Samuel I. Thomas
The book 3 Maccabees is included as a canonical work in Orthodox and Armenian collections of Scripture, and is considered noncanonical in Protestant and Catholic traditions. Originally composed in Greek by an anonymous Jewish writer living in Alexandria sometime after the Battle of Raphia (217 BCE), and perhaps as late as the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula (37–41 CE), 3 Maccabees constitutes three main episodes involving the Ptolemy-Seleucid conflict and persecution of the Jews of Alexandria.
The title of the work is something of a misnomer, since the narrative of 3 Maccabees does not involve any members of the Hasmonean family and its historical setting is well before the Maccabean Revolt (167–164 BCE). Nevertheless, it was grouped with the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees in early manuscripts, and presents a plot line that is thematically similar to them. In genre, it can be compared to other Maccabean literature, the books of Esther and Daniel, and the Letter of Aristeas, especially in the way that it presents an account of royal conflict and Jewish persecution with a degree of historical verisimilitude.
The literary style of 3 Maccabees, which has been described as “bombastic” and “pretentious,” fits within the range of Hellenistic Jewish writings of the period (Croy, xiii–xiv). While the author employs some conventions of Greek style in the composition, he appears less interested in style than in religious and nationalistic propagandizing.
Scholars generally agree that the beginning of the work is missing. The extant version of 3 Maccabees opens abruptly with an account of the Battle of Raphia between Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV Philopator, moves to a narrative about the latter’s persecution of the Jews of Alexandria, and ends with a story about a gruesome plot to slaughter apostate Jews and purify those who have remained faithful to the covenant community. The work as a whole is intended to uphold the authority of torah and the sacredness of the Jerusalem temple—either in the face of an immediate persecution or in memory of one—and to affirm the status of Israel as the covenant people. The author’s theology shows no apparent signs of interaction with the apocalyptic eschatology and messianic hope then current in Palestine (and, to a lesser extent, in the Diaspora), advocating instead for a traditionally Deuteronomic understanding of divine favor and retribution.
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Third Maccabees begins with a terse account of the Battle of Raphia, a confrontation between Ptolemy IV Philopator and Antiochus III (“the Great”) in 217 BCE. This event is recorded also by Polybius (Histories 5), whose lengthier account accords with the general shape and details of 3 Macc. 1:1–2:24. The perspective of the author of 3 Maccabees differs from that of the ancient Roman historian; for the former, the historical details are the raw materials out of which he fashions a narrative that is not primarily a work of historiography, but one that is polemical and apologetic at its core, arguing that Jews should not trade their ancestral faith for acceptance in Greco-Roman societies.
The characters in this account are for the most part known from other sources: Philopator, Antiochus, Arsinoë, Dositheos son of Drimylus, and Theodotus—all of these figure into Polybius’s rendering of the episode, and some are mentioned by Josephus. The author of 3 Maccabees, however, is interested in these characters primarily insofar as their roles can be manipulated to serve his purposes. The victory of Philopator over Antiochus, for example, provides the occasion for the Ptolemaic king to become “eager” to visit the Jews in Jerusalem and to worship their “faithful” God (see below). Dositheos (whose existence is also likely attested in P. Hibeh 90) is introduced as one of the “apostate” Jews who, as a group, are scorned and executed in the conclusion to the work.
