M

IVINE Providence at this crisis interposed, not, as formerly, with miraculous assistance, but by the instrumentality of human virtues; the lofty patriotism, adventurous valour, daring and sagacious soldiership, generous self-devotion, and inextinguishable zeal of heroic men in the cause of their country and their God.

In Modin, a town on an eminence commanding a view of the sea, the exact site of which is unknown, lived Mattathias, a man of the priestly line of Joarib, himself advanced in years, but with five sons in the prime of life-Johanan, Simon, Judas, Eleazar, and Jonathan. When Apelles, the officer of Antiochus, arrived at Modin to enforce the execution of the edict against the Jewish religion, he made splendid offers to Mattathias, as a man of great influence, to induce him to submit to the royal will. The old man not merely rejected his advances, but publicly proclaimed his resolution to live and die in the faith of his fathers; and when an apostate Jew was about to offer sacrifice to the heathen deity, in a transport of indignant zeal, Mattathias struck him dead upon the altar. He then fell on the king's commissioner, put him to death, and summoned all the citiacus who were zealous for the law, to follow him to the mountains. Their numbers rapidly increased; but the Sy

rian troops having surprised a thousand in a cave, attacked them on the sabbath day, and meeting with no resistance, slew them without mercy. From thenceforth Mattathias and his followers determined to break through this over-scrupulous observance of the sabbath, and to assert the legality of defensive warfare on that day.

The insurgents conducted their revolt with equal enterprise and discretion. For a time they lay hid in the mountain fastnesses; and, as opportunity occurred, poured down upon the towns, destroyed the heathen altars, enforced circumcision, punished all apostates who fell into their hands, recovered many copies of the law which their enemies had wantonly defaced; and re-established the synagogues for public worship; the temple being defiled, and in the possession of the enemy. Their ranks were swelled with the zealots for the law, who were then called the Chasidim: for, immediately after the return from Babylonia, two sects had divided the people-the Zadikim, the righteous, who observed the written law of Moses; and the more austere and abstemious Chasidim, or the holy, who added to the law the traditions and observances of the fathers, and professed a holiness beyond the letter of the covenant. From the former sprang the Caraites and Sadducees of later times; from the latter, the Pharisees. But the age of Mattathias was ill-suited to this laborious and enterprising warfare: having bequeathed the command to Judas, the most valiant of his sons, he sank under the weight of years and toil. So great already was the terror of his name, that he was buried, without disturbance on the part of the enemy, in his native city of Modin.

If the youth of the new general added vigour and enterprise to the cause, it lost nothing in prudence and discretion. Judas unfolded the banner of the Maccabees, a name of which the derivation is uncertain. Some assert that it was formed from the concluding letters of a sentence in the eleventh verse of the fifteenth chapter of Exodus, “Mi Camo Ka Baalim Jehovah," signifying, Who is like unto thee among the gods, O Jehovah? Some, that it was the banner of the tribe.

of Dan, which contained the three last letters of Abranam, Isaac, and Jacob: others, that it was the personal appellation of Judas, from a word signifying a hammer, like that of Charles Martel, the hero of the Franks.

Having tried his soldiers by many gallant adventures, surprising many cities, which he garrisoned and fortified, Judas determined to meet the enemy in the field. Apollonius, the governor of Samaria, first advanced against him, and was totally defeated and slain. Judas took the sword of his enemy as a trophy, and ever after used it in battle. Seron, the deputy-governor of Colesyria, advanced to revenge the defeat of Apollonius, but encountering the enemy in the strong pass of Beth-horon, met with the same fate. The circumstances of the times favoured the noble struggle of Judas and his followers for independence. By his prodigal magnificence, both in his pleasures and in his splendid donatives and offerings, Antiochus had exhausted his finances. His eastern provinces, Armenia and Persia, refused their tribute. He therefore was constrained to divide his forces, marching himself into the east, and leaving Lysias, with a great army, to crush the insurrection in Judæa. The rapid progress of Judas demanded immediate resistance. Philip, the Syrian governor in Jerusalem, sent urgent solicitations for relief. The vanguard of the Syrian army, amounting to twenty thousand, under the command of Nicanor and Gorgias, advanced rapidly into the province: it was followed by the general in chief, Ptolemy Macron, their united forces forming an army of forty thousand foot and seven thousand horse. In their train came a multitude of slave merchants; for Nicanor had suggested the policy of selling as many of the insurgents as they could take, to discharge the arrears of tribute due to the Romans.

