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Context No. 1553 of 4322 · 1 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

1 Maccabees 6:28-39: in context

28When the king heard this, he was angry, and gathered together all his friends, the rulers of his army, and those who were over the cavalry. 29Bands of hired soldiers came to him from other kingdoms and from islands of the sea. 30The number of his forces was one hundred thousand infantry, and twenty thousand cavalry, and thirty-two elephants trained for war. 31They went through Idumaea, and encamped against Bethsura, and fought against it many days, and made engines of war. The Jews came out and burned them with fire, and fought valiantly. 32Judas marched away from the citadel and encamped at Bethzacharias, near the king’s camp. 33The king rose early in the morning, and marched his army at full speed along the road to Bethzacharias. His forces made themselves ready to battle and sounded their trumpets. 34They offered the elephants the juice of grapes and mulberries, that they might prepare them for the battle. 35They distributed the animals among the phalanxes. They set by each elephant a thousand men armed with coats of mail and helmets of brass on their heads. Five hundred chosen cavalry were appointed for each elephant. 36These were ready beforehand, wherever the elephant was. Wherever the elephant went, they went with it. They didn’t leave it. 37Strong, covered wooden towers were upon them, one upon each elephant, fastened upon it with secure harnesses. Upon each were four valiant men who fought upon them, beside his Indian driver. 38The rest of the cavalry he set on this side and that side on the two flanks of the army, striking terror into the enemy, and protected by the phalanxes. 39Now when the sun shone upon the shields of gold and brass, the mountains lit up, and blazed like flaming torches.

The Seleucid king marches against the Maccabees with an overwhelming army: a hundred thousand foot soldiers, twenty thousand cavalry, and thirty-two war elephants trained for battle. Each elephant is prepared for war and surrounded by a thousand armored men and five hundred cavalry, with a wooden tower of soldiers on its back. The cavalry are arrayed on the flanks to strike terror. And when the sun shines on the shields of gold and bronze, the passage says, the mountains blaze with the reflected light like flaming torches. It is a display of overwhelming force set against a small band of the faithful.

The passage lingers on the sheer scale and spectacle of the enemy army, and it is easy to feel, reading it, the intimidation it was meant to produce: the vast numbers, the terrifying elephants, the flashing armor lighting up the mountains. It was a display designed to overwhelm, to make the small Jewish force feel the hopelessness of resistance. And there is a truth here about how the things that oppose us often work. They present themselves as overwhelming, arrayed in intimidating scale and spectacle, meant to make us feel that resistance is futile and we are certain to be crushed. The armies of elephants and flashing shields have their modern equivalents, the opposition, the obstacle, the difficulty that presents itself as too big to face, too strong to resist, its very scale calculated to defeat us before the battle begins. But the larger story of the Maccabees, and of scripture as a whole, is that God is not impressed by numbers and elephants, not deterred by flashing shields and towers of soldiers. The spectacle of force that terrifies us does not terrify him; he has routed larger armies with smaller, and the scale of what opposes his purposes has never determined the outcome. When we face something whose sheer size and spectacle are meant to overwhelm us, it is worth remembering that God is not counting elephants. The intimidating array is real, but it is not the deciding factor; the deciding factor is God, to whom the hundred thousand and the thirty-two elephants are not the obstacle they are to us.

When something opposes me whose sheer scale and spectacle are meant to overwhelm me and make resistance feel futile, do I let the intimidating array decide the outcome in my mind, or do I remember that God is not impressed by numbers and elephants, and that the deciding factor is him?

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