II Maccabees (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 41A)

614 Pages·1983·43.61 MB·English

by  Jonathan A. Goldstein

THE ANCHOR BIBLE
II MACCABEES
A New Translation
with
Introduction and Commentary
by
Jonathan A. Goldstein
THE ANCHOR BIBLE
DOUBLEDAY
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
"Die Hellenistische Welt um 185 vor Chr." from GROSSER HISTOR-
ISCHER WELTATLAS I edited by Herman Bengtson and Vladimir
Milojcic, 5th edition. Reprinted by permission of Bayerischer Schulbuch
Verlag.
CARTA'S ATLAS OF THE PERIOD OF THE SECOND TEMPLE, THE
MISHNAH AND THE TALMUD by Michael Avi-Yonah. Copyright @
Carta, Jerusalem 1966. Reprinted by permission of Carta Publishing Com-
pany, Ltd.
Qadmonior V, 1972. Map from "Jerusalem Revealed" p. 43 reprinted by
permission of the Israel Exploration Society.
Revue Biblique, XXXIII ( 1924), 38 1, Fig. 3 "Topographie des Campagnes
MachabCennes" by F. M. Abel. Reprinted by permission of Librairie
Lecoffre, France.
THE MACMILLAN BIBLE ATLAS by Yohanan Aharoni and Michael
Avi-Yonah. Copyright @ Carta, Jerusalem 1964, 1966, 1968. Redrawn with
permission from Macmillan Publishing Company.
THE WESTMINSTER HISTORICAL ATLAS TO THE BIBLE, Revised
Edition, edited by George Ernest Wright and Floyd Vivian Filson. Copy-
right 1956 by W. L. Jenkins. Redrawn with permission of the Westminster
Press.
Coin pictures courtesy of Ya'akov Meshorer.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bible. O.T. Apocrypha. Maccabees, 2nd.
I1 Maccabees.
(The Anchor Bible; v. 41A)
Bibliography: p. 129.
Includes indices.
1. Bible. O.T. Apocrypha. Maccabees, 2nd-
Commentaries. I. Goldstein, Jonathan A., 1929-
11. Title. 111. Title: 2 Maccabees. IV. Series: Bible.
English. Anchor Bible. 1964. Anchor Bible; v. 41A.
BS192.2.Al1964.G3 vol. 41A [BS 1825.31 220.7'7s
[229'.731
ISBN 0-385-04864-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 82-45200
Copyright @ 1983 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
In memory of my brother,
ALEXANDER M. GOLDSTEIN
(1935-1980)
and my teacher,
ELIAS J. BICKERMAN
(1897-1981)

THE APOCRYPHA
The term Apocrypha (or "Deuterocanonical Books" in Roman Catholic
usage) is popularly understood to describe the fifteen books or parts of
books from the pre-Christian period that Catholics accept as canonical
Scripture but Protestants and Jews do not. This designation and definition
are inaccurate on many counts. An apocryphon is literally a hidden writ­
ing, kept secret for the initiate and too exalted for the general public; vir­
tually none of these books makes such a claim. Not only Roman Catholics
but also Orthodox and Eastern Christians accept these books, wholly or
partially, as canonical Scripture. Roman Catholics do not accept all of
them as Scripture, for I and II Esdras and the Prayer of Manas-
seh are not included in the official Catholic canon drawn up at the Council
of Trent. Many Protestant churches have no official decision declaring
these books to be non-canonical; and, in fact, up to the last century
they were included in most English Protestant Bibles. What is certain
is that these books did not find their way into the final Jewish Palestinian
canon of Scripture. Thus, despite their Jewish origins (parts of II Esdras
are Christian and Latin in origin), they were preserved for the most part
in Greek by Christians as a heritage from the Alexandrian Jewish commu­
nity and their basic text is found in the codices of the Septuagint. How­
ever, recent discoveries, especially that of the Dead Sea scrolls, have
brought to light the original Hebrew or Aramaic text of some of these
books. Leaving aside the question of canonicity, Christians and Jews now
unite in recognizing the importance of these books for tracing the history
of Judaism and Jewish thought in the centuries between the last of the He­
brew Scriptures and the advent of Christianity.

