One King, Two Deaths, Two Words

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Maccabees, Books of,” “Antiochus,” “Judas Maccabeus,” “Alcimus,” “Nicanor,” “Hasideans.”
• Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — “1 Maccabees,” “2 Maccabees,” “Hasmoneans,” “Seleucids.”
• Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — “Maccabean Literature,” “Hasmoneans,” “Rome.”
• The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), “The Books of Machabees” (F. Bechtel), and The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), “Maccabees, Books of” — both public domain, both read online for this page, and both quoted in Stage 2 because they answer different questions about the same two books.

• Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees (Anchor Bible 41, 1976), and II Maccabees (Anchor Bible 41A, 1983).
• John R. Bartlett, The First and Second Books of the Maccabees (Cambridge Bible Commentary, 1973).
• Bezalel Bar-Kochva, Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle against the Seleucids (Cambridge, 1989) — on the battles, Beth-zechariah and its elephants included.
• Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature, 2008).
• Werner Kappler, Maccabaeorum liber I (Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum IX/1, Göttingen) — the critical edition, with the apparatus this page does not hold.
• NETS (A New English Translation of the Septuagint) — named because it is a modern English made from the Greek; not quoted here.

Four accounts are set out below: three held on this disk in Greek, and a fourth read online. A fifth, Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.354–361, is also held here in Greek and was not measured for this page. The four agree that the king went east for money, met resistance, and died there. They do not agree on the city, the cause, or the place of death:

Measured on the two Greek books: the name Elymais stands in 1 Maccabees once (6:1) and in 2 Maccabees never; Persepolis, Ecbatana and Nanaia stand in 2 Maccabees and never in 1 Maccabees. Polybius agrees with 1 Maccabees on Elymais, and names a town of death, Tabae, that neither book names.

• The thirteenth of Adar → Esther 9. 1 Maccabees fixes Nicanor’s defeat on τῇ τρισκαιδεκάτῃ τοῦ μηνὸς Αδαρ (7:43) and makes the day an annual feast: τῇ τρισκαιδεκάτῃ τοῦ Αδαρ (7:49). Those four words stand in two screened units: 1 Maccabees 7:49 and Esther 9:16, the day the Jews of the provinces defended themselves. 1 Maccabees never names Mordecai. 2 Maccabees does — at 15:36 the day is πρὸ μιᾶς ἡμέρας τῆς Μαρδοχαϊκῆς ἡμέρας, ‘the day before Mordecai’s day’.
• Hezekiah’s deliverance → 1 Maccabees 7:41. Judas’ prayer recalls an angel who struck one hundred eighty-five thousand. The Greek of 1 Maccabees never names Assyria, Sennacherib or Hezekiah; the Greek identifies the story only by the number.
• Roman diplomatic form → 1 Maccabees 8:22–32. The treaty is introduced as a copy of a letter written δέλτοις χαλκαῖς, on bronze tablets, a phrase that occurs four times in the screened Greek Old Testament, all in 1 Maccabees. Its distinctive phrases occur nowhere outside 1 Maccabees: καλῶς γένοιτο once, ὡς ἔδοξεν Ῥώμῃ twice (8:26, 8:28), φιλίαν καὶ συμμαχίαν four times, all in this book. One clause also stands outside the book: and they shall keep the charges (8:26, 8:28) shares four words with Leviticus 22:9, where they are the priests’ duty.
• The Roman constitution as chapter 8 describes it — a council of τριακόσιοι καὶ εἴκοσι, three hundred and twenty, deliberating daily (8:15), and one man, ἑνὶ ἀνθρώπῳ, entrusted with rule each year (8:16). Bechtel (1910) reports the charge that the author is “inexact in several particulars regarding the Romans” (viii, 1 sq.), and answers that he “cannot be charged with whatever inaccuracies or exaggerations may be contained in viii, 1-16,” since there he “merely sets down the reports” that had reached Judas. This page prints what the Greek says and does not test it against Roman history, which no corpus here holds.

At 5:26 the Nabataeans tell Judas that Jews are shut up in six towns. The narrative then marches through them. In the Greek column every one of the six is reached by name. In the two other witnesses, it is not:

Tally. Greek: six of six reached by name. King James: three reached with the same spelling, two respelled within ten verses, and one replaced — Maspha stands where the Greek has Alema. Latin: three reached with the same spelling, one respelled, and two that never recur. Three witnesses, three itineraries.

And three of the six names stand nowhere else. By exact spelling, Αλεμα, Χασφω and Μακεδ occur in the screened Greek Old Testament only in these verses of chapter 5. Bosorra elsewhere is a city of the kings of Edom (Genesis 36:33, 1 Chronicles 1:44, and Job 42:17c, in the Greek Job’s closing addition), and Karnain elsewhere is Genesis 14:5.

