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1Meanwhile, Judas Maccabeus and those who were with him went secretly through the towns, calling together their relatives and friends and enlisting those who continued in the Jewish faith. They gathered six thousand men.
2Then they called on the Lord to look down upon his oppressed people and to have pity on the Temple, which had been defiled by wicked men.
3They asked the Lord to have mercy on Jerusalem, which was being destroyed and was soon to be leveled to the ground, and to listen to the blood crying out to him.
4They begged him to remember the wicked slaughter of innocent children and the blasphemies spoken against his name and to show his hatred for evil.
5Once Maccabeus had organized his army, the Gentiles could not stand against him because the anger of the Lord was turned to mercy.
6So Maccabeus took the towns and villages by surprise and set them on fire. He captured strategic places and sent many enemies fleeing,
7usually making his strikes during the night. The reports of his bravery spread far and wide.
8Philip could see that Maccabeus was gaining ground little by little and that his victories were becoming more frequent, making him a real threat. So he wrote to Ptolemy Macron, the governor of Coelesyria and Phoenicia, asking him to send aid to the king’s garrisons.
9Immediately Ptolemy sent Nicanor son of Patroclus, one of the king’s most favored leaders, giving him no less than twenty thousand Gentile troops from different nations to wipe out the whole Jewish race. He also sent Gorgias, a general who was very experienced in matters of war.
10The king owed a large sum of money to the Romans, so Nicanor proposed to raise seventy-five tons of silver by selling captured Jews into slavery.[#8:10 Greek 2,000 talents [68 metric tons].]
11So he sent invitations to dealers in the coastal cities, offering to sell Jewish slaves at the price of ninety slaves for seventy-five pounds of silver. Little did he know that the vengeance of the Almighty was about to catch up to him.[#8:11 Greek 1 talent [34 kilograms].]
12When Judas learned that Nicanor was invading, he told those who were with him that the enemy was near.
13Some of them were afraid and did not trust the justice of God, so they ran away.
14Others sold all their possessions and prayed to the Lord that he would save them from the wicked Nicanor, who had already sold them even before meeting them.
15They asked the Lord to do this, if not for their own sakes, then for the sake of the covenant he had made with their ancestors and for the honor of his holy and glorious name, by which they were called.
16Maccabeus called together the six thousand that were now with him, encouraging them to fight bravely and not to be afraid of the enemy or discouraged at the vast horde of Gentiles who were wickedly advancing against them.
17He vividly reminded them of the sinful and outrageous acts done to the Holy Place and of the way Jerusalem had been attacked and humiliated, not to mention the destruction of the ancestral customs.
18“They trust in their weapons and their boldness,” Maccabeus said, “but we trust in almighty God, who with a single nod can completely destroy both those that fight against us and the whole world.”
19He also reminded them of the help their ancestors had received from God. Once in the days of Sennacherib, 185,000 enemy soldiers were destroyed.[#8:19 Greek lacks from God.]
20Maccabeus also recalled the battle when 8,000 Jews and 4,000 Macedonians fought against the Galatians in Babylonia. When the Macedonians were in danger, the Jews received help from God and killed 120,000 of the enemy. Then they carried off many of the Galatians’ possessions.[#8:20 Greek from heaven.]
21The soldiers were greatly encouraged by these words and resolved even to die for their laws and country.
Maccabeus divided his army into four divisions
22and appointed his brothers—Simon, Joseph, and Jonathan—to be captains over three of the divisions. Maccabeus assigned fifteen hundred men to each division.
23He instructed Eleazar, another one of his brothers, to read to them from the holy book, and then he gave them their battle cry: “God is our help!” Then Maccabeus himself led the first division in an attack against Nicanor.
24With the Almighty as their helper, they killed more than nine thousand of the enemy. They also wounded and disabled the greater part of Nicanor’s army and forced them to flee.
25They seized the money of those who had come to buy them as slaves. They also pursued the enemy for a considerable distance, but they had to call off the chase because it was getting late.
26The Sabbath would begin that evening, and for that reason, they could not continue in pursuit.
27When they had gathered together the weapons and captured the spoils of their enemy, they observed the Sabbath. They greatly praised and thanked the Lord, who had saved them that day and had chosen to begin showing his mercy to them.
28After the Sabbath, they gave some of the spoils to those who had been tortured and to orphans and widows. The rest they took for themselves and their children.
29When this was done, they all prayed together, asking the merciful Lord to be fully reconciled to his servants, the Jews.
30In confrontations with Timothy and Bacchides, the Jews killed more than twenty thousand of the enemy. They captured the high strongholds, and then they divided a great amount of plunder among those who had been tortured and to orphans and widows and the elderly.
31When they had carefully gathered together the enemy’s weapons, they stored them in strategic places. They carried the rest of the plunder to Jerusalem.
32They also killed the commander of Timothy’s forces, a wicked man who had harmed the Jews in many ways.
33As they celebrated the victory in Jerusalem, the city of their ancestors, they burned Callisthenes and some others who had been hiding in a certain house. These men had set fire to the sacred gates of the Temple, so they were justly repaid for their sacrilege.
34But Nicanor—that most hated man, who had brought a thousand merchants to buy the Jews as slaves—
35was humiliated, with the Lord’s help, by the very ones he considered insignificant. He took off his brilliant uniform and fled like a runaway slave through the open country. He was fortunate to even arrive at Antioch, for his entire army had been destroyed.[#8:35 Or He arrived in Antioch, having been very successful in destroying his own army.]
36He had promised to raise the tribute money for the Romans by capturing people from Jerusalem, but now he proclaimed that the Jews had a Defender and that they could not be harmed, for they were following the laws God had given them.