The Mighty One Fallen, and the Sand by the Sea

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — articles on Maccabees, Books of, the Hasmoneans, Jonathan, Judas Maccabeus, Alcimus and the Seleucids.
• Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism — 1 Maccabees, Hasmoneans, High Priests.
• Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP) — Maccabean literature, Hasmoneans, priests and priesthood.
• On the kings — any reference article on the Seleucid succession after 162 BC. Read with the text open: 1 Maccabees introduces Alexander as the son of Antiochus, Epiphanes (10:1, our gloss) and lets the claim stand; whether it was true is a question for the historians, and this page does not settle it.

• Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees (Anchor Bible 41, 1976).
• 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) — the military history, including the last battle.
• F.-M. Abel, Les livres des Maccabées (Études bibliques, 1949).
• Werner Kappler (ed.), Maccabaeorum liber I (Göttingen Septuagint IX/1) — the critical text. Not held here.
• NETS, 1 Makkabees — the New English Translation of the Septuagint. Named as the obvious next English for a reader; not quoted.

Josephus retells these chapters in Jewish Antiquities 12.420–13.163 — 178 sections, 6,877 Greek words in Niese’s edition. That he worked from 1 Maccabees here is the common scholarly view; this page tests only how much of the wording he shares, by the same run engine, every row of 1 Maccabees 9–11 against every one of those sections.

Every row that reaches five words or more with Josephus stands inside a quoted royal document. Where Josephus is telling the story, the deepest he comes to 1 Maccabees’ wording is four words; where he gives a king’s letter, he comes to eight. And the lament for Judas (9:21) reaches one word; the closing formula (9:22) reaches two. Josephus has neither. In their place he gives his own verdict: ἄνδρα γενναῖον καὶ μεγαλοπόλεμον — a noble man and a great warrior (Ant. 12.433; our gloss).

A Hellenistic letter opens X to Y, greeting, with the infinitive χαίρειν. Measured across the 30,348 screened units, that infinitive stands in 25: 1 Maccabees 10, 2 Maccabees 7, 1 Esdras 2, 3 Maccabees 2, Esther (an Addition) 1 — and three that do not open a letter: Isaiah 48:22 and 57:21, there is no rejoicing for the wicked, and Tobit S 5:10, a greeting spoken face to face. 1 Maccabees carries more of them than any other book, four of them in these chapters. In the 7,927 New Testament verses it stands in seven, and three of those open a letter (Acts 15:23, Acts 23:26, James 1:1).

Alexander: βασιλεὺς Ἀλέξανδρος τῷ ἀδελφῷ Ιωναθαν χαίρειν (10:18). Demetrius II: βασιλεὺς Δημήτριος Ιωναθαν τῷ ἀδελφῷ χαίρειν καὶ ἔθνει Ιουδαίων (11:30), and to his own official, βασιλεὺς Δημήτριος Λασθένει τῷ πατρὶ χαίρειν (11:32) — to Lasthenes his father. Two rival kings call Jonathan brother. Josephus gives Alexander’s greeting as βασιλεὺς Ἀλέξανδρος Ἰωνάθῃ τῷ ἀδελφῷ χαίρειν. (Ant. 13.45) — the same words with the name moved and spelt another way, so the measured run between the two is two.

Measured against every verse unit of 1 Esdras, Esther, 3 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees and Ezra–Nehemiah, the four greeting verses in these chapters (10:18, 10:25, 11:30, 11:32) never share more than three consecutive words with any of them — and the three are of the Jews, greeting or these words. The closest thing to a shared formula is 2 Maccabees 11:22, βασιλεὺς Ἀντίοχος τῷ ἀδελφῷ Λυσίᾳ χαίρειν, where another king calls another subordinate brother: two words in a row, to the brother. The formula is a frame, not a phrase — the same slots, filled with different names — and a run screen sees only the filler.

Measured: 2 Maccabees names Nicanor for the last time at 15:37, two verses from its end, where the epitomator says that since Nicanor’s affairs turned out so, he will stop his story there; the last time it names a Jonathan is 8:22. 1 Maccabees tells that fall at 7:43–50, and its chapter 8, on the Romans, stands between. 1 Maccabees 9:1 opens on the news of Nicanor’s fall. From here on, 1 Maccabees is the only narrative of the two, and Josephus is the only other telling this disk holds.

