and the Jewish force before instead of behind; and in such circumstances the picked troops of the Syrian general made little more resistance than the rest. The treasures of the camp remained with Judas; and the fate of the slave-traders has been preserved on record. They were sold into slavery. The next day was the Sabbath; and its services were animated by new hopes of recovering the Temple.
Much had to be done first; and years passed before that hope was fulfilled. Next year, a vast army had to be met beyond the Jordan; and the year after, another, on the southern frontier, in the direction of Edom. The victory each time remained with Judas; and one consequence was, that his name was in itself a strong force, so that the Syrian commanders recruited only in distant countries where the fame of the Maccabees was as yet unknown.
The day came at last (B.C. 165), when Judas found himself master of Judæa, and at liberty to turn to Jerusalem. At sight of the Temple the soldiery cast ashes on their heads, and wept aloud. In that climate desolation proceeds rapidly; and the courts were full of tangled shrubs and weeds, like the underwood of a forest. Instead of the golden vine over the portal, there was this dank vegetation below. But there was no enemy now. The pavements were renewed; the defiled altar was carried away, and a new one consecrated: the priesthood was reorganised, and the daily sacrifice resumed; the restoration being celebrated by a Feast of Dedication of eight days long,—decreed to be an annual festival from that time forward.
In the next year. King Antiochus died; and the general sent by his successor was defeated by Judas with such tremendous slaughter that the Syrians regarded the Jews as truly invincible. An offer was made of absolute religious freedom, if they would be loyal to the state; and the terms were sufficiently favourable to justify the truce which ensued. One of the Maccabees had just fallen. In the last battle, the Syrians had exhibited a troop of elephants, to the amazement of the Hebrews. The parade was very imposing,—a body of five hundred horse, and a thousand foot soldiers being attached to each elephant, their armour and weapons glittering in the sun, over all the hills in front, as they moved down to the plain. Eleazer, the fourth of the brothers, fixed his eye on one elephant as probably bearing the king, made his way to it and under it, stabbed it in the intestines, and brought the dying beast down upon himself, crushing him in a moment. Thus died the first of the brothers.
Though one great champion was laid low, the land rang with triumph. “On every hill and under every green tree” the idols were cleared away; the synagogues were opened, and the Lord’s Song was sung in His own land. From the snowy peak of Hermon to the Egyptian desert, the territory was free:—that is, till on the western side of the Jordan. Judas found it necessary so far to concentrate and secure his forces as to call in all from beyond the Jordan, where they were liable to attacks from both the east and the north. Along the whole valley of the Jordan, however, and among the religious communities already existing by the Dead Sea, and even in half-hearted Samaria, where the schismatics had been disposed to trim, and compromise with the heathen worship), there was rejoicing at the comparative independence of the country, and the cessation of the religious persecution. As for Jerusalem,—the people delighted to enrich the Temple again; and the Syrian garrison in the Castle, over against the Temple wall, listened by night with wonder and pleasure to the glorious music which came on the wind from the military bands in the city, as they played triumphant marches, and celebrated the acts of the Maccabees.
A foreign garrison in such a position was, however, fatal to a continued peace. During no part of the truce had Judas any rest; for the late enemy was for ever stirring up neighbouring-tribes to aggression; and the Maccabees were all kept busy in punishing their raids. When Judas returned from such an expedition towards Petra, he found that some renegade Jews who had joined the Syrians in the Castle on Mount Zion were guiding the foreigners in impeding and insulting the Temple worship; and the great Captain at once besieged the citadel which he had never yet succeeded in reducing. A few of the garrison got out unperceived, made their way home, and complained that the Hebrew general was breaking the terms of the peace. Such hosts then came down upon the country as were at first irresistible; and Jerusalem itself must have fallen once more but that the hostile king and his generals were called home by a civil war. They renewed the terms of the peace, and departed; but they threw down, before they left, the strong walls which had enclosed the Sacred Mount. There were still difficulties to be managed, from the religious schisms which were encouraged by the heathen enemy. The Maccabees were of too strait a sect of High Churchism, as it was in those days, to satisfy the large portion of the people who held by the Law alone; and while Judas carried matters with a high hand, on the authority of the tradition on which his party relied, the monstrous innovation grew up of Temples being founded elsewhere. The Samaritans had one before, and had admitted into it a modified worship of Jupiter, as one with Jehovah. A less objectionable, but wholly unauthorised one was now founded in Egypt, with an ignorant audacity very shocking to the Maccabees. The founder was the hereditary claimant of the High Priest’s office at Jerusalem, who was set aside for political reasons. The illicit temple and its priesthood thus founded by Onias, under the patronage of the Egyptian king, lasted nearly as long as the true Temple; but even the Egyptian Jews used only in the intervals of their visits to Jerusalem, where alone every Jew still believed that Jehovah could be worshipped with perfect efficacy. When Judas was Governor of the whole country, he was still in the first place its Commander-in-Chief; for he could not give the nation peace.
The paltering and renegade Jews were perpetually tempting the pagan enemy down upon him; and in B.C. 160 he was fighting the same Syrian general, with the same array of armed men and