Context No. 3376 of 4322 · 1 Maccabees

1 Maccabees 2:34-38: in context

34They said, “We won’t come out. We won’t do the word of the king, to profane the Sabbath day.” 35Then the enemy hurried to attack them. 36They didn’t answer them. They didn’t cast a stone at them, or block their secret places, 37saying, “Let’s all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth testify for us, that you put us to death unjustly.” 38So they attacked them on the Sabbath, and they died—they, their wives, their children, and their livestock—in number a thousand souls of men.

A group of the faithful, hiding in caves, are attacked on the Sabbath. Rather than break the Sabbath by fighting or even blocking the entrances of their hiding places, they choose to die, a thousand of them, with their wives and children, saying, let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify that you kill us unjustly.

Their devotion is heartbreaking and sincere; they would rather perish than transgress what they believed God required. It is a costly, tragic faithfulness. And yet, as the following verses show, their leaders concluded that this could not have been God's intent, that defending life did not profane the Sabbath, and they resolved to fight if attacked on that day. The episode holds a hard tension: a reverence for God's law willing to die rather than disobey, and the wisdom to understand that the law was given for life, not for needless death. God's commands are meant to serve life, and reverence for them includes grasping their true purpose.

Do I hold God's commands with reverence, and also with the wisdom to understand their true intent, that they were given to serve life and not to destroy it?

Sources

1 Maccabees 2:37: "Let's all die in our innocence. Heaven and earth testify for us, that you put us to death unjustly."
1 Maccabees 2:41: "Whoever comes to fight with us on the Sabbath day, let's fight against him... that we not all die."
Mark 2:27: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."