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"Maccabees"
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The Dead Sea scrolls and the first Christians : essays and translations
By the co-author of the highly successful The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, this book takes us back to Qumran on the Dead Sea for a further exploration of the relationship between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity's formative years. Included in this volume are Professor Eisenman's two ground-breaking works, Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran and James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher, which were first published in the mid-1980s, but were not previously widely available. These classics are a foundation piece of Professor Eisenman's research on the Dead Sea Scrolls and fascinating for the beginner and scholar alike. Most importantly, these works triggered the debate over the relationship of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christian Origins, which ultimately led to the freeing of the Scrolls in the early 1990s, a struggle in which Eisenman played a pivotal role.
Book
Tales of high priests and taxes
In the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, the ancient world of the Bible—the ancient Near East—came under Greek rule, and in the land of Israel, time-old traditions and Greek culture met. But with the accession of King Antiochos IV, the soft power of culture was replaced with armed conflict, and soon the Jews rebelled against their imperial masters, as recorded in the Biblical books of the Maccabees. Whereas most scholars have dismissed the biblical accounts of religious persecution and cultural clash, Sylvie Honigman combines subtle literary analysis with deep historical insight to show how their testimony can be reconciled with modern historical analysis by conversing with the biblical authors, so to speak, in their own language to understand the way they described their experiences. Honigman contends that these stories are not mere fantasies but genuine attempts to cope with the massacre that followed the rebellion by giving it new meaning. This reading also discloses fresh political and economic factors.
eBook
Revisiting ΣΤΟΡΓΗ and ΑΓΑΠΗ IN Sirach, 3 and 4 Maccabees
Both στοργή and ἀγάπη are widely translated as love. BDAG understands στοργή as the love of spouse: husband to his wife or wife to her husband. Αγάπη, on the other hand, generally refers to a sacrificial love revealed in Christ in the Christian literature. This research, however, refuses BDAG’s limited aspect of στοργή and a general understanding of ἀγάπη as God’s sacrificial love in Christ. This article, therefore, attempts to provide more comprehensive understandings of these two loves by revisiting στοργή and ἀγάπη in the book of Sirach, 3 and 4 Maccabees. To achieve this goal, this research employs lexical analysis for its methodology.
Journal Article
Spartans or Samaritans? Revealing the Creativity of the Author of 1 Maccabees
A majority of scholars view the Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence, reported in 1 Maccabees, as inauthentic, since it contains many improbabilities, including the assertion that the Jews and the Spartans are fraternal nations. However, its patent implausibility also renders it unimaginable that the correspondence was intended to be understood literally. Hence, the binary choice offered in research, whereby it is either a bizarre fabrication or an authentic correspondence, despite all its peculiarities, is problematic. The Hasmonean-Spartan correspondence thus remains a conspicuous, unresolved enigma in the research of 1 Maccabees and the early Hasmonean period. Based on a textual clue, this article proposes a solution, namely, that the correspondence is, in fact, an ingenious derision of the Jews’ authentic ethnic “brothers”—the Samaritans. This suggestion provides new insights into the history of the early Hasmoneans and the literary creativity of the author of 1 Maccabees.
Journal Article
2 Maccabees
2 Maccabees is a Jewish work composed during the 2nd century BCE and preserved by the Church. Written in Hellenistic Greek and told from a Jewish-Hellenistic perspective, 2 Maccabees narrates and interprets the ups and downs of events that took place in Jerusalem prior to and during the Maccabean revolt: institutionalized Hellenization and the foundation of Jerusalem as a polis; the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, accompanied by famous martyrdoms; and the rebellion against Seleucid rule by Judas Maccabaeus. 2 Maccabees is an important source both for the events it describes and for the values and interests of the Judaism of the Hellenistic diaspora that it reflects - which are often quite different from those represented by its competitor, 1 Maccabees.
