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Context No. 452 of 4322 · 2 Maccabees

Context · Reflection

2 Maccabees 13:1-8: in context

1In the one hundred forty-ninth year, news was brought to Judas and his company that Antiochus Eupator was coming with multitudes against Judea, 2and with him Lysias his guardian and chancellor, each having a Greek force of one hundred ten thousand infantry, five thousand three hundred cavalry, twenty-two elephants, and three hundred chariots armed with scythes. 3And Menelaus also joined himself with them, and with great hypocrisy encouraged Antiochus, not for the saving of his country, but because he thought that he would be set over the government. 4But the King of kings stirred up the anger of Antiochus against the wicked wretch. When Lysias informed him that this man was the cause of all the evils, the king commanded to bring him to Beroea, and to put him to death in the way customary in that place. 5Now there is in that place a tower that is fifty cubits high, full of ashes, and it had all around it a circular rim sloping steeply on every side into the ashes. 6Here one who is guilty of sacrilege or notorious for other crimes is pushed down to destruction. 7By such a fate it happened that the breaker of the law, Menelaus, died, without obtaining so much as a grave in the earth, and that justly; 8for inasmuch as he had perpetrated many sins against the altar, whose fire and whose ashes were holy, he received his death in ashes.

This grim little passage tells the end of Menelaus, one of the great villains of the Maccabean story. Menelaus had bought his way into the high priesthood, betrayed his own people, and profaned the temple, all in a relentless pursuit of power. Now, as the Seleucid army invades Judea, Menelaus attaches himself to the invaders, flattering the young king Antiochus with great hypocrisy. And the writer is careful to name his motive: he did it not for the saving of his country, but because he thought he would be set over the government. Even siding with the enemies of his own people was, for Menelaus, just another move to advance himself.

But it does not work, and the way it fails is pointed. The King of kings, the text says, meaning God, stirred up the anger of Antiochus against the very man who had been flattering him. Lysias, the king's chancellor, informs Antiochus that Menelaus is the cause of all the troubles, and the king orders him executed. And the manner of it is a kind of poetic justice. He is thrown into a tower fifty cubits high, filled with ashes, with a rotating rim that pitches the condemned down into the ash to smother. Menelaus, who had sinned against the holy altar with its sacred fire and ashes, dies in ashes, and, the writer adds, he received no grave, and justly so. The man who betrayed everything sacred for advancement was destroyed by the very power he had courted, and his corruption came back on his own head.

There is an old and sober warning in that. Betraying something sacred, your people, your faith, your integrity, your loyalties, in order to get ahead is not only wrong; it is self-destructive. The powers a person flatters and sells out to in the climb toward advancement have no loyalty to him and will turn on him the moment it suits them, as Antiochus turned on Menelaus. Where am I tempted to compromise or betray something genuinely sacred to me for the sake of advancement, courting a power that will use me and then discard me, forgetting that this kind of betrayal has a way of recoiling onto the one who commits it?

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