Scriptures & Texts

3 Maccabees

Deuterocanonical Books

Despite its name it has nothing to do with the Maccabees: it tells how the Jews of Egypt were delivered under Ptolemy IV Philopator, who, repulsed from the Jerusalem Temple, ordered them trampled by drunken elephants, only for the beasts to turn on his own troops. Written in ornate Greek, probably in the first century BCE, it is a festival legend of rescue in the manner of Esther. It was never part of the Catholic or Protestant canons and is absent from the Vulgate, but it stands as received scripture in the Eastern Orthodox and Armenian churches and is printed in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles. Judaism does not receive it. It is one of the clearest cases of a book canonical in the East and effectively unknown in the West.

Facts

Origins

Era of Composition

100 BCE to 1 BCE 1

Language

Koine Greek 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Anonymous; a Hellenistic Jewish narrative of deliverance, c. 1st c. BCE (critical) 1

Status

Canonical Statusthe subject's own account

Deuterocanonical 2Eastern Orthodoxy

Canonical Status

Non-canonical 1Judaism

Canonical Status

Non-canonical 1Roman Catholicism

Text

Literary Form

Didactic narrative / novella 1

Structure

7 chapters 1

Structure

The deliverance of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV (unrelated to the Maccabean revolt) 1

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 3

Learn More

A Deliverance in Egypt

Third Maccabees is a short Jewish book, written in Greek, that despite its name has nothing to do with the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids recounted in 1 and 2 Maccabees. It tells instead of an earlier threat, set in Egypt under the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy IV Philopator (late third century BCE). In the story the king, having been mysteriously prevented from entering the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple, turns in fury against the Jews of Egypt, ordering them rounded up in the hippodrome of Alexandria to be trampled by intoxicated war elephants.

Twice the massacre is thwarted by divine intervention, the king is struck with forgetfulness, and then the elephants are turned back by avenging angels against his own forces, and finally the repentant king reverses himself, releases the Jews, and honours them. The book is generally dated to the first century BCE and read as a work of edifying historical fiction, composed to encourage the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Egypt in their loyalty to the God of Israel under the pressures of life in a pagan kingdom.

Themes and Canon

The purpose of Third Maccabees is plainly consolation and exhortation: it assures a diaspora community that God protects his faithful people even in a foreign land, that apostasy is a betrayal to be resisted, and that deliverance comes to those who hold fast and pray. It shares this theme, and its taste for dramatic reversal and divine rescue, with books such as Esther and Daniel, and it includes a long penitential prayer that became part of its appeal.

In canon it stands among the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanonical books, printed in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles, but it was not received by the Latin West: it is absent from the Vulgate and from the Roman Catholic canon, and Protestant Bibles omit it or relegate it to the further reaches of the Apocrypha. It is thus one of the books that marks the difference between the broader Orthodox canon and the narrower Western ones. Scholars value Third Maccabees as a window onto the situation and self-understanding of Egyptian Judaism in the Hellenistic period, and onto the literary forms (dramatic, providential, martyrological), through which that community expressed its hope and its identity.

Connections

Belongs to Tradition

Church of Cyprus

Included in the wider Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canon beyond the Trent-era Roman Catholic deuterocanon, affirmed at the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.