Chateau Lloyd

I've discovered another ancientfaith.com podcast that I enjoy: Bad Books of the Bible.

This series is dedicated to going through The Apocrypha - those writings not generally found in Protestant Bibles.  Throughout the series they go over how this division took place and I won't get into that discussion here.

Instead, I will note that their first 'season,' which was about Tobit, was entertaining but moved rather slow.  The hosts took a lesson from that, I believe, and their discussion of 1 Maccabees is much more enjoyable.

The exclusion of 1 and 2 Maccabees from the Protestant Canon is unfortunate, because as my wife (who was raised Baptist) noted, they provide a crucial connection between the Old Testament and the time of Christ.

They also deeply undercut the notion of Christian pacifism, because it is explicitly spelled out that allowing God's temples to be desecrated and His people killed cannot possibly be pleasing to Him.  Rather than meekly submit to idol worshipers, they will draw the sword in defense of the Covenant.

For those who don't know, the Maccabees were Jewish rebels who rose up against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd Century BC.  The Seleucid Empire was a successor state to Alexander the Great's empire, and its king, Antiochus, decided that his Jewish subjects' faith was an affront to his notion of imperium.  The therefore offered the Jews a choice - assimilate into Hellenistic culture or die.

The Maccabee family (it's not a true surname, but means "hammer") lead the ultimately successful rebellion against Greeks.

I'm still going through it as I listen to the podcast, but it is - like 1 Enoch, a remarkable "metal" book of the Bible.