• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.”

“I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.”

“One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!” (2 Macc 6:9, 11, 14)

All of this seems to be a way of spelling out what the first brother says:

“The Lord God is watching over us and in truth has compassion on us, as Moses declared in his song that bore witness against the people to their faces, when he said, ‘And he will have compassion on his servants.’” (2 Macc 7:6)

The mercy of God, which makes the whole notion of resurrection necessary in the case of martyrdom, is a way of spelling out the prophecy that we have already seen in Daniel 12. Resurrection shows God’s continuing mercy in vindicating those who suffer marytrdom. The resurrection will be bodily, in fact, very bodily, as the third son’s remarks make clear. It is much more physical than the resurrection described in Daniel. The effect of this extreme attention to the body in the restoration of this world shows that the tradition of resurrection was not at all obligated to Platonic or any other Greek philosophical thought, although 2 Maccabees was written first in Greek using Greek cultural norms in a variety of ways.

The palpability of the bodily resurrection, wherever it comes from, has become a quintessentially Jewish idea because, when it distinguishes the oppressed from the oppressors, it speaks to the reward which a pious Israelite must obtain through the covenant and, if necessary, through martyrdom. It was the remedy given by God to the Jews because of the cruelty and oppression of foreign domination, a notion which carried on directly into the Roman period. And it is easy to see why it was stressed at this particular moment. The persecutors have destroyed the bodies of these young martyrs, though Deuteronomy promised length of days to those who kept God’s law. But God’s mercy guaranteed that they would have their youth back and have the pleasures of their bodily existence again when God raises them.

In the Greek epitomist’s comments in 2 Maccabees 12:43,18 we also see a similar interest in resurrection:

He also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection . For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again , it would have been superfluous to pray for the dead.

Creatio ex Nihilo Is Born to Bolster Resurrection

ONE OTHER important aspect of this passage is often overlooked. The mother encouraged her martyr sons in several ways, but nowhere more importantly than when she exalted God’s creative powers:

“I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.” (2 Macc 7:22-23)

And this can be seen even more clearly in 2 Maccabees 7:28: “I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. Thus also mankind comes into being.”

This is the first clear statement of creatio ex nihilo, the first time God is clearly praised as creating the world from nothing.19 In Genesis 1, God does not actually create everything-darkness and the deep precede creation. God creates man from dust of the earth in Genesis 2. The writers of the great