text:
The books of the Maccabees.
Counted among the apocrypha.
Attributed author(s).
Text(s) available.
None on site.
Swete LXX (Greek only).
HTML Bible:
1 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 (Latin Vulgate only).
2 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (Latin Vulgate only).
Humanities Text Initiative: 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, and 4 Maccabees (English only).
Kata Pi LXX:
1 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 (Greek and English).
2 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (Greek and English).
3 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Greek and English).
4 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 (Greek and English).
Sacred Texts:
1 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 (polyglot).
2 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (polyglot).
3 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Greek only).
4 Maccabees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 (Greek only).
Online Critical Pseudepigrapha.
Useful links.
Books of Maccabees in the Jewish Encyclopedia.
EJW (Peter Kirby).
Books of Machabees and the apocryphal books in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees at Kata Pi (Oesterly and Robinson).
Lecture Notes on 3 Maccabees.
Jewish background texts (Jim Davila).
The books of the Maccabees are counted among the apocryphal books of the Old Testament.
These books are not extant among the Hebrew scriptures, but rather in the Septuagint, abbreviated LXX.
Peter Kirby (Early Jewish Writings).
1 Maccabees.
Peter Kirby surveys scholars writing on the book of 1 Maccabees:
James King West writes: "After a brief preface summarizing Alexander's conquests, death, and successors, the author begins his story with Antiochus Epiphanes' invasion of Egypt and subsequent desecration of the temple, and traces the story of the Maccabean revolt, the death of Antiochus, the defeat of Nicanor, and Simon's achievement of independence, his death, and the accession of John Hyrcanus I. The story is told in the idiom of the Former Prophets and Chronicles (cf. 9:22 and 16:23 with I Kg. 11:41 passim) and is concerned principally with the war itself and the providential victories of the Jews. So similar is the form, in fact, that R. H. Pfeiffer conjectures that the author may have planned his work as a sequel to Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. The large place he gives to the exploits of Judas Maccabeus leaves no doubt that Judas is the author's hero, and that the book was written to show how God used him to bring deliverance once more to Israel. As with most ancient historians, the author provided appropriate speeches and prayers to help interpret the story, accent its important turns, characterize the heroes, and the like. At several points he presents copies of official documents affecting the course of his history. Whether these are authentic materials is a matter of dispute among scholars. Probably they represent a knowledge of the existence of such documents, and perhaps also at least a general knowledge of their content. Although in II Maccabees we have an alternate source for a considerable part of this history, the work is so basic to our knowledge of this period as to be indispensable. Not without reason, Josephus took it over as his main source for the period in his Antiquities of the Jews (XII, 5 to XIII, 7)." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 467)
J. Alberto Soggin writes: "The author of the work is not mentioned once. Whoever he was, he must have composed his text in the last years of John Hyrcanus, and in any case before the occupation of Jerusalem by Pompey, that is, about the end of the second ro the beginning of the first century BC. He was a Palestinian Jew who knew Hebrew and Aramaic well; we do not know whether he also knew Greek. He was an ardent patriot, for whom religion and nation were identical. The celebration of the action of the Maccabees stands out here against the modesty of the last chapters of proto-canonical Daniel. The author does not seem to have had any close contact with the sect of the Pharisees, since he never speaks of resurrection or of the messianic hope; it is possible that he wanted to write a kind of unofficial history of his time glorifying the Maccabees. However, he does not conceal some of the misdeeds of Simon, the founder of the dynasty: 14.4-48; 15:15-24 are the only texts which give him unqualified praise. In reality the author admires those who have made a substantial contribution towards liberating his country from Syrian oppression, but he also tries to show that they were subordinate to an institution which is historically obscure but mentioned on a number of occasions, which he calls 'the Great Synagogue' (3.44; 14:26-28): in the last analysis this decides policy and confirms Simon in his position." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 466)
David A. deSilva writes: "The book must have been written after the accession of John Hyrcanus in 134 B.C.E., since this event is the last related in the narrative. The author speaks of the Romans highly and emphasizes the Jews' friendly relations with Rome and Rome's faithfulnes as allies, necessitating a date of composition prior to 63 B.C.E. (Oesterley 1913: 60; Goldstein 1976: 63; Fischer 1992: 441; Bartlett 1998: 34). The narration of the achievements and character of the Romans in 8:1-16 is an encomium, contrasting sharply with later reflection on Roman conquest and rule as arrogance, insolence, and an affront against God. Pompey's entry into the holy places in 63 B.C.E. would have marred the author's unqualified appreciation of the Romans (as a comparison with the response of Psalms of Solomon 2; 8; 17 to that event might show). . . . The conclusion to the whole (16:23-24), while not necessitating a date after Hyrcanus's death, is certainly more naturally taken that way, given the parallels in the books of Samuel and Kings, on which the author is intentionally drawing (Oesterley 1913: 60; Pfeiffer 1949: 301; Goldstein 1976: 63; Bartlett 1998: 33). . . . It seems preferable, therefore, to consider 1 Maccabees as having originated sometime after John Hyrcanus's death in 104 B.C.E. and before Roman intervention in the dispute between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II in 63 B.C.E." (Introducing the Apocrypha, p. 248)
