3 Maccabees: The Elephants That Turned Around

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer in Egypt, almost certainly Alexandria, who wrote in showy Greek.

When: Probably between about 100 BC and AD 70. Many scholars place it in the decades just before my birth.

Where it fits: Set in 217 BC, in the reign of the Egyptian king Ptolemy IV, after his victory over the Greek king of Syria at Raphia. It has nothing to do with the Maccabees, who came fifty years later.

Which Bibles keep it: The Greek Orthodox and other Eastern Orthodox Bibles. Catholic and Protestant Bibles do not. It was not in the 1611 King James.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Nowhere quoted. Its plot follows Esther: a king turned against the Jews, a plan to destroy them all on one day, a reversal, and a festival.

How close it stays to me: Close in the God who hears a people facing the empire’s beasts. Far in killing their own who gave in.

If you only read three chapters: 3 Maccabees 2, 3 Maccabees 5 and 3 Maccabees 6.

Words to Know

Ptolemy — the name of the Greek kings who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. This one is Ptolemy IV, called Philopator, father-lover.

Dionysus — the Greek god of wine and of wild religious rites. The ivy leaf was his sign.

Hippodrome — a stadium for horse and chariot races.

Apostate — someone who has abandoned their faith.

The Book in Brief

King Ptolemy IV of Egypt defeats the king of Syria at Raphia, and visits Jerusalem afterward. He insists on entering the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest may enter, once a year. The people beg him not to. The high priest Simon prays, and God shakes the king like a reed and drops him on the pavement, speechless.

The humiliated king returns to Egypt and takes revenge on the Jews there. He orders them registered as common people, branded with the ivy leaf of Dionysus, and stripped of their rights, unless they join his god’s rites, in which case they may become full citizens. A few do. Most refuse. In chapters 3 and 4 he orders all the Jews of Egypt rounded up, chained, and brought to Alexandria to be killed. They are crowded into the hippodrome.

In chapter 5 the king orders five hundred elephants drugged with wine and incense, to trample the Jews to death. Twice the plan fails: once the king oversleeps, and once God makes him forget what he ordered. The third time the elephants are driven toward the Jews, and an old priest named Eleazar prays. In chapter 6 God opens heaven, two terrible angels appear, and the elephants turn and trample the king’s own soldiers.

The king repents, blames his advisers, sets the Jews free with a feast, and writes a letter in their favor. In chapter 7 the Jews ask permission to punish those of their own people who abandoned the law, and kill more than three hundred of them. They establish a yearly festival and go home in joy.

The name was probably given because it was copied with the books of the Maccabees, and is also about my people under persecution by a Greek king. But its story is set fifty years before Judas the Hammer, and in Egypt, not Judea.¹

It is a wild story, full of elephants, drunkenness, a king who keeps oversleeping, and angels. Read it like a story, the way you would read Esther. Underneath the noise, it is about one of the oldest temptations in the world.

The king who wanted in

It begins in Jerusalem. King Ptolemy has won a great battle and comes to see the Temple. He is so impressed that he wants to go into the innermost room, the Holy of Holies.

They tell him he cannot. None of the nation, no, nor even the priests in general, but only the supreme high priest of all, and he only once in a year (3 Maccabees 1:11). He will not listen.

The high priest prays. Give ear to us who are oppressed by a wicked and profane one, who exults in his confidence and strength (3 Maccabees 2:2). And God answers. He scourged the man greatly uplifted with scorn and insolence. Shaking him to and fro as a reed is shaken with the wind, he cast him upon the pavement, powerless (3 Maccabees 2:21–22).

The great king, who had just beaten an army, is shaken like a reed. I once asked the crowds about John the Baptizer, What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? (Matthew 11:7). The kings in soft clothing are the reeds. The prophet was not.

Citizens, if you join

The king goes home angry, and turns on the Jews of Egypt. And the first thing he does is not violence. It is an offer.

He puts up a decree. All Jews are to be registered as common people, without the rights of citizens, and marked on their persons by the ivy-leaf symbol of Dionysus. But if any of them should elect to enter the community of those initiated in the rites, these should have equal rights with the Alexandrians (3 Maccabees 2:29–30).

That is the real test in this book. Not the elephants. The offer. Give up your God, join the king’s religion, and you can be a full citizen of the greatest city in the world. Refuse, and be branded and pushed down.

Some took it. Most did not. And the writer tells you why they were hated: as they worshipped God, and observed his law, they made certain distinctions, and avoided certain things. Hence some persons held them in odium (3 Maccabees 3:4). They would not eat everything, would not worship everything, and their neighbors resented them for it.

I know that offer. Every empire makes it. Bow to what the powerful bow to, and you will be one of them. My followers would face it from Rome: offer incense to the emperor, and be left alone. Many would not.

Go deeperRegistered as common people

Part of this story may come from the writer’s own time, not from Ptolemy IV’s.

