4 Maccabees 4

1 A man named Simon set himself against Onias in the affairs of the city. Onias in those days held the office of chief priest for life, and he was a fine and good man; and when Simon, though he slandered him in every way, could not do him any harm before the nation, he went off into exile, meaning to betray his own country. [a] 2 So he came to Apollonius, the commander of Syria and Phoenicia and Cilicia, and said, [b] 3 “I come as a friend of the king’s interests, to report that many tens of thousands in private money are stored up in the treasuries at Jerusalem — money that has no part in the temple funds and belongs by right to King Seleucus.”

4 Apollonius learned every detail of it. He praised Simon for his care of the king’s interests, went up to Seleucus, and reported the hoard of money. 5 He was given authority over it, and came quickly into our own country with the accursed Simon and a very heavy army; 6 and when he arrived he said he had come with the king’s commands, to take the private money out of the treasury.

7 The nation was outraged at this word and spoke against it. They thought it a terrible thing that men who had entrusted deposits to the sacred treasury should be robbed of them, and they blocked him as well as they could. 8 But Apollonius went on into the temple with threats.

9 The priests, with the women and the children, begged God in the temple to hold his shield over the sacred place now being despised; 10 and as Apollonius was going up with his armed force to seize the money, messengers appeared out of heaven on horseback, lightning flashing off their armor, and put great fear and trembling into the men. [c] 11 Apollonius fell half dead in the court of the temple that is open to every people. He stretched out his hands toward heaven and begged the Hebrews with tears to pray for him and win over the army of heaven. 12 For he said he had sinned so badly that he deserved to die, and that if he were spared he would sing to every man alive of the blessedness of that sacred place.

13 Onias the chief priest was won over by these words. He was uneasy on another count as well — that King Seleucus might suppose Apollonius had been killed by a human plot and not by divine justice — and so he prayed for him. 14 And Apollonius, brought through alive past all expectation, went off to tell the king what had happened to him.

15 When King Seleucus died, his son Antiochus Epiphanes took over the rule — an arrogant and terrible man — [d] 16 who put Onias down from the office of chief priest and made his brother Jason chief priest in his place. 17 Jason had agreed that, if the office were handed over to him, he would pay three thousand six hundred and sixty talents a year; [e] 18 and the king handed over to him both the office of chief priest and the leadership of the nation.

19 Jason changed the way the nation lived and remade its public life into every kind of lawbreaking, 20 so that he not only built a gymnasium on the citadel of our country itself, but also put an end to the care of the temple. 21 At this the divine justice was angry, and set Antiochus himself at war with them.

22 He was at war in Egypt with Ptolemy when he heard that a rumor of his own death had gone round, and that the people of Jerusalem were as glad of it as they could possibly be; so he marched back against them at once, 23 and when he had sacked them he laid down a decree: any of them found living by the law of their fathers were to die.

24 But he could find no way at all to break down the nation’s good order under its own law by decrees. He watched all his own threats and punishments broken down instead — 25 women, for instance, who had circumcised their children were thrown down from a height along with their babies, and they had known beforehand that this was what they would suffer. 26 So then, since the people despised his decrees, he set about compelling every single one of the nation, by tortures, to taste defiled food and swear off the Jewish way of life. [f]