• 213 rows, 4,459 Greek words — 1,448 in chapter 5, 1,314 in chapter 6, 984 in chapter 7, 713 in chapter 8.
• Three dated rows, three consecutive years: 6:16 (149), 6:20 (150), 7:1 (151).
• The word group peace sixteen times; swore five times; deceit four times — and every one of the four is in chapters 7 and 8.
• Joseph son of Zacharias is spelled two ways in the Greek of one chapter: Ιωσηπον at 5:18 and Ιωσηπος at 5:60, but Ιωσηφ at 5:56. The King James calls him Joseph all three times.
• The King James at 5:3 reads Gael where the Greek reads Ισραηλ and the Latin Israëlitas. Printed as the file has it; the page offers no explanation it cannot check.

2 Maccabees says of itself that it condenses into one book the five books of Ἰάσωνος τοῦ Κυρηναίου, Jason of Cyrene (2:23). It tells the same five episodes as chapters 5 to 7. Each 1 Maccabees block was screened against the 2 Maccabees block that tells the same events, paired by the names both carry:

1 Maccabees 7:16 says the sixty were killed in one day κατὰ τὸν λόγον ὃν ἔγραψεν αὐτόν, according to the word which he wrote, and 7:17 gives the words. The formula licenses one statement and no more: the book presents 7:17 as the words of a writer. It names no writer and no book. That the writing is Psalm 79 is a reader’s identification, made on the wording — and the wording supports it: fifteen words, twelve of them in the order of the Greek Psalm 78:2–3, and a five-word run that no other screened unit reaches.

The formula itself is unique. According to the word which he wrote stands once in the 30,348 screened units. Its core, ὃν ἔγραψεν, which he wrote, stands in two — here and Joshua 9:2c (Greek B text) — and once in the Greek New Testament, at John 1:45, where the writer is named: him of whom Moses wrote.

What the formula does not license. It does not say which Psalter’s wording was in view — a Hebrew one or a Greek one — and it does not make the Greek of 7:17 a copy of the Greek of Psalm 78. The differences above are exactly what two independent renderings of one Hebrew verse could produce, and exactly what a loose quotation of one Greek verse could produce. The page reports both columns and chooses neither. And the psalm’s own closing words, καὶ οὐκ ἦν ὁ θάπτων, and there was none to bury, stand in one other screened unit: Psalms of Solomon 2:27. So, from the psalm’s side, the five-word contact is band 2 — 1 Maccabees 7:17 and Psalms of Solomon 2:27 each reach five with Psalm 78:3 — where from 7:17’s side it is band 1. The Psalms of Solomon run is not in 1 Maccabees, whose αὐτοῖς breaks them.

Across the 213 rows against 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament: 212 reach two, 161 reach three, 48 reach four, 9 reach five, and nothing reaches six. For the whole book the deepest contact lies outside this range: 11:1 and Hebrews 11:12, nine words, band 1.

Against the 29,424 screened units outside 1 Maccabees: all 213 rows reach two, 209 reach three, 139 four, 48 five, 16 six, 9 seven, 4 eight, and nothing reaches nine. Depth is not rarity, and it is not citation: the four eights are war and court formulae, and 7:17, the one row the text marks as words written outside its story, sits at five.

At six places the CATSS Greek and at least one other printed witness part company.

• 6:37 — four men, or thirty-two. CATSS τέσσαρες; the King James, the Latin and Swete’s text thirty-two. Checked online: the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition prints four and marks it as a correction (“Cn”), noting that “ancient authorities read thirty or thirty-two”. So the four is an editor’s reading, not a manuscript’s, on that edition’s own account; this disk has no apparatus to say more.
• 7:32 — five hundred, or five thousand. CATSS πεντακόσιοι, five hundred; the King James five thousand, the Latin quinque millia, Swete’s text πεντακισχίλιοι.
• 5:35 and 5:66 — which town. CATSS Αλεμα and Μαρισαν; the King James Maspha and Samaria, the Latin Maspha and Samariam; Swete Μααφὰ and Σαμαρίαν. Checked online: the NRSV Updated Edition footnotes both (“Other ancient authorities read Alema”; “Other ancient authorities read Samaria”) — and prints a different town from CATSS at 5:35. Editors divide here; the page does not.
• 6:43 and 7:16 — the name Avaran/Savaran and the singular word against the plural words: see the codex lines.

