MACCABEES, THE SECOND BOOK OF, accord ing to the order of the Sept., which is followed both by the ancient versions and modem exposi tors of the Apocrypha.
i. Position of the Book.—This book ought, ac cording to the historic order, to be the first of the Maccabees, because its narrative begins with an event which occurred in the reign of Seleucus Philopator, about ISO B. C., i. e., four years earlier than the preceding book. Its being placed second in order is evidently owing to the fact that it is both of a later date and of less intrinsic worth than the one nominated the first of the Maccabees. Cotton, in his translation of the Maccabees, has put this book as third of Maccabees.
2. Design, Contents, and Division of the Book.— The design of this book is to admonish and en courage the Jews to keep the religion of their fathers, and especially to inculcate into the minds of the Israelites resident in Egypt a reverence for the Temple in Jerusalem, urging them to take part in the celebration of the festivals instituted to commemorate the dedication of the Temple as the sacred and legitimate place for divine worship (x. 6), and the defeat of Nicanor (xv. 36). To effect this design the writer gives a condensed history of the Maccabean struggles for their religion and sanctuary, beginning with the attempts of Helio dorus to plunder the Temple, circa ISO B. c., and
terminating with the victory of Judas MaccabDus over Nicanor, B. C. 161. The whole narrative, therefore, which is partly I-iv. 6) anterior to I Maccab., partly (iv. 7-vii. 42) supplementary to the brief summary in I Maccab. i. to-64, and partly (vii. I-xv.) parallel with I Maccab. vii. 4S, embraces a period of about nineteen years, and is divided into three sections, each of which is made to terminate with the great event commemo rated by the festival which the writer is so anxious that his Egyptian brethren should celebrate.
i. The first section (i. r-ii. 32) comprises two epistles addressed by the Jews in Palestine to their brethren in Egypt, inviting them to take part in the celebration of the Feast of Dedication (i. 18), and an account given by the writer of this book of the sources from which he derived his information, and of the trouble he had in compiling it (ii. 19 32).
ii. The second section (iii. I-x. 9) gives impor tant information about the origin of the persecu tions (iii. 42), which is simply hinted at in I Maccab., and then describes and supplements (in viii. 1-ix. 29) the events recorded in I Maccab., concluding with the dedication of the Temple (x: 1.9), which is the great object of the book, circa