Alrighty, today is the day that we are going to get into the two most famous books from the intertestamental period of all. These are the books that I think you are most likely to have heard of from this era. Whether you are a Jew or a Protestant evangelical Christian who doesn't regard these as part of the Bible at all, but would regard these as valuable, useful, and interesting. Or whether you're from a Christian tradition that would say, well, it's different than the Old and the New Testament, but I'm okay with it being put in the same book, bound up inside the same leather as the rest of the Bible, or whether you're from a tradition that would say, nah, this should be totally integrated into the Bible. No matter where you fit in all of that, I think these are the two books from the period between where the Old Testament leaves off, 440 BC, and just before the time of Jesus, that you are most likely to have heard of. These are the books of first and second Maccabees. These books are named for the hero family. They describe the family that saw a problem and solved a problem. The problem they saw was that a madman and his descendants from Seleucid Greek Syria had overstepped their bounds. They were trying to force Greekism onto the Jewish people and snuff out the law of God and the worship of God in the temple and force everybody to become Greek. They blasphemed God. And so the namesake of these two books, the Maccabees family, it's kind of a nickname that they take on, they push back and win. They throw off their overlords, they purify the temple, and eventually they win so completely that they re-establish a new free kingdom in Jerusalem and Judea. And then they're only able to keep that kingdom for about a hundred years. That isn't recorded in first and second Maccabees. But then until 1948, that's the last time there's a free Jewish kingdom or government there in historic Israel. So, I mean, this is a pretty big deal, a pretty big moment in history. First and 2nd Maccabees tell roughly the same story, but they are not the same book. They've got just a very different feel between the two. First Maccabees is really, it's just pretty dang good nationalistic history. It's accurate. The people and the places and the dates are all where they ought to be within the margin of error for writing about history in this time, a year or two. First Maccabees doesn't have a lot of theology in it. It's just more of a Braveheart story about the underdogs rising up and throwing off the oppressor. It's got cool military history in it. It interacts as much with geopolitical history from the ancient world as really just about anything in the Old Testament, and kind of more. It feels like a history book, not a Bible book when you read through it. Second Maccabees is different. It's a little bit looser on the historical detail side of things. The margin of error for dates and so forth is a little more flexible. There's what I would consider to be a pretty gigantic historical biblical gaff in the first chapter that I think is going to be like if you go and read it and you're like, oh, maybe this is Bible, and you know the Old Testament, you're going to be pretty turned off by the first chapter because it gets Nehemiah and the Second Temple period in Persia from the end of the Old Testament way wrong. It credits Nehemiah with being the guy who built the second temple when we know that was Zerubbabel descended from David. Nehemiah comes along, you know, 70 or 80 years later, along with his buddy Ezra. They rebuild the people and rebuild the wall. We documented that extensively in the seasons we did on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther from this era. So, you know, that's in there. There's a few other things like that where it clunks a little bit, but the author of Second Maccabees, I don't think he'd be embarrassed about that. I think he'd be a bro about it because I want to hang out with this guy. The author of Second Maccabees seems really cool. He's a little bit self-effacing. He acknowledges that this kind of work is pretty hard and he's doing his best. He also acknowledges that he's trying to take a really big thing and make it make sense more quickly to a group of people who are interested but don't have time to wade through all of it. Do you see why I might want to hang out with him and like his impulses? Hey, okay, so you know he goofed up on something. I can relate to that. Also, hey, he studied a big giant thing really hard and likes the task of trying to distill it and make it make sense for normal people like everybody else. Cool, I can relate to that too. And he owns it completely in 2 Maccabees chapter 2. He's like, all right, so I'm at I'm paraphrasing a little bit. This is the account of Judas Maccabees and his brothers and how they purified the temple, consecrated the altar, and it's about the wars against Antichus, Epiphanes, and all this other stuff. And then he says, uh, all