3 Maccabees 4:11-21

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

The Jews Imprisoned at Schedia

¹¹ When these people had been brought to the place called Schedia and the voyage was concluded as the king had decreed, he commanded that they should be enclosed in the hippodrome that had been built with an immense perimeter wall in front of the city and that was well suited to make them an obvious spectacle to all coming back into the city and to those from the city^[a] going out into the country, so that they could neither communicate with the king’s forces nor in any way claim to be inside the circuit of the city.^{[b] 12} And when this had happened, the king, hearing that the Jews’ compatriots from the city frequently went out in secret to lament bitterly the ignoble misfortune of their kindred, ¹³ ordered in his rage that these people be dealt with in precisely the same fashion as the others, not omitting any detail of their punishment. ¹⁴ The entire people was to be registered individually, not for the hard labor that has been briefly mentioned before but to be tortured with the outrages that he had ordered and at the end to be destroyed in the space of a single day.^{(A) 15} The registration of these people was therefore conducted with bitter haste and zealous intensity from the rising of the sun until its setting, coming to an end after forty days but still not completed.

¹⁶ The king was greatly and continually filled with joy, organizing banquets in honor of all his idols, with a mind alienated from truth and with a profane mouth, praising speechless things that are not able even to communicate or to come to one’s help and uttering improper words against the supreme God.^{(B) 17} But after the previously mentioned interval of time the scribes declared to the king that they were no longer able to take the census of the Jews because of their immense number, ¹⁸ though most of them were still in the country, some still residing in their homes, and some at the place;^[c] the task was impossible for all the generals in Egypt. ¹⁹ After he had threatened them severely, charging that they had been bribed to contrive a means of escape, he was clearly convinced about the matter ²⁰ when they said and proved that both the papyrus and the reeds they used for writing had already given out. ²¹ But this was an act of the invincible providence of him who was aiding the Jews from heaven.