63 myths · Page 1 of 3
Each story names the sources it was written from.
Jonathan the Maccabee tears his clothes in the dirt while his army flees. David walks onto a field no one sent him to. Both win the same way.
When the king who defiled the Temple fell from his chariot and began to rot alive, he made a vow to God he had spent years destroying. God did not accept it.
Two judges swore they had caught her with a man under a tree in her own garden. The court believed them. A boy in the crowd asked which tree.
Most of the camp walked off when they finished counting. Eight hundred stayed. Judah looked for the right wing and went at it anyway.
Judah's men had won in the hills. In the Temple courts they found shrubs and a burned altar. One sealed flask of oil had to last eight nights.
Gold and brass caught the sunrise and the ridges burned like lamps. Judah looked at the shine and still called his men forward.
Simon was the last Maccabee brother standing. He stood before a terrified assembly and said he knew he was no better than the ones already dead.
The messenger reached Gazara before the knives did. John took hold of the men Ptolemy had sent, and none of them left the city alive.
He had silenced the earth, lifted his heart, and taken the ends of the world. Then he fell into bed in Babylon and gave everything away.
Antiochus tortured six sons in front of their mother and she watched each one die. Then she told the youngest not to let the king touch him.
Judah Maccabee defeated four Seleucid generals in sequence, each time outnumbered. After the first battle he took Apollonius's sword and never put it down.
He spat toward the Temple and bared his right arm. The priests cried between the porch and the altar. Judah promised that arm a new place to hang.
When the exiles returned, Nehemiah's priests dug for the sacred altar fire and found only thick water. He ordered them to pour it anyway.
They would not throw a stone or block the cave mouth. On Shabbat the soldiers walked in and killed the men, the women, the children, and the cattle.
The officers offered Eleazar a way out. Bring your own food, they said, and only pretend to eat what the king requires. He was ninety, and he said no.
The tallest elephant on the field wore royal armor. Eleazar cut his way under it to kill the king. The king was somewhere else.
Judah was already in the ground. Jonathan was gone. Simon put his shoulder under what was left of the house of Mattathias and did not step back.
Ptolemy had married Simon's daughter and held the plain of Jericho. He invited his father-in-law to dinner and put armed men in the inner room.
Mattathias dies and Judas rises, and the Seleucid court sends larger and larger armies as the revolt refuses to be finished.
The Greek fort inside Jerusalem had watched the Temple for years. Simon starved the soldiers out, paid for the war himself, and let them live.
The last men inside the sanctuary did not leave because courage failed. They left because famine won. Then Simon stepped forward and carved his name in brass.
Jonathan was still alive in Tryphon's camp when the price arrived. Simon paid anyway. Snow, not swords, shut the last road to Jerusalem.
A Seleucid king signed the tribute away in purple. Simon still had to take Joppa and Gazera before that paper meant a thing on the ground.
The king's officers praised Mattathias and offered his family safety. He refused, struck down the man who stepped forward to comply, and fled into the hills.
Alexander offered gold for a statue of himself between the sanctuary and the Holy of Holies. The High Priest offered him a generation of children instead.
Soldiers came into the wilderness on a Sabbath and killed a thousand who would not fight back. Mattathias ruled that a man may fight to stay alive.
The report reached him and the light went out of his face. Alone in his house he forged a blade two spans long, short enough to vanish under a robe.
An old priest strikes the king's officer at Modin and hands his sons a war no army can win, and one son frees Judea only to fall on a deserted field.
Judas was already in the ground. The fields were empty and the traitors were out. Jonathan told the remnant he would die the same way.
Lysias packed Bethsura with sixty thousand foot. On the far bank they waited to see if Judas would get wet first.