Lawrence H. Schiffman writes: "It is generally agreed that the First Book of Maccabees was originally written in Hebrew. Even though no manuscripts or fragments still exist in Hebrew, the Greek text of 1 Maccabees has the unmistakable style of a rather literal translation from the Hebrew. Moreover, the church father Origen (third century A.D.) claimed that the Hebrew title of 1 Maccabees was Sarbethsabaniel. This puzzling title is difficult to interpret but may be a somewhat corrupt rendering of Hebrew sar bet 'el ('Prince of the House of God') or of sfar bet sabanai 'el ('Book of the House of the Resisters of God'). Most Greek manuscripts simply term the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees Makkabaion A and Makkabaion B. By the second century A.D. To Makkabaika ('The things Maccabean' or 'Maccabean Histories') was the designation for both 1 and 2 Maccabees. The early church father Clement of Alexandria (second century A.D.) termed 1 Maccabees to Biblion ton Makkabaikon ('The Book of Thing Maccabean') and 2 Maccabees he ton Makkabaikon epitome ('The Epitome of Things Maccabean'). Although 'Maccabee' (meaning 'hammer') was originally the nickname of the hero Judah, the use of the title 'Maccabean Histories led to the custom of referring to all of the heroes of the book as 'Maccabees.'" (Harper's Bible Commentary, p. 875)
Neil J. McEleney writes: "Several complaints have been lodged against the historical reliability of 1 Mc. Its author's nationalism and the exaggerated importance he gives Judean events (1:41-43; 3:27-31; 6:5-13) are said to make his objectivity suspect. He is anti-Seleucid (1:9-10), and, moreover, he shows ignorance of the history, geography, and political organization of foreign peoples. His Jewish nationalism leads him to inflate the numbers of the enemy so as to make more striking the divine intervention on behalf of the Hasmoneans. And he has erred in placing the death of Antiochus IV after the dedication of the Temple. These and other historical shortcomings are thought to disqualify him as an accurate reporter of the period. Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss him so easily. Within the context of his culture and the canons of histriography then in force, he is a trustworthy witness of men and events. His care, for example, in matters of topography (7:19; 9:2, 4, 33) and Jewish chronology (1:54; 4:52; etc.) illustrate his genuine concern to report matters accurately within the limits of his capabilities and aims. His placing of Antiochus' death is wrong, but his description of it corresponds to that of an independent witness, the secular historian Polybius of Megalopolis (Histories 31.9). Despite his limitations, then, 1 Mc's author has, as Dancy notes, 'such large stretches of honest and sober narrative that 1 Mc deserves to be regarded as equal if not superior in historical worth, not only to any book of the Old Testament but also to most surviving Hellenistic history' (Dancy, op. cit., 8)." (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, vol. 1, p. 463)
Daniel J. Harrington writes: "First Maccabees is part of the canon of Scripture in the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Russian Orthodox churches. It is not recognized as Scripture by Protestants and Jews. There has been, however, a puzzling ambivalence about 1 and 2 Maccabees in the Jewish tradition. Hanukkah, which celebrates the cleansing and rededication of the Jerusalem temple in 164 B.C.E. under Judas, is part of the traditional Jewish calendar of festivals. Although it is a minor holiday (except in countries where its proximity to Christmas has made it very significant), the 'biblical basis' for it lies in books not regarded as canonical. Since it is likely that 1 Maccabees was composed in Hebrew, its absence from the canon of Hebrew Scriptures is somewhat puzzling. These puzzlements have led some scholars to suspect that at some point in the first century there was a Jewish reaction against the Maccabees and what they stood for, and a deliberate attempt to push them out of the sacred tradition of Judaism. Perhaps 'messianic' claims were being made about Judas Maccabeus or some other figure who traced his ancestry back to the Maccabean movement. Perhaps in light of failed uprising against the Romans by Jews claiming to follow the example of Judas and his brothers, the custodians of the Jewish tradition found the Maccabees too controversial and dangerous. The revival of interest in the Maccabees as men of action and noble warriors in the modern state of Israel suggests that these suspicions have some basis in fact." (Invitation to the Apocrypha, p. 135)
Peter Kirby also surveys scholars writing on the book of 2 Maccabees:
James King West writes: "In the author's own preface, 2:19-32, he tells us that his work is an epitome, condensing 'into a single book' a five-volume history of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers written by Jason of Cyrene. His description of the toils, difficulties, and responsibilities of the epitomizer is a classic (2:26-31). Since Jason's work has been lost, how faithfully the epitomizer has represented the scope and character of his work, and how much, if anything, has been imported into the present work from other sources, are moot questions into which we need not enter. The epitomizer has also assumed responsibility for making his work pleasant reading (2:25), and to that end employed the devices and style of popular Greek rhetoric. If the mention of 'Mordecai's day,' in 15:36, comes from Jason's work, the original from which the epitome of II Maccabees was made must have been written some time after Esther, not earlier than the last part of the second century B.C. The epitomizer, therefore, can hardly have written earlier than 100 B.C. Some scholars date his work as late as A.D. 50." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 468)
J. Alberto Soggin writes: "The book abounds in explanation of the law, either for the use of the pagans or for Israel (cf. 6.5 and 5.17-20; 6.12-17 respectively). In fact II Maccabees has a much greater interest in theology than I Maccabees, although it is expressed in a somewhat rough form of reward and punishment. The pagans are defined as 'blasphemous and barbarous nations' in 10.4, but there are also severe censures of apostate Jews, of whom there must therefore have been considerable numbers. We find a series of theological features in II Maccabees which were abent from I Maccabees: for example, the resurrection of the body in 7.11; 14.46, a feature which is quite a contrast first to Wisdom and then to Philo, both of whom, following Neo-Platonic lines, tend rather to teach the immortality of the soul. In 7.28 there appears for the first time in Hebrew thought the doctrine which will later be called creatio ex nihilo, though not in the absolute form in which it has sometimes been presented: the Greek is ouk ex onton epoiesen auto ho theos, that is, 'God made the world not from things which were', which is not identical with 'nothing' in the philosophical sense of the term. In 7.9, 14 (cf. 14.46; 12.43) we have concepts of eternal life and death, and in 12.43 the intercession of the living for the dead, an element on which the Catholic church has sometimes sought to found the doctrine of Purgatory. We have drawn attention to a well-developed angelology (3.24-28; 5.2-4; 10.29ff.; 11.8, etc.). As Pfeiffer has well observed, the fact is that II Maccabees is more a work of edification than of history. The author, Jason of Cyrene (in Cyrenaica), seems to have been a diaspora Jew who lived at Alexandria about 100 BC." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 469)