The rest of the prologue is taken up by an account of Philopator’s attempt to enter the Jerusalem temple. Here the author juxtaposes the pious and humble Jews with the arrogant, haughty king, deploying maudlin appeals to emotion in order to underline the importance of maintaining the covenant obligations. This episode may reflect a real event (it is recorded elsewhere that Philopator visited other sacred sites of Coele-Syria in his postvictory tours), though it is unlikely to have transpired in the way 3 Maccabees narrates it. The author is possibly drawing from a parallel story in 2 Maccabees, a story in which controversy arises out of a pagan king’s desire to enter the temple (2 Macc. 3:1–40; cf. Josephus, Ant. 11.329–39; 2 Macc. 5:11–21; Josephus, Ant. 14.67–72; Philo, Embassy 203; Josephus, Ant. 18.252–309). This section concludes with a prayer by the high priest Simon II, who presided over Jerusalem during the last fifth of the third century BCE. Simon’s prayer follows a series of dramatic escalations of suspense—young maidens rushing forth, mothers and nurses abandoning newborn children, and so on—serving thus as the climactic reversal of the plot’s movement. Using language and structure reflecting “a type common in postexilic Judaism (Ezra 9; Nehemiah 9; Daniel 9; Bar. 1:15–3:8) that reviews salvation history and emphasizes the righteousness of God and sinfulness of Israel” (Collins, 1756), Simon’s prayer brings about God’s intervention in the story. According to the narrative, Philopator falls paralyzed and mute and then slinks away in defeat.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Sara Raup Johnson aptly notes that scholarly interpretations of the date of 3 Maccabees fall into two main categories, each of them with consequences for how to understand the message of the work as a whole. Those who have viewed 3 Maccabees as a pre-Roman Hellenistic composition (prior to 30 BCE) have tended to “stress the possibilities for peaceful compromise found in the story,” while those who ascribe it a date in the early Roman period “stress the elements in the story that depict the Jews as a persecuted minority” (Johnson, 2683). She writes that “both interpretations are possible, and ultimately readers must decide for themselves whether the text works more effectively as a model for life in a time of compromise, or life in a time of crisis and conflict.” This view no doubt represents the various ways 3 Maccabees functioned for later readers attempting to navigate their own experiences of cultural difference, persecution, and assimilation, and may help to explain why this text was transmitted despite its questionable canonical status.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Third Maccabees reframes historical events in order to address questions of religious identity and piety. This is a tendency found in other biblical texts, and appears to be a perennial theme in religion more broadly. While this particular passage does not figure explicitly into contemporary discussions, it represents a continually relevant problem: How is the telling of history used to shape culture and self-understanding? Should history writing be about the politics of identity, or should it strive for some more objective truth about the nature of human affairs?
A more contemporary example might be the way the history of the United States is sometimes framed as a story of moral progress and of the instantiation of “Judeo-Christian values” in national life. History then becomes the theater for a series of ideological claims that serve to shore up the identity of certain contemporary groups—often at the expense of others. One thinks, for example, of the revisionist history of evangelical author David Barton, who draws on the reconstructionist and racist theology of R. J. Rushdoony in his glorifications of the American past. Whom does this kind of historiography serve? While the overall goals of Barton and the author of 3 Maccabees are clearly very different, they share the tendency to intermix history-telling with religious propaganda.
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Philopator was apparently not adequately chastened by his experience entering the Jerusalem temple. According to 3 Maccabees, he went to Egypt and added to his nefarious deeds, most especially by setting out to restrict the Jews from worshiping at their religious sites, registering and “branding” them, and relegating them to the status of slaves (2:25–30). Alternatively, they could choose to participate in the “mysteries” of Dionysius and receive the same political rights as citizens of Greek descent. This moment in the narrative introduces the possibility that some Jews will become apostate and align themselves with the king—which is what the story as a whole attempts to circumvent (see below). These apostates thus serve as a counterexample to the kind of religious fidelity that 3 Maccabees advocates.
The registration (laographia) of the Jews was to include branding by fire with an image of the Dionysian ivy leaf—representing the family god of the Ptolemies—and, perhaps, the payment of a special tax (see 2 Macc. 6:7). It was not uncommon in the history of the Roman Empire for Jews to be subject to special laws and taxation (see especially the fiscus Iudaicus of the first century CE and following; see Josephus, J.W. 7.218; Suetonius, Life of Domitian 12.1–2; Cassius Dio, 65.7.2, 67.14.1–2), but this practice is otherwise unattested in pre-Roman Greek law.
Philopator’s warning of servitude is reminiscent of the exodus story, perhaps deliberately invoking the paradigmatic account of liberation for a new time and place: Jews in Egypt threatened with slavery by a king whose aims are frustrated by divine intervention. As the narrative unfolds, the Jews are imprisoned and several chapters in this section recount the changing moods and designs of Philopator, who is presented alternately as a madman and as someone whose intentions can easily be undermined by the divine will.
This section as a whole emphasizes the various ways in which God (or “providence”) frustrates the plans of Philopator to persecute the Egyptian Jews. First, the registration in the hippodrome fails for lack of time, paper, and pens. In response, Philopator issues the strange order to unleash a large number of intoxicated elephants on the Jews assembled in the hippodrome. Philopator then reverses his disposition—which, according to 3 Maccabees, is yet another instance of divine intervention—and castigates Hermon (whose name is reminiscent of Haman, who plays a similar role in the book of Esther) for seeking to carry out the elephant plan too diligently. Another reversal by Philopator then heightens the drama, as he charges Hermon once again to execute the genocide. Here the capricious and moody character of the king perhaps intentionally plays on a trope found elsewhere in early Jewish texts: that of the mad king (see Daniel 4; Prayer of Nabonidus [4QPrNab]).
