by
Damien F. Mackey
For,
did not Jesus Christ, with Whom Moses would appear on the
Mount
of Transfiguration, enjoin upon his disciples to put away their swords (Matthew
26:52): ‘Put your sword back in its place because all who take up
the
sword will perish by the sword’. For God’s weakness (nailed to a Cross)
is
greater than any human strength (swords and armour).
When
righteous killing, so to speak, had to be done throughout the Old Testament,
often priests (who are Levites) or (non-priest) Levites were the ones who
carried it out.
Levi and Simeon
The first
instance of this is the case of the eponymous Levite, Levi, son of Jacob, when
he - in partnership with his brother, Simeon - would revenge the ‘rape’ of his
sister, Dinah, by the Canaanite prince, Shechem, son of Hamor (Genesis 34).
The cunning Israelite
pair devised a ruse whereby they would promise to allow the pagan Shechem to
marry Dinah, with whom he had fallen in love, and to allow inter-marriages, if every
Shechemite male be circumcised.
That agreed,
the brothers waited until the effects of the circumcision took effect before
they went amongst the pagans with the sword and slew all of the males
(34:25-26):
On the third day,
when they were still in pain, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi,
Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city unawares and
killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword
and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house and went away.
The father
Jacob, who had hoped to settle peacefully in the land, and so had no intention
of avenging the plight of his daughter, was thus furious with Levi and Simeon
(vv. 30-31):
Then Jacob said to
Simeon and Levi, ‘You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the
inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few,
and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both
I and my household’. But they said, ‘Should our sister be treated like a
prostitute?’
Levi, Simeon
and Dinah all shared the same biological mother, Leah (cf. Genesis
29:33-34; 30:21).
Jacob on his
deathbed, recalling the dramatic incident, would not hold back against Simeon
and Levi, cursing ‘their anger’:
‘Simeon and
Levi are brothers—
their swords are weapons of violence.
Let me not enter their council,
let me not join their assembly,
for they have killed men in their anger
and hamstrung oxen as they pleased.
Cursed
be their anger, so fierce,
and their fury, so cruel!
I will scatter them in Jacob
and disperse them in Israel’.
Scroll down
the ages by about a millennium, to c. 700 BC, and we find the Simeonite heroine,
Judith, on the eve of her bloody encounter with a new Shechem - (providentially
coincidental that her abode was in Shechem, with which C.C. Torrey has
wonderfully identified Judith’s town of “Bethulia”) - the Assyrian
Commander-in-chief, “Holofernes”.
Judith, in
her prayer to the Lord for strength, will recall the Shechem-Dinah incident,
and will, unlike Jacob of old, laud her ancestor Simeon, whilst parochially
failing even to mention Levi in the incident (Judith 9:2-4):
‘O Lord God of my
ancestor Simeon, to whom you gave a sword to take revenge on those strangers
who had torn off a virgin’s clothing to defile her, and exposed her thighs
to put her to shame, and polluted her womb to disgrace her; for you said, ‘It
shall not be done’—yet they did it; so you gave up their rulers to be
killed, and their bed, which was ashamed of the deceit they had practiced, was
stained with blood, and you struck down slaves along with princes, and princes
on their thrones.
You gave up their
wives for booty and their daughters to captivity, and all their booty to be
divided among your beloved children who burned with zeal for you and abhorred
the pollution of their blood and called on you for help. O God, my God, hear me
also, a widow.
Moses and
the Levites
Moses, who
had led armies for Pharaoh “Chenephres” (who was, e.g., Sesostris Neferkare),
was presumably no stranger to sword, spear or bow. Would not his career in
Egypt come to a dramatic end when he killed an Egyptian taskmaster and fled the
land to escape the angry Pharaoh? (Exodus 2:11-15).
Soon after
that, in Midian, Moses would ward off some shepherds who were harrassing
Jethro’s daughters, thereby earning himself a Midianite wife, Zipporah (vv.
16-21).
