The Letters Prefixed to Second Maccabees

Abstract

THE TWO DOCUMENTS treated in the following pages have been sadly misunderstood, for reasons that will be made clear. They are in fact what they profess to be, official letters sent from the Jews in Jerusalem to those in Egypt; and their historical importance, in more than one particular, is not slight. Neither of the two, up to the present time, has been correctly translated; and the false interpretation of the second and longer document, making it a truly ridiculous forgery, has been especially unfortunate. There are two chief reasons for the present misunderstanding: the nature of the writings, as festal letters belonging to a routine, has not been appreciated; and the true character of the Greek text, which is the result of translation from a slightly corrupt Semitic original, has not been seen. Festal letters, sent out from the seat of authority, calling to the common observance of a day or celebration of a feast, are a familiar thing. So are the similar edicts regarding matters requiring common action or general acceptance; such, for example, as the three circular letters of Rabban Gamaliel II which happen to have been preserved (see the references in Dalman's Aram. Dialektproben 3). To quote one of the three, relating to the intercalary month, sent forth from Palestine to all the lands of The Diaspora (Xe?:) : We notify you that the young lambs are (still) tender and the chickens are small, the time of ripe grain is not yet come; it has therefore seemed good to me and to my associates to add thirty days to this year. In such a case, the need of the broadcast is evident. In the celebration of festivals of which the precise date requires to be specified by a central authority, a general message must be issued. Our Thanksgiving proclamations are an example. The variously conceived grounds of thanksgiving are usually included, often also the mode of observing the day, though nobody needs the instruction. In the early Christian church the festal letters appointing the time of the Easter celebration were a necessary feature. The few which have been preserved either contain some

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