1. In the hundred forty and ninth year tidings were brought to Judas and his company that Antiochus Eupator was coming with great multitudes against Judaea,
2. and with him Lysias his guardian and chancellor, each having a Greek force, a hundred and ten thousand footmen, and five thousand and three hundred horsemen, and two and twenty elephants, and three hundred chariots armed with scythes.
3. And Menelaus also joined himself with them, and with great dissimulation encouraged Antiochus, not for the saving of his country, but because he thought that he would be set over the government.
4. But the King of kings stirred up the passion of Antiochus against the wicked wretch; and when Lysias informed him that this man was the cause of all the evils, the king commanded to bring him to Beroea, and to put him to death after the manner of that place.
5. Now there is in that place a tower of fifty cubits high, full of ashes, and it had all round it a gallery descending sheer on every side into the ashes.
6. Here him that is guilty of sacrilege, or has attained a preeminence in any other evil deeds, they all push forward into destruction.
7. By such a fate it befell the breaker of the law, Menelaus, to die, without obtaining so much as a grave in the earth, and that right justly;
8. for inasmuch as he had perpetrated many sins against the altar, whose fire and whose ashes were holy, in ashes did he receive his death.
9. Now the king, infuriated in spirit, was coming with intent to inflict on the Jews the very worst of the sufferings that had befallen them in his father’s time.
10. But when Judas heard of these things, he gave charge to the multitude to call upon the Lord day and night, beseeching him, if ever at any other time, so now to succour them that were at the point to be deprived of the law and their country and the holy temple,
11. and not to suffer the people that had been but now a little while revived to fall into the hands of those profane heathen.
12. So when they had all done the same thing together, beseeching the merciful Lord with weeping and fastings and prostration for three days without ceasing, Judas exhorted them and commanded they should join him for service.