Neil J. McEleney writes: "The first letter, 2 Mc 1:1-9, dated to 124, contains reference to another (vv. 7-8) written in 143. The second letter, 2 Mc 1:10-2:18, which is undated, is considered substantially authentic and a literary unity by Abel and Starcky (op. cit., 27-30), who assign it to a contemporary of Judas writing in 164. Other authors (W. Brownlee, IDB 3, 208; Dancy, op. cit., 15-16; Eissfeldt, OTI 580-81) consider it spurious, and even a composite, because 2 Mc 1:19-2:15, a later addition, seems to interrupt the flow of the letter." (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, vol. 1, p. 462)
Lawrence H. Schiffman writes: "It seems most likely that the abridger worked directly from the works of Jason of Cyrene, shortening Jason's lengthy text into this small book. Either he or a later hand added the two letters in 2 Macc. 1:1-2:18. It is difficult to judge the full extent of the work of Jason. In view of its five-volume length, it is difficult to believe that it would only have been a more detailed history of these fifteen years. It may be that the abridger selected a period of great importance to him and prepared an abridgment and adaptation of Jason's account of that period. As to the letters, there are a number of indications that they were added by a third hand, since they are not fully integrated into the text as it now stands. They may have been added in an attempt to propagate the observance of the festival of Hanukkah, which celebrated the purification of the Temple by Judah in 164 B.C. A few other additions were certainly made by either the abridger or some other editor." (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 898)
Daniel J. Harrington writes: "The forthright and engaging way in which the author expresses himself in his preface can mask several critical problems in using 2 Maccabees as a historical source. The first problem concerns the relationship between the original five-volume work of Jason of Cyrene (now lost) and the one-volume work now known as 2 Maccabees. The original composition of both works seems to have been in Greek. But there is no way of knowing how closely the epitomator (as the author is often called) followed the style and vocabulary of Jason of Cyrene. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing what the epitomator left out or added into Jason's story in his efforts at being entertaining and telling the story from his own perspective. In particular, was Jason's work as focused on the defense of the Jerusalem temple as 2 Maccabees is?" (Invitation to the Apocrypha, pp. 138-139)
David A. deSilva writes: "Assessing the date of the work is difficult. Jason's original history must post-date 161 B.C.E. and may even have been written just before, or shortly after, Judas's death. Goldstein (1983: 71-83), however, places Jason's work as late as 85 B.C.E., after 1 Maccabees. The epitome is generally held to have been composed prior to 50 C.E., given its influence on 4 Maccabees and Hebrews, and probably before 63 B.C.E., given the positive portrayal of relations with Rome (4:11; 8:10, 36; 11:34-36) (van Henten 1997: 51). Because it is important to consider how the epitome came to be connected with the two prefixed letters, the question of their date often enters the discussion. The later letter (1:1-9) was written in 124/123 B.C.E., a period in which Judea enjoyed prosperity and strength under John Hyrcanus. This was a suitable period in which to invite the translocal Jewish community (yet again) to join in the celebrations of their independence from Greek rule (van Henten 1997: 53). Harrington (1988: 38) suggests that the epitome was used as support for the request for observance of Hanukkah among the Jews in Egypt, to provide the festal story, as it were. The epitome probably was not composed for this purpose, since the epitomator's prologue itself gives no hint that promoting Hanukkah was part of the agenda but certainly was conducive to it. In this hypothesis, both Jason and his abridger would have completed their work prior to 124 B.C.E." (Introducing the Apocrypha, pp. 269-270)
Martin McNamara writes: "The title of this book is a misnomer since it treats of the sufferings of the Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV Philopator (221-203 B.C.) rather than of the persecution of the Palestinian Jews under Antiochus IV at the time of the Maccabees. It describes how Ptolemy IV attempted to enter the holy of holies in the temple in Jerusalem and how he was miraculously repelled (1:1-2:24). Then, on his return to Egypt he revenges his humiliation on the Jewish community there and attempts to impose the pagan cult of Dionysius on them. He even orders punishment and death on all who refuse to forsake Judaism (2:25-5:51). However, after Eleazar an aged preist prays for his people, the king repents and becomes the protector of the Jews." (Intertestamental Literature, p. 230)
James C. VanderKam writes (An Introduction to Early Judaism, pp. 78-79):
The title of 3 Maccabees is curious because the book has nothing to do with the Maccabees (who are never mentioned in it). The principal feature that it shares with 1-2 Maccabees is that it is a story about a situation in which the Jewish people, this time in Egypt, were in danger of being annihilated by a Hellenistic monarch, in part for their religious convictions and practices. The book was composed in Greek and relates a story set in the time of Ptolemy IV Philopater (221-203 BCE).
After his victory over Antiochus III (223-187 BCE) in the battle of Raphia (217 BCE), Ptolemy, according to our story, visited the cities in Coele-Syria (the area that Antiochus was trying to take from Ptolemy) to boost their morale and give gifts to their temples. Naturally he came to Jerusalem. While there, he was so impressed with the temple that he wanted to enter it, including the holy of holies. The Jews desperately tried to stop thiw violation of their law. Amid the great uproar that broke out in the city, the high priest Simon offered a prayer in which he appealed to past cases of divine deliverance from danger and to the promise that if his people prayed in their distress from the temple God would hear them (see 1 Kings 8:33-34, 48-50). The Lord answered his prayer swiftly by striking King Ptolemy with temporary paralysis that forced him to withdraw from Palestine and return to Egypt, though he went uttering curses and vowing revenge for such humiliating treatment.
