Judah the Lion Who Had Nowhere to Retreat

He had put on the breastplate as a giant puts it on. This is the language of the Maccabean chronicle, and it is the language of a tradition that watched a man fight for six years across an impossible series of battles and needed words large enough to hold what they had witnessed. He made battles, protecting the host with his sword. This is the language of the Maccabean chronicle, preserved in medieval Hebrew manuscripts drawing on earlier sources. In his acts he was like a lion, and like a lion's whelp roaring for his prey.

The account of Judah Maccabee's death in the medieval Hebrew chronicle of the Hasmoneans begins with a statement that stops the reader cold: at the end of the year, the Lord ordained that Judah end his days, and be gathered to his people the Hasidim.

The Lord ordained it. This is not a failure of faith. It is the tradition's deepest act of faith, the acknowledgment that the man who fought God's battles for six years and won every time was also, when his time came, held in the same hand that had guided him through every battle before. His death was not an abandonment. It was a completion. The chronicle records it this way because to record it any other way would be to suggest that Judah's life had been outside God's ordering, and nothing in the chronicle supports that reading.

Bacchides came suddenly, with thirty thousand men of the Macedonian army, while Judah was camped at Laish. The three thousand men who had been with Judah fled as one man. What remained was Judah, his brothers, and eight hundred chosen men, tried veterans in all the wars he had fought. The chronicle is precise about this: they did not stir from their places.

Eight hundred men. Thirty thousand. The numbers are so far beyond ordinary military calculation that the chronicle does not try to make the math work. It simply records what happened next: Bacchides arranged fifteen thousand men on Judah's right and fifteen thousand on his left. The shouting rose from both sides. And Judah, seeing the battle was very fierce, seeing Bacchides standing on his right with all his best warriors gathered there, shouted and leaped forward followed by his brothers and the few Hasmoneans.

He ran toward Bacchides. He ran into the thirty thousand.

He had done this before, in the battle against Apollonius, where he had seen the Greek general standing in the midst of his company and run toward him in the fury of his anger, cutting through the Macedonian lines the way a reaper cuts through sheaves. He had done it against Seron at Beth Horon, where his men had looked at the large army on the road ahead and said: how can we who are so few go to war against this great multitude? And he had said: cry unto heaven, and you shall be saved, for the battle is in the hands of the Lord to deliver the many into the hands of the few.

He had said it and it had been true, battle after battle, six years of battles in which the impossible arithmetic kept resolving in Israel's favor. He had seized Apollonius's sword on the field and fought with it for the rest of his life. He had chased Nicanor's merchants away from the soldiers they had brought gold to purchase, gold intended to buy Jewish captives for the slave markets. He had defeated four Greek generals in a single campaign. He had cleansed the Temple and relit the Menorah and ordained eight days of celebration that would be kept forever.

And now the numbers had finally caught up with him. Heaps of Macedonians fell in the opening moments of that last battle, but the army behind them did not break. Bacchides's face looked to Bacchides himself like the face of a lion robbed of its prey, and fear seized him, and he turned and fled toward Ashdod. But the army behind Bacchides found Judah faint and weary, and war was waged on every side, and Judah fell upon those he had slain.

His brothers Simeon and Jonathan took him and buried him on Mount Modi'in, the mountain where the Hasmonean family had its roots. All Israel mourned for him many days. He had ministered to Israel for six years, and the Lord had caused him to prosper all the days of his life.

The wicked shrunk for fear of him, the chronicle said, and all the workers of iniquity were troubled, because salvation prospered in his hand. It prospered in his hand until the hand was empty, and then the mourning came, and then the tradition built a celebration around what had not been lost, the Temple, the menorah, the eight days of light he had given his life to recover. The lion fell. The light remained. Both of these things are true, and the tradition holds both.