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Begin Typing VigilThe scene of 3 Maccabees is placed in the reign of Ptolemy IV (Philopator) at the time of the battle of Raphia (217 B.C.). It narrates an attempt made by the king to enter the Temple at Jerusalem, and his miraculous repulse. In consequence he determines to wreak his vengeance on the Jews of Alexandria, and of Egypt as a whole, first by interfering with their religion, and altering their political status, and afterwards by letting loose drunken elephants to trample them to death in the Hippodrome of Alexandria. After his purpose has been several times providentially delayed, it is finally foiled by a vision of angels which turns the elephants upon the persecutors. The king repents and becomes the patron of the Jews, who return in safety and rejoicing to their homes.
The story as it stands is full of impossibilities and bombastic exaggerations, but each one of the incidents taken singly may well rest on some basis of fact, though they certainly did not all take place in the same reign. The general accuracy of the technical and official language of the book is confirmed by a comparison with Ptolemaic Papyri, and the book as a whole has striking points of contact with 2 Maccabees and the Letter of Aristeas. It would seem to have been written in Alexandria at about the same time as these books, not far from 100 B.C., a date which is confirmed by indications drawn from Papyri. The writer apparently used the lost memoirs of the reign of Philopator, written by Ptolemy Megalopolitanus shortly after his death. He seems to have combined a narrative of Philopator’s attempt to enter the Temple with a later story, preserved in another form by Josephus, of a persecution of Egyptian Jews by Physcon.
These apocryphal writings were preserved in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Ethiopic.