this, which was made clear by Jason of Cyrene in five books, we shall attempt to abridge into a single book. So there's this guy, Jason of Cyrene, who apparently wrote a gigantic Hellenistic style history in the very verbose, long-winded style of maybe like Herodotus, the father of history. Histories from back then were very, very long, which I'm cool with, but it can be a lot to wade through. And what do you know? The very next verse of 2nd Maccabees chapter two has this cool guy who wrote this admitting it. Yeah, we realize that a confused mass of material and subject matter makes it too hard on most people who wish to plunge into the narrative of history. So thus we've aimed to help those who wish to read with delight and make it easy for those who are inclined to memorize and appeal to those who read for profit. And he goes on to just say, I'm taking this huge amount of stuff. I'm doing my best to sort through it. I'm going to try to make it make sense and get it all down into one volume so you can get the story down for yourself. Again, I love this guy. I like how he thinks about it. And he goes on to tell a historical story in the context of the theological trajectory of the Old Testament. It all flows out of the same cycle we see in the Old Testament that if God's chosen people obey him, God's going to bless him. If they disobey him, God's going to punish them. The character of the leaders matters. The honoring of God matters. And so he frames it all up like that. And I frankly really like the effort he put into it. And I super enjoy both of these books, but I love the tone of 2nd Maccabees. And get this you get to the end of 2nd Maccabees. This is what the dude says about the book he just wrote. It's this total shrug. Like, I tried, I hope you had fun. I had fun. I guess this is just going to be the end. So the end. Oh, also there's a likewise right in the middle. This is the coolest thing. Listen to how this book ends. This is the way things turned out for Nickanor. We'll learn later who that is. So from that time on, the city's been controlled by the Hebrews. Thus I'll end my story here. If I've written well and made my point in the narrative, this is what I myself desired. But if it was done poorly and it's just average, well, this is the best I could do. For as it is disagreeable to drink wine only or water only, whereas wine mingled with water is pleasing and delightful and brings greater joy. So likewise, I added the likewise. Also, the written style of the account delights the ears of those who read it. This then shall be the end. Nice job. High five, second Maccabees guy. So the two books complement each other, and mostly they seem to square with all of these other historical accounts that surround it. Here's the gist of how the story unfolds. First Maccabees opens with Alexander the Great. You and I have talked about that a ton. He dies, his generals start fighting over things. First Maccabees gives a little more charitable account there toward those generals and their fighting than what other historians from this era tell us, but you know, whatever, close enough. And there's even hints in these books, but more so outside of these books, that the Ptolemies, who initially held Jerusalem, and then the Seleucids who later hold Jerusalem, even all the way up to the time of a guy named Antiochus III, were just pretty chill about Jerusalem. They kind of carried forward the Achaemenid Persian relationship with the Jews that it existed going all the way back at this time for 300 plus years to the time of Cyrus the Great. And we're like, eh, you folks seem like you're better just left alone. And you have good laws that are in place. There are laws that are pretty agreeable and peaceable, like whatever. Just here's a little bit of money. Run your temple and govern yourselves. It'll be it'll be fine. So the high priests then were kind of regents on behalf of the Persians first, then on behalf of the Ptolemies, then on behalf of the Seleucids, right up until the time that first and second Maccabees get going, and we get into the really hostile, difficult stuff that leads to the Maccabean revolt. Well, then Antiochus III dies, and somewhere in there, like we talked about yesterday, a guy named Jason, who is from this emerging Jewish upper crust, who live in fancy houses and look down their noses at the normal normies who are from rural areas and who still believe in passe things like the God of Israel and the law. We believe in a more enlightened form of religion that involves Zeus and the new fashionable things that our new fashionable overlords do. It's time to get with the times. And so there's this huge, snobbish cultural divide that happens. And one of the things that is often overlooked when we consider the story of this time is that the bad guys aren't just the Greek Gentiles trying to inflict Greekism on the Jews. It's the collaborating Jewish upper crust who want it. They like this