• 236 rows, 4,792 Greek words: chapter 9 has 1,467, chapter 10 has 1,795, chapter 11 has 1,530.
• The quoted letters: Alexander to Jonathan, 50 words (10:18–20); Demetrius I to the Jews, 514 words (10:25–45); Demetrius II, 171 words (11:30–37); Antiochus VI, one verse of 25 words (11:57). The verses carrying those four come to 760 words — 15.9% of the passage; add the other quoted messages (Alexander to Ptolemy and his reply, 10:52–56; Apollonius’s challenge, 10:70–73; Ptolemy to Demetrius, 11:9–10; Demetrius to Jonathan, 11:42–43) and it is 1,056 words, 22.0%.
• ‘He fell’ (singular): four times — 9:1, 9:18, 9:21, 10:50.
• ‘Returned to Jerusalem’: six times — 9:50, 10:66, 10:87, 11:7, 11:51, 11:74.
• Seven dated rows — 9:3, 9:54, 10:1, 10:21, 10:57, 10:67, 11:19.
• The mourning formula: the seven words of 9:20 in three units of 30,348 — 2:70, 9:20, 13:26. Mattathias, Judas, Jonathan. The book has no such sentence for Simon (16:16–17).

234 reach two, 171 reach three, 49 reach four, 10 reach five — and then nothing until nine. No row reaches six, seven or eight. Two rows (10:79, 11:19) share single words only.

Nine of the ten rows that reach five share strings of the commonest words — articles, pronouns, prepositions, and — mostly around one ordinary noun, a name or a common verb — and his brothers and, in that day and, upon his head and. The tenth is a figure of speech. Read the right-hand column too: it is the same run measured from the New Testament verse’s side, against the whole Greek Old Testament.

1 Maccabees 11:1: the king of Egypt gathers forces ὡς ἡ ἄμμος ἡ παρὰ τὸ χεῖλος τῆς θαλάσσης — as the sand which is by the lip of the sea.
Hebrews 11:12 (SBLGNT): διὸ καὶ ἀφ’ ἑνὸς ἐγεννήθησαν καὶ ταῦτα νενεκρωμένου καθὼς τὰ ἄστρα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ τῷ πλήθει καὶ ὡς ἡ ἄμμος ἡ παρὰ τὸ χεῖλος τῆς θαλάσσης ἡ ἀναρίθμητος — from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as the stars of heaven in multitude and as the sand which is by the lip of the sea, innumerable (our literal gloss; the ESV of Hebrews is not held on this disk).

Measured from 1 Maccabees’ side: a run of nine, tie band 1 among the 7,927 NT verses. Measured from Hebrews’ side: against the 30,348 screened Greek Old Testament units, Hebrews 11:12’s deepest run is the same nine words with the same verse, tie band 1.

Genesis 22:17 — the promise to Abraham, which Hebrews 11:12 is commonly read as recalling — shares five. It has the simile in the accusative, as the object of I will multiply: ὡς τὴν ἄμμον τὴν παρὰ τὸ χεῖλος τῆς θαλάσσης. Hebrews needs the nominative, because the descendants are the subject of were born: ὡς ἡ ἄμμος ἡ παρὰ τὸ χεῖλος τῆς θαλάσσης. And the place where the nine-word sequence becomes unique is three words long: ἡ παρὰ τὸ — the nominative article which followed by Genesis’s by the lip. The nominative simile with by stands in 1 Kingdoms 13:5 and 3 Kingdoms 2:35a and 5:9 (ὡς ἡ ἄμμος ἡ παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν, as the sand which is by the sea); Genesis has by the lip of the sea. The nominative alone does not produce the nine words. Judges 7:12 has the sand upon the lip of the sea in the nominative in both Greek texts — ὥσπερ ἡ ἄμμος ἡ ἐπὶ τὸ χεῖλος τῆς θαλάσσης (A), ὡς ἡ ἄμμος ἡ ἐπὶ χείλους τῆς θαλάσσης (B) — with upon where Hebrews has by, and so do 2 Kingdoms 17:11 and 3 Kingdoms 2:46a without the lip; each reaches four with Hebrews, not nine. In the corpora held here, two texts carry all nine; the screen does not say how either came to have them.

