"Imitate me, O brethren, nor ever desert your station, nor abjure my brotherhood in courage: Fight the holy and honourable fight of religion" (4 Maccabees 9:23).
Intro
With this book I wade out into the murkier waters outside the true Apocrypha and leave the books of Maccabees behind. The Ethiopian Bible may be next or I'll try and find one or two other works which are barely canonical, and thence onto Pseudepigrapha.
Unlike the 1, 2 & 3 Maccabees, this book doesn't do much storytelling except to prove philosophical points. None of the stories appear to be original. This is a wisdom book of sorts but a very different wisdom book to Sirach or the Wisdom of Solomon. It is part Greek philosophy and part literary review. The main themes of the work are logic in religion, and attitude towards martyrdom. The book attempts to reconcile religion and philosophy – in fact at times it even refers to Judaism as the later – much as some try and do with religion and science today.
Name
This book is normally called 4 Maccabees, IV Maccabees or Fourth (Book of) Maccabees. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canon, there are three other books of Maccabees with varying relevance to the first one. There are also several Ethiopian books of Maccabees. The Jewish Encyclopedia claims that only the first is a reliable historical source.
The word "Maccabee" is believed to mean "hammer" since Judas/Judah and his family hammer the Greek pagans.
It may have an ancient title, being "On the Sovereignty of Reason".
Canonicity
4 Maccabees has the least traction of the four books of this title. It doesn't appear in the KJV Apocrypha, and is not part of the western canon at all, since it doesn't appear in Roman Catholic Bibles either. Even the Orthodox churches are sceptical, with the book, if anything stuffed into an appendix. Some Orthodox Bibles don't include it at all. The writer recognises the immortality of the soul, but not resurrection.
It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible at all. Some people have attributed it to the Jewish historian Josephus but it does not read like him at all.
Summary
Ironically for a work pleading the superiority of Jewish culture over the Greek, 4 Maccabees seems to have originated in Greek and has not been much esteemed by Jews. Stylistically the original Greek is apparently fluent and well written.
The book seems to be written to convince Greeks and Hellenised Jews of the logic of Judaism. It often reads far more like a text from ancient Greek philosophy than a Biblical work and is unusual in being what appears to be a Jewish missionary text. Jews have never been known for trying to convert people to their religion, at least not in any numbers, and yet this is what this is what this book tries to do. It is almost a kind of midrash for Gentiles about 2 Maccabees putting it in a strange contradictory position. As Wikipedia says:
The work is largely an elaboration of the stories of martyrdom in the book 2 Maccabees: that of the woman with seven sons and the scribe Eleazar, who are tortured to death by Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes in an attempt to make them renounce their adherence to Judaism. What 2 Maccabees covered in one chapter and a half, 4 Maccabees extends to a full 14 chapters of dialogue and philosophical discussion. 4 Maccabees recasts the story as one of reason and logic: the martyrs will be rewarded in the afterlife, so it is rational to continue to obey Jewish law, even at the risk of torture and death.
The ancient Greeks, and especially the Stoics, esteemed reason over emotion, and saw emotion as a lack of self-restraint:
But the book's self-contradiction extends into this realm "even now, we ourselves shudder as we hear of the suffering of these young men" (4 Maccabees 14:9) It declaims Greek culture, yet also praises it. In time the Jews would stop loving Greek culture and move on. The Greeks embraced Christianity and received Hebrew religion by a very different route.4 Maccabees 1:7–9 (NRSV) "I could prove to you from many and various examples that reason is dominant over the emotions, but I can demonstrate it best from the noble bravery of those who died for the sake of virtue, Eleazar and the seven brothers and their mother. All of these, by despising sufferings that bring death, demonstrated that reason controls the emotions."
For details of the events this describes, see my post on 1 & 2 Macc.
4 Maccabees audiobook - 1 hour 9 minutes.
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This is part of my ongoing series on Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical works:
1 Esdras inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?p=1343974
2 Esdras (the most relevant book in the Apocrypha?) inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?p=1344302
1 Maccabees
viewtopic.php?t=69454
2 Maccabees
viewtopic.php?t=69468
3 Maccabees
viewtopic.php?t=69496
Book of Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremy/Jeremiah
viewtopic.php?t=69433
Book of Tobit inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?p=1341501
Apocryphal additions to Esther inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?p=1343414
Bel and the Dragon (quoted in full, KJV; inc audiobook link)
viewtopic.php?t=69261
Prayer of Azarias and Hymn of the Three Children (quoted in full KJV, inc. audiobook link)
viewtopic.php?p=1341611
Book of Judith and the Book of Mormon, inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?t=69402
Book of Susanna inc. audiobook link
viewtopic.php?t=69386
Wisdom of Solomon
viewtopic.php?t=69469
Book of Sirach or Ecclesiasticus
viewtopic.php?t=69412
Prayer of Mannases (aka Mannaseh; quoted in full KJV, inc. audiobook link)
viewtopic.php?t=69263
Psalm 151 (quoted in full, NRSV)
viewtopic.php?t=63875
Epistle to the Laodiceans (NT, quoted in full Wycliffe's translation, )
viewtopic.php?t=64025
The Book of Odes - this is an Eastern Orthodox work of limited interest, but included for the sake of completeness.
viewtopic.php?t=69470
Outside the Western and Eastern Orthodox Canon...
The Ethiopian canon. This includes brief info on the books of Sinodos, Ethiopian Clement, Ethiopian Covenant, and Didascalia as well as a list of other works in the canon.
viewtopic.php?t=69540
The Book of Enoch
viewtopic.php?t=69577
The Book of Jubilees, also known as Leptogenesis or Little Genesis
viewtopic.php?t=69548
3 Corinthians (Armenian)
viewtopic.php?t=69567
And also
Antilegomena: the books which barely made it into the Bible - Revelation, the Song of Solomon, Jude, Esther etc.
viewtopic.php?t=69609