Horsemen in the Sky and the End of Jason
1Around this time Antiochus launched his second expedition into Egypt. 2Then, over the whole city, for nearly forty days, there appeared horsemen galloping through the air in robes shot through with gold, armed with lances and drawn up in companies, with swords unsheathed, 3squadrons of cavalry drawn up for battle, attacks and charges from both sides, shields shaken, masses of spears, volleys of missiles, the glint of golden trappings, and every kind of armor. 4So everyone prayed that the manifestation might prove to be for good. 5When a false rumor spread that Antiochus had departed this life, Jason gathered a force of at least a thousand men and made a surprise attack on the city. The defenders on the wall were driven back, and as the city was finally being taken, Menelaus fled for refuge into the acropolis. 6Jason went on slaughtering his own fellow citizens without mercy, not realizing that a good day at the expense of one’s kindred is the worst of days, but imagining that he was raising trophies over enemies and not over his own countrymen. 7He did not gain power; in the end he reaped only shame from his plotting, and he fled once again into the Ammonite country. 8So he came to a miserable end. Accused before Aretas, the ruler of the Arabs, fleeing from city to city, hunted by everyone, hated as a rebel against the laws and loathed as the executioner of his country and his fellow citizens, he was flung out into Egypt. 9He who had made exiles of many from their homeland died in exile himself, having sailed to the Lacedaemonians in the hope of finding shelter there because of their kinship. 10He who had thrown out a multitude to lie unburied had no one to mourn him; he received no funeral of any sort and no share in the tomb of his fathers.
Antiochus Plunders the Temple
11When word of these events reached the king, he took it that Judea was in revolt. So he set out from Egypt, savage as a wild beast in spirit, and took the city by storm. 12He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy everyone they came upon, and to butcher those who fled up into their houses. 13Young and old were put to death; boys, women, and children were wiped out; young girls and babies were slaughtered. 14Within the space of three days eighty thousand were lost: forty thousand fell in the fighting, and no fewer than the number slain were sold into slavery. 15Not satisfied with this, he dared to enter the holiest temple on all the earth, guided by Menelaus, who had become a traitor to his country as well as to the laws. 16With his polluted hands he seized the holy vessels, and with profane hands he swept up the offerings that other kings had dedicated to increase the glory and honor of the place. 17Antiochus was carried away with pride, not seeing that the Master had been angry for a short time on account of the sins of the city’s inhabitants, and that this was why the place had been left unregarded. 18If they had not been caught up in many sins, this man too would have been flogged the moment he stepped forward and driven back from his audacity, just as Heliodorus was, the man King Seleucus sent to inspect the treasury. 19But the Lord did not choose the nation for the sake of the place; he chose the place for the sake of the nation. 20That is why the place itself, which had shared in the misfortunes of the nation, afterward shared in its benefits; and what had been abandoned in the Almighty’s wrath was raised up again in all its glory when the great Master was reconciled. 21Antiochus, then, carried off one thousand eight hundred talents from the temple and hurried away to Antioch, imagining in his arrogance, so puffed up was his heart, that he could make the land a place to sail and the sea a place to walk. 22He also left overseers to maltreat the race: in Jerusalem, Philip, a Phrygian by race, whose ways were more barbarous than those of the man who appointed him; 23at Gerizim, Andronicus; and besides these, Menelaus, who lorded it over the citizens worse than all the others, in his hostility toward the Jewish citizens. 24The king sent Apollonius, the commander of the Mysians, with an army of twenty-two thousand, under orders to slaughter all the grown men and to sell off the women and the young. 25He came to Jerusalem and, playing the man of peace, held back until the holy Sabbath day. Then, finding the Jews resting from work, he ordered his troops to parade under arms. 26Everyone who came out to watch the display he had stabbed to death, and rushing into the city with his armed men he laid low great numbers of people. 27But Judas, who was also called Maccabeus, with some nine others, withdrew into the wilderness. He and those with him lived in the mountains the way wild animals do, and they went on eating plants for food, so as to have no part in the defilement.