So the deepest verbatim contact in these three chapters is real and does not by itself show dependence. It does not show that the writer to the Hebrews read 1 Maccabees, nor the reverse; it shows that on a word-form screen one article can make a nine-word run unique while the promise Hebrews is commonly read as recalling scores five. The stars half of the same verse makes the same point: its deepest Greek Old Testament match is not Genesis but Exodus 32:13, where Moses repeats the promise — τὰ ἄστρα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ τῷ πλήθει καὶ, seven words, against two with Genesis 22:17’s stars. Direction of influence is not measurable and is not asserted.

9:62 → Mark 1:36, five words, tie band 1. Σιμων καὶ οἱ μετ' αὐτοῦ — Simon and those with him. In 1 Maccabees it is Jonathan and Simon withdrawing to Bethbasi; in Mark it is Simon Peter hunting for Jesus at dawn. Measured from Mark’s side, its deepest Greek Old Testament contact is this phrase, band 2 — 9:62 and 9:67, both 1 Maccabees. A shared name and four of the commonest words in Greek narrative.

11:71 → Revelation 10:1, five words, tie band 1 — and band 12 the other way. Jonathan throws earth upon his head and prays; the angel has a rainbow upon his head and a face like the sun. From Revelation’s side the same five words reach twelve Greek Old Testament units, from the turban set on Aaron’s head in Exodus 29:6 to the oil poured on Saul’s in 1 Kingdoms 10:1. A band of one on one side and twelve on the other is the clearest sign on this page that a band must be read from both ends.

The death notice of Judas is five verses. Screened against the 29,424 Greek Old Testament units outside 1 Maccabees, each of them reaches a different part of the older books — except the two that sound most like them.

The burial, καὶ ἔθαψαν αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ τάφῳ τῶν πατέρων αὐτοῦ, begins with six words that bury three kings of Judah — Ahaziah, Amon and Josiah (4 Kingdoms 9:28, 21:26, 23:30) — and ends with of his fathers, which makes the whole phrase stand nowhere else. The fourth unit in the band is a counter-example: 2 Chronicles 24:25 reaches six with a different stretch, and inside a denial — καὶ οὐκ ἔθαψαν αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ τάφῳ τῶν βασιλέων, and they did not bury him in the tomb of the kings, said of Joash. The mourning has its first five words in Samuel’s death notice (1 Kingdoms 28:3), and the book carries all seven for Mattathias, Judas and Jonathan and for nobody else. The transition shares its first five words with the first sentence of Joshua and of Judges: καὶ ἐγένετο μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν Ιουδου.

The lament. πῶς ἔπεσεν δυνατὸς σῴζων τὸν Ισραηλ — how has he fallen, the mighty one, saving Israel. David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan in the Greek of 2 Kingdoms 1 has πῶς ἔπεσαν δυνατοί three times, plural; the Masoretic Hebrew of 2 Samuel 1:19 is plural too, אֵ֖יךְ נָפְל֥וּ גִבּוֹרִֽים. The longest contiguous run between 9:21 and any of the three is one word: how. The phrase how he fell stands nowhere else in the screened Greek Old Testament. A reader may hear 2 Samuel 1 here, and the English of the KJV — “How is the valiant man fallen” — makes it easier to hear; the Greek keeps a single man, and the hearing is the reader’s, not the run’s.

The closing formula. The books of Kingdoms end a reign with καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τῶν λόγων Εζεκιου… οὐχὶ ταῦτα γεγραμμένα ἐπὶ βιβλίῳ λόγων τῶν ἡμερῶν — and the rest of the words of Hezekiah… are they not written in the book of the words of the days? (4 Kingdoms 20:20). The five words and the rest of the words in that form stand in 35 screened units: 32 in 3–4 Kingdoms, 2 in 2 Chronicles — and one in 1 Maccabees, at 16:23, for John: καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τῶν λόγων Ιωαννου… ἰδοὺ ταῦτα γέγραπται ἐπὶ βιβλίῳ ἡμερῶν ἀρχιερωσύνης αὐτοῦ, behold, these are written in the book of the days of his high priesthood. For Judas the same book writes καὶ τὰ περισσὰ τῶν λόγων… οὐ κατεγράφη πολλὰ γὰρ ἦν σφόδρα. A different word for the rest, found in this phrase nowhere else in the 30,348 screened units, and the verb turned round: not are they not written? but they were not written, for they were very many. Its deepest run anywhere in the Greek Old Testament is four words with Psalm 144(145):3 — καὶ τῆς μεγαλωσύνης αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔστιν πέρας, and of his greatness there is no end.

