3 Maccabees 6:36-38

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

³⁶ And when they had ordained a public rite for these things for their whole community for generations to come, 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.^{(A) 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, for forty days, and their destruction was set for the fifth to the seventh of Epeiph, the three days^(B)