2 Maccabees: The Mother and Her Seven Sons

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer who boiled down a five-book history by a man named Jason of Cyrene, in North Africa. He wrote in Greek, and his polished Greek style shows it. Two letters were added at the front.

When: Jason’s history probably soon after 160 BC. This shorter version probably in the late 100s BC. The first letter at the front is dated 124 BC.

Where it fits: It covers only about fifteen years, from about 175 to 161 BC: the corruption of the high priesthood, the persecution under Antiochus IV, and the victories of Judas Maccabeus (the same years as 1 Maccabees 1 to 7).

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: The martyrs of chapters 6 and 7 are remembered in Hebrews 11:35: Others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.

How close it stays to me: Close in martyrs who will not take up the sword. Far in paying silver for the dead.

If you only read three chapters: 2 Maccabees 4, 2 Maccabees 7 and 2 Maccabees 12.

Words to Know

Martyr — from the Greek word for witness: someone who dies rather than give up what they believe.

Resurrection — the raising of the dead, body and all, by God. This book is one of the clearest early witnesses to it.

High priest — the chief priest of the Temple. In these years, the most powerful Jewish office in the land.

Talent — a very large weight of silver, worth many years of a laborer’s wages.

The Book in Brief

The book opens with two letters from the Jews of Jerusalem to the Jews of Egypt, urging them to keep the new festival of the Temple’s purification, and telling stories of how the sacred fire was hidden in the exile and how Jeremiah hid the ark of the covenant. Then the writer explains that he is shortening Jason of Cyrene’s five books into one.

In chapter 3 the king’s minister Heliodorus comes to seize the Temple treasury, which holds the savings of widows and orphans, and is beaten by a horseman and two young men from heaven. In chapters 4 and 5 the high priesthood is sold. Jason buys it from Antiochus, brings Greek ways into Jerusalem, and is outbid by Menelaus, who has the good former high priest Onias murdered. Antiochus plunders the Temple and massacres the people.

In chapters 6 and 7 the Temple is defiled and the Jewish religion is banned. The writer stops to explain that these sufferings are discipline, not destruction. An old scribe named Eleazar refuses even to pretend to eat pork and is beaten to death. A mother and her seven sons are tortured one after another before the king, and each refuses, the sons promising that God will raise them up, until the mother dies last.

In chapters 8 to 15 Judas Maccabeus fights the king’s generals. Antiochus dies in agony, eaten by worms. Judas cleanses the Temple. After a battle, he finds idols on his dead soldiers, takes up a collection, and sends it to Jerusalem for a sacrifice for the sins of the dead. In the last chapters Judas defeats the general Nicanor, who had threatened the Temple, after a dream in which Jeremiah hands him a golden sword. The day of victory becomes a festival.

The king wanted them to eat pork, to show that they had given up the law of their fathers. One of them answered for all: What would you ask and learn of us? for we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers (2 Maccabees 7:2).

They were tortured one after another, each in front of the others and their mother. When the second was dying, he said: You, miscreant, do release us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise up us, who have died for his laws, to an eternal renewal of life (2 Maccabees 7:9).

The third put out his tongue and held out his hands to be cut off, and said: From heaven I possess these; and for his laws’ sake I contemn these; and from him I hope to receive these back again (2 Maccabees 7:11).

Their mother watched all seven die in one day, and did not break. She told the youngest, Don’t be afraid of this butcher … accept your death, that in the mercy of God I may receive you again with your kindred (2 Maccabees 7:29).

That is the center of this book. It is where my people learned, in blood, to say clearly that God would raise the dead.

A second history of the same war

1 Maccabees tells the same years as a war story, praising the family of Mattathias. This book is different, and its writer tells you how.

He is shortening a much longer history. These things, I say, which have been declared by Jason of Cyrene in five books, we will assay to abridge in one work (2 Maccabees 2:23). He wants it to be easy and pleasant to read. At the end he even compares his book to wine mixed with water, which is better than either alone (2 Maccabees 15:39).

His history has angels and visions. When the king’s minister comes to rob the Temple treasury, a horse with a rider in golden armor appears and kicks him down, and two shining young men beat him (2 Maccabees 3:25–26). When Antiochus dies, out of the body of the impious man worms swarmed (2 Maccabees 9:9).

And its heroes are not mainly the soldiers. They are the martyrs.

Go deeperTwo histories, two heroes

1 and 2 Maccabees are not volume one and volume two. They are two separate books, by different writers, about overlapping years, with different points of view.¹

1 Maccabees was written in Hebrew by a supporter of the Hasmonean family, and its heroes are Mattathias and his sons. It barely mentions resurrection or angels. Its God works through soldiers.