Whether the Greek τὰ περισσὰ stands for the same Hebrew word as the Kingdoms formula cannot be tested: no Hebrew 1 Maccabees exists. The page reports the two Greek wordings and the one book that uses both.

• 9:22 → John 20:30 and 21:25 — run of ONE each. Many deeds left unwritten, in 1 Maccabees and at the end of John. The idea is shared; the measured contact is single words — many, did, and — never two in a row.
• 9:27 → Matthew 24:21 — run of TWO. θλῖψις μεγάλη, great tribulation, such as there had not been since the day no prophet was seen among them. Matthew has the same two words; they stand in no other screened Greek Old Testament unit, and in one other New Testament verse (Acts 7:11). Two words, and the rest of each sentence differs.
• 9:41 → Amos 8:10 — run of THREE; → James 4:9 — run of TWO. καὶ μετεστράφη ὁ γάμος εἰς πένθος καὶ φωνὴ μουσικῶν αὐτῶν εἰς θρῆνον — and the wedding was turned into mourning, and the voice of their music into lamentation. Amos 8:10: καὶ μεταστρέψω τὰς ἑορτὰς ὑμῶν εἰς πένθος καὶ πάσας τὰς ᾠδὰς ὑμῶν εἰς θρῆνον; ESV: “I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.” Amos 8:10 has the same pattern — turn X into mourning and Y into lamentation — and the contiguous run is three words, into mourning and, which Amos 5:16 and both Greek Tobits (2:6) also carry.
• 9:10 → Paul — run of TWO, and a formula. Judas refuses to flee: μὴ γένοιτο ποιῆσαι τὸ πρᾶγμα τοῦτο. May it not be is Paul’s word (Romans 3:4 and thirteen more), and Luke 20:16: fifteen New Testament verses; in the screened Greek Old Testament it stands four times. A formula, measured as one.
• 11:71 → Matthew 26:65 — run of THREE. Jonathan tears his clothes; the high priest διέρρηξεν τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ. Matthew’s four words stand as one sequence in ten screened Greek Old Testament units, from Reuben (Genesis 37:29) to Job (1:20); 1 Maccabees puts Jonathan’s name between the verb and the garments, which is why the run is three. A gesture of grief with a long history, measured as one. The page draws no line between the two high priests; the text does not.
• 10:21 → Exodus 28:2 — run of ONE. The holy robe, with the two words in the other order. Contact by content, invisible to a run screen.
• 11:29 → Acts 23:25 — run of ONE. A king in 1 Maccabees and a tribune in Acts each write a letter having this manner / form: 1 Maccabees has τρόπον, Acts has τύπον, two different nouns, and the difference breaks what would otherwise be a run of three.

Against the 29,424 screened units outside 1 Maccabees: all 236 reach two, 221 reach three, 134 reach four, 48 reach five, 12 reach six, 2 reach seven, and nothing reaches eight. The two sevens are narrative: 9:39 with 4 Kingdoms 6:20 (lifted their eyes and saw, and behold) and 9:66 with Jeremiah 42:3 in the Greek numbering — 35:3 in the Hebrew and English Bibles (and his brothers and his sons). So the deepest contact these chapters make with the rest of the Greek Old Testament is seven words — shallower than their deepest contact with Josephus (eight) and with Hebrews (nine). Depth measures shared wording, not kinship.

