Maccabees
Reply #1 - August 08, 2015, 11:57 AM
I was reading 1 Maccabees for my paper on homosexuality, just to check if it said anything (coded or directly) about homosexuality (since as we all know, the Greeks liked to bum each other), and it didn't say anything about homosexuality but it did say this: 1 Mac. 2:46 "And what children soever they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised, those they circumcised valiantly." -- Just how does one perform a circumcision "valiantly", exactly?
Also, it was pretty clear as I was reading it that whoever wrote it really intended for it to be a part of the Bible. They used the same sort of language as the Bible authors like in 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, and 1 & 2 Samuel, although it was also pretty clear that it was strained and wasn't their "modern" language anymore. It was like they were trying to write it to be a continuation of the kind of books that the aforementioned Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel were, a documentation of the lives of (sometimes mythical) kings and their (sometimes mythical) exploits.
But it also was at a bit of a disadvantage because it was written relatively contemporaneously, and therefore it was harder to make up big fancy miracles and overstate military victories (like, the total number of people that the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles say died in battle at the hands of the Israelite kings or through direct acts of God probably exceeds the entire world population of the time they were set in). The Greeks were not a distant memory of an ancient people of whom all that remained was myth when 1 Maccabees was written, so it was really hard to say something like "and he put them all to the sword, from the oldest to the youngest, every one that pissed against the wall, from the king even to the son of the slave-woman; he left not one of them alive, and thus was fulfilled the word of the Lord spoken by the prophet X, that he would bring destruction on them for the sin of Y." And that kind of blowing everything out of proportion is what makes the Bible texts cool, really.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I have a sonic screwdriver, a tricorder, and a Type 2 phaser.
Topic: Maccabees