This morning we told you the story of the "Battle of Rafah", in which the armies of Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom fought, each relying on a different breed of elephants to break through the enemy's defenses. Now, just before you light the second candle of Chanukah, we will tell you about the connection between the king who won that battle – Ptolemy IV – and the story of the Hanukkah miracle, with a little help from ChatGPT.
"Maccabees 3" is a book written about a century after the books of the Maccabees that we know from Chanukah – but not by a member of the Maccabees family, but by a Jew, probably from Hellen, who lived in Alexandria. Its name derives from the stylistic connection between it and the books that tell about the Hasmoneans, but it was not accepted in the Jewish canon and was almost forgotten.
In contrast to the books of Maccabees I and II, which focus on the revolt of Israeli Jews against Hellenistic culture, focusing on the heroism of the fighters from the Hasmonean family, Maccabees 3 develops against the background of Hellenistic Egypt, and focuses on the heavy danger (literal) that hovered over the Jews of the state and the miracles that prevented its realization.
In the book, King Ptolemy, returning victorious from the Battle of Rafah, embarked on a sort of "tour" to offer a rabbinical sacrifice of gratitude for the dramatic victory in the temples of all the gods (when he himself was one of them – after all, he was a pharaoh). When he arrives at the Temple of the God of the Jews in Jerusalem, he asks to enter the Holy of Holies, is refused, and when he tries to enter by force, the High Priest prays, and God paralyzes Ptolemy's body to prevent him from entering a room that only one person is allowed to enter once a year (on Yom Kippur).
A humiliated Ptolemy returns to Egypt and hatches a sinister plan to exterminate the Jewish population: first he decrees them to force them to Hellenize – but when that doesn't work, he orders them all to be rounded up, tied up with a hippodrome, and then released a battalion of 500 drunken elephants to crush them to death.
When the threat becomes palpable, Jews pray for divine intervention. Then the miracles begin to happen: first the king falls asleep on the day he planned to trample on the Jews, then he forgets the plan and scolds the elephant guard for preparing for the operation, and finally two angels appear to the elephants just before entering the hippodrome, causing them to rush back and trample on their masters. The shock of the unnecessary death causes Ptolemy to retract his plan, and he liberates the Jews and even holds a kind of holiday for them that resembles Purim (the original, not ours).
As mentioned, "Maccabees III" was not included in the Bible – probably due to a combination of factors (it was written in Greek, in Alexandria, where shortly afterwards the community was almost completely extinct, and after the Sages had already finished compiling the Bible as we know it). Christianity, which sanctified the books of Maccabees I and II, also largely ignored it, and only a few Christian sects included it in their scriptures.
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