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2 Maccabees 1:17-19
New Catholic Bible
2 Maccabees 1:17-19
New Catholic Bible
17 Blessed in all respects be our God who has delivered the godless to death.
18 The Legend of the Sacred Fire.[a] We shall be celebrating the purification of the temple on the twenty-fifth day of the month Chislev, and thus we thought it proper to give you some information so that you too may celebrate the Feast of Booths and the feast of the fire[b] that appeared when Nehemiah offered sacrifices after he had rebuilt the temple and the altar.
19 For when our ancestors were being led in exile to Persia, the devout priests of that period took some of the fire from the altar and hid it secretly in the hollow of a dry cistern, taking the necessary precautions to ensure that the place of concealment was unknown to anyone.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- 2 Maccabees 1:18 The thick water that becomes fire is none other than unrefined petroleum (naphtha, v. 36). The Persians were familiar with it and used it to celebrate fire, which played a great part in their worship. Inspired by the reminders of the Exodus, this legendary anecdote wished to attest that the worship rendered to God in the temple of Jerusalem was to remain the legitimate liturgy established by Moses and by Solomon because it would allow the sacred fire to be miraculously kept burning (Lev 6:12-13).
- 2 Maccabees 1:18 The feast of the fire: fire and light are connected with the Feast of Hanukkah, which is celebrated with a nine-branched candlestick. There is a Talmudic tradition that a small amount of oil burned miraculously for a long time until new oil could be consecrated. Nehemiah: in reality, it was not Nehemiah who rebuilt the altar and the temple but Zerubbabel (see Ezr 3:2; 5:2); but the importance of Nehemiah’s work was so great that tradition attributed to him everything that took place after the return of the first exiles.
