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Context No. 282 of 4322 · 2 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

2 Maccabees 8:30-36: in context

30Having had an encounter with the forces of Timotheus and Bacchides, they killed more than twenty thousand of them, and made themselves masters of exceedingly high strongholds, and divided very much plunder, giving the maimed, orphans, widows, and the aged an equal share with themselves. 31When they had gathered the weapons of the enemy together, they stored them all up carefully in the most strategic positions, and they carried the rest of the spoils to Jerusalem. 32They killed the phylarch of Timotheus’s forces, a most unholy man, and one who had done the Jews much harm. 33As they celebrated the feast of victory in the city of their fathers, they burned those who had set the sacred gates on fire, including Callisthenes, who had fled into a little house. So they received the proper reward for their impiety. 34The thrice-accursed Nicanor, who had brought the thousand merchants to buy the Jews as slaves, 35being through the help of the Lord humbled by them who in his eyes were held to be of least account, took off his glorious apparel, and passing through the country, shunning all company like a fugitive slave, arrived at Antioch, having, as he thought, had the greatest possible good fortune, though his army was destroyed. 36He who had taken upon himself to make tribute sure for the Romans by the captivity of the men of Jerusalem published abroad that the Jews had One who fought for them, and that because this was so, the Jews were invulnerable, because they followed the laws ordained by him.

This passage comes right after a major victory for Judas Maccabeus and his fighters, who have routed a much larger force. What they do with the win is the part worth watching. When they divide up the plunder from the battle, they give the maimed, the orphans, the widows, and the aged an equal share with themselves. The people who could not fight receive the same cut as the men who did the fighting.

That is not how spoils usually work. The strong take the largest portions, and the weak get the leftovers, if anything. Here the ones with no capacity to earn a share, the disabled and the fatherless and the widowed and the old, are handed a full and equal one, as though their inability to fight had no bearing on their claim. The victory is treated as belonging to the whole people, not to the arms that won it. The passage then turns to the enemy commander Nicanor, who had come to sell Jews into slavery and had been beaten by the very people he counted worthless. He strips off his fine clothes and slinks back to Antioch like a runaway slave, and, humbled, he goes around telling everyone that the Jews had a Defender fighting for them. The man who came to make slaves ends up proclaiming their God.

But the line that stays is the equal share. A win that could have been hoarded by the winners was instead spread out to the people who had contributed nothing to it. When something goes well for me by my own effort, do I treat it as mine to keep, or as a portion to be shared equally with those who could not have fought for it themselves?

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