His plan for revenge involved the Jews of Alexandria. The king decreed that they were to be subjected to a registration that involved a poll-tax and reduction of status to the level of slaves. In addition the registration included being branded with an ivy leaf shape, a symbol of the god Dionysus. The monarch also decreed through a letter that the many Jews outside Alexandria were to be delivered to the city in chains after undergoing other forms of harsh treatment. Those who handed Jews to the authorities were to be given substantial monetary rewards. During the process of registering this large number of Jews, the second divine intervention in the story occurred: God made the writing materials used by the scribes run out so that the registration was impeded.
When Ptolemy saw that his plans were being frustrated by exhaustion of scribal materials, he angrily commanded that his five hundred elephants be given an intoxicating drink and that, when drunk, they be let loose to trample the Jews who were bound and held within the enclosed hippodrome. On the day when the plan was to be carried out, the king miraculously overslept so badly that the event had to be postponed until the next day. However, on the next day God plagued the king with forgetfulness so that he was unable to remember his plan, reversed himself, and defended the Jews as loyal subjects. Indeed he claimed it was only his own benevolence that kept him from letting loose the elephants on his own employees who had made them drunk to trample Jews. Later the king did another about-face and vowed irrevocably to kill the Jews the next day and swore that he would also level Judea and its temple. When it seemed that all was lost, Eleazar, an elderly Jewish priest, prayed; like Simon the high priest, he cited biblical examples of past deliverances and asked God to intervene on behalf of his people in these dire circumstances. Once more God responded by sending two angels (unseen by the Jews) who terrified the elephants and made them turn back on the soldiers (and on Ptolemy) who were conducting them to the hippodrome.
Astonishingly, the king changed his mind yet again and chided his subordinates for how they had treated the Jews. He released the imprisoned Jews and provided the resources so that they could celebrate a seven-day festival of deliverance. He then dismissed them and wrote a letter to governmental officials in Egypt. He blamed all the misfortunes suffered by the Jews on malicious friends of his, and credited their salvation to his own actions and his awareness of the true situation. Some sentence in the letter are thematic for 3 Maccabees: "Since we have come to realize that the God of heaven surely defends the Jews, always taking their part as a father does for his children, and since we have taken into account the friendly and firm goodwill that they had toward us and our ancestors, we justly have acquitted them of every charge of whatever kind" (7:6b-7; see also v. 9). The Jews requested and received permission from the king to execute any Jews who had apostatized to save themselves from the king's earlier edicts; they killed about three hundred and also kept that day as a holiday. The Jews from the countryside were then transported home, where there was more celebrating and all regained their confiscated property.
Emil Schürer writes: "As to the date of the author, the utmost that can be ventured is a conjecture. The contents and tendency of the book seem to presuppose a persecution of the Alexandrian Jews, on account of which the author desires to comfort and encourage his co-religionists. This leads our thoughts to the time of Caligula, when such a persecution on a large scale took place for the first time. Hence Ewald, Hausrath, Reuss and others place the composition of the book in his reign. But then it would be strange, that the author does not make Ptolemy lay claim to divine honours, which was the chief stumbling-block in th case of Caligula. On the whole we should expect in it more special references to events under Caligula. Hence we can but approve of Grimm's reservation, though he has every inclination to agree with Ewald's hypothesis (Exeget. Handb. p. 218 sq.). In general, we may say, that the book originated at the earliest in the first century before Christ, at the latest in the first century after Christ; the former, because the author already knows the Greek additions to Daniel (vi. 6); the latter, because it would otherwise have found no acceptance with the Christian Church." (The Literature of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, p. 218)
Raymond F. Surburg writes: "Waxman says there is a possibility that the story was written around A.D. 30, when the first persecution took place against the Jews under Caligula. There is, however, no evidence to corroborate this theory, because 3 Maccabees contains no reference to Caligula. Ferrar places its origin around 100 B.C., at the same time that The Letter of Aristeas and 2 Maccabees originated, with both seemingly linked by literary similarity. Hadas would have the book originate in the year 25-24 B.C., when the privileges of the Alexandrian Jews were in danger of being lost." (Introduction to the Intertestamental Period, pp. 148-149)
Leonhard Rost writes: "Although it is likely that there was some historical occasion for the celebration of the festival in Alexandria (it is mentioned also by Josephus), and although the description of the historical events at the battel of Raphia is accurate and the journey to Jerusalem appears reasonable, the rest of the story is highly unlikely. At the very least it is highly exaggerated. Furthermore, in Contra Apionem ii. 5 Josephus ascribes the attempt to take all the Jews captive and have them stand naked in readiness to be trampled by elephants to Ptolemy VII Physcon (146-117). It is naturally possible to draw the conclusion that the history of the Jews in Egypt includes situations in which the very existence of Jews was endangered and even that on some occasion command was given to have certain Jews, or the Jewish population of one or more cities, trampled by elephants. But there is no certain evidence of such an event. The permissions to slay apostate Jews is probably wholly legendary, although it is likely that such illegal executions were occasionally carried out." (Judaism Outside the Hebrew Canon, pp. 106-107)
Emil Schürer writes: "This narrative is not only almost throughout a mere fiction, but it belongs, among productions of the kind, to those of the weakest sort. The author evidently revels in keeping up psychological impossibilities. The style also corresponds, being bombastic and involved. The only foundation for the author's fiction seems to have been an old legend which we still read in Josephus. For he relates (contra Apion. ii. 5) that Ptolemy VII. Physcon cast the Jews of Alexandria, who as adherents of Cleopatra were his political opponents, to intoxicated elephants, who however turned instead against the friends of the king, whereupon the king gave up his purpose and the Jews of Alexandria celebrated the day in remembrance of the event. According to this account the celebration of this festival, which is also mentioned in the third Book of Maccabees (vi. 36), seems at all events to be historical. And some unascertained fact may certainly be the foundation of the legend, the older form of which seems to have been in the hands of Josephus, since all is in his account simpler and more psychologically comprehensible, and he was evidently unacquainted with the third Book of Maccabees. When then the latter refers the history to Ptolemy IV. instead of VII., this is already a divergence from the older legend, and still more so are the other additions with which the author has enriched his narrative." (The Literature of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, pp. 217-218)
