Readings:
2 Maccabees 5-6
Revelation 9

2 Maccabees 5-6

The writer tells of a mini civil war between the former high priest Jason, and the man that replaced him. Jason slaughters many of his own people in an attempt to regain control of Jerusalem but he fails and ends up dying in exile in Sparta.

This is told as an explanation for why Antiochus, who previously had been ambivalent about Judah and the Jews, turns with such ire on Jerusalem. Their infighting and backstabbing led to a catastrophe from the outside when Antiochus thought they were in revolt against his rule and took a much harder line against the Jews.

Verse 19 contains a nugget of wisdom that many had forgotten. God didn’t chose the people because of the temple, he set up the temple because of the people. When they people became wicked then the temple lost its purpose and meaning.

Antiochus seems to go into a blood lust and appoints vicious men as governors for the surrounding region and attempts to genocidally thin the numbers of Jews to perhaps make them less of a threat or maybe just due to hatred.

The persecution turns into outright suppression. They set up idols of Zeus and sacrifice pigs to him on the altar in the temple, they also encourage the pagan act of cultic prostitution inside the temple. Circumcision is banned and the sabbath is violated by requiring people work all week long. Eventually it comes down to mass killings for even the slightest infraction or evidence that one is still practicing Judaism.

The writer breaks into the narrative here to give an explanation, and it’s a pretty good one, that these things happen as a way to chastise and turn the people back to God. Its more medicinal than punitive.

Eleazar was forced to eat pork but spat it out and gladly accepted death over eating the nonkosher flesh from the sacrifice to an idol. His fiends urge him to eat some other meat and pretend it’s pork. But he gives another wonderful explanation that it’s not just about this single act, it’s about causing scandal for the rest of the faithful and the danger of them following his example because they believed he actually ate the pork.

A similar thing takes place in the early days of the church when the Roman authorities attempt to seize all Christian writings from the churches. Some hand them over, some refuse and die, but some take a third way and hand over what amounts to grandmas cookbook and pretend it’s the scriptures. This happened at the urging of their friends in the Roman authorities to save their own lives. Those that participated in this charade where spared their lives but it caused a rift in the church and in many cases they had to perform years of public penance to atone for their actions.

Revelation 9

At the end of the previous chapter it’s announced that three woes are about to fall on the earth and these are the 5th through 7th trumpets. The fifth trumpet is blown and it unleashes a swarm of locusts that are described in very similar ways to the swarm from Joel 2. That swarm was a literal plague sent by God to spur the nation to repentance, but the one in revelation may actually refer to the many legions that arrive under the command of Vespasian during the First Jewish Revolt.

The sixth trumped is blown and it unbinds four fallen angels that are bound at the Euphrates river. This river is symbolic because it can be another way of saying Babylon, and also the Assyrians and Elamites lived on its banks. These fallen angels unleash a horde of fire and sulfur breathing horses that have the ability to kill, unlike the scorpion/locusts that only wounded.

Despite these woes, the wicked refuse to repent. The whole point of these judgments is to spur repentance, but some people are so far down the road that they either think they can’t ever turn back, or have no desire to.

Tomorrow’s Readings:
2 Maccabees 7-9
Revelation 10