While, after
that we hear nothing more about Moses personally engaging in any fight, he who
was “the mildest man, over all men that dwelled in earth” (Numbers 12:3), with
Joshua taking up the rôle of sword wielder, we read that, in the aftermath of
the incident of the Golden Calf, Levites went amongst the people with swords
and slew about 3000 Israelites (vv. 25-29):
Moses saw that the
people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so
become a laughingstock to their enemies.
So he stood at the
entrance to the camp and said, ‘Whoever is for the Lord, come to me’. And
all the Levites rallied to him.
Then he said to
them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a
sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the
other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor’.”
The Levites did as
Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people
died. Then Moses said, ‘You have been set apart to
the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and
he has blessed you this day’.
Moses, for
his part, now envisioning far greater things, would raise up a bronze serpent
as an anticipation of the healing Christ on the cross, and would, himself, pose
cruciform, arms extended, so that Joshua would be able to defeat the army of
Amalek.
In this way
he was marvellously anticipating the Gospels.
For, did not
Jesus Christ, with Whom Moses would appear on the Mount of Transfiguration,
enjoin upon his disciples to put away their swords (Matthew 26:52):
‘Put your
sword back in its place because all who take up the sword will perish by the
sword’. For the weakness of God (nailed to a Cross) is stronger than any human
strength (swords and armour) (cf. I Corinthians 1:25).
Intervention of Phinehas,
the Aaronite
Perhaps
incited by the venal false prophet, Balaam (cf. Jude 1:11), pagan
Moabite women will seek to corrupt the men of Israel at Shittim (Numbers
25:1-18):
While Israel was
staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual
immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the
sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and
bowed down before these gods. So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal
of Peor. And the Lord’s anger burned against them.
The Lord said
to Moses, ‘Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and
expose them in broad daylight before the Lord, so that
the Lord’s fierce anger may turn away from Israel’.
So Moses said to
Israel’s judges, ‘Each of you must put to death those of your people who
have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor’.
Then an Israelite
man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses
and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance
to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron,
the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his
hand and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into
both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach.
Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; but those who died in
the plague numbered 24,000.
The Lord said
to Moses, ‘Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has
turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my
honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal.
Therefore tell him
I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants
will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was
zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the
Israelites’.
The name of the
Israelite who was killed with the Midianite woman was Zimri son of Salu,
the leader of a Simeonite family. And the name of the Midianite woman who
was put to death was Kozbi daughter of Zur, a tribal chief of a Midianite
family.
The Lord said
to Moses, ‘Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill
them. They treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the Peor
incident involving their sister Kozbi, the daughter of a Midianite leader,
the woman who was killed when the plague came as a result of that incident’.
The zeal of Phinehas was
recalled a millennium or so later by Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) (45:23-24; cf.
Psalm 105:30-31, Douay):
Phinehas son of
Eleazar is third in glory because of his zeal in the fear of the Lord, because
he stood firm when the people revolted, with a staunch and courageous heart;
and in this way made expiation for Israel.
Hence a covenant
of peace was sealed with him, making him governor of both sanctuary and people,
and securing to him and his descendants the high priestly dignity for ever.
Phinehas probably acquired
his unusual name back in Egypt (Pa-nehasi pꜣ-nḥsj).
Two corrupt priest sons of
Eli
One of this
pair has the same name as the noble Phinehas (above), but that is where all
similarity with that godly man ceases.
Jewish
Virtual library tells
the story of Eli’s two wicked sons: Hophni and Phinehas
HOPHNI AND PHINEHAS (Heb. חָפְנִי, Egyptian ḥfn (r),
"tadpole"; Heb. פִּנְחָס, Egyptian pi-nḥsy, "the dark-skinned
one"), the two sons of *Eli who served with him as priests in
Shiloh (I Sam. 1:3).
The fact that both had
Egyptian names may be explained by the family's Pharaonic connection (I Sam.
2:27). The Bible designates them "sons of *Belial,"
"thoroughly worthless individuals" (Sperling), and describes in
detail the ways in which they abused their priestly privileges. They
intimidated sacrificers into giving them meat for their own use (I Sam.