Leonhard Rost writes: "The author's purpose is to examine a 'wholly philosophical question'—can religious reason of her own accord become mistress over the passions? At the same time, he counsels men for their own benefit to hold fast to philosophy. He brings all the forces of rhetoric to bear on the question. In chapters 1-3, he takes up particular ethical problems and illustrates the power of reason through examples taken from the conduct of Jacob, Joseph, and David. Then he moves on to the history of the recent past, recounting the intrigues of Simon, who envied Onias the office of high priest, telling of the attempt of Apollodorus to enter the Temple (instigated by the order of Antiochus Epiphanes), of the replacement of Simon with Jason (3:19-4:26), and of the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus, using the examples of Eleazar (cf. II Macc. 6:18-31) and of the mother and her seven sons (cf. II Macc. 7). In spite of torture and threatened execution, reason led these faithful souls to maintain their fear of God and thus remain superior to the threats of the king; at the same time, they became models for the people (5:1-17:6). The striking conclusion begins with an imaginary memorial inscription ascribing the deliverance of the nation to the death of these sacrificial victims; there follows a call to emulate them. Then the mother addresses her sons, pointing out to them how careful she had been to observe the Law and the traditional customs of the fathers. The book ends with a hymn in praise of God, who took vengeance on Antiochus for the execution of the victims but received the victims of his tyranny into 'the company of the fathers once they had received pure and immortal souls' (17:7-18:24; following A. Deissmann in Kautzsch, p. 177)." (Outside the Hebrew Canon, pp. 108-109)
Raymond F. Surburg writes: "In a brief introductory paragraph, the author indicated the scope of the question which he proposes to discuss (1:1-11) and the method he will use in the course of his presentation. The book has two main divisions: 1) A philosophical discussion on the main proposition (1:13-3:18); 2) The story of the martyrs and the lessons to be learned from it (3:19-to the end). Chapters 3-7 of 2 Maccabees furnishes the basic material for the second part of the book." (Introduction to the Intertstamental Period, pp. 149-150)
Martin McNamara writes: "4 Maccabees is a philosophical treatise that could be entitled: 'On the Supremacy of Reason over the Emotions.' It opens with the words: 'The subject that I am about to discuss is most philosophical, that is, whether devout reason is sovereign over the emotions.' First there is a philosophical introduction (1:1-3:18) in which the author tells us that he is about to demonstrate his point best 'from the noble bravery of those who died for the sake of virtue, Eleazar and the seven brothers and their mother' (1:8). The author of this work belongs to the Stoic tradition, combining its principles with those of Judaism. He then moves on to the story of the Maccabean martyrs, referring to the High Priest Onias III, 'that noble and good man', and to Apollonius' attempt on the treasury of the temple (3:9-4:14). After this there follows (5:1-7:23) a detailed account of the martyrdom of Eleazar, 'leader of the flock . . ., of priestly family, learned in the law, advanced in age' (5:4) after which is narrated the martyrdom of the seven brothers (8:1-12:19). The author then gives a philosophical interpretation of the events (13:1-14:10), followed by an account of the martyrdom of the mother of the seven (14:11-17:1) and the author's panegyric of her (17:2-18). To this brave woman, the real heroine of the story, the author reserves the closing oration, one in which she expatiates on the principles that guided her life. Her words are addressed to her children, by which all God-fearing Jews, not merely the seven martyrs are intended." (Intertestamental Literature, pp. 233-234)
James Charlesworth writes: "The composition is a diatribe (see J. C. H. Lebram, no. 1101) with Stoic influences by a Jew who had mastered Greek thought and language. The theme is clarified in the prologue (1:1-12): inspired reason is the supreme ruler over passions (pleasures and pains). After a definition of reason and passion, Joseph, Moses, Jacob, and David are chosen as examples of how reason can rule the passions (1:13-3:19). Following an historical note regarding the cultural and religious innovations by Antiochus Epiphanes and Jason (3:20-4:26), 'the demonstration of the story of the self-controlled reason' (ten apodeixin tes historiae tou sophronos logismou, 3:19), the heart of the book, unfolds with an account of the courageous words and actions of Eleazar (cf. 2Mac 6:18-31), and of the seven young men and their mother (cf. 2Mac 7:1-52), with appropriate concluding summaries (5:1-17:24). The work ends with an exhortation to the Israelites to obey the Law, be righteous, and recognize 'that inspired reason is lord over passion' (hoti ton pathon setin despotes ho eusebes logismos, 18:2), and with a speech by the mother (18:1-24). There are tensions and inconsistencies, since the motive for martyrdom is not reason but obedience to Torah (cf. 5:16, 9:1-8, 16:17-22)." (The Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research, pp. 151-152)
Emil Schürer writes: "Josephus is named by Eusebius and other Church writers as the author of this book. This view however has only the value of a hypothesis. For the book still appears in many manuscripts anonymously, and was therefore certainly at first issued without the name of the author. The entirely different style, and the circumstance, that Josephus in his Antiquities nowhere makes use of the second Book of Maccabees and thus seems not to know it, while the work in question is entirely based upon it, speak against his authorship. The first century after Christ is generally accepted as the date of composition, chiefly because the book must have been written before the destruction of Jerusalem. though the latter cannot be proved, this view must be pretty nearly correct, since a more recent book would no longer have been accepted by the Christian Church." (The Literature of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, p. 246)
Peter Kirby also surveys scholars writing on the book of 5 Maccabees (which is not included in any canonical list to the best of my knowledge):
