2 Maccabees 8

1 But Judas, also called Maccabeus, and those with him slipped unnoticed into the villages. They called their relatives together, and took in those who had held to the Jewish way of life, and they gathered about six thousand. [a] 2 They called on the Lord to look on the people that everyone was trampling, and to pity the sanctuary that ungodly men had treated as common, 3 and to have mercy on the city being destroyed and about to be leveled with the ground, and to hear the blood that was crying out to him, 4 and to remember the lawless killing of blameless infants, and the reviling of his name, and to show his hatred of evil. [b]

5 Once Maccabeus had a company around him, the nations could no longer stand against him, for the Lord’s wrath had turned to mercy. 6 He came on cities and villages without warning and burned them, took the key positions, and routed no small number of the enemy. 7 Above all he made the nights his allies for such attacks, and the talk of his bravery rang out everywhere. [c]

8 Philip saw that the man was gaining ground little by little, and pushing ahead more and more often as things went well for him. So he wrote to Ptolemy, the commander of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, to come to the aid of the king’s affairs. 9 Ptolemy quickly picked out Nicanor son of Patroclus, one of the king’s first friends, and sent him off with no fewer than twenty thousand men of every nation under him, to wipe out the whole people of Judea. He set Gorgias with him as well, a commander with experience in matters of war. 10 Nicanor undertook to make up the two thousand talents of tribute the king owed the Romans out of the selling of captured Jews. [d] 11 At once he sent word to the cities along the coast, inviting them to buy Jewish bodies and promising to hand over ninety for a talent — not looking for the justice that was about to come after him from the Almighty. [e]

12 Word reached Judas about Nicanor’s advance, and when he told the men with him that the army was near, 13 those who lost their nerve and did not trust God’s justice ran off and got themselves out of the place. 14 The others sold everything they had left, and at the same time begged the Lord to rescue those whom the godless Nicanor had sold before he had even met them — 15 and if not for their own sake, then for the covenants with their fathers, and because his revered and magnificent name had been called over them.

16 Maccabeus gathered the six thousand who were with him and urged them not to be terrified of the enemy, and not to be afraid of the great crowd of nations coming against them unjustly, but to fight nobly, 17 keeping before their eyes the outrage those men had lawlessly worked on the holy place, and the abuse of the city they had made a mockery of, and the pulling down of the way of life their fathers had handed on. 18 “They trust in weapons and in daring,” he said, “but we trust in the Almighty God, who can bring down both those who come against us and the whole world with a single nod.”

19 He went on to recount for them the help their forefathers had been given, and what happened in Sennacherib’s day, when a hundred eighty-five thousand perished, 20 and the battle fought in Babylonia against the Galatians, where eight thousand in all went into the action along with four thousand Macedonians. When the Macedonians were at a loss, the eight thousand destroyed a hundred and twenty thousand, because of the help that came to them from heaven, and they took much plunder. 21 With this he made them bold and ready to die for the laws and for their homeland, and he made the army into four parts. 22 He set his own brothers at the head of each division — Simon, Joseph, and Jonathan — with fifteen hundred men under each, [f] 23 and Eleazar as well. Then he read aloud from the holy book, gave them the watchword ‘God’s help,’ and, leading the first company himself, engaged Nicanor. [g]

24 With the Almighty as their ally, they cut down more than nine thousand of the enemy, wounded and maimed the greater part of Nicanor’s army, and forced them all to flee. 25 They took the money of the men who had come to buy them. They chased them a good way, but they turned back, hemmed in by the hour; 26 for it was the day before the sabbath, and for that reason they did not keep up the pursuit. 27 They gathered the enemy’s weapons and stripped their spoils, and then kept the sabbath, blessing and thanking the Lord over and over — the one who had brought them safely to that day, and had set it as the beginning of mercy for them.

28 After the sabbath they gave a share of the spoils to those who had been tortured, and to the widows and the fatherless, and divided the rest among themselves and their children. [h] 29 When this was done they made a common plea together, begging the merciful Lord to be fully reconciled with his servants.

30 In their fights with the forces of Timothy and Bacchides they killed more than twenty thousand of them, took firm hold of some high strongholds, and divided a great deal of plunder, giving equal shares to themselves, to those who had been tortured, to the fatherless and the widows, and to the aged as well. 31 They gathered up the enemy’s weapons and stored them all carefully in the key positions, and the rest of the spoils they carried to Jerusalem. 32 They killed the tribal commander of Timothy’s men, a most unholy man who had done the Jews a great deal of harm. [i] 33 While they were keeping the victory feast in their homeland, they burned the men who had set the holy gates on fire — Callisthenes among them, who had fled into one small house; and he was paid the wage his godlessness deserved.

34 As for Nicanor, that three-times-cursed man, who had brought the thousand merchants to buy the Jews — [j] 35 he was brought low by the Lord’s help, and by the very men he counted the least of all. He put off his splendid clothing, and, in the manner of a runaway slave, alone and with no one about him, he crossed the inland country and came to Antioch, having succeeded, beyond everything else, in the ruin of his own army. [k] 36 And the man who had taken it on himself to pay the Romans their tribute out of captives from Jerusalem now announced that the Jews had a champion fighting for them, and that this was why the Jews could not be wounded: because they followed the laws he had laid down for them.