UNIV. OF

And every request of the soul that hopeth for Him doth the Lord accomplish.

Blessed is the Lord, who sheweth mercy to those who love Him in sincerity.

Note.-Editions by Ryle and James (1891) and Rendel Harris (1911); and S.P.C.K. edition, by Box.

THE FOURTH BOOK OF MACCABEES

THE book known to us as the Fourth Book of Maccabees appears among the works of Josephus under the title "On the Supremacy of Reason but it is almost impossible to regard it as written by him.

Internal evidence seems to show that it was written between 60 B.C. and A.D. 38, the date of the persecution of the Emperor Caligula.

Its author must have been a learned and cultured Jewish rhetorician, teaching most probably in Alexandria, the meeting-place of Hebrew and Hellenic thought. He is quite at home with the phraseology of Greek philosophy, and writes as a Stoic, but at the same time holds his orthodox faith firmly, and teaches that the ideals of Stoic virtue are best reached by those who are trained under the Law of Moses. He thus blends for us the culture of the Greek and of the Jew in a way that must have been common in our Lord's time.

The book is either a sermon for the synagogue, or a rhetorical exercise of the nature of a lecture, very much worked-up and somewhat florid in its manner. Its object seems to be to stiffen the spirits of Jewish hearers by recalling the heroism of the martyrs of their race in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, more than a century before.

The thesis of the discourse is that the Reason of man exists to control his passions, and to assure the balance of character by the attainment of the right measure of the four Stoic virtues of judgement, justice, courage, and temperance. Unlike the Stoic, however, the writer teaches that the passions are grounded in

human nature, and only need control, not destruction. He is saner and more human than the Stoic. As illustrations of his thesis he refers to the lives of Joseph, Jacob, Moses, and David, and then describes at length the heroic martyrdom of Eleazar, and the Seven Brethren and their mother, by Antiochus. He gives us the tragic conversations between the tyrant and his victims-the old man Eleazar, the seven brothers and their noble mother, who are all examples of the power of Reason to make men true to their principles in spite of the severest strain of suffering. In a flood of eulogy he claims that such martyrs not only attain a heavenly reward, but save their country by disarming and shaming the tyrant. In the last chapter the writer imagines the mother implanting the spirit in which they died, by recalling their dead father's teaching from the Law and the prophets about the great heroes of their race.

The description of the tortures is often gruesome in the extreme. We have "wheels, joint-dislocators, and racks, and bone-crushers, and catapults, and chaldrons, and braziers, and thumb-screws, and iron claws, and wedges, and branding-irons," employed by the tyrant to break down the constancy of the youths, until the last and youngest being allowed to go free to speak to him and those round him, proudly denounces him and leaps into a red-hot brazier. The persuasions of the tyrant are made most alluring, the torment unspeakably horrible, yet they remained firm, and their mother pressed them on. So the conclusion is

'How can we do otherwise than admit right Reason's mastery over passion with those men who shrank not before the agonies of burning? For even as towers on harbour-moles repulse the assaults of the waves, and offer a calm entrance to those entering the haven, so the seven-towered right Reason of the youths defended the haven of righteousness, and repulsed the tempestuousness

of the passions. They formed a holy choir of righteousness, as they cheered one another on, saying, 'Let us die like brothers, O brethren, for the Law. Let us imitate the Three Children at the Assyrian court, who despised this same ordeal, the furnace.' ... Let us then own ourselves with divine Reason's mastery of the passions. After this our passion Abraham, Isaac and Jacob shall receive us, and all our forefathers shall praise us."

The writer exhausts himself in the eulogy of the mother. She overcame the primitive instincts which work just as much in the animal world as in human nature; for a mother's love "becomes the centre of her whole world." She overcame by Reason "nature and parenthood and mother-love and her children on the rack," and became like the Ark of Noah, a bearer of the burden of the future. For by her fidelity she upheld for coming generations the burden of the Law of God.

The Fourth Book of Maccabees is interesting as being the ground of a free paraphrase, in another era of persecution, by the great Erasmus. It certainly is a vivid picture of the spirit of the martyrs of all ages, and it is no wonder that it has spoken with something of a clarion-voice to the Church in times when fidelity to the Truth meant peril of death.

Note.-S.P.C.K. edition, by Emmet (1918).

THE BIBLICAL ANTIQUITIES OF PHILO

IN the so-called Biblical Antiquities of Philo we have an instance of the rediscovery for the use of students of our own day of a piece of Jewish literature, most probably of the same date as a great part of the New Testament. Dr. M. R. James, its translator and editor, found some fragments of this work in 1893 in a manuscript at Cheltenham, which led to their being identified with part of a Jewish work, which had been sufficiently well-known during the Revival of Learning in the sixteenth century to be printed in at least five editions. Its history through the Middle Ages is very obscure, and there are no certain allusions to it in the Fathers, unless it be in Origen [On John (Tom. vi. 14)]. Modern scholars regard it as a valuable addition to our sources of knowledge of the orthodox Jewish mind after the Fall of Jerusalem A.D. 70, and as closely connected with the school of writers who produced the Fourth Book of Esdras and the Apocalypse of Baruch. Its attribution to Philo is a vagary of which there is no explanation, and the title was probably appended in the sixteenth century.

There seems no doubt that, like the Assumption of Moses, it was originally written in Hebrew, then translated into Greek, and that our somewhat corrupt and imperfect Latin Version was made in the fourth century.

All that remains of the book includes a more or less continuous history of Israel from Adam to the death of Saul. It is suggested that the Books of Chronicles were its model, but in reading it we are