James Charlesworth writes (The Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research, pp. 153-156):
This book is extant in unedited Karshuni (Borg. syr. 28, ff. 412v-482v of A.D. 1581; Par. syr. 3, ff. 92v-116v [?] of A.D. 1695; Vien. or. 1548, ff. 20r-199r of A.D. 1729 [Karshuni or Syriac?]) and Arabic manuscripts (Vat. ar. 468, ff. 718v-759v of A.D. 1579; Vat. syr. 461, ff. 831-888 of A.D. 1667; Leningrad, Collection of Gregory IV. Nr. 3 [?]; and Leningrad, Collection of Gregory IV. Nr. 18, ff. 69-78 of A.D. 1642). The Arabic manuscript listed first was probably (so G. Graf, Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 223) the text behind G. Sionita's edition (in Le Jay's Polyglotte de Paris, 1645. Vol. 9, pp. 1-76 at the end; repr. in Walton's London Polyglotta, 1657. Vol. 4, pp. 112-59). An English translation, unfortunately made "from the Latin version of the Arabic text printed in the Polyglotts," was published by H. Cotton (The Five Books of Maccabees. Oxford: OUP, 1832; see esp. pp. xxx-xxxv, 227-446).
The crucial question regarding this work, which is virtually unknown to scholars, is its date. While Graf (Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 223) suggested it originated in early Melchite circles, Cotton (p. xxxii) and E. Beurlier ("Machabées [Livres apocryphes des]," DB 4, col. 502) concluded that the book was written in the latter part of the first century.
A date in the early Middle Ages appeared likely until the lack of later tendencies and ideas became noticeable, along with the recognition of early expressions (viz., "the third house," 22:9), the mention of the destruction of Jerusalem (9:5, 21:30), and the impossibility of concluding that it is a pasticcio of 1, 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees and Josephus' Antiquities and Wars. It is wise to remain skeptical about the possibility of a late first century A.D. date for the work, although the intrinsic evidence presently appears to point in that direction.
The author of 5 Maccabees used other sources besides the works attributed to the Maccabees and Josephus' writings. Is it possible that this document preserves portions of the books written by Jason of Cyrene, Justus of Tiberias, or Nicolaus of Damascus? This question needs examination along with another; what is the relation between 5 Maccabees and the medieval Hebrew chronicle of Jewish history called Josippon? D. Flusser has completed a critical edition of the Hebrew text, which is now with the printer.
An important link between 5 Maccabees and Nicolaus of Damascus is that both, against Josephus (Wars 1.6, 2) and others (e.g. Hegesippus), claim that Antipater, Herod's father, was not an Idumaean, but a Jew who had come from Babylonia with Ezra (cf. 5Mac 35:1 with Josippon 37).
Is 5 Maccabees an epitome of the Josippon, as Graf contended (p. 223)? It is tempting to dismiss so-called 5 Maccabees from the Pseudepigrpaha and assume it is derived from the late Jewish Josippon. This attribution would solve some problems and explain why specialists of the Pseudepigrapha and of Josippon do not discuss or mention 5 Maccabees (e.g. it is mentioned neither in J. Strugnell's "Josippon," NCE 7, p. 1124, nor in A. A. Neuman's "Josippon and the Apocrypha," Landmarks and Goals. Philadelphia: Dropsie, 1953; pp. 35-59). The acid test is always the sources themselves, and the manuscripts of 5 Maccabees and of Josippon resist a simple explanation of their relationship. 5 Maccabees, moreover, is dissimilar from the Arabic epitomes of Josippon (it is extremely different from the text edited and translated by M. Sanders and H. Nahmad; cf. their "A Judeo-Arabic Epitome of the Yosippon," Essays in Honor of Solomon B. Freehof, eds. W. Jacob, et al. Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1964; pp. 275-99). Since neither the Arabic of 5 Maccabees nor the Hebrew of Josippon was available, Cotton's translation of 5 Maccabees was juxtaposed with J. Wellhausen's translation of Josippon (Der arabische Josippus [Abhand. der Königl. Gesell. d. Wiss. z. Göttingen, Philol.-Hist. Klasse, n. F. 1, 4] Berlin: Weidmann, 1897). The comparison did not suggest that 5 Maccabees derives from Josippon. Any conclusion, however, must be unusually cautious since no reliable edition exists of either text. It is also difficult to conclude that 5 Maccabees is an abbreviated version of Josippon, because it is a longer text yet covers only a portion of the history represented in Josippon, which begins with Alexander the Great and concludes with the capture of Masada in A.D. 73.
Additional evidence that a relationship exists between 5 Maccabees and Josippon is that both interrupt, though with substantial differences, the chronology from Heliodorus to Antiochus IV by inserting an account of the translation of the Septuagint for Ptolemy. A significantly shared feature is the identification of the famous martyr Eleazar as one of the seventy translators.
Without having completed a detailed research on the relationships of 5 Maccabees with the other Maccabean books, with Josephus' two works, and with Josippon, one should not suggest a theory. A tentative hypothesis, which is similar to those suggested by Wellhausen (p. 47) and Beurlier (cols. 502f.), may be proposed: perhaps 5 Maccabees is a late first-century A.D. compilation of early documents, some now lost, and of a few new sections; this compilation was later epitomized along with other texts by the author of the Josippon.
Beurlier (col. 502) thought that the original language of the book is Hebrew. This possibility is enhanced by numerous Semitisms that suggest a Hebrew Vorlage. It is difficult to prove this hypothesis since some of the Semitisms could have been introduced in the transmission of the Karahuni and and Arabic texts. A note in some Arabic manuscripts at the end of the first sixteen chapters, however, reports that this section had been translated from Hebrew.
5 Maccabees is a chronicle of Jewish history from Heliodorus' attempt to rob the Temple treasury in the early decades of the second century B.C. to the death of Herod the Great's two sons about 6 B.C.—with an interpolation relating Eleazar's role in translating the Septuagint, as well as other interesting expansions (viz. the futile prayer of Antiochus Epiphanes, chp. 8). The work is bifurcated internally: the first section, 1:1-16:26, relates the history from Heliodorus to the death of Nicanor which is called "The Second Book of the Maccabees According to the Translation of the Hebrews"; 17:1-59:96, the second section, is the history from the war between the Roman Scipio and the Carthaginian King Hannibal to the murder of the sons Alexander and Aristobulus, which is called "The Second Book of Maccabees" (cf. the preface in the Polyglotte de Paris).
This work is not included in Charlesworth's The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.