stuff. They're not doing circumcision anymore. Some of them who got circumcised against their will as kids even invented a reverse circumcision surgery so they would look more Greek. They welcome Jason, this corrupt high priest, weasling in to power with the new madman, Seleucid King Antiochus IV. And they love it when Jason, according to these books and other historical books from this time, builds a Greek-style gymnasium where naked sports happen next to the temple. And he builds a Greek school next to the temple. The idea being we're just going to eradicate Judaism using the power of the Jewish high priesthood and the money of the Jewish temple. We're just going to get rid of Judaism and we're going to replace it with Greekishness. It wasn't just like, oh, we made things unfashionable. No, they implement policy. They erect a statue to Zeus in the temple. And Tyakus Epiphanes, with the cooperation of Jason, the pseudo-high priest, they let people build altars and put idols to Greek gods in the temple complex. They sacrifice a pig in there to Zeus. What? Then on top of that, when people understandably get mad about it, they're like, oh, it's so passe. You don't get it. And they start punishing people who like the law, read the law, keep the law of God, the Pentateuch, the books of Moses with them. And again, the Jewish Uppercrust are collaborators with this. And when they found the books of the law, they tore them into pieces and burned them in the fire. Whenever a book of the covenant was found in someone's possession, or if anyone sympathized with the law, the judgment of the king was to kill him. Get this. In keeping with this decree, they sentenced to death the women who had their children circumcised, and the families who had circumcised them. This next part is graphic. Plug your ears if you don't want to hear it. Three, two, one, here I go. And they hung the infants from their mothers' necks. But then this big opening chapter describing the troubling times that are brewing ends with this. Yet many in Israel grew strong and determined in themselves not to eat unclean things. They chose rather to die than be defiled by foods or profane the holy covenant. So they died, and great wrath came upon Israel. Oh, it's getting spicy. Well, up the road in a little town called Modin, there's some faithful types. People who kind of come off like, I don't know, not quite as peacefully, but who come off like Simeon and Anna in the book of Luke, who welcome the arrival of Jesus. They're part of this remnant. People who haven't been swept up in whatever latest empire comes through town. They've still got this long view of the promises of God, even if they don't totally understand them. And one of these types of people at this time in the around 170 BC, during this time of great persecution, is this old man named Mattathias and his sons. They're from the tribe of Simeon. They're in this little town called Modine. So the collaborators and the Greeks show up in this little town. They're like, hey, everybody has to do sacrifices to Greek gods. Come do it right now. And Mattatthias isn't like, as for me and my household, this is my paraphrase, we're not doing it. But then another Jew in front of everybody steps forward and is like, I'll do it. I'll sacrifice to Zeus or the Greek gods or whatever. And he walks forward, and old man Mattathias, make of this what you will, he quote, ran and slew him upon the altar. And it goes on, so Mattathias killed the king's man who wanted to offer sacrifice at that time, and he tore down the altar. Thus he had zeal for the law. Now it's on, right? You remember in Braveheart when William Wallace has his secret wife taken from him by the disgusting man who shall practice prima docta? William Wallace is like, no, okay, it's uh it's time for revenge. And he shows up and he routes the garrison. Then it's on, right? Like once you light that fire, now everybody has to choose. Do you rally to the side of the William Wallace Braveheart style rebel and risk everything? Or do you run away and hide, like some people did who went and hid by the Dead Sea and created communities there? Or do you collaborate even harder to signal your fealty to the new order to the oppressors? Long story short, a whole bunch of people rally to the hill country and they take up arms and they start doing guerrilla warfare against the Seleucids. And what do you know? They're pretty dang good at it. Tomorrow, I am telling you, you better show up with your loins properly girded, whatever that exactly means. And you better have whatever themes or visuals in your brain that makes your hot-blooded revolutionary-minded freedom loving, get rid of the oppressor, heart pumping. You gotta come ready because tomorrow we're gonna get into a bunch of the awesome stuff about how Judas Maccabees and his brothers kicked the Greeks' butts, and it's fun. All right, I'll catch you then. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.