2:13–17), and took sexual advantage of the women who worked at the entrance to
the tabernacle (I Sam. 2:22). Hophni and Phinehas disregarded their father's
rebuke (2:22–25), and he did not admonish them further (3:13).
Accordingly, Eli received
prophetic messages of doom (2:27–36; 3:11–18), foretelling, among other things,
the death of Hophni and Phinehas on the same day (2:34). At the time of the
battle between the Philistines and Israel at Aphek (I Sam. 4), the Ark of the Covenant
of God was taken from
Shiloh by Hophni and Phinehas in the belief that its presence on the
battlefield would ensure victory. Instead, the results were disastrous: Israel's army was defeated, Hophni and Phinehas were
killed, and the Ark was captured by the Philistines. When the news reached Eli
(4:14ff.), he, too, died. Phinehas' pregnant wife went into labor on hearing of
the calamity and died while giving birth. She called her orphaned son Ichabod
("where is the glory?"; 4:19–22).
The narrative of Hophni
and Phinehas, which is also the account of the decline of the priestly house of
Eli, is accompanied by the parallel narrative of the ascent of Samuel. The text
emphasizes the character differences between Hophni and Phinehas and Samuel
(cf. e.g., I Sam. 2:11 with 12; 2:13–17 with 18–20; 2:22–25 with 26).
[End
of quote]
Unlike those
other priests/Levites listed above, and below, Hophni and Phinehas were
disastrous in fight and warfare, even to the extent of losing the Ark of the
Covenant to the uncircumcised Philistines.
Samuel slays King Agag
One may be
quite surprised to read of a great and wise prophet like Samuel completing the
work that a belligerent king such as Saul had failed to do, by personally
slaying the king of the Amalekites.
For that is
what the priest Samuel did (I Samuel 15:24-33):
Then Saul said to
Samuel, ‘I have sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your
instructions. I was afraid of the men and so I gave in to them. Now I
beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me, so that I may worship the Lord’.
But Samuel said to
him, ‘I will not go back with you. You have rejected the word of
the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel!’
As Samuel turned
to leave, Saul caught hold of the hem of his robe, and it
tore. Samuel said to him, ‘The Lord has torn the
kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to one of your
neighbors—to one better than you. He who is the Glory of Israel does not
lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should
change his mind’.
Saul replied, ‘I
have sinned. But please honor me before the elders of my people and
before Israel; come back with me, so that I may worship the Lord your
God’. So Samuel went back with Saul, and Saul worshiped the Lord.
Then Samuel said,
‘Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites’.
Agag came to him
in chains. And he thought, ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past’.
But Samuel said,
‘As your sword has made women childless, so will your mother be childless among
women’.
And Samuel put
Agag to death before the Lord at Gilgal.
Prophet Jeremiah, Judah’s
Defence Minister
Another
surprise is to find that the good and noble prophet Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah,
who became High Priest during the reign of the great reforming Judean king
Hezekiah (who was Josiah), was also the king’s numero uno in the face of
the Assyrian invasion:
Jeremiah
was both prophet and high priest
(4) Jeremiah was
both prophet and high priest
For
Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, was all at once, (i) Isaiah’s “Eliakim son of
Hilkiah” (22:20-24):
‘In that
day I will summon my servant, Eliakim son of Hilkiah. I
will clothe him with your robe and fasten your sash around him and hand
your authority over to him. He will be a father to those who live in
Jerusalem and to the people of Judah. I will place on his
shoulder the key to the house of David; what he opens no one can
shut, and what he shuts no one can open. I will drive him like a
peg into a firm place; he will become a seat of honor for
the house of his father. All the glory of his family will hang on him: its
offspring and offshoots—all its lesser vessels, from the bowls to all the jars
…’.
clearly a High Priest,
and he was (ii)
Eliachim (Douay version), or Joakim, the priest of the Book of Judith,
who oversaw the defence of Jerusalem (Judith 4:5):
And Eliachim the
priest wrote to all that were over against Esdrelon, which faceth the great
plain near Dothain, and to all by whom there might be a passage of way, that
they should take possession of the ascents of the mountains, by which there
might be any way to Jerusalem, and should keep watch where the way was narrow
between the mountains.