text:
What's the value in punishment? These community groups say school discipline must include healing

What's the value in punishment? These community groups say school discipline must include healing

by Rupen R. Fofaria, EducationNC
September 9, 2021

Andrew Harding is a white man who teaches social studies and coaches football at Tarboro High School, where enrollment is more than 80% Black. He doesn't reach for the concept of "colorblindness" to connect with his students, though. He reaches for his past — his experience growing up in poverty and suffering trauma.

He finds connection there, where he can honor his students' unique identities. A big part of that connection, he says, is knowing that there are events in each of his students' lives that, depending on their response, determine outcomes for them.

Sometimes, their responses aren't the best. But blindly punishing them for those responses doesn't make sense to him, he says. He's had poor responses in his own past, after all, and he has gotten where he is now through healing and learning to do better.

He leads now with trauma-responsive interventions because he wants to give his students and players the same opportunities to heal.

"And we tell our kids this isn't going away," he said of the approach. "This is something that we wholeheartedly believe in."

Harding is invested in becoming better at it, too. He has joined an initiative with Rural Opportunity Institute, an organization based in Edgecombe County that uses human-centered design to help residents build and implement trauma resiliency and healing in the community.

As part of the Learning for Equity: A Network of Solutions (LENS) initiative, ROI is just one group promoting healing and restorative approaches to student behavior. The group says trauma too often goes unidentified in schools, and students end up being punished for things outside their control. That's particularly true of students of color and students with disabilities.

Trauma in schools

Black and Brown kids, researcher Sal Terrasi says, are especially at risk because historical and systemic racism means they are more likely to live in economic disadvantage or feel threatened because of their skin color.

"What is it that we can do as adults to accommodate that child, and to change the environment to make that child be successful, and to meet his or her needs?" said Terrasi, project director of the Lesley Institute for Trauma Sensitivity. "And we try to do that and see how far we can get with that before we diagnose the child as having a deficit."

In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente conducted a 10-year longitudinal study of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a term that includes abuse, household challenges, and neglect. The ACEs categories, according to the study, are events or experiences that can result in trauma.

The study of 17,000 adults reflecting on their childhood experiences found that more than 60% had at least one adverse childhood experience and 38% had two or more. The study also found a relationship between ACEs and negative health outcomes as adults.

While the research methodology tried to control for demographics, the study group skewed heavily white (75%) and affluent (75% attended at least some college).

"The ACEs categories originally didn't talk about neglect, didn't talk about homelessness, didn't talk about community violence, didn't talk about things like food insecurity, didn't talk about chronic poverty, and certainly didn't talk about things like institutional racism, systemic discrimination or anything like that," said Terrasi, who presented to the LENS organizations at a convening last October. "We know so much more now than we did about trauma when this study was originally conducted in the late '90s."

Roy Wade, a doctor at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, co-authored a 2014 study of urban youth that included a more diverse sample and studied many of the things Terrasi mentions. That study found additional categories of adverse childhood experiences, including single-parent homes; exposure to violence, adult themes, and criminal behavior; personal victimization; bullying; economic hardship; and discrimination.

Systemic racism and complex trauma

When the trauma is in response to a series of events, as in the case of Black and Brown kids who live in conditions created by the compounded effects of slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, it results in something called complex or developmental trauma.

"It's what happens when you're living in an unfavorable situation and you experience toxic stress, day after day after day," Terrasi said. "And that can lead to a pernicious, deleterious, and harmful type of trauma, which we see now affecting children in a major way in our schools every day."

These students often also experience another kind of trauma, historical trauma, because their parents might have grown up in these conditions and the trauma those parents experienced in schools and the community went unaddressed.

"They are still suffering from those effects," said Jason Marshall, a national education consultant who presented to LENS alongside Terrasi. "So we think about our young people and the families that they go home to every day. What are they still holding in those homes? What have been their parents' experiences in school? [Do] they still have trauma from their past days in school as marginalized students who don't have a lot of access to resources?"

Kids can "catch" this trauma from caregivers as if it were contagious, Marshall said. And it can mean students have difficulty with trust and perceive the school environment as threatening.

"We need to work with students to create a sense of community, a sense of belonging, so that students, and I mean all students, feel that they belong, that their presence is valued in the community," Terrasi said.

Creating community to heal trauma in Edgecombe County

Terrasi says most schools are not trauma-informed spaces, but every school should be. In fact, he says, they should be trauma-sensitive spaces. Trauma-informed means adults in the building are educated on trauma. Trauma-sensitive means they are doing something about it.

"We try to do that by focusing on relationships, the establishment of routines and rituals, creating venues for honest communication with students — to not only listen to the words that students are saying to us but to understand and to be sensitive to the emotions that underlie those words," he said.

That's what Harding is doing now at Tarboro High, where he's the defensive coordinator for the football team. About five years ago, while attending a conference with Tarboro's head football coach, he began learning how to show up in trauma-sensitive ways for his students and players, he says. From the conference, he extracted lessons about discipline that prioritizes growth and healing over punishment.

Last year, he said, he realized he could build on that experience after meeting ROI co-founder Seth Saeugling, who told him about the group's work in training resiliency leaders and creating healing environments in schools.

"And I texted our head football coach and said, dude, this is the next steps for everything we've been talking about," Harding said. Now, Harding joins a group of community members, including school leaders and teachers, who are taking the next steps together to put healing ahead of punishment.

When ROI co-founders Saeugling and Vichi Jagannathan began their work in Edgecombe, they focused on human-centered design (HCD). They wanted to help communities help themselves by defining their own problems, discovering their own needs, and working toward their own solutions.

ROI has performed several rounds of HCD interviews in Edgecombe, and "what people largely named were stories of unaddressed trauma and stories of stress," Saeugling said. "And so we really focused on ACEs and resilience."

