Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and we are working through the story of the Maccabean Revolution from the intertestamental books of 1st and 2nd Maccabees. Yesterday we looked at how oppressive and horrible Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his stool pigeons were in Jerusalem and the horrible things they did to people, and how when they finally went out to the rural folk who still believed in God and tried to make one dude in particular, Mattatthias, sacrifice to the Greek gods, he was like, no way. And blood was shed and the beacon was lit. Revolution was in full swing. Well, when that happened, Mattathias was not a young man. And so he dies pretty early in the story of first Maccabees. But his most prominent, competent son, Judah Maccabees, or Judas Maccabees, which means the hammer. He's always portrayed as wielding like a war hammer as well, even though we know that he took up a sword. I mean, dude is just awesome in the way he's described in these books. And he is the main hero of this story, a military liberating leader, very William Wallace-like. And over the next few chapters of First Maccabees, we get an account of him conducting this guerrilla-style swamp fox sort of warfare in the hill country. But Judas the Hammer is smart. He knows how the Greeks fight. The Greeks, all the way back to the time of when they were fighting the Persians during the Book of Esther in the 480s BC, they were able to beat much bigger armies using this fighting formation called a phalanx. Surely you've seen this in a movie or something else, but they got those round shields. The Spartans had the Greek lambda on those shields, maybe you can picture it. And then they had long spears and maybe like a sidearm, a short sword on their hip. The long spears and the shields would all overlap. They'd create like a hedge. They could basically just push their enemies because you couldn't hit them with projectiles. The hedge of spears would break up incoming arrows and defeat their velocity, and then the arrows would fall harmlessly off of their shields. They were super athletic and they could just take ground on a battlefield, close ground on you, and outpush you until the route was on. Then enemies in the ancient world would run. And then the very athletic Spartans, Athenians, Greeks, Macedonians, whatever, they would chase you down and run you through with spears or slash you down with short swords. And when the route was on, that's when they really won. So it was kind of like an ancient tug of war, and the Greeks were just better at it than anybody. Well, they were winning like this. I mean, they defeated Persia like this. This is how Alexander the Great fought with the addition of cavalry. Yeah, you can tell I get excited about this and I want to take us off on all kinds of rabbit trails. Let me try to focus in a little bit here. Judas Maccabees figures out we don't want to meet them in combat on an open field. We, the Jews, the rebels, who are underfunded and who don't have the privilege of organizing up in public, we got to be more clever. So when Antiochus sends troops to come down and put down this disgusting rebellion, the Judas Maccabees just goes and runs to the hills. He's hugely outnumbered, but stupidly, the Greeks follow him into his home hill country where he knows everything and they know nothing. Vastly outnumbered, Judas Maccabees routes the Greeks who are not able to form up into their phalanxes. Now this has gone from a nuisancey little rebellion to a full-on, huh? We got a legit military problem going on down here because I mean just think about how this works. And this is characterized throughout first and second Maccabees, but Mattathias kills the guy who's gonna sell out. He's doing the symbolic gesture to sell out to the Greek oppression. I mean, if that goes on unchecked at all, it's over. It's just the Greeks will win. They will kill or intimidate everybody who would still worship God into oblivion. I don't know. I don't really want to kill anybody. I don't know what I would do. I don't know. I'm conflicted a little bit about all of that stuff. But Mattathias, I mean, it's not even hard for him to be like, no, the line has to be drawn somewhere and it's going to be drawn here. You are not going to make us worship false gods. And instead of saying we'll die for it, like so many others in his generation had said, which I think is heroic as well, he's like, we'll kill for it. And he does that. He goes on the offensive. Okay, that lights a fire, right? It's a decent-sized metaphorical beacon that that lights, but it forces people into action, as we discussed. You're going to rally to that, you're going to retreat, or are you going to signal to the oppressors that you are loyal to them all the more? Well, a lot of people rally, and a lot of other people play their cards close to their vest. They're waiting to see if there's