Anonymous (Septuagint) · a new plain-English translation from the original language
1| Judas, called Maccabeus, and his companions made their way secretly into the villages and called together their kinsmen, and taking in with them those who had remained faithful in Judaism, they gathered about six thousand.
2| And they called upon the Lord to look upon the people who were being trampled by all, and to have pity on the temple that had been profaned by ungodly men,
3| and to have mercy on the city that was being destroyed and was about to be leveled to the ground, and to listen to the blood crying out to him,
4| and to remember also the lawless slaughter of the innocent children, and the slanders hurled at his name, and to hate wickedness.
5| When Maccabeus had gathered his force, he at once became unbearable to the nations, for the wrath of the Lord had turned to mercy.
6| Coming unexpectedly upon cities and villages, he set them ablaze; and seizing the strategic positions, he routed no small number of the enemy,
7| choosing the nights above all as allies for such undertakings, and the report of his valor spread everywhere.
8| Now Philip, seeing the man advancing little by little, and gaining ground more and more with his successes, wrote to Ptolemy, the governor of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, to come to the aid of the king's affairs.
9| And he quickly appointed Nicanor, son of Patroclus, one of the king's chief friends, and sent him out, putting under his command mixed nations numbering no fewer than twenty thousand, to wipe out the whole race of Judea; and they associated with him also Gorgias, a general and a man experienced in military matters.
10| And Nicanor undertook to raise for the king the tribute owed to the Romans, two thousand talents, out of the sale of the Jewish captives.
11| At once he sent to the coastal cities inviting men to come and buy Jewish slaves, promising to hand over ninety bodies for a talent, not reckoning the judgment that was soon to follow him from the Almighty.
12| Word came to Judas concerning Nicanor's approach; and when he told those with him of the arrival of the army,
13| the cowardly and those who did not trust in the justice of God fled and removed themselves elsewhere;
14| but the others sold all that remained to them, and at the same time begged the Lord to rescue those who had been sold by the impious Nicanor before they were even brought together,
15| and if not for their own sake, then for the sake of the covenants made with their fathers, and because his name, majestic and glorious, had been called upon them.
16| So Maccabeus, gathering those with him, six thousand in number, urged them not to be shaken by the foe or dread the vast horde of nations wrongfully advancing against them, but to fight nobly,
17| keeping before their eyes the lawless outrage the enemy had committed against the holy place, and the mistreatment of the humiliated city, and further, the overthrow of their ancestral way of life.
18| "For they trust in weapons and in acts of daring," he said, "but we trust in the Almighty God, who is able with a single nod to strike down both those coming against us and the whole world."
19| And he recounted to them also the deliverances that had come to their forefathers, both the one in the days of Sennacherib, when a hundred eighty-five thousand perished,
20| and the battle that took place in Babylonia against the Galatians, how in all only eight thousand went into the action, together with four thousand Macedonians, and when the Macedonians were hard pressed, the six thousand destroyed the hundred twenty thousand because of the help that came to them from heaven, and took great spoil besides.
21| With these words he made them courageous and willing to die on behalf of the laws and their homeland, and he divided the army into four divisions,
22| appointing his own brothers to lead each division — Simon and Joseph and Jonathan — putting under each of them fifteen hundred men,
23| and Eleazar besides; and after reading aloud from the sacred book, and giving as a watchword "The help of God," he himself led the first company and joined battle with Nicanor.
24| And since the Almighty was their ally, they cut down more than nine thousand of the enemy, and wounded and maimed the greater part of Nicanor's army, and forced them all to flee.
25| They took also the money of those who had come to buy them as slaves. And having pursued them a good distance, they turned back, being pressed for time,
26| since it was the day preceding the Sabbath, and for this reason they pressed the pursuit no further.
27| And when they had gathered up the weapons and stripped the enemy of their spoils, they kept the Sabbath, blessing and giving thanks abundantly to the Lord, who had preserved them to this day, having appointed it as the beginning of mercy for them.
28| After the Sabbath they gave a share of the spoils to those who had been mistreated, and to the widows and orphans, and divided the rest among themselves and their children.
29| When they had done these things and made a common supplication, they begged the merciful Lord to be fully reconciled with his servants.
30| And having engaged the forces of Timothy and Bacchides, they killed more than twenty thousand of them, and gained mastery over high strongholds with great ease, and divided a very large amount of spoil, giving equal shares to those who had been mistreated, and to the orphans and widows, and also to the elderly.
31| And having gathered up the weapons, they carefully stored them all in the strategic places, and carried the rest of the spoils to Jerusalem.
32| They also killed the commander of Timothy's forces, a most unholy man who had caused the Jews much suffering.
33| And while celebrating the victory in their homeland, they burned those who had set fire to the sacred gates, together with Callisthenes, who had fled into a small house; and so he received the wages his impiety deserved.
34| But the thrice-wretched Nicanor, who had brought the thousand merchants to buy the Jews,
35| being humbled by the help of the Lord through those he had reckoned the least of all, laid aside his splendid robe, and making his way alone through the interior like a runaway slave, came to Antioch, having succeeded, beyond all else, only in the destruction of his army.
36| And he who had promised the Romans to make good the tribute from the captivity of the people of Jerusalem now proclaimed that the Jews had a champion, and that for this reason the Jews were invulnerable, because they followed the laws he had laid down for them.