3 Maccabees 6:36-38

Revised Standard Version

³⁶ And when they had ordained a public rite for these things in their whole community and for their descendants, they instituted the observance of the aforesaid days as a festival, not for drinking and gluttony, but because of the deliverance that had come to them through God. ³⁷ Then they petitioned the king, asking for dismissal to their homes. ³⁸ So their registration was carried out from the twenty-fifth of Pachon to the fourth of Epeiph,^[a] for forty days; and their destruction was set for the fifth to the seventh of Epeiph,^[b] the three days