Judas assembled six thousand men at Mizpeh: there they fasted and prayed; and the religious ceremony, per formed in that unusual place, sadly reminded them of the desolate state of the holy city, the profanation of the sanctuary, the discontinuance of the sacrifices. But if sorrow sub

dued the tamer spirits, it infused loftier indignation and nobler self-devotion in the valiant. Judas knew that his only hope, save in his God, was in the enthusiastic zeal of his followers for the law of Moses. In strict conformity to its injunctions, he issued out through his little army the appointed proclamation, that all who had married wives, built houses, or planted vineyards, or were fearful, should return to their homes. His force dwindled to three thousand men. Yet with this small band he advanced towards Emmaus, where the enemy lay encamped. Intelligence reached him that Gorgias had been detached, with five thousand chosen foot and one thousand horse, to surprise him by night. He instantly formed the daring resolution of eluding the attack by falling on the camp of the enemy. It was morning before he arrived; but, animating his men to the attack, he rushed down upon the Syrians, who, after a feeble resistance, fled on all sides. Judas was as wary as bold; his troops as well disciplined as enterprising. He restrained them from the plunder of the camp, till the return of Gorgias, with the flower of the army, who came back weary with seeking the Jewish insurgents among the mountains, where they had hoped to surprise them. To their astonishment, they beheld their own camp in a blaze of fire. The contest was short, but decisive: the Syrians were defeated with immense loss. The rich booty of the camp fell into the hands of the Jews, who, with just retribution, sold for slaves as many of the slave-merchants as they could find. The next day was the sabbath, a day indeed of rest and rejoicing. But success only excited the honourable ambition of the Maccabee. Hearing that a great force was assembling beyond the Jordan, under Timotheus and Bacchides, he crossed the river, and gained a great victory and a considerable supply of arms. Here two of the chief oppressors of the Jews, Philarches and Calisthenes, perished; one in battle, the other burnt to death in a house where he had taken refuge. Nicanor fled, in the disguise of a slave, to Antioch.

The next year Lysias appeared in person, at the head of

sixty thousand foot and five thousand horse, on the southern frontier of Judæa, having, perhaps, levied part of his men among the Idumeans. This tribe now inhabited a district to the west of their ancestors, the Edomites, having been dispossessed of their former territory by the Nabathean Arabs. Judas met this formidable host with ten thousand men, gained a decisive victory, and slew five thousand of the enemy. Thus on all sides triumphant, Judas entered, with his valiant confederates, the ruined and desolate Jerusalem. They found shrubs grown to some height, like the underwood of a forest, in the courts of the temple; every part of the sacred edifice had been profaned; the chambers of the priests were thrown down. With wild lamentations and the sound of martial trumpets, they mingled their prayers and praises to the God of their fathers. Judas took the precaution to keep a body of armed men on the watch against the Syrian garrison in the citadel, and then proceeded to instal the most blameless of the priests in their office, to repair the sacred edifice, purify every part from the profanation of the heathen, to construct a new altar, replace out of the booty all the sacred vessels, and at length to celebrate the feast of Dedication, (a period of eight days,) which ever after was held sacred in the Jewish calendar. It was the festival of the regeneration of the people, which, but for the valour of the Maccabees, had almost lost its political existence.

The re-establishment of a powerful state in Judæa was not beheld without jealousy by the neighbouring tribes. But Judas, having strongly fortified the temple on the side of the citadel, anticipated a powerful confederacy which was forming against him, and carried his victorious arms into the territories of the Idumeans and Ammonites. Thus discomfited on every side, the Syrians and their allies began to revenge themselves on the Jews who were scattered in Galilee and the Transjordanic provinces. A great force from Tyre and Ptolemais advanced into the neighbouring country. Timotheus, son of a former general of the same name, laid waste Gilead with great slaughter. Judas, by the general consent