Read this if you…
- want the same Maccabee story as 1 Maccabees but with miracles and angels added
- curious about the earliest clear Jewish statement of bodily resurrection
- like the gruesome martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons (it's intense)
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read explicitly religious/Christian texts
The lineage through 2 Maccabees
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. 2 Maccabees shaped it. - The doctrinal bedrock of Dante's *Purgatorio* — its whole engine of prayer for the dead rests on 2 Maccabees 12:43-46 - Dante also mines it for exempla: Heliodorus, the temple-robber beaten by a horseman (2 Macc 3), is cried out by the avaricious penitents in *Purgatorio* XX - A short, fierce book of martyrdom and plunder that quietly supplied the *Comedy* with a theology and a cast of cautionary figures
Depicted in Art
Heliodorus sprawls in the Temple foreground beaten by a heavenly horseman and two angelic youths; the high priest Onias kneels in prayer at the altar while Pope Julius II watches from a litter at left.
Raphael, 1512
Heliodorus cowers on the Temple steps as the angelic horseman charges down on him; an accomplice tumbles backward over the looted treasure heaped in the foreground.
Francesco Solimena, 1725
A great crowd of Jews around the corpses of murdered children at the foot of Seleucid soldiers reading Antiochus's decree; mourners cower, faint, and stand defiant.
Wojciech Stattler, 1842
Recommended Editions
King James Version
Oxford University Press · 1611
The most influential and commonly quoted translation in English. The prose rhythm everyone else is responding to, even modern translations.
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Notable Quotes
For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.
- Augustine of Hippo, Church Father, Bishop of Hippo, 354–430: "These are held as canonical, not by the Jews, but by the Church, on account of the … sufferings of certain martyrs."
- John Chrysostom, Church Father, Archbishop of Constantinople, c. 347–407: "They are more brilliant than ten thousand suns and more visible than the major stars."
- Thomas Aquinas, Dominican theologian, Doctor of the Church, 1225–1274: "It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins."
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Church Father, Archbishop of Constantinople, c. 329–390: These martyrs who lived before the cross deserve equal veneration with Christian martyrs.
- Council of Trent, Roman Catholic ecumenical council, Fourth Session, 1546: "If any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books … let him be anathema."
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