Under the Greek kings of Egypt, the Jews of Alexandria had a protected place in the city, with their own council and their own courts, and some of them enjoyed the privileges of citizens. In 30 BC Egypt fell to Rome. A few years later, the Romans introduced a poll tax, the laographia, paid by the native Egyptian population. Greek citizens of Alexandria were exempt. Jews were not, or not all of them, and they fought hard to keep their status.²

The word the book uses for the king’s registration of the Jews is the same word, laographia. Some scholars think the writer was living through that Roman registration and told a story about an old king to say something about his own day: being counted with the common people, losing rights, and being offered citizenship at the price of the faith.²

It is also worth knowing that the historian Josephus tells a very similar elephant story, but about a different king, Ptolemy VIII, about seventy years later, and says the Jews of Alexandria kept a festival in memory of it.³ So there was a story of the Jews and the elephants told in Alexandria, attached to more than one king. The details changed. The memory of being made a spectacle for a king’s rage did not.

Five hundred elephants

Then comes the violence. The king orders all the Jews of the countryside brought to Alexandria in chains and shut into the hippodrome. He orders the keeper of his elephants to drug five hundred elephants with unmixed wine and handfuls of incense, to make them mad, and drive them over the Jews (3 Maccabees 5:2).

Twice it fails, and here the book almost becomes a comedy. The first morning the king oversleeps. The second, God makes him forget the whole plan, and he asks his servants what the elephants are for (3 Maccabees 5:27–28). The third time, they go.

An old priest named Eleazar prays for his people, now being wrongfully destroyed as strangers in a strange land (3 Maccabees 6:3). Appear quickly to those of the race of Israel, who are insulted (3 Maccabees 6:9).

Then the all-glorious, all-powerful, and true God, displayed his holy countenance, and opened the gates of heaven, from which two angels, dreadful of form, came down … They turned back the animals upon the armed forces which followed them; and the animals trod them down (3 Maccabees 6:18, 21).

The empire’s beasts turn around and trample the empire’s soldiers.

Strangers in a strange land

What I keep from this book is that prayer of an old man in a stadium: God, look at your people, strangers in a strange land.

Every people that has lived as a minority under a foreign king has known what it is to be crowded into a place by the authorities, counted, marked, and made a show for a crowd. Some of my own people would live it again in Europe, in the twentieth century, and no angels came. I will not pretend otherwise.

What the book believes is that God hears that prayer, and that the beasts the powerful let loose can turn on them. I believe that God hears it. I said, I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35). I put myself among the strangers in the stadium, not with the king in the stands.

Go deeperA festival like Purim, in Egypt

3 Maccabees ends as Esther ends: with a reversal, a royal letter in favor of the Jews, and a yearly festival. The Jews of Egypt, it says, decided to keep the days of their deliverance as a feast, and wrote it on a pillar, and made the place of their feast a place of prayer (3 Maccabees 6:36; 7:19–20).

The book is built so much like Esther that many scholars think the writer knew the Greek Esther and was writing an Egyptian version of it: a king persuaded against the Jews, a plan to kill them all on one day, prayer, a reversal, the punishment of enemies, and a festival.¹ Like Esther, it explains why a local community kept a holiday that was not in the law of Moses.

The book was popular in the Eastern churches. It is in the Greek Bible, though not in the Latin, and so it is part of the Old Testament in the Greek and other Orthodox churches today. The Western church, which read the Latin, never knew it well, and the 1611 King James did not include it. If you were raised in a Western church, Catholic or Protestant, this is probably the first time you have heard of it.

Where 3 Maccabees and I part

The book has one more scene, at the very end, and it is the one I cannot keep.

When the king sets the Jews free, they ask him for one more thing: permission to punish those of their race who had willingly transgressed the holy god, and the law of God (3 Maccabees 7:10). The ones who had taken the king’s offer, joined the rites of Dionysus, and become citizens. The king agrees. Then they punished and destroyed with ignominy every polluted Jew that fell in their way; slaying thus, in that day, above three hundred men, and esteeming this destruction of the wicked a season of joy (3 Maccabees 7:14–15).

Three hundred of their own neighbors, killed for being weak when the pressure came, and the killing called a season of joy.

I had a friend who, when the pressure came, denied three times that he knew me. I did not have him killed. After I rose, I asked him three times whether he loved me, and gave him my sheep to feed. The people who break under the empire’s pressure are not your enemies. They are the ones you go and bring home.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 3 Maccabees 2:28–30.

You will find: the king’s offer: be branded and lose your rights, or join his god and become a citizen.

Then read 3 Maccabees 6:18–21, the elephants, and 7:10–15, what the freed people did next.

The Short Version

• 3 Maccabees has no Maccabees in it. It is set in Egypt in 217 BC and is kept in Orthodox Bibles.
• A king tries to enter the Holy of Holies and is shaken like a reed.
• At home he offers the Jews of Egypt citizenship if they join his god, and branding if they refuse. Most refuse.
• He drives five hundred drunken elephants at them in the stadium, and God turns the elephants on his own army.
• The freed people then kill three hundred of their own who had given in. I would have gone to bring them home.