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Hermeneia
2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary
The second-century B.C.E. Maccabean revolt against Seleucid oppression was a watershed event in early Jewish history and Second Maccabees is an important testimony to the revolt and its aftermath. Robert Doran's commentary on 2 Maccabees explores the interplay between history and historiography in the document. Providing detailed philological analysis of the elegant Greek of the text, Doran carefully sifts the evidence for the historicity of the events recounted, while giving full attention to the literary and rhetorical qualities that mark this dramatic narrative.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2012
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April 14, 2023
If you’re Protestant and you say you’re reading a commentary on 2 Maccabees, you get funny looks. Not to fear: the Pope hasn’t clawed me back across the Tiber. I just have a quirk where I like tales of revolutionary wars to the glory of God and country against imperial Greek armies with war elephants.
Of course, you don’t need a critical commentary with its textual criticism and variant readings to get all that. Just reading the books of the Maccabees, especially the first and second, will hit the sweet spots. Where a commentary is helpful is in teasing out the historical and literary context that I certainly don’t have two millennia after the Maccabbean revolt.
For example, I wouldn’t have known 2 Maccabees provides the first literary reference we have to the word “Judaism.” The wars of the Maccabees in defense of the Law and the Temple were a crucible that forged a Jewish identity that persists to the present. Indeed, one of the letters attached to this book represents it as an invitation for Egyptian Jews to join their Judean brethren in celebrating the new feast day that we know as Hanukkah.
That said, 2 Maccabees doesn’t present Jewish identity as hostile to Gentile polities. In contrast to 1 Maccabees, where Gentiles are presented as unfailingly treacherous liars, this book represents Jews as perfectly capable of living as peaceful subjects of Gentile rulers as long as Jews are allowed to observe their own laws.
In fact, the real troublemakers in 2 Maccabees are Jews who fall away from the Law and raise factions hostile to pure Temple worship, thus inviting God to bring corrective punishment through the Greeks. To be sure, Antiochus IV and V, and Demetrius I, are represented as cruel and tyrannical; and yet it is the factionalism of wicked Jews hungry for power who bring down the refining fire of Greek overreach.
Given all that, I consider 2 Maccabees a bit of a prequel to the New Testament, illuminating the reaction of the Pharisees to Jesus. It wouldn’t be hard for them to sense in this man from Galilee a factionalist hostile to the Law, another Menelaus or Alcimus inviting a second Antiochian judgment, this time at the hands of the Romans rather than the Greeks.
With this history in mind, and with this itinerant rabbi building a passionate following and physically assaulting the Temple commerce, it would be easier to justify an extreme solution: that it is better for one man to die for the people than for an entire nation to perish.
So if you’re a Protestant, don’t be afraid of the Books of the Maccabees. Read them for the history, read them for the war elephants, and above all read them to better understand the cultural forces that culminated in a crucifixion which changed absolutely everything.
Of course, you don’t need a critical commentary with its textual criticism and variant readings to get all that. Just reading the books of the Maccabees, especially the first and second, will hit the sweet spots. Where a commentary is helpful is in teasing out the historical and literary context that I certainly don’t have two millennia after the Maccabbean revolt.
For example, I wouldn’t have known 2 Maccabees provides the first literary reference we have to the word “Judaism.” The wars of the Maccabees in defense of the Law and the Temple were a crucible that forged a Jewish identity that persists to the present. Indeed, one of the letters attached to this book represents it as an invitation for Egyptian Jews to join their Judean brethren in celebrating the new feast day that we know as Hanukkah.
That said, 2 Maccabees doesn’t present Jewish identity as hostile to Gentile polities. In contrast to 1 Maccabees, where Gentiles are presented as unfailingly treacherous liars, this book represents Jews as perfectly capable of living as peaceful subjects of Gentile rulers as long as Jews are allowed to observe their own laws.
In fact, the real troublemakers in 2 Maccabees are Jews who fall away from the Law and raise factions hostile to pure Temple worship, thus inviting God to bring corrective punishment through the Greeks. To be sure, Antiochus IV and V, and Demetrius I, are represented as cruel and tyrannical; and yet it is the factionalism of wicked Jews hungry for power who bring down the refining fire of Greek overreach.
Given all that, I consider 2 Maccabees a bit of a prequel to the New Testament, illuminating the reaction of the Pharisees to Jesus. It wouldn’t be hard for them to sense in this man from Galilee a factionalist hostile to the Law, another Menelaus or Alcimus inviting a second Antiochian judgment, this time at the hands of the Romans rather than the Greeks.
With this history in mind, and with this itinerant rabbi building a passionate following and physically assaulting the Temple commerce, it would be easier to justify an extreme solution: that it is better for one man to die for the people than for an entire nation to perish.
So if you’re a Protestant, don’t be afraid of the Books of the Maccabees. Read them for the history, read them for the war elephants, and above all read them to better understand the cultural forces that culminated in a crucifixion which changed absolutely everything.
Displaying 1 of 1 review