As part of the LENS initiative, ROI focuses on learning, healing, and connecting.

"What can we do to positively impact ourselves and the people around us?" Saeugling said.

Through the LENS work, the community has helped more than 25 school and community leaders to become resilience trainers. Another team under the LENS project started by helping the school system develop a new code of conduct, and is now working with schools to create healing spaces.

Much of the work is aimed at shifting the school climate and default responses from punishment and isolation toward healing and safety. It also involves families in the restorative process.

"We all agreed that good discipline maintains and even strengthens relationships, and doesn't negatively impact learning," said Na'im Akbar, who is helping to lead the LENS efforts in Edgecombe. "Our data also tells us that while we want grace and understanding in our everyday lives, we sometimes have a hard time extending that grace ... to the parents of the school."

Posters are going up in school halls to remind students of ways to cope with trauma. Educators are creating safe spaces for students to come when they are having trouble regulating. And a group of students is starting a youth podcast to share experiences with trauma and countermeasures that have helped.

Giving kids safe spaces to learn

The community approach is similar in Wake County, where LENS member Education Justice Alliance is fighting to make schools restorative spaces.

In the Wake County Public School System, the largest district in the state, Black students received 62% of all short-term suspensions in 2018-19, even though they made up less than 23% of the student population.

The data on school-based referrals to the criminal justice system are even more staggering. Black students represented 73% of referrals that school year.

"So much of our work is around really telling the truth as we know it to be," EJA Executive Director Letha Muhammad said. "And even uncomfortable truth."

The truth, Muhammad and Marshall say, is that many students of color do not feel safe in the presence of police officers.

"And so we know that our young people currently are living within this world; this is their truth," Marshall said. "That police is not safe for them, and a lot of times they have police at their schools, so they're in classrooms that are trauma-induced spaces, or actual sites of oppression."

EJA has advocated for the removal of school resource officers from Wake County. It wants district schools to use peace builders instead. PeaceBuilders is a program that focuses on discipline prevention and positive response. Participants use de-escalation techniques and are trained to assist with school social emotional learning efforts.

"We can address trauma and make sure that students are in a place where they feel safe and they feel valued," Muhammad said.

Through LENS, EJA is expanding its advocacy and organizing work. The group is working with Wake County's board of education to gain access to better data to inform advocacy efforts. Last month, EJA's efforts resulted in school board approval of collection of more detailed data about students with disabilities and English language learners.

"This is significant because we have always known Black and Brown students are disproportionately referred to the school resource officers," Muhammad said. "But we suspect that students with disabilities or IEPs are also. So with this new mandate to collect data, this will give us more information and to continue to push to remove school resource officers from all Wake County Public Schools, as well as across North Carolina."

Muhammad said these aren't the first steps her group has taken, and they aren't the last. The goal is to continue naming problems, particularly for students of color with learning differences, so that more people understand that the school experience, itself, is a traumatic experience for many marginalized students.

Marshall says creating this awareness is important, but it must be met by productive action on the other end.

"What we know about the U.S. school system, because we're in a country that oppresses most marginalized people consistently, is that those same schools are sites of oppression," Marshall said. "And so you're either going to maintain that site of oppression, that learning space for a young person and for yourself, or you're going to choose to start doing practices that are moving everyone toward being in a liberative space. That is a decision that has to be made, make no bones about it."

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Feature Equity K-12 LENS-NC
Doris Stith, Community Enrichment Organization executive director, and Seth Saeugling, Rural Opportunity Institute co-founder, discuss cycles of trauma. Liz Bell/EducationNC
Andrew Harding is a white man who teaches social studies and coaches football at Tarboro High School, where enrollment is more than 80% Black. He doesn't reach for the concept of "colorblindness" to connect with his students, though. He reaches for his past — his experience growing up in poverty and suffering trauma.
He finds connection there, where he can honor his students' unique identities. A big part of that connection, he says, is knowing that there are events in each of his students' lives that, depending on their response, determine outcomes for them.
Sometimes, their responses aren't the best. But blindly punishing them for those responses doesn't make sense to him, he says. He's had poor responses in his own past, after all, and he has gotten where he is now through healing and learning to do better.
He leads now with trauma-responsive interventions because he wants to give his students and players the same opportunities to heal.
"And we tell our kids this isn't going away," he said of the approach. "This is something that we wholeheartedly believe in."
Harding is invested in becoming better at it, too. He has joined an initiative with Rural Opportunity Institute, an organization based in Edgecombe County that uses human-centered design to help residents build and implement trauma resiliency and healing in the community.
As part of the Learning for Equity: A Network of Solutions (LENS) initiative, ROI is just one group promoting healing and restorative approaches to student behavior. The group says trauma too often goes unidentified in schools, and students end up being punished for things outside their control. That's particularly true of students of color and students with disabilities.
Trauma in schools
Black and Brown kids, researcher Sal Terrasi says, are especially at risk because historical and systemic racism means they are more likely to live in economic disadvantage or feel threatened because of their skin color.
"What is it that we can do as adults to accommodate that child, and to change the environment to make that child be successful, and to meet his or her needs?" said Terrasi, project director of the Lesley Institute for Trauma Sensitivity. "And we try to do that and see how far we can get with that before we diagnose the child as having a deficit."
In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente conducted a 10-year longitudinal study of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a term that includes abuse, household challenges, and neglect. The ACEs categories, according to the study, are events or experiences that can result in trauma.
The study of 17,000 adults reflecting on their childhood experiences found that more than 60% had at least one adverse childhood experience and 38% had two or more. The study also found a relationship between ACEs and negative health outcomes as adults.
While the research methodology tried to control for demographics, the study group skewed heavily white (75%) and affluent (75% attended at least some college).
"The ACEs categories originally didn't talk about neglect, didn't talk about homelessness, didn't talk about community violence, didn't talk about things like food insecurity, didn't talk about chronic poverty, and certainly didn't talk about things like institutional