The episode involving drunken elephants is unlikely to have transpired exactly as described (see Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.52–55, in which there is a similar scene involving not Philopator but Ptolemy Physcon). Elephants were often used in war and in games and other public performances in the Greco-Roman world. While it is highly implausible that Philopator could have actually assembled five hundred elephants, and the number simply appears to have been symbolic for a very large quantity, “the rhetorical force of the number is unmistakable: the Jews faced a calamity of mind boggling proportions” (Croy, 84). If the number of elephants was exaggerated, other sources attest that their drunkenness remains an intriguing possibility (Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.53–55; 1 Macc. 6:34).
With his plans to kill the Jews foiled several times, and with those in attendance at the banquet growing unruly, Philopator additionally resolves to invade Judea and destroy the temple in Jerusalem. While he never undertook such an attempt, this notice serves to heighten the drama of the narrative and connect the current episode with earlier parts of the work. Here the text refers to Philopator as a “Phalaris in every way,” invoking the image of the sixth-century-BCE ruler of Acragas (Sicily) whose name was synonymous in antiquity with savage tyranny (Polybius, Hist. 12.25.1–5; Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 9.19, 13.90, 19.108; Lucian, Phal. 1.11–12)
At the climax of suspense, this section of 3 Maccabees concludes with an intercessory prayer by Eleazar, in which that figure calls forth Daniel and Jonah as exemplars of Jewish redemption from death by beast and the three companions in Babylon as examples of fidelity in the face of persecution and death (Daniel 3; cf. the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men). The identity of this Eleazar is unknown; in most manuscripts, he is described as a “priest,” though elsewhere he is simply one of “the Jews.” His supplication is structurally and thematically reminiscent of the prayer of Simon II at the end of chapter 1, referencing also Israel’s salvation history and God’s reputation among the gentiles as reasons for his saving mercies to work once again. It is worth noting that the beginning of his prayer calls to mind a standard Jewish daily prayer known as the Amidah, the opening of which also appeals to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and recounts the saving acts of God in history. The themes of the prayer align with the basic Deuteronomic sin-punishment/repentance-deliverance theology found in some biblical texts.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
While some German biblical scholars aligned with the ideology of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party and produced scholarship that exhibited antisemitic tendencies (see, for example, Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), 3 Maccabees was not apparently used directly to support the Nazi program of Jewish extermination. Nevertheless, some of the most chilling lines from 3 Maccabees—lines that would be echoed more than two millennia later by leaders of the Nazi Party in the 1930s and 1940s—come in the decree issued by Philopator in chapter 3: “we have given an order that as soon as this letter reaches you [royal functionaries in the provinces], you are to send to us those who live among you, together with their wives and children, with abusive and harsh treatment, bound on all sides in iron chains, for an irremediable and ill-fated slaughter befitting enemies. For we have come to understand that, when these people have been punished together, the affairs of our state will be perfectly established for us in stability and the best order for time hereafter” (3 Macc. 3:25–26; translation from Croy, 13).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Perhaps the most salient aspect of this passage for contemporary reflection is the registration and marking of Jews—or any ethnic group—for “special” treatment. Third Maccabees thus represents perhaps the earliest source attesting to what will later become an enduring practice in Roman, European, and some Islamic societies, culminating in the yellow “Jude” badges of the German Third Reich in the twentieth century. This passage thus represents an opportunity for dominant groups to consider ways in which minority religious communities might be similarly “marked” and oppressed or marginalized (or perhaps the ways in which groups that “mark” themselves with outward signs of religious observance might receive different treatment from others in positions of power).
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
King Philopator finally arrives at the hippodrome to witness the spectacle he has ordered, and his appearance provokes an outcry of terror on the part of the captive Jews. But suddenly angels of the Lord intervene and the elephants “forget” their mission (because of their inebriation? or because of the terrifying angels?), thus mirroring the amnesiac mania of the king in all his earlier reversals. The angels represent a common theme in early Jewish—especially apocalyptic—literature of the Hellenistic era, namely, that God’s redemptive plans are brought about by the work of heavenly intermediaries. The fact that these particular angels remain invisible to the assembled Jews is striking, leading at least one interpreter (Grotius) to suggest that “God did not want the Jews, who were already traumatized, to be further frightened by the angels” (Croy, 103). Here the story finds parallels in other early Jewish literature in which angels come to the rescue of Jews in heavy-hitting displays of supernatural power (see the parallel story in Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.53–55; cf. 2 Macc. 3:25–29; Wis. 17:3; Herodotus, Hist. 6.117).
