Claims in 1 Maccabees About Alexander the Great Still Need Confirmation
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
Starting with Henke (2022dm), I am replying to responses that Lundahl (2022m) gave to a series of questions and statements from Section 5.2 of Henke (2022b) on the four hypotheses on the origin of the Talking Snake of Genesis 3. In the 11th statement/question in Henke (2022b), I commented on a PPS in Lundahl (2022d). The PPS statement in Lundahl (2022d) follows:
“PPS - Here is the oldest reference proving Alexander was a conqueror from Greece overthrowing Persia and many nations:
[1] Now it came to pass, after that Alexander the son of Philip the Macedonian, who first reigned in Greece, coming out of the land of Cethim, had overthrown Darius king of the Persians and Medes: [2] He fought many battles, and took the strong holds of all, and slew the kings of the earth: [3] And he went through even to the ends of the earth, and took the spoils of many nations: and the earth was quiet before him. [4] And he gathered a power, and a very strong army: and his heart was exalted and lifted up. [5] And he subdued countries of nations, and princes: and they became tributaries to him.
[6] And after these things, he fell down upon his bed, and knew that he should die. [7] And he called his servants the nobles that were brought up with him from his youth: and he divided his kingdom among them, while he was yet alive. [8] And Alexander reigned twelve years, and he died.
And twelve years seems to refer to his Macedonian, not his Persian, kingship.
It is in 1st Maccabees, in the LXX and Vulgate Bible, and it's late 2nd C. BC, which is older than Diodorus./HGL”
Here is my 11th comment in Henke (2022b):
· [#11] In the PPS of Lundahl (2022d), he cites statements about Alexander the Great in 1 Maccabees 1:1-8 in the Roman Catholic Bible. Any claims about Alexander the Great in 1 Maccabees 1:1-8, just like any other ancient literature, still need to be verified with external evidence.
Here is the response from Lundahl (2022m) on my 11th comment from Henke (2022b):
The thing is, non-textual evidence do not provide the carreere [sic, spelling], and in the textual one, Maccabees is actually earlier than Arrian and the rest, that is if not contemporary to the events, at least closer to them than Arrian. And probably, there may be a Dead Sea scroll which is earlier than any manuscript of Arrian as well.
In my essays Henke (2022k) and Henke (2022L), I explained why Mr. Lundahl needs to learn how to spell “career” properly. He stubbornly refuses to do so.
While earlier manuscripts are always more desirable, they are not always more accurate. If the author of 1 Maccabees, Arrian and the authors of other ancient documents were all using written and/or oral sources with a lot of erroneous claims and assumptions about Alexander the Great, then 1 Maccabees is not necessarily more accurate. Nevertheless, as I explained in Henke (2022b), the archeological results, by themselves, indicate that Alexander the Great was a powerful king. So, we can confidently conclude that we know something about Alexander the Great’s career.
As I explained in Henke (2022a) and Henke (2022b), unreliable information being passed from one document to another is why we must rely on archeological and other contemporary sources to confirm any claims in ancient documents. Certainly, these external sources often do not contain the level of detail that we want. However, it’s always more important to have quality and reliable history than a lot of detailed, but unconfirmed, claims about the past that may not be accurate (see Henke 2022br2). Quality over quantity.