eBook
Probing the Sources of the Scroll of Antiochus
The Scroll of Antiochus purports to be a contemporaneous account of the revolt of the Hasmonaeans and the miracle of the oil. It is written in a kind of literary Aramaic that imitates the biblical and targumic Aramaic dialects and was probably composed in gaonic Babylonia as an etiology for the festival of Hanukkah. Since the text relates details of the revolt that have not been preserved in rabbinic writings, it is usually assumed that its author relied on Greek sources such as 1 Maccabees or Josephus’s writings. But knowledge of Greek was not common among Babylonian Jews. Based on a lexical correspondence in the wording of one section of the scroll and in the Syriac translation of 1 Maccabees, I argue that the author of the Scroll of Antiochus relied on this latter version for the historical details of the revolt. Syriac is a Christian Aramaic dialect from Mesopotamia that resembles Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. Recent research has found evidence for knowledge of Syriac in Jewish circles and for the adaption of Syriac texts into square script, which provides a fitting background for my hypothesis. The findings contribute to a refined picture of the composition of the Scroll of Antiochus.
Journal Article
From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Empire in Jewish Literature from Egypt
Abstract
This article studies the use of τὰ πράγματα in Jewish literature written in Ptolemaic and early Imperial Egypt. While there was no Greek term for \"empire\" that aligns with the modern sense of an empire as a territorial polity, τὰ πράγματα most closely resembles our modern notion of empire. First, we analyze the range of meanings of πράγματα in Ptolemaic documents and literature. Next, we examine the uses of this concept in Jewish sources from Ptolemaic Egypt. Then, we investigate the shifting understandings of πράγματα in the Jewish sources from Roman Egypt. We conclude that Jewish texts have much more complex views of empire than the descriptors pro- or anti-empire allow. This approach redirects our attention from empire as a static and tangible entity to a dynamic suite of practices through which power is exercised and derived.
Journal Article
Fourth Maccabees 1:1–6 in Sahidic Coptic
This article constitutes the editio princeps of a parchment leaf
from a codex that once belonged to the library of the White Monastery. This leaf
is the only surviving textual witness of 1:1–6 of “The book of the Maccabees,”
the Sahidic Coptic version of 4 Maccabees. In the introduction, I discuss the
date of the version, the significance of its title, and the translator's
rendering of certain Greek technical terms. This is followed by a
semi-diplomatic edition of the leaf, an English translation, and images.
Journal Article
Possible Misreading in 1 Maccabees 7:34 in Light of Its Biblical Model
First Maccabees 7:34 employs four verbs to describe the offensive speech by Nicanor, the Seleucid general, addressed to the Jewish elders and priests. The third verb indicates that Nicanor defiled his audience. While this has led scholars to associate 1 Maccabees with the Jewish concept of gentile impurity, several factors suggest that, at this point, an error found its way into the Greek translation from the original Hebrew. The present argument comprises three steps. First, I use the biblical Sennacherib story, featured in the background of the Nicanor episode in 1 Maccabees, as a means of reconstructing the relevant original Hebrew verb employed by 1 Maccabees. Second, I suggest a possible misreading of one letter on the part of the Greek translator. Finally, I propose that a similar, earlier verse in 1 Maccabees, 1:24b, may have been conducive to the translator's commission of this mistake, thus offering an insight into his way of thinking.
Journal Article
Garments of Shame, Garments of War: Clothing Imagery in 1 Maccabees 1:25-28, 14:9
Abstract
Two poetic passages in 1 Maccabees depict historical circumstances via the use of apparel. 14:9 portrays the young men as wearing \"glories and garments of war\" as a marker of the peace and prosperity characterizing Simon's reign. These contrast with the \"shame\" that shrouds the people following Antiochus Epiphanes' desecration of the temple in 1:28. This paper explores the biblical background of the dress imagery, suggesting that the Maccabean author transformed the \"robe of righteousness\" in Isa 61:10 into \"garments of war\" on the basis of a gezerah shava with Isa 59:17. The biblical metaphor of \"being clothed with shame\" in 1 Macc 1:28, on the other hand, refers to the \"putting on of mourning dress\"-a practice also alluded to in v. 26.
Journal Article