"Bible Week"

 “Bible Week” at The Ambiguities 

Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Three stories from 2 Maccabees.

It happened when Antiochus was retreating from Persia. (He had made the mistake of trying to take Persepolis, rob the temples, and rule the city.) He had come to Ecbatana, where he heard about the defeat of Nicanor and Timothy by the Jews. And he was (in what has become common parlance) pissed. And he decided he’d take out on the Jews the shame the Persepolites had put on him. So he ordered his charioteer to drive on, no stops until they got to Jerusalem, which, he said, he was going to make “a cemetery of Jews.”

     But the God of Israel, who sees all and hears all, saw Antiochus and heard what he said, and he struck him “an incurable and unseen [and obscene] blow.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Anti was “seized with a pain in his bowels,” for which there was no relief and no let up. It was torture. “And that very justly, for he had tortured the bowels of others with many and strange inflictions.”

It was a different Antiochus, the son of Antiochus, that the wicked Menelaus, who kept hoping to be chief priest, “with utter hypocrisy” goaded on against his own people. But God, “the King of kings,” got into that, too, arousing “the anger of Antiochus against the scoundrel,” based on information Lysias had. So Antiochus ordered them to take him to Beroea “and to put him to death by the method which [was] the custom in that place.”

     So they did. And the method was this. There was a tower in Beroea, “fifty cubits high” (or about 75 feet)* “full of ashes, and it [had] a rim running around it which on all sides [inclined] precipitously into the ashes,” like a funnel. And they punished men “guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes” over the edge. Naturally, they died, smothered in the ashes, and they were left there; they were not buried in the earth.

     And that was the fate of “Menelaus the lawbreaker” finally, and it was “eminently just, because he had committed many sins against the altar whose fire and ashes were holy.” So he “met his death in ashes.”

The same Nicanor that served the first Antiochus served the second. His long and inglorious career ended this way.

J. M.

     He came after the Jews with a ton of stuff, though his “abominable design” to attack them on the Sabbath failed. Still, a ton of stuff, and Judas Maccabeus saw that, that Nicanor had ranks and ranks of soldiers and a “varied supply of arms” and elephants. So Judas prayed to “God the righteous judge,” saying, “O Lord, thou didst send thy angel in the time of Hezekiah king of Judea, and he slew fully a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of Sennacherib. By the might of thine arm may these blasphemers who come against thy holy people be struck down.” By “struck down,” he meant annihilated.

     Nicanor must not have heard Maccabeus prayer, for “his men advanced with trumpets and battle songs, but “Judas and his men met the enemy in battle with invocation to God” and more prayers. And, of course, they prevailed, though they killed only thirty-five thousand men not one-hundred and eighty-five thousand. Still, they “were greatly gladdened by God's manifestation,” and when the action was over they turned toward home “with joy.”

     But on the way, they saw Nicanor. He was in full armor but dead. And interrupting, the army’s “shouting and tumult,” their blessing “the Sovereign Lord in the language of their fathers,” Judas, “the man who was ever in body and soul the defender of his fellow citizens, the man who maintained his youthful good will toward his countrymen, ordered them to cut off Nicanor's head and arm” so they could take them with them back to Jerusalem.
     And when they got there, he called everyone together, including the priests at the altar and those that were in the citadel. And he showed them “the vile Nicanor's head and that profane man's arm, which had been boastfully stretched out against the holy house of the Almighty.” Then, holding up the head, he cut out the “ungodly” Nicanor’s tongue, saying that he was going to feed it to the birds. And he was going to hang his head and arm, “these rewards of [the ungodly man’s] folly” opposite the sanctuary. And all looked to heaven and blessed the Lord “who had manifested himself” in the battle. And Judas did hang Nicanor’s head from the citadel, as “a clear and conspicuous sign” of the Lord’s help.

     This was the thirteenth day of the Adar, and it was by decree “by public vote never to let [the] day go unobserved, but to celebrate it as Nicanor’s day. And so it was.

Here endeth the lesson.

04.20.16

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Quotes are from the Revised Standard Version.
 
 * This is really cool. (It may be found here.)