PREFACE
Like my volume 41 in the Anchor Bible, this volume 41A contains chiefly
my own efforts to solve the problems of the First and Second Books of
Maccabees, though I am aware of, and try to acknowledge, my deep in­
debtedness to my predecessors. Where I believe my own views to be
solidly based, I have presented my evidence for them and have tried to
avoid presenting and refuting opposing views, in the belief that a com­
mentary should not look like a debate. An important exception to this
rule are the views of my late revered teacher, Elias J. Bickerman.
This and my earlier volume are among the thicker contributions to the
Anchor Bible. They are so thick partly because I found myself making
many discoveries that would not be believed if I did not present rather
massive proof for them. Not everyone will want to read my volumes from
cover to cover, but any literate person should be able to enjoy large sec­
tions of them.
First and Second Maccabees are classics and have always attracted big
audiences. As reading matter they can stand on their own. Part I of my
introduction to this volume gives sufficient background on Second Mac­
cabees for the general reader. Parts II through V of the introduction and
many sections of commentary are more technical. Some readers will
choose to skip them; I hope others who are interested in the problems I
try to solve will also find those more technical passages rewarding.
The reader may find that unfamiliar names and words make my book
difficult. I hope that any such problems will be solvable through the use
of a collegiate dictionary and the indices to this book.
As usual in the Anchor Bible, the translated text is divided into sec­
tions. In my commentary, a comment on an entire section is called an "in­
troductory NOTE." Comments on passages are arranged in the order of the
initial verses: a NOTE on 1:1-5 will appear before a NOTE on 1:2-5.
Where two passages have the same initial verse, I comment on the longer
one first: a NOTE on 1:1-7 will appear before a NOTE on 1:1-6.
The "sea of words" generated by my research turned the projected sin­
gle volume on both books of Maccabees into two separate volumes, a fact
which now gives me the opportunity to correct in the second volume errors
I committed in the first. Of these, I should mention here the two worst.
There is the ten-day error that has affected my chronology in AB vol.
41, pp. 43, 165-67 and, to my knowledge, has not been noticed by any-
XII PREFACE
one but me. I have corrected it in the present volume, pp. 117-19. And
there is my unfortunate hypothesis that one of the sources of First and
Second Maccabees was a work on the deaths of the persecutors that omit­
ted to treat the Jews' repossession and cleansing of the temple. I called
this hypothetical source De Mortibus Persecutorum (abbreviated: DMP).
It is most unlikely to have existed as described. A pious Jew narrating the
wondrous events of the time could hardly have omitted the repossession
and cleansing of the temple even if he was concentrating on the deaths of
the persecutors. And if such a work, a "Hamlet without the prince," had
been written, it is hard to see how it could have survived and could have
gone on attracting readers long enough to have been a source for First
and Second Maccabees. The chronological difficulty that I tried to solve
by the hypothesis of the source DMP is better solved by other means (see
NOTE on II 14:1-4). I hereby disown most of Part V of my introduction
to AB vol. 41. Only if points made there are endorsed or repeated here in
AB vol. 41A do I still stand by them.
My repudiation of that section of AB vol. 41 leaves me with a task to
perform. Nowadays a historian must always be concerned with the ques­
tion of how much time elapsed between the events and the writing of the
work that tells of them. If long years passed, the historian must try to as­
certain how the author of that work knew about the events he narrates. As
I show here in Part IV of my introduction, I am convinced that First
Maccabees and the history of which the abridgment is preserved in Second
Maccabees were written sixty years or more after the death of Judas Mac-
cabaeus. Therefore, I must again play, in Part II of the introduction, the
seductive, hazardous, and complicated game I played (and lost) in Part V
of the introduction to AB vol. 41: I must try to reconstruct the sources
that lay before both authors and, as far as possible, must try to show that
the results are not mere products of my imagination. The procedures are
somewhat difficult and the results inevitably lack complete certainty.
Some readers may therefore prefer to skip over Part II of the intro­
duction, as well as the many sections of commentary that deal with such
source analysis.
In giving parts of the introductions to my two volumes the title "What
Really Happened," I have no intention of claiming finality for my
theories. Everything I present in my books is only what I believe to be the
truth. The historians who wrote in First and Second Maccabees made
mistakes. I try to correct those mistakes and to draw on reliable evidence
from other sources, and I label the results of my efforts "What Really
Happened."
In this volume II Esdras is the Greek translation of the Hebrew books
of Ezra and Nehemiah, not the apocalyptic work called II Esdras in AB
vol. 42.
The appendices were planned when there was to be but a single volume
PREFACE XIII
covering both First and Second Maccabees. Hence the first appendix in
this volume bears the number VII, to follow Appendix VI of AB vol. 41.
I dedicate this volume to the memory of my brother, Alexander, and to
the memory of my teacher, Elias J. Bickerman. My brother was a brilliant
and talented rabbi who suffered from depressions that drove him to an
untimely end. My teacher was a brilliant, creative, and generous scholar
to whom I owe much in all my work. Our disagreements had no effect on
his scholarly generosity. He welcomed refutations of his theories as much
as he welcomed confirmations of them. I think he would have been
pleased over my use of his own methods (of appreciating and analyzing
ancient documents) to refute his theory that King Antiochus IV, in im­
posing a revised cult upon the Jews, was carrying out a reform requested
by the Jews' high priest, Menelaus.
Other scholars have been generous to me as I wrote this book. I have
enjoyed learned conversations with my colleague at the University of
Iowa, George Nickelsburg. The following graciously answered my que­
ries: L. Timothy Doty, Jonas Greenfield, Ya'akov Meshorer, Joachim
Oelsner, Bezalel Porten, Martin Schwartz, the Abbe Jean Starcky, Mi­
chael Stone, C. B. F. Walker, and Herbert C. Youtie. Joseph Sievers
kindly sent me a copy of his doctoral dissertation on the Hasmonaeans.
The University of Iowa gave me excellent working conditions, and its de­
partment of history provided me with my helpful research assistants,
James Skyrms, Warren Smith, Matthew Parsons, and Walter Bell. I am
pleased to acknowledge here the help of my scholarly wife, Helen, and the
encouragement I have received from my parents, Rabbi and Mrs. David A.
Goldstein. My daughter, Rise, typed portions of the manuscript.
I wish also to thank the editors for their contributions. David Noel
Freedman and David Graf made valuable suggestions, and Eve Roshevsky,
Peter Schneider, and John Carter have done well in bringing this book at
last before the eyes of its readers.
My lecture "Jewish Parties of the Time of the Hasmonaean Uprisings"
has, unfortunately, not been published. It contained my argument for the
date of the book of Jubilees, and I referred to it at AB vol. 41, p. 122, n.
110. My argument will appear instead in my article "The Date of the
Book of Jubilees," to be published in Proceedings of the American Acad­
emy for Jewish Research 50 (1983).
Elias Bickerman changed the spelling of his name when he changed the
language in which he was writing. In French he was £lie Bikerman; in
German Elias Bickermann. In this volume I spell his name Elias Bicker­
man.
JONATHAN A. GOLDSTEIN
June 1982