2 Maccabees 5:1-14

Common English Bible

Antiochus robs the temple

5 At about this time, Antiochus made his second invasion of Egypt. ² For about forty days, there were visions of soldiers on horses running through the air around the city. They wore gold garments and were armed with spears and ³ with drawn swords. They organized companies of cavalry, each attacking and counterattacking, wielding shields and spears and shooting arrows. Gold ornaments and armor gleamed brightly. ⁴ As a result, everyone hoped that the visions were a good sign. ⁵ When a false rumor spread that Antiochus had died, Jason took no fewer than a thousand soldiers and made an unexpected assault on the city. When the troops on the wall had been defeated, and the city had been seized at last, Menelaus fled into the elevated fortress.^{[a] 6} Jason mercilessly slaughtered his own citizens. He failed to realize military success against one’s own people is the greatest misfortune but thought that he was winning trophies from his enemies and not from his fellow citizens. ⁷ But he didn’t gain the government; instead, he received shame as a result of his plot and again fled as a fugitive into Ammonite country. ⁸ Finally, he came to a miserable end. Brought up on charges before Aretas the Arab tyrant, he fled from city to city, chased by everyone. Hated as a traitor to the laws and loathed as the murderer of his native land and citizens, he was cast ashore in Egypt. ⁹ He, who had exiled many from their homeland, died in a foreign land after he sailed to the Spartans to seek protection because of their kinship. ¹⁰ So the one who had cast out a crowd of corpses to lie unburied died without mourning and received no funeral or place in his ancestral burial plot.

¹¹ When the news of these events reached the king, he thought Judea was in revolt. So he broke camp and marched from Egypt while wild with emotion, and took the city by force. ¹² He commanded his soldiers to cut down without mercy anyone they met and to slaughter those fleeing into their houses. ¹³ They killed young and old, murdered adolescents, women and children, and slaughtered virgins and infants. ¹⁴ Over a three-day period, eighty thousand people’s lives were ruined. Forty thousand were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, and no fewer than those slaughtered were sold as slaves.