2 Maccabees was written in Greek, by and for Jews of the dispersion. Its hero is Judas alone; his father Mattathias is never mentioned, and his brothers barely. Its God works through miracles, apparitions and martyrs. It cares about the Temple more than the dynasty. Many scholars think its outlook is close to the people who would later be called Pharisees, who believed in the resurrection and in angels.¹

The two books sometimes disagree. 1 Maccabees puts the cleansing of the Temple before the death of Antiochus; 2 Maccabees puts it after. Historians still debate which order is right, since a Babylonian record puts the king’s death in the same month as the cleansing. The second book also has things the first does not, such as the corruption of the high priesthood before the persecution began, which explains a great deal about how the persecution came about.¹

Read together, they show you that even the people who lived through the same events, and loved the same heroes, did not tell the same story. That is true of the gospels too.

The high priesthood for sale

Before Antiochus banned the religion, the rot started in the Temple itself. This is the part 1 Maccabees leaves out, and 2 Maccabees puts first.

The good high priest Onias had a brother named Jason. When Antiochus came to the throne, Jason went to him and bought his brother’s office, having promised to the king at an audience three hundred and threescore talents of silver (2 Maccabees 4:8). He paid more to set up a Greek gymnasium in Jerusalem. Soon the priests had no more any zeal for the services of the altar, but hurried off to the games (2 Maccabees 4:14).

Three years later, Jason sent a man named Menelaus to carry his payment to the king. Menelaus got the high priesthood for himself, outbidding Jason by three hundred talents of silver (2 Maccabees 4:24). Then he had the old high priest, Onias, lured out of sanctuary and murdered (2 Maccabees 4:34).

The highest office of my people’s religion was sold twice to the highest bidder, and the second buyer stole from the Temple to pay for it.

In my time, the high priest was no longer bought from a Greek king. He was appointed by Rome, and his family grew rich from the Temple’s business. When I overturned the tables in the Temple and called it a den of robbers (Matthew 21:13), I was standing in a place with a long memory of men who turned the house of God into a market.

The old man who would not pretend

Before the seven brothers, there is Eleazar, a scribe, ninety years old. The king’s men try to force pork into his mouth. He spits it out and walks to the rack.

Some of the officials, old friends of his, take him aside and offer him a way out: bring his own meat, pretend it is pork, and save his life. He refuses. It becomes not our years to dissemble … that through this many of the young should suppose that Eleazar, the man of fourscore years and ten, had gone over to an alien religion (2 Maccabees 6:24).

He could have lied, and no one would have known but him and the young people watching. He thought of the young people.

They did not fight

Notice what the martyrs of this book do not do. They do not take up the sword. They do not kill anyone. They refuse, and they die.

That is the choice the thousand in the caves made in 1 Maccabees, and that Mattathias turned away from. 2 Maccabees honors the fighters too; Judas wins battle after battle in its pages. But the scenes it lingers on, the ones that would be remembered for two thousand years, are not the battles. They are an old man and a mother and her sons who would not bow and would not strike back.

I went to my death the same way. I did not call down an army. I said, Don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul (Matthew 10:28). The mother in this book said the same to her youngest son.

The letter to the Hebrews remembers these martyrs when it lists the heroes of faith: Others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection (Hebrews 11:35). It is talking about Eleazar and the seven brothers.

The God who raises the dead

The older books of my people say very little about life after death. The dead go down to Sheol, a shadowy place. The clearest promise of resurrection in the Hebrew scriptures comes late, in Daniel 12. This book says it out loud, again and again.

And the mother adds something more. I beseech you, my child, to lift your eyes to the heaven and the earth … and thus to recognize that God made them not of things that were (2 Maccabees 7:28). God made the world from nothing. So he can make your body again from nothing.

When the Sadducees, the party of the wealthy priests, who did not believe in resurrection, tried to trap me with a riddle, I answered them from the books of Moses: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all are alive to him (Luke 20:38). The mother of the seven had already staked her sons’ lives on it.

