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Context No. 347 of 4322 · 1 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

1 Maccabees 9:35-42: in context

35Jonathan sent his brother, a leader of the multitude, and implored his friends the Nabathaeans, that they might store their baggage, which was much, with them. 36The children of Jambri came out of Medaba, and seized John and all that he had, and went their way with it. 37But after these things, they brought word to Jonathan and Simon his brother that the children of Jambri were celebrating a great wedding, and were bringing the bride, a daughter of one of the great nobles of Canaan, from Nadabath with a large escort. 38They remembered John their brother, and went up, and hid themselves under the cover of the mountain. 39They lifted up their eyes and looked, and saw a great procession with much baggage. The bridegroom came out with his friends and his kindred to meet them with timbrels, musicians, and many weapons. 40They rose up against them from their ambush and killed them, and many fell wounded to death. The remnant fled into the mountain, and the Jews took all their spoils. 41So the wedding was turned into mourning, and the voice of their musicians into lamentation. 42They avenged fully the blood of their brother, and turned back to the marshes of the Jordan.

This is a dark and honest little story from the years after Judas Maccabeus died, when his brothers Jonathan and Simon were fighting to survive. Jonathan had sent their brother John to the Nabateans with the group's baggage for safekeeping, and on the way a local clan, the sons of Jambri from Medeba, ambushed John, seized everything, and killed him. What follows is revenge, and the Bible tells it without dressing it up as anything nobler.

Word comes that the Jambrites are holding a great wedding, escorting the bride of a Canaanite noble from her town with a large, festive procession, drums and music and a crowd. Jonathan and Simon remember their murdered brother, go up, and hide in the hills above the road. When the bridegroom comes out with his friends and family to meet the wedding party, they rush down from the ambush and kill them, and the survivors flee, and the brothers take all the spoils. Then comes the line that stays with you: so the wedding was turned into mourning, and the voice of their musicians into lamentation. They fully avenged the blood of their brother, the text says, and went back to the marshes of the Jordan. It is straightforward blood-vengeance, one killing answered with a slaughter, joy flipped into a funeral in an afternoon, and the writer records it plainly, not as a model of virtue but as a thing that happened.

The passage does not ask me to admire it; it asks me to see the cycle clearly, how a wrong done gets answered with a wrong returned, and how quickly a day of celebration can be turned to mourning by someone settling a score. Where have I nursed a wrong done to me until getting even mattered more than anything, willing to turn someone else's joy into grief just to balance the ledger?

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