any realistic chance of winning. Then Judas Maccabees scores this huge victory against the military that is the most intimidating thing in the world. The military that beat Persia. It's still them. Judas Maccabees and these this hill country rabble defeats them. Well, now the beacon is lit, homies. And everybody's like, okay, we have a reasonable chance of winning. I agreed with their cause. I just didn't want to sign up for it, you know, commit suicide by rebellion. I'm in. People start rallying to Judas Maccabees and his brothers, and they keep winning. So the beacons are lit. People are rallying to the Maccabees. Judas and his family go on the offensive, first striking back against collaborators. This is an oft-overlooked historical detail, but he attacks his own people who had sold out the upper crust, the Hellenizing leadership within the Jewish people, he attacks them. He attacks key villages where this has been going on, and he basically undoes what had been done by Antiochus IV, which is we're going to punish you for circumcising. He goes in and forcibly circumcises defeated Jewish adult men. If you were here for the Galatians season that we just got done with season five, uh, you've got a lot of images dancing about in your mind of what adult circumcision might look like. Well, now imagine it unvoluntary. And I'm sure that was quite the scene. But as we get to the one-third mark of 1 Maccabees, there's a pivot in the action. Antiochus IV, all his attention is bent on we got to solve this stupid Jerusalem thing. But all of a sudden, there's problems out in Old Persia. Yeah, they're still out there. We kind of forget about them, but there they are. There's a rebellion. And so he himself has to ride east to go and deal with that. And he puts a guy named Lysias in charge of solving the Judas Maccabees problem. But Antiochus, he doesn't do so well out there. He gets sick and dies. And in 1 Maccabees 6, you kind of get the impression that he has the same realization that happened in Daniel to the king there, who was king on the last day at that feast before the Medes and the Persians showed up and the writing was on the wall, like, oh, he was fiddling around with the gold and silver from the temple. He was serving his body guests at that feast. And then the finger shows up and writes on the wall your kingdom has been weighed and found wanting. Today, your kingdom will be divided between the Medes and the Persians. And so here we are fighting against Persia again in 1 Maccabees. There's some historical thematic rhyming here. Antiochus IV, Epiphanes, the madman, the evil king, the oppressor of the Jews, has this realization that I've been struck ill here because I looted that temple and because of what I did to the people in Judah. And it's not really a repentance, but he's real sad and then he dies. And then his very young son, Antiochus V, who's like 10, takes over. Well, while all of this is going on, Judas Maccabees has won so much that he's able to march into Jerusalem. There's really nobody there from the Greek side to defend it. So in just a couple of years, from 167, when the incident in Modin with Judas' dad Matthias happened, to 164, in just these three years, the tables have totally turned. Antiochus IV is dead. An impotent 10-year-old kid is on the throne. There's clamoring for power back up in the royal courts of the Seleucid Empire. And Judas Maccabees rides into Jerusalem where there are no longer walls to defend it because the Greeks had torn down Nehemiah's walls in effect. He rolls in and he purifies the temple. This purification of the temple with the limited artifacts from the temple that are still there is what creates the holiday of Hanukkah. Judas and the purifiers of the temple take a lampstand from the temple. That's an image that's very prominent in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the book of Revelation. They take the lampstand and it's only supposed to have enough oil to burn for just a little while, but it burns for eight days. And I think my understanding is that the number of candles that are lit during the celebration of Hanukkah corresponds to the purported miraculous extra number of days that this lampstand burned as a symbol of God's faithfulness to the people and as a symbol of his affirmation of their rededicating and purifying the temple. So at this point, it seems like things are back to where Nehemiah left them. Stuff is better, but also things are ambiguous because there is no king. There is no real emperor over them. As you're reading through first and second Maccabees, it doesn't feel like at this point that a new kingdom has really been established. It's just we got rid of the oppressor, and now comes the very difficult question throughout all of history. Well, how do you rule? What do you do? What's the next move? And we will get into that next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.