⁵ When a false rumor spread that Antiochus had died, Jason took no fewer than a thousand soldiers and made an unexpected assault on the city. When the troops on the wall had been defeated, and the city had been seized at last, Menelaus fled into the elevated fortress.^[a]

¹¹ When the news of these events reached the king, he thought Judea was in revolt. So he broke camp and marched from Egypt while wild with emotion, and took the city by force. ¹² He commanded his soldiers to cut down without mercy anyone they met and to slaughter those fleeing into their houses.

¹⁴ Over a three-day period, eighty thousand people’s lives were ruined. Forty thousand were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, and no fewer than those slaughtered were sold as slaves.

Judaism is outlawed

6 Shortly afterward the king sent out an Athenian elder^[a] to force the Jews to turn away from their ancestral laws and stop living according to God’s laws.

⁶ It was impossible to keep the Sabbath or the ancestral festivals, or even simply to profess to be a Jew. ⁷ Instead, out of bitter necessity, they had to observe the birthday of the king each month by eating the organs of sacrificial animals. When the Festival of Dionysus arrived, they were forced to take part in a procession honoring Dionysus, holding ivy wreaths. ⁸ At Ptolemais’ suggestion,^[a] a decision was announced to the neighboring Greek cities that they should adopt the same policy against the Jews and that they should be made to eat the sacrificial portions, ⁹ and that those who refused to change to Greek practices should be slaughtered. At that point it was easy to see the miserable state that had arrived.