In 3 Maccabees, this reversal serves as the pivot point between Philopator’s earlier forgetfulness and his present inability to remember that he himself was responsible for the situation now culminating before him. Both the king and the elephants turn on those executing the plan against the Jews, and the king is safeguarded, presumably, so that he can repent and then vindicate the Jews in their triumph. Perhaps not surprisingly—the theme is found elsewhere in biblical and early Jewish literature—the entire scenario provides the occasion for a “foreign” king to pay homage to the God of the Jews and to “confess” that he owes his own prosperity and authority to none other than Israel’s God. While such a scenario is historically unlikely, it fits the propagandistic purposes of the story.
The feasting and celebrating then becomes the prerogative of the Jews, who, having barely escaped death (Hades), take the place of Philopator’s previously favored guests. Only now, as if to emphasize that this is indeed a “festival of deliverance,” the celebration takes place in the hippodrome itself (3 Macc. 6:31; cf. Luke 9:14). The author of 3 Maccabees apparently wishes also to commemorate the celebration of this deliverance in repeated ritual observance (cf, e.g., Esther 9:20–32; 1 Macc. 4:56; 2 Macc. 10:5–8), though there are no signs that this was ever instituted in early Jewish practice.
According to 3 Maccabees, Philopator issues a letter at this point for the Jews to take with them on their journeys home. Here the irony of the story reaches a climax: the king accuses his (former) companions of having designed the treachery against the Jews who had only ever shown “steadfast good will,” and he grants the Jews safe passage on account of their standing as children of “the most high God.” It is implausible that such a letter would have been written, and yet it represents an effort on the part of the author to lend verisimilitude to the story (cf., e.g., Ezra 1; 1 Macc. 8:23–30; 10:25–45; 2 Macc. 9:19–27; Gk. Esther 13:1–7). The presentation of a foreign king praising the God of Israel has parallels in other texts of the period, such as in Dan. 4:34–37.
In a dramatic denouement, the Jews who have been freed by Philopator do not depart until some final business is settled. The author of 3 Maccabees wishes to make another point—and perhaps, in the end, this is the central goal of the composition—namely, that those who previously converted or acquiesced to the king’s demands ought to be put to death. In this way, the end of the work circles back toward its beginning, so that only those who steadfastly resisted the temptations of assimilation to Greek religion and society would live on to enjoy the deliverance from the hippodrome and the return to their homes. Here, then, is another dramatic irony: Philopator’s “conversion” turns him against the very Jews who earlier had acquiesced to his demands. What is more, it is the faithful Jews who petition the king for the right to slaughter the apostates, and thus divine clemency is juxtaposed to human desire for retribution and purification.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
While 3 Maccabees does not appear to have much of an interpretive afterlife in Jewish and Christian traditions, it attests to a theme that is prominent in contemporary and later discourse: that of apostasy. Later Jewish traditions make examples out of apostates such as Elisha ben Abuyah (y. Hag. 2:1), and there is epigraphic evidence that the practice of Jewish defection was not uncommon around the Mediterranean world for a long period of time (Wilson, 44–65). Stephen Wilson aptly notes that defection and/or conversion are always two sides of the same coin, but that accounts of apostasy are “generally not interested in both sides at once” but seek to assure their audiences that “leaving the fold” is a poor option (Wilson, 134).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Perhaps especially in the Hellenistic Jewish Diaspora communities (such as in Egypt), assimilation was a social and religious problem that was negotiated in various ways by different individuals and groups. Some chose to embrace Greek culture, religion, and authority, and others to resist it. Thus the question of whether and how much to assimilate was a central fact of life for Jewish people in the Hellenistic age, and it gave rise to both external and internal conflicts. While the depiction of the released captives happily slaughtering three hundred of their apostate kinfolk is surely not historically factual, it is an apt literary expression of the inherent tensions of Jewish existence during this period.
Some contemporary scholars have suggested that the conditions inviting assimilation in Hellenistic settings may be compared to those of the modern period. Elias Bickerman, for example, draws a parallel between the enticements of Hellenistic “belonging” and those of nineteenth-century European societies in which Jews left or modified their traditional practices in favor of more modern ones (see Wilson, 25). In this way, the beginnings of Reform Judaism can be seen as a response to the conditions of contemporary Western life—an attempt to align Jewish life with the ethical, intellectual, and cultural values of modernity.
Croy, N. Clayton. 2005. 3 Maccabees. Leiden: Brill.
Collins, John J. 1993. “3 Maccabees.” In HarperCollins Study Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, edited by Wayne A. Meeks, 1752–67. New York: HarperCollins.
Johnson, Sara Raup. 2013. “3 Maccabees.” In Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, volume 3, edited by Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2681–2707.
Wilson, Stephen G. 2004. Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.