And
he was, again, King Hezekiah’s chief official, (iii) Eliakim, son of Hilkiah,
who confronted the Assyrian Rabshakeh (2 Kings 18:18): “They called for
the king, but Eliakim son of Hilkiah, who was over the household, Shebna the
scribe, and Joah son of Asaph, the recorder, went out to them”.
Eliakim’s
office here, “over the household”, is usually interpreted as Major domo, but should,
instead, be “over the Tabernacle”, that is, the Temple, for of Shebna, whom Eliakim
replaced, it was written, qui habitat in tabernaculo (Isaiah 22:16,
Vulgate).
Finally,
Jeremiah (Eliakim) was the otherwise unknown (iv) “Jehoiakim the high
priest, the son of Hilkiah, son of Shallum”, of Baruch 1:7.
Jeremiah’s priestly office would later become, greatly
spiritualised, that of the Apostle Peter:
Prophet
Jeremiah and Saint Peter
(13) Prophet
Jeremiah and Saint Peter
The prophet
Jeremiah will now connect marvellously, mystically, with that giant of a
warrior, Judas Maccabeus.
Judas
Maccabeus and his brothers
Few Levites
in the Bible wielded the sword more effectively than did Judas Maccabeus and
his four brothers, despite these being few in number. With Divine assistance
they were able to bring to their knees large, highly-experienced and well-armed
Seleucid Greek armies.
Judas, faced
with the formidable strength of the invading army of Nicanor, for instance, encouraged
his men with the following account of a dream-vision that he had had of the
prophet Jeremiah (2 Maccabees 15:6-16):
This Nicanor in
his utter boastfulness and arrogance had determined to erect a public monument
of victory over Judas and his men. But Maccabeus did not cease to trust
with all confidence that he would get help from the Lord. And he exhorted
his men not to fear the attack of the Gentiles, but to keep in mind the former
times when help had come to them from heaven, and now to look for the victory
which the Almighty would give them.
Encouraging them
from the Law and the prophets, and reminding them also of the struggles they
had won, he made them the more eager.
And when he had
aroused their courage, he gave his orders, at the same time pointing out the
perfidy of the Gentiles and their violation of oaths. He armed each of
them not so much with confidence in shields and spears as with the inspiration
of brave words, and he cheered them all by relating a dream, a sort of
vision, which was worthy of belief.
What he saw was
this: Onias, who had been high priest, a noble and good man, of modest bearing
and gentle manner, one who spoke fittingly and had been trained from childhood
in all that belongs to excellence, was praying with outstretched hands for the
whole body of the Jews. Then likewise a man appeared, distinguished by his
gray hair and dignity, and of marvelous majesty and authority. And Onias
spoke, saying, ‘This is a man who loves the brethren and prays much for the
people and the holy city, Jeremiah, the prophet of God’. Jeremiah
stretched out his right hand and gave to Judas a golden sword, and as he gave
it he addressed him thus: ‘Take this holy sword, a gift from God, with
which you will strike down your adversaries’.
I belong to
the Australian Marian Academy of the Immaculate Conception, and we have adopted
the Golden Sword of Judas Maccabeus as our emblem.
The golden
sword represented for Judas Maccabeus and his followers their Divine
protection. It was not, of course, a sword that Judas would actually wield in
battle. His preference for that, like David taking up the mighty sword of
Goliath (I Samuel 21:9): ‘There is none like it. Give it to me’, was for the
sword of the Syrian governor, Apollonius (I Maccabees 3:12): “Judas took the
sword of Apollonius, and used it in battle the rest of his life”.
2
Maccabees 3:5: “At
this time Apollonius son of Thraseus was the governor of Greater Syria”.
