Anonymous (Septuagint) · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Now the aforementioned Simon, who had turned informer against the funds and against his own country, kept slandering Onias, saying that it was he who had provoked Heliodorus and had been the architect of the whole calamity.
2| The benefactor of the city, the guardian of his own people, the zealot for the laws — him he dared to call a schemer against the state.
3| The hostility grew to such a pitch that murders were even carried out through one of the men whom Simon had put forward,
4| and Onias, seeing how dangerous the rivalry had become, and that Apollonius son of Menestheus, governor of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, was fanning Simon's malice still further,
5| went up to the king, not to bring accusation against his fellow citizens but to look to the common good and the private good of the whole people.
6| For he saw that without the king's intervention it was impossible for affairs to find peace, and that Simon would not give up his madness.
7| When Seleucus departed this life and Antiochus, called Epiphanes, took over the kingdom, Jason the brother of Onias obtained the high priesthood by underhanded means,
8| promising the king at an audience three hundred and sixty talents of silver, and from another source of revenue eighty talents besides.
9| Beyond this he undertook to make over a further hundred and fifty, if he were granted authority to establish a gymnasium and a body of youth for it, and to enroll the men of Jerusalem as citizens of Antioch.
10| When the king had given his consent and Jason had secured the office, he immediately set about shifting his countrymen over to the Greek way of life.
11| He set aside the royal grants of favor to the Jews that had been secured through John the father of Eupolemus — the man who went on the embassy to the Romans for friendship and alliance — and, overturning the lawful institutions, he introduced new customs contrary to the law.
12| For he took eager delight in establishing a gymnasium right under the citadel itself, and he brought the noblest of the young men under his control and made them wear the Greek hat.
13| Such was the high tide of Hellenism and the advance of foreign ways, brought on by the surpassing impurity of Jason, ungodly wretch that he was and no true high priest,
14| that the priests were no longer eager about the services of the altar; instead, despising the temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they hurried to take part in the unlawful exercises of the wrestling-ground once the signal for the discus-throw had called them,
15| holding the honors of their fathers in no esteem at all, but counting the glories of the Greeks the finest of all.
16| For this reason a grievous turn of fortune overtook them, and the very people whose ways of life they envied and whom they longed to resemble in everything became their enemies and their tormentors.
17| For it is no light thing to act impiously against the divine laws — but the time that followed will make that plain.
18| When the games held every four years were being celebrated at Tyre, and the king was present there,
19| the vile Jason sent envoys from Jerusalem, registered as Antiochenes, to carry three hundred silver drachmas for the sacrifice to Hercules — though the men who carried them thought it fitting not to use the money for the sacrifice at all,
20| but rather, since it was on hand, for the building of triremes.
21| Now when Apollonius son of Menestheus had been sent to Egypt for the enthronement of King Philometor, Antiochus, learning that Philometor had turned hostile to his interests, took thought for his own security; he therefore went to Joppa and from there came on to Jerusalem.
22| He was received there magnificently by Jason and by the city, brought in with torch-bearing processions and with shouts of acclaim; after which he encamped his army in Phoenicia.
23| Three years later Jason sent Menelaus, the brother of the aforementioned Simon, to carry the money to the king and to complete certain memoranda concerning urgent business.
24| But Menelaus, once commended to the king, and having glorified himself before him by the appearance of authority, secured the high priesthood for himself, outbidding Jason by three hundred talents of silver.
25| Having received the royal mandate he came back, bringing nothing worthy of the high priesthood, but carrying the temper of a savage tyrant and the rage of a barbarous beast.
26| And so Jason, who had cheated his own brother, was in turn cheated by another and driven as a fugitive into the land of the Ammonites.
27| Menelaus, for his part, held on to the office, but as for the money he had promised the king, none of it was he putting in proper order,
28| though Sostratus, the commander of the citadel, kept pressing the demand — for the collection of the revenues fell to him. For this reason the two of them were summoned before the king;
29| Menelaus left his brother Lysimachus as his deputy in the high priesthood, and Sostratus left Crates, the officer over the Cypriots.
30| While matters stood thus, it happened that the people of Tarsus and Mallus rose in revolt, because their cities had been given as a gift to Antiochis, the king's concubine.
31| The king therefore hastened to go and put down the disturbance, leaving Andronicus, one of his men in high standing, to act in his place.
32| Menelaus, thinking he had found a fine opportunity, stole some of the golden vessels of the temple and made a gift of them to Andronicus, and other vessels he had, as it happened, already sold off in Tyre and the neighboring cities.
33| When Onias learned of this for certain, he denounced him, having withdrawn to a place of asylum at Daphne, near Antioch.
34| At this Menelaus took Andronicus aside privately and urged him to lay hands on Onias. Andronicus went to Onias and, deceiving him, clasped his hand and swore solemn pledges to gain his trust, though Onias still had his suspicions, and induced him to come out of the asylum; then he shut him in at once, showing no respect for justice.
35| For this reason not only the Jews but many of the other nations as well were indignant and took it hard, over the unjust murder of the man.
36| And when the king returned from the region of Cilicia, the Jews of the city appealed to him, joined by the Greeks who shared their hatred of the wrong, over the unreasonable killing of Onias.
37| Antiochus was genuinely grieved at heart and moved to pity, and he wept, recalling the dead man's self-restraint and great orderliness of life,
38| and, inflamed with anger, he immediately stripped Andronicus of his purple robe, tore off his tunics, and led him around the whole city to the very spot where he had committed his outrage against Onias, and there did away with the murderer, the Lord repaying him the punishment he deserved.
39| Many acts of temple-robbery had by that time been carried out across the city through Lysimachus, acting with Menelaus's connivance, and when word of it got out, the populace gathered in protest against Lysimachus, for a great quantity of the golden vessels had already been carried off.
40| As the crowds rose up in fury, Lysimachus put roughly three thousand men under arms and set off on a course of violent, lawless action, with a certain Auranus taking the lead, a man advanced in years but no less advanced in folly.
41| But when the people perceived the assault of Lysimachus, some snatched up stones, others clubs of wood, and some grabbed handfuls from the ashes lying nearby, and in the confusion they hurled them at the men around Lysimachus.
42| For this reason they wounded many of them, struck some down, and drove all of them to flight, and the temple-robber himself they seized and killed beside the treasury.
43| Concerning these events a trial was brought against Menelaus.
44| When the king arrived at Tyre, three men sent by the council of elders presented the case against him in his presence.
45| But Menelaus, now that he saw himself losing, promised Ptolemy son of Dorymenes a considerable sum of money to win the king over.
46| So Ptolemy took the king aside into a certain colonnade, as though to let him cool off, and there changed his mind.
47| Menelaus, the man responsible for the whole wickedness, he released from the charges brought against him, while on those unfortunate men — who, had they pleaded their case even before Scythians, would have been let go uncondemned — he passed sentence of death.
48| So those who had spoken up for the city and its people and the sacred vessels quickly paid the unjust penalty.
49| For this reason even the Tyrians, indignant at the wrong, provided magnificently for their burial.
50| But Menelaus, thanks to the greed of those in power, remained in office, growing ever more entrenched in his wickedness, now established as the great schemer against his fellow citizens.