• Anything in Hebrew for this book. No Hebrew 1 Maccabees survives and none is on this disk; the Hebrew-side screens cannot run. Jerome’s sentence is held; the book he describes is not. His preface to Samuel and Kings (the Prologus Galeatus, in The Latin Library’s transcription, not a critical edition, fetched for this shelf’s study of 1 Maccabees 1:1–4:61) reads: Macchabeorum primum librum hebraicum repperi, secundus graecus est, quod et ex ipsa frasin probari potest. — I found the first book of Maccabees in Hebrew; the second is Greek, as can be shown from its very style (our gloss). The Hebrew book he says he found is not held, and nothing about it can be checked here; the wider view that the book was composed in Hebrew is reported from the commentaries and not tested.
• The critical Greek text. CATSS prints Rahlfs. The Göttingen edition (Kappler) and its apparatus are not held, so no variant reading in the Greek manuscripts is reported here — including any that might bear on the nine-word run at 11:1 or the wording of 9:21–22.
• Why the KJV reads “Spain” at 11:2. The Greek and the Latin on this disk both read Syria. The English edition the 1611 translators worked from is not held, and the page offers no explanation.
• Josephus’s other figures. Only the 178 sections that retell these chapters were measured. Statements Josephus makes elsewhere about the high-priestly succession were not consulted, so the page does not say whether he is consistent with himself.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls. A common proposal identifies the Wicked Priest of the Qumran Habakkuk commentary with Jonathan; others name his successors. No Qumran text is held and the proposal is not tested here.
• Dates. The Seleucid-era years are the text’s own; their conversion to BC, and the date of the book, are taken from the commentaries and are not measured.

• The English column is quotation. The KJV Apocrypha is printed verbatim and checked, but it was not made from the Greek printed beside it, and it puts a clause across seven verse boundaries differently. Every English line in the codex sits clear of those seven boundaries; the reader should still treat the English as a second witness, not a gloss. The Latin is less tidy: it divides on its own at ten more boundaries, and one of them (9:20/21) falls inside the codex.
• The Josephus comparison crosses editions. Niese’s Josephus and Rahlfs’s 1 Maccabees are different editions with different spellings of the same names (Josephus’s Ἰωνάθης and 1 Maccabees’ Ιωναθαν do not match as forms). A run cut by a spelling difference is reported short, never long, so the Josephus figures are lower bounds.
• The two normalisers. Cross-corpus runs (1 Maccabees against the SBLGNT or Josephus) use the shelf’s cross-edition normaliser, which treats οὐ and οὐκ as one word; runs inside the Greek Old Testament use the plain one. Run 9:22 against Psalm 144:3 with the cross-edition one and it reaches five, not four — the extra word is not. The page prints the plain figure.
• The Hebrews result has explanations the page cannot test. One proposed account is that two writers independently joined the nominative simile to Genesis’s by the lip of the sea; it is an account, not a measurement. Judges 7:12 shows that the nominative alone does not force the nine words, and the run itself is silent on how either text came to have them.
• The division differences were found by reading. The seven KJV shifts and the ten places where the Clementine divides on its own were located by reading the ends and openings of all 233 verse boundaries in the three files side by side, not by a program; the self-check confirms each one listed, but a missed boundary would not show up in it.
• The structure diagram labels a sequence. Its panels are ours; what is measured is the refrain, the four singular fells and the three conferrals of the high priesthood.

• 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).
• F.-M. Abel, Les livres des Maccabées (1949).
• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12–13 — Greek text of B. Niese (1885–1890), Perseus Digital Library digitisation, CC BY-SA 4.0: held and measured. The Loeb translation of these books (Ralph Marcus, 1943) is not held.
• Werner Kappler, Maccabaeorum liber I (Göttingen) — not held.

• The deepest match is not always the closest relative. Hebrews 11:12 shares nine words with an Egyptian army and five with the promise to Abraham in Genesis 22:17. Count, then think — and never let the count do the thinking.
• Hearing an echo is not the same as finding one. How is the mighty fallen sounds like David; measured, it shares the word how. Both facts are true, and a careful reader holds both.
• The book grieves in sentences the older books also carry. The burial of kings, the mourning for Samuel, the first line of Joshua: in a time when, 9:27 says, no prophet was seen, Judas is mourned in words a reader of Kings, Samuel and Joshua would know.
• Offers from power come with a price written in. Two kings bid for Jonathan; the larger offer was refused because the people remembered what its author had done (10:46). The third king, the text says, lied in all that he had said (11:53).
• One concrete response. Read 2 Samuel 1:17–27 and 1 Maccabees 9:19–22 side by side this week, aloud, and name one person whose death you are still carrying. Lament is a thing God’s people have always been given words for.