⚠️ Swete’s file is a transcription, and it has slips. In the rows read for this page it writes Ἐλεαὰρ at 2:5, the name Eleazar without its zeta, and Ἰοδαίᾳ at 5:3, where every other witness has Idumea. Its readings are printed beside the other witnesses and never alone as evidence; at 5:35 its spelling matches no other witness printed here. Its base is named on its own preface’s word: for the books of Maccabees, “since the Codex Alexandrinus is the only early Uncial which contains them all, the text of that MS. has been adopted throughout” (Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, vol. III, p. vi; the paragraph and its footnote are transcribed on this disk). His own footnote qualifies it: “the copy which the scribe of A follows was so carelessly written that it has been found necessary to admit a considerable number of corrections from the other MSS.”, and “a conjecture has been allowed to take a provisional place in the text” where all the uncials fail. So a reading quoted here as Swete’s is Swete’s printed text, not a verified reading of the codex; his notes, which record the rejected readings, were not consulted.

• Any Hebrew 1 Maccabees. None is held. Jerome, quoted in Author & Audience, says he found the book in Hebrew; the Jewish Encyclopedia reports that the Greek only has survived; no Hebrew text is quoted here. The acrostic and Hebrew-parallel screens cannot run on this book; there is no result to report, not even a null one.
• The critical apparatus. Kappler’s Göttingen edition is named in Stage 1 and was not consulted. Every variant above is reported from the witnesses held and from one modern translation’s footnotes, not weighed.
• Josephus. His retelling of these years (Jewish Antiquities book 12; the king’s death at 12.354–361) is held on this disk in Greek (Niese, Perseus) but was not measured for this page, so the page does not say how a third ancient Greek writer worded them.
• Polybius was read online at one passage (31.9, Loeb edition of 1927, on the LacusCurtius site). It is not on this disk, and no run was measured against it.
• The commentaries named in Stage 1 were not read for this page. Where the page quotes a view, it quotes a named public-domain source — Jerome, Polybius, two encyclopedias, Swete’s preface — and names it.
• Whether either Maccabean writer knew the other. Not measurable. See Stage 4.

• The episode pairing is the page’s own. The 2 Maccabees blocks were chosen by the names both books carry (Timothy, Carnaim, Ephron, Antiochus, Lysias, Alcimus, Nicanor). Drawn wider, a block has more chances to share a run; the whole of 2 Maccabees against these 213 rows reaches five and no further, at the same 5:13 and at 8:20, a name formula.
• The screen measures word forms in a row. Two writers who say the same thing with a different case ending score as strangers. Low runs are evidence of different wording; they are not evidence of independent knowledge.
• The English column follows a different Greek at five places or more, and the Latin parts from the CATSS Greek at most of the same places. The page flags each one it found; a reader comparing the columns elsewhere should assume nothing.
• The Latin’s seven division seams were found by reading. The self-check re-tests the words at each seam, but no algorithm searched for more.
• Dates are the book’s. 149, 150, 151 are years of the Seleucid era as the Greek gives them; the page does not convert them to years BC, because the conversion is a matter of scholarly argument this page has not checked.

• Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees (Anchor Bible 41, 1976).
• John R. Bartlett, The First and Second Books of the Maccabees (CBC, 1973).
• Bezalel Bar-Kochva, Judas Maccabaeus (Cambridge, 1989).
• Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees (CEJL, 2008).
• Werner Kappler, Maccabaeorum liber I (Göttingen Septuagint IX/1). Not held.
• H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek according to the Septuagint, vol. III — the Alexandrinus-based text held on this disk.

• Two witnesses can agree on the event and share almost no words. 1 Maccabees 6 and 2 Maccabees 9 both say Antiochus IV died in the east after failing to plunder a city with a rich temple; their Greek never runs three words together. Agreement of substance and agreement of wording are different things, and both are worth knowing.
• Count before you connect. The deepest New Testament contact these chapters make, five words, is reached seven ways, and the one reached most often is a name — Judas and his brothers — that belongs to two different men. The one place the text itself marks as words written outside its story is also the one that measures five with Psalm 79 — naming Psalm 79 is the reader’s step, not the text’s.
• Notice who keeps faith. Every oath in these chapters is sworn by the other side, and the king’s and the high priest’s are broken; the one document that promises not with deceit is a treaty with a foreign power. The book’s heroes are not described as perfect — two of their commanders lose two thousand men chasing a name — but its enemies are described as faithless.
• Remember the grave. The words 1 Maccabees sets beside its sixty dead are a lament: blood poured round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them. One concrete response: read Psalm 79 aloud this week, slowly, as the prayer of people who could not bury their own.
• Read on. 1 Maccabees 1:1–4:61 · 1 Maccabees 9:1–11:74.