Given my
collapsing of this phase of the Maccabean story into the era of the Infancy of
Jesus Christ:
Judas
the Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2’s “rock cut out of a
mountain”
(13) Judas the
Galilean vitally links Maccabean era to Daniel 2’s “rock cut out of a mountain”
this
Apollonius looms as a possible candidate for Luke’s “Quirinius” (Luke 2:11-2):
“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be
taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took
place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)”.
Ezra, as Esdras,
with sword
In my article:
Ezra
‘Father of the Jews’ dying the death of Razis
(2) Ezra 'Father
of the Jews' dying the death of Razis
I was able to identify Ezra as High
Priest, and as the Esdras, and as Razis (Esdras name inverted), of Maccabees.
There I wrote:
Thanks
to a considerably truncated, revised chronology, I was able earlier in this article
to suggest a connection – {one conventionally quite impossible} – of the
significant personage, Razis of 2 Maccabees 14:1-46, of highly spectacular
death, with the great priest-scribe himself, Ezra.
Ezra,
or Esdras (= Razis), Razis, known as “the Father of the Jews” (v. 37).
So
significant was this Razis that “Nicanor sent over 500 soldiers to arrest him”
(v. 40), so as to deal a “severe blow” to the Jews.
Since
my writing of the first part of this series, I have picked up in 2 Maccabees a
couple of other points that do no harm to my theory that Razis was Ezra.
One: The elderly Razis was in possession
of a “sword” at the time of his death (v. 41). And, a little earlier in 2
Maccabees, in chapter 12, we learn that Razis, there called Esdrias (cf. Ezra
as Esdras) was even commanding Jewish troops (v. 36). “… Esdrias and his men
had been fighting for a long time and were exhausted …”.
That
might explain the “sword”.
Two: More significantly, after a Maccabean
victory over Nicanor, Judas Maccabeus gets this Esdrias (8:23) “to read the
sacred book aloud …”.
Is
this not what Ezra did? (Nehemiah 8:1-3): “… all the people … asked Ezra the
scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses which Yahweh had prescribed for
Israel. … Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly …. On the square
before the Water Gate … he read from the book from early morning till noon …”.
Razis will
die easily one of the most extraordinary deaths in the Bible, falling upon his
own sword (2 Maccabees 14:37-46):
A certain Razis,
one of the elders of Jerusalem, was denounced to Nicanor as a man who loved his
compatriots and was very well thought of and for his goodwill was called father
of the Jews. For before the days of separation, he had been accused of Judaism,
and he had most zealously risked body and life for Judaism. Nicanor,
wishing to exhibit the enmity that he had for the Jews, sent more than five
hundred soldiers to arrest him, for he thought that by arresting him
he would do them an injury. When the troops were about to capture the
tower and were forcing the door of the courtyard, they ordered that fire be
brought and the doors burned. Being surrounded, Razis fell upon his own
sword, preferring to die nobly rather than to fall into the hands of
sinners and suffer outrages unworthy of his noble birth. But in the heat
of the struggle he did not hit exactly, and the crowd was now rushing in
through the doors.
He courageously
ran up on the wall and bravely threw himself down into the crowd. But as
they quickly drew back, a space opened and he fell in the middle of the empty
space. Still alive and aflame with anger, he rose, and though his blood
gushed forth and his wounds were severe he ran through the crowd, and standing
upon a steep rock, with his blood now completely drained from him, he tore
out his entrails, took them in both hands, and hurled them at the crowd,
calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to give them back to him again. This
was the manner of his death.
Saint
Peter with sword
This is another
famous incident.
Peter draws
the sword to protect Jesus in the Garden (Matthew.26:51-52):
With that, one of
Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the
servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.
‘Put your sword
back in its place’, Jesus said to him, ‘for all who draw the sword
will die by the sword’.
Peter, who
may have been a Simeonite, rather than a Levite:
Peter
as a potential descendant of the Simeonite prophet Jonah
(3) Peter as a
potential descendant of the Simeonite prophet Jonah
will
become High Priest of the newer spiritual order established by Jesus Christ.
