Anonymous (Septuagint) · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| About this time Antiochus made his second expedition into Egypt.
2| And it happened that for nearly forty days over the whole city there appeared, racing through the air, horsemen in gold-embroidered robes, armed with lances drawn up in troops,
3| and the drawing of swords, and squadrons of horses drawn up in order, and charges and onslaughts made by both sides, and the brandishing of shields, and a great mass of spears, and the hurling of missiles, and the flashing of golden ornaments, and armor of every kind.
4| So all prayed that the apparition might prove to be for good.
5| But when a false rumor arose that Antiochus had departed this life, Jason took no fewer than a thousand men and suddenly launched an assault on the city; and when the men on the wall had been forced back and the city was at last on the point of being taken, Menelaus fled into the citadel.
6| Jason went on slaughtering his own countrymen without mercy, not realizing that success against one's kinsmen is the greatest misfortune, but thinking that he was setting up trophies over enemies and not over fellow-countrymen.
7| Yet he did not gain control of the government, but in the end got only shame as the fruit of his plot, and fled again as a fugitive into the country of the Ammonites.
8| So he met a wretched end: shut up in the house of Aretas, tyrant of the Arabs, fleeing from city to city, pursued by everyone, hated as a rebel against the laws and abhorred as the executioner of his country and fellow citizens, he was cast out into Egypt.
9| He who had driven so many from their homeland perished in a foreign land, having crossed over to the Lacedaemonians in hope of finding shelter there because of his kinship with them.
10| And he who had thrown out a multitude of the unburied was mourned by no one, and received no funeral of any kind, nor any place among his ancestors' tombs.
11| When news of what had happened reached the king, he concluded that Judea was in revolt; so setting out from Egypt in a savage rage, he seized the city through armed assault,
12| and ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy anyone they met, and to slaughter those who took refuge in their houses.
13| There was killing of young and old alike, destruction of grown men, women, and children, and the slaughter of virgins and infants.
14| Within the space of three days, eighty thousand were destroyed, forty thousand in hand-to-hand fighting, and no fewer were sold into slavery than were slain.
15| Not content with this, he dared to enter the holiest temple in all the earth, guided by Menelaus, who had turned traitor both to the sacred law and to his own homeland,
16| and with polluted hands he took the sacred vessels, and with profane hands swept away the offerings which other kings had set up to increase the glory and honor of the place.
17| And Antiochus was lifted up in his mind, not perceiving that it was because of the sins of those who inhabited the city that the Master had been angered for a little while, and that this was why the place had been overlooked.
18| For if it had not happened that they were entangled in many sins, then, just as Heliodorus was sent by King Seleucus to inspect the treasury, this man too, the moment he came forward, would have been scourged and turned back from his insolence.
19| But the Lord did not choose the nation for the sake of the place, but the place for the sake of the nation.
20| Therefore the place itself, having shared in the nation's misfortunes, later shared also in its blessings; and what had been forsaken in the wrath of the Almighty was, in the reconciliation of the great Master, restored again with all glory.
21| So Antiochus, having carried off eighteen hundred talents from the temple, hurried back to Antioch, thinking in his arrogance that he could turn dry ground into sea-lanes and walk across the waves on foot, so far had the pride of his heart carried him aloft.
22| And he left behind overseers to afflict the people: in Jerusalem, Philip, by birth a Phrygian and in character more barbarous than the man who appointed him;
23| and at Gerizim, Andronicus; and besides these, Menelaus, who lorded it over his fellow citizens worse than the rest, harboring a hostile disposition toward his Jewish countrymen.
24| He also sent Apollonius, captain of the Mysian troops, with an army of twenty-two thousand, with orders to slaughter all the grown men and sell the women and the younger ones.
25| This man, on arriving at Jerusalem and pretending to be peaceable, waited until the holy day of the Sabbath, and then, finding the Jews at rest from work, ordered his men to parade fully armed.
26| He ran through all who had come out to watch and, rushing into the city with his armed men, cut down great numbers of the people.
27| But Judas, also called Maccabeus, withdrew with about nine others into the hills, and lived there like wild animals with those who were with him, continuing to eat only what grew wild, so as not to share in the defilement.