The Fourth Book of Maccabees in a Multi-Cultural City

The Fourth Book of Maccabees in a Multi-Cultural City Tessa Rajak Introduction There are those for whom the Fourth Book of Maccabees sits comfortably as a minor book of the Bible, or at least an adjunct, belonging to the wider bib- lical corpus, among them, naturally enough, experts on the Septuagint and related fields. But such a categorization is really only meaningful in the con- tingent sense that 4 Maccabees figures in two of the great Septuagint codices, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus (of the fourth and fifth centuries respectively). It is probably not an advantageous approach if we seek to give this extraordinary little tract its due, and if we aspire to explore it without preconceptions, and to locate its context. True, the work was loved by the early Church; but even so, it is worth pointing out, very few Christian denominations have allowed it apocryphal or deuterocanonical status.1 This book is patently a pious and yet highly rhetorical literary and philosophical composition in dialogue form; a product of the Graeco-Jewish Diaspora of the Roman period. We cannot absolutely rule out that what we have received through a complicated manuscript tradition (which is of course wholly Christian) is an original production of the early Church, posing as an authentic pre-Christian, Jewish discourse, a contribution to the appropriation of the Maccabean heritage by the “new Israel”. I shall pro- ceed here, however, as has been done almost universally, on the assumption that this is not the case, and that what we see is what we get, a rare example of late Jewish-Greek writing: in fact, our only full-length ancient Jewish-Greek (or largely Jewish) martyrology. The eighteen chapters are a rhetorical and philosophical elaboration on the narrative of the deaths in the persecution of the early 160s BCE conducted by the Seleucid monarch Antiochus (IV Epiphanes) of nine Jewish martyrs: an aged priest, Eleazar (in 2 Maccabees the martyr is a scribe), followed by seven sons and then their mother. Antiochus seeks to force Eleazar, and then each of the sons in turn to deny Judaism by publicly eating sacrificial pork. One by 1 In most academic collections 4 Macc appears in the category of Pseudepigrapha. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043��694_007 The Fourth Book Of Maccabees In A Multi-cultural City 135 one, brutally terrorized, the boys refuse to eat the forbidden meat or even to pretend to do so as a device for saving the King’s honour. Each declares that he prefers extreme torture and agonizing death, in the knowledge that he has been loyal to the Law of his people, and in the certainty expectation of imme- diate access to heaven. Each son in turn personally confronts the enthroned tyrant, utters words of defiance and contempt, and gladly pays the price. They are encouraged and pressed by their elderly, widowed mother, whose exem- plary constancy wins the author’s special praise, and who herself dies last and untouched, by leaping into the flames. The narrative of our book is an expansion of the much briefer account of the same incident in a stirring, and equally gruesome digression within the late Hellenistic Second Book of Maccabees, chapters 6 (18–31)-7. There, the event was represented as taking place during the Maccabean revolt (167–164 BCE), as part of the persecution that culminated in the desecration of the Temple through the installation of a pagan cult. In 4 Maccabees the location of the martyrdoms is not clearly identified, but there are dim echoes of a distant conflict.2 The dependence of the 4 Maccabees version on the second Maccabean book is completely clear, even though 4 Maccabees is a very different kind of work in terms of genre, style and focus. There appears to be no added information in the latter; rather some of the background information derived from the earlier book seems to have become garbled; notably, in the preliminary scene setting, the name of the Seleucid commander repelled by an angel from the Temple is given as Apollonius instead of Heliodorus (4 Macc 4:10; cf 2 Macc 3:31–5). A proposed localization to a city of Roman Asia, quite recently put forward, is not compelling when set against the more familiar association with the great city of Antioch in Syria, as we shall shortly see. In what follows, I shall reflect upon the Antiochene connection from a new angle by exploring how 4 Maccabees might fit into what we can piece together of the history of the Jews of Antioch. I shall go on to view the position of 4 Maccabees between Greek thought and Jewish values, and between Judaism and Christianity, against the background of that mixed, sometimes conflicted, sometimes harmonious city. 2 Perhaps, however, the concluding mention of the King’s abject departure from Jerusalem after failing to get its people to change their identity and abandon the customs of their fathers (18:5) suggests that this was the location of the specific episode that has just been discussed..

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