1 Maccabees 2:32-41
New Catholic Bible
32 A large force set out in pursuit and caught up with them; they encamped opposite them and prepared to attack them on the Sabbath. 33 “Enough of this defiance!” they said. “Come out and obey the king’s edict, and your lives will be spared.” 34 “We will not come out,” they replied, “nor will we do what the king commands and profane the Sabbath.”
35 Then the enemy immediately launched an attack on them, 36 but they did not retaliate, neither hurling rocks nor barricading their hiding places. 37 They only said, “Let us all die in a state of innocence. Heaven and earth are our witnesses that you are massacring us without the slightest justification.” 38 Therefore, the enemy attacked on the Sabbath and massacred them along with their wives, their children, and their livestock—one thousand persons in all.
39 Mattathias Organizes the Resistance.[a] When Mattathias and his friends were informed of this, they grieved deeply for them. 40 “If we all do as our kindred have done,” they said to one another, “and refuse to fight against the Gentiles in defense of our lives and our traditions, they will soon wipe us off the face of the earth.” 41 On that day they formulated this decision: “Let us fight against anyone who attacks us on the Sabbath, so that we will not all be killed, as happened to our kindred who died in their hiding places.”
Read full chapterFootnotes
- 1 Maccabees 2:39 Mattathias is joined by the Hasideans, the “pious,” a group of fervent Jews who would give rise to the Pharisees (and probably the Essenes). At first they had resisted passively (1 Mac 1:62f; 2:37), but now they turned to active resistance. They would later oppose the Maccabean movement as too political.