Go deeperWhere Jeremiah hid the ark

The letters at the front of this book tell a story you will not find in your Bible. When Babylon was about to destroy the Temple, it says, the prophet Jeremiah took the tabernacle, and the ark, and the altar of incense to the mountain where Moses had seen the promised land, found a cave, put them inside, and sealed the door (2 Maccabees 2:4–5). When some of his companions came back to mark the way, they could not find it. Jeremiah told them it would stay hidden until God gathered his people again.²

Your Bible never says what happened to the ark of the covenant, the gold-covered chest that held the tablets of the law. It is in the Temple in the days of the kings, and then it simply disappears from the story. When Babylon carried off the Temple’s treasures in 586 BC, the list does not mention it (2 Kings 25:13–17). The second Temple, rebuilt after the exile, had no ark at all. When Pompey walked into the Holy of Holies in 63 BC, the historian Tacitus says, he found it empty.²

So there were stories. This one, in 2 Maccabees, says Jeremiah hid it on Mount Nebo. Others said it was taken to Babylon, or hidden under the Temple mount. Ethiopian Christians say it is in Aksum, in their land, to this day. None of them can be checked. The ark is one of the great unanswered questions of my people’s history, and this book holds one of the oldest written answers.

Silver for the dead

Then comes the passage that would split the church fifteen centuries later.

After a battle, Judas’s men go to bury their dead, and find, under each dead man’s clothes, consecrated tokens of the idols of Jamnia (2 Maccabees 12:40). Charms to protect them in battle, from a pagan temple. The men decide that is why these soldiers died.

So Judas made a collection man by man to the sum of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent to Jerusalem to offer a sacrifice for sin for the dead men (2 Maccabees 12:43). The writer approves: For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it were superfluous and idle to pray for the dead … Wherefore he made the atoning sacrifice for those who had died, that they might be released from their sin (2 Maccabees 12:44–45).

Prayer for the dead, and money sent to the Temple to release them from their sin.

You can see what was later built on that. In the Middle Ages, the church taught that the dead could be helped through a place of cleansing called purgatory, by prayers and by masses said for them, and people paid for those masses. Then they paid for indulgences, papers that promised to shorten the time of the dead in purgatory. The money built churches and bought power. When the Protestant reformers rejected purgatory, they also rejected this book as scripture, partly because this passage was the strongest text the church had for it. The Council of Trent confirmed it as scripture in 1546, and defended purgatory in 1563.³

Judas’s soldiers collected silver out of love for their dead friends. I do not mock that. But a church that turned that love into a business, selling relief for the dead to the living poor, had found its own door under the table.

Go deeperLuther and the books he wished away

Martin Luther included this book in his German Bible, translated by his colleagues, and put it among the Apocrypha, books not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet profitable and good to read.⁴

He did not like it. In conversation with his students, recorded in his Table Talk, he is reported to have said that he was so hostile to 2 Maccabees and to Esther that he wished they did not exist at all, because they Judaize too much and contain much pagan impropriety.⁴

You should hear both halves of that. Luther objected to this book partly because it was used to defend purgatory and the sale of indulgences, which he rightly attacked. But his reason, as he gave it at the table, was also that it was too Jewish. In his last years he wrote some of the most hateful pages ever written against my people, and they were reprinted by men who murdered them four centuries later.

A book can be set aside for good reasons and bad ones at the same time. When you are told that a book is not part of the Bible, it is fair to ask who decided, and why.

Where 2 Maccabees and I part

The seven brothers die without striking a blow, and their deaths are the strongest thing in the book. But listen to what some of them say to the king as they die.

Hold you on your way, and behold his sovereign majesty, how it will torture you and your seed (2 Maccabees 7:17). Think not you that you shall be unpunished (2 Maccabees 7:19). They die promising the king that God will torture his children.

And the book ends with Judas receiving, in a dream, a golden sword from the prophet Jeremiah: Take the holy sword, a gift from God, wherewith you shall strike down the adversaries (2 Maccabees 15:16).

I did not die cursing the men who killed me. The gospel of Luke remembers me praying, Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). And no prophet handed me a golden sword. I told my friend to put his away.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 2 Maccabees 7, the whole chapter.

You will find: seven brothers and their mother, the promise that the King of the world shall raise up us, and a mother telling her last son not to be afraid.

Then read Hebrews 11:35, and 2 Maccabees 12:38–45 beside what you know about purgatory and indulgences.

The Short Version

• 2 Maccabees is a shortened version of a lost five-book history by Jason of Cyrene, written in Greek. It covers the same war as 1 Maccabees with a different heart.
• It shows the high priesthood sold twice to the highest bidder before the persecution began.
• Its heroes are martyrs: old Eleazar, who would not even pretend, and a mother and her seven sons, who would not strike back. Hebrews 11:35 remembers them.
• It is one of the clearest early witnesses to the resurrection of the body.
• Its collection of silver for a sacrifice for the dead became a proof text for purgatory, and is one reason Protestants dropped the book.
• Its martyrs die promising torture to the king’s children, and its hero receives a holy sword. I did neither.