisted not only of "the Law and the Prophets", but also of this third installment, which, from the roll to which they were appended, took the name of "the Psalms" or more generally, from their own indeterminate character, "the Writings", "the Sacred Writings", "the Books", "the other Books". That is to say, inferior as their place was compared with the older volume; they took the name, which, little as it could have been then anticipated, was destined afterwards to comprehend and throw into the shade the titles borne even by the venerated Law and the inspired Prophets. They were emphatically "the Scriptures", the "Hagiographa", "the Holy Scriptures", "the Bibles", the "Biblia Sacra" of the Jewish Church. Already in the Book of Daniel there is a slight trace­ of the name "Book" or "Bible", including the writings of Jere­miah. But, as a general rule, the name, naturally appropriate to more purely literary productions, belonged only to these later additions and it was not till long afterward that it ascended to its higher level and with an iron grasp embraced the whole multifarious volume of the Old and the New Covenant.

The door was closed, and, as far as the Church of Pales­tine was concerned, no new intruder was ever admitted. But there were several modifications still possible, so difficult is it even for the strictest rigor to fetter those books, "which are like living creatures with hands and feet". Whether written or unwritten, the Word of God cannot be bound with earthly chains. First, they were divided and subdivided afresh, in order to assimilate them to the fancy which sprang up of making their number exactly equal to the twenty‑two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For this purpose the Law was disintegrated into five parts. The two large groups, under the name of "the Prophets" – "the former", containing the historical books of Joshua and Judges, and the Book of Kings, and "the hinder", containing Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, and the Lesser Prophets all in one – were now broken up. Joshua and Judges became two books. The "Book of Kings" was divided into four, and the Prophets into fifteen component parts. Ruth was reckoned as part of "Judges", and the Lamentations as one with Jeremiah. Again, either for the purposes of public reading or from doubt as to their character, five were taken out of the whole collection and ranged on separate rolls, called "Megilloth". These were Ruth, Esther, Canticles, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations. Secondly, arrangement of the Books, as they issued from the hands of the Maccabaean leader, had on the whole preserved the order in which the successive accretions had been formed. At the head was the Pentateuch; then came the Books which, whether of the earlier histories, or of the Prophets, properly so called, were comprised under the common title of Prophetical. And last were "the Scriptures", ending with the Chronicles. To the Jews of that age this was the last book of the Canon. But all this time-honored arrangement was pulled to pieces by the Alexandrian critics, whose labors we considered in the study of Alexandria.

They determined to entirely disregard the redactions of Nehemiah and Judas Maccabaeus and as far as possible placed the books according to their subjects and chronology. The collection of "the Prophets" was torn asunder, and into the midst of it, following on the last book of the Kings, were inserted the three later historical books from the Hagiographa – the Chronicles, Ezra now broken into two parts and Esther. These were followed by the poetical books, according to the supposed order of their authorship – Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes. Then followed at last the second part of Nehemiah's collection of the Prophets, preserving the priority of the twelve Lesser Prophets, and thus, with a true instinct of the latest book of the whole series, closing with Daniel, followed by the three kindred books of the Maccabees. This was the arrangement which prevailed more or less till it was once more disturbed by the Churches of the Reformation, which, by a rough compromise, have combined the Maccabaean Canon with the Alexandrian order. The Greek Bible kept the entrance open for the admission of yet newer books, for which Judas Maccabaeus had left no place, and which were to exercise a still wider influence. But it is to him that we owe the distinction between the Hebrew and Grecian books, to which the Reformers returned, and which remains a lasting monument of the victory of the holy Hebrew cause over the Graeco‑Syrian kingdom, though in quite another sense than he intended it. In later ages, both in the Jewish and Christian Church, not only has this hard line of demarcation been questioned, but several of the books which he admitted – Ezekiel, the Canticles, Esther, and Ecclesiastes – have been challenged. Yet on the whole his judgment has been confirmed. The Greek additions, at least down to the last unexpected burst of Israelite prophecy, in the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles, have always borne, even when most admired, a stamp of inferiority. The original Hebrew books, even when opened to censure, have a native vigor and conciseness which belongs to the old Palestinian atmosphere – "the Rock of Abraham, from whence they were hewn". Even as a theologian, Judas "has fought the battle of Israel".

Notes on Acra and Mount Zion
Zion and Acra
Without embarking on the intricate question of the interior topography of Jerusalem, there are two points which are clear in the Maccabaean time:

1. "Mount Zion" in I Macc. 4:37, 60; 5:54; 6:62; 7:33; 12, is the Temple Hill – that which in 2 Chronicles 3:1 and in later times has been called Mount Moriah.
2. The "city or citadel of David" (I Macc. 1:33; 14:36) is that which was occupied by the Syrian fortress, and usually known by the name of "Acra" (with the definite article) "the Height" (I Macc. 4:2; 9:52; 10:32; 13:52; 14:7; II Macc. 15:31, 35).

From this it follows:
That "Mount Zion" had changed its meaning since 2 Samuel 5:7, 9 (1 Chron. 11:5), when it was identical with the citadel of David.
That Acra afterward changed its meaning, when it was identified by Josephus, Ant. 12:5, 4 ; 13:6, 7; B. F. 5:4, 1. I. 22, with the Lower Hill.
That both were different from the Baris or tower occupied by the Persian garrison, close to the Temple (Neh. 2:8; 7:2) and apparently on the site of the later Tower of Antonia.

Notes on the Feast of the Dedication
The Hanucah
We are indebted to the kindness of the late Dr. James E. Priest, a modern-day Hebrew scholar, for the accompanying description of the celebration of the Hanucah or Feast of the Dedication: "The Feast of Lights is observed as an eight days' holiday, on which, however, all manner of work is allowed without restriction. At home on each evening, as soon as possible as is consistent with their arrangements, the lights are lit, commencing with one green taper on the first night, the number increasing by one every evening, eight being used on the last occasion. Tapers are the ordinary custom, but the more orthodox people use oil and wick; but either is allowable. The prescribed formula of blessing is said over these lights, and they burn for half‑an‑hour, during which all work is at a standstill. Latterly, that is to say, in modern times, a very pretty hymn has been added, written as, an acrostic by one Mordecai. The tune is popular throughout the world where Jews are to be found. This is about the whole of the home service, except that at every meal, when grace is said, a special prayer is added commemorative of God's mercies in rescuing the nation from the hands of their Greek oppressors. This prayer is also said in synagogue every morning, noon, and night, being introduced among the eighteen Benedictions, which are repeated three times daily throughout the year".

Dr. Priest further wrote: "In the synagogue the feast is likewise observed with some solemnity. There is usually a large gathering on the first night, but this falls off during the remainder of the week. Every evening during the week the officiating minister ascends a platform and lights the candles exactly as at home. Here large wax candles are employed; oil is allowed, but I have never seen it. The hymn referred to before is not said in synagogue, but Psalm 30 is repeated instead, more stress being laid upon the opening evening's service than the others. In the more important metropolitan synagogues, the service on the first night is stirring and choral".

Dr. Priest concluded with these words: "Ordinarily, on Mondays and Thursdays, a scroll of the Law is taken from the Ark and a small portion of the Pentateuch is read I to the congregants, varying from a dozen to two dozen verses, but during Hanucah the Law is read every morning. As, however, here is naturally no allusion to the Feast of Dedication to, be found in the Pentateuch, the history of the Dedication of the Tabernacle is read in lieu of it, as being the readiest reminder; and this is subdivided into eight sections, one for each day. On the Sabbath of the feast (there may be two Sabbaths if the first day is Saturday) this section is read in addition to the Lesson of the day, so that two scrolls are removed from the Ark; the reading from the Prophets, common to every Sabbath, is selected from Zechariah 2:14 to 4:7, as being most appropriate. The sermon of the day is usually devoted to the events being commemorated. The period is marked by an extra half‑holiday or so being given in schools during the week, a festive entertainment being often added".

Notes on the Chronological Statements of Daniel 9:24-27
"I know", said Jerome, "that this passage has been much disputed amongst the most learned men. Each has spoken the opinions suggested by his own mind. And, therefore, because I consider it dangerous to pass judgment on the views of the Doctors of the Church, and invidious to prefer one to another, I will state what each one has thought, and leave it to the option of the reader whose interpretation he shall follow".

Such is the statement prefixed to the elaborate summary of the contradictory opinions in the "Speaker's Commentary" on the Book of Daniel, pp. 360‑365, which concludes with the words, "It is impossible at present to explain the passage satisfactorily".

It is not in accordance with the plan of this work to discuss these several opinions. But it is permissible, and may be useful, to state the view which is commended to us by the nearest contemporary authority and by a coincidence of fact.

According to this "view", the commandment to "rebuild Jerusalem" in Daniel 9:25 is the prophecy of the seventy years in Jeremiah, 588 B.C. (Dan. 9:2); the Anointed Prince is Cyrus, as in Isaiah 45:1, 536 B.C. More doubtfully, in Daniel 9:21, "the death of the Anointed one without a successor" (Heb.) is Onias the high priest (II Macc. 4:35), which is substantially the explanation of Eusebius (H. E. 1:6, Demonst. Ev. 8. 391). "The Prince who shall destroy the city and sanctuary, whose end shall be sudden", in Daniel 9:26, is Antiochus Epiphanes (I Macc. 6:8). In Daniel 9:27 (compare 8:11; 12:12) the cessation of the daily sacrifice is the cessation described in I Macc. 1:54, and the Abomination of Desolation (Dan. 11:31; 12:12) is the desecration of the altar by Antiochus as described under that same phrase in II Macc. 1:54. The three years (Dan. 8:14; 12:11, 12) relate to the interval between the desecration and the re‑consecration of the altar (I Macc. 2:54; 4:52).

The only illustrations from any other part of the Bible are to be found in the application of the words "the Abomination of Desolation" in Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, to the desecration of the Herodian temple by the Roman Government. Such a secondary application is in accordance with the well‑known usage of the New Testament, as, for example, Matthew 2:15, 18; Acts 7:43; Revelation 11:11; 18:2.

The expression, "One like to a Son of Man", in Daniel 7:13 (Heb.) is explained in Daniel 7:27 to be "the people of the saints" The phrase "Son of Man", in the only other place in which it occurs in Daniel (8:17), agrees with its universal signification in the Old Testament, viz., as representing man, collectively or individually, in his mortal and fragile aspect. See especially Psalm 8:4, 80:17, and the forty‑seven times in which it is applied to Ezekiel. It is in the Book of Enoch that it is first applied to the Chosen One who is to judge the world (45:3, 5; 46:3, 6; 47:3; 62:2, 5; 62:27, 29; 70:1). The references are given at length in Dr. Pusey's Daniel the Prophet, 382‑385.

It is obvious that numerous applications of these passages can be made to the events of Christian history, past or future. The purpose of these remarks is to point out – what is admitted by almost all scholars (see Speaker's Commentary, 4. 337, 365) – that their primary and historical reference is to the Maccabaean age.

Authorities:
Historical
I Maccabees – Greek translation of a lost Hebrew original, which bore the name of Sarbath Sar Beni El, 120 B.C. It contains the history from the accession of Antiochus to the death of Simon.
II Maccabees – Greek abridgment of a lost work of Jason of Cyrene, 160 B.C., in five books. 100‑50 B.C. It contains the history from the accession of Antiochus to the death of Judas, with legendary additions.
III Maccabees – Greek. No Latin Translation, and therefore in the Greek Bible, but not in the Roman, Lutheran, or English Bible. 50 B.C.? It contains the account of the persecutions by Ptolemy Philopator.
IV Maccabees – Greek; wrongly ascribed to Josephus, but printed in his works. 4 B.C.? It contains an amplification of 2 Macc. 6:18, 7:42.
V Maccabees – A late work, certainly after 70 A.D. – known only in Arabic and Syriac. It contains the history both of the Asmoneans and of Herod.
Above five books by Archdeacon Cotton were published in one volume under the title, "The Five Books of Maccabees in English", 1832.
Josephus, Ant. 12: 5‑11, B. F. 1:1, 71 A.D.

Scholarship
Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient History
Thomas Mangey's notes on Philo ad Caium
Henry Fynes Clinton, Fasti Hellenici
Frederic William Farrar, The Life of Christ
Hans Herzfeld, Geschichte
Georg Heinrich August von Ewald, History of Israel
Hartwig Derenbourg, Histoire de la Palestine
Abraham Kuenen, The Religion of Israel to the Fall of the Jewish State
Raoul Rochette, Mémoires de ľ Académie
Grimm, De Execratione
John Lightfoot, A Commentary on the New Testament From the Talmud and Hebraica
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Days of Ancient Rome
Alexander William Kinglake, Crimean War
Henry Hart Milman, History of Jews
Titus Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture
Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life
Alfred Edersheim, The Temple
Morris Jacob Raphall, Post-Biblical History of the Jews
Adriaan Reland, Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata

Prophetic and Poetical
1. Daniel – probably 167‑164 B.C.
2. Psalms 74, 79
3. Psalter of Solomon (Fabricius, Codex Pseud. 5:1, p‑ 914‑999) – 167‑162 B.C.?
4. Sibylline Books, 3: 2, 3, 165 B.C., or 124 B.C.

Gentile:
1. Diodorus Siculus, 34: 4, 40:1
2. Polybius, 26:10, 32: 3, 4
3. Livy, 41:21

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