II.  Party of the Hasideans or Pious.  It was fortunate that Mattathias had five able, mature sons to support him.  Simon, the eldest, was already famous in council.  Judas, who bore the surname Maccabeus (whence the word Maccabees), soon proved himself a great military leader.  Jonathan combined the qualities of Simon and Judas with a certain craftiness that makes him the least attractive of the three.  Eleazar later proved on the battle-field that he had the qualities that make heroes and martyrs.  Among the Judean hills, and especially in the barren, almost inaccessible fastnesses that descend in a series of terraces from the central plateau to the Dead Sea, Mattathias and his followers found refuge.  Hither many patriotic Jews had already fled.  The Syrian mercenaries, however, led by the relentless, apostate Jews, pursued them, and, knowing their scruples, attacked them on the sabbath day and pitilessly slaughtered them.  Learning from this awful example, Mattathias and his sons wisely decided that it was more important to fight for their lives than to die for a mere institution.  They soon attracted to their standard all who were still faithful to the law.  Chief among these were those known as the Hasideans or Pious.  They were the spiritual successors of the pious or afflicted, whose woes are voiced in the earlier psalms of the Psalter (Section XLVII:v).  They were also the forerunners of the party of the Pharisees, which was one of the products of the Maccabean struggle.  In them faith and patriotism were so blended that, like Cromwell’s Ironsides, they were daunted by no odds.  At first they depended upon the guerilla type of warfare, to which the hills of Judea were especially adapted.  By enforcing the law of circumcision, by punishing the apostates, and by attacking straggling Syrian bands, they encouraged the faltering Jews, and intimidated the agents of Antiochus.  Mattathias soon died, leaving the leadership to his third son, Judas.  The poem recording his dying injunctions voices the inspiration that came at this time to Israel’s patriots from their nation’s past, and that supreme devotion to the law and dauntless courage that animated the leaders in this great movement.

III.  Date of the Visions in Daniel 7-12.  A parallel but different type of character and hope is reflected in the latter part of the book of Daniel.  In the form of visions or predictions, these chapters interpret the meaning of the great world movements from the beginning of the Babylonian to the end of the Greek period.  Each vision culminates in a symbolic but detailed description of the rule and persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes.  Several passages describe the destructive policies of this Syrian ruler almost as vividly as the books of Maccabees (Dan. 8:11, 12):  “It (Antiochus) magnified itself even to the Prince of the Host (Jehovah), and took away from him the daily sacrifice, and cast down the place of his sanctuary, and set up the sacrilegious thing over the daily sacrifice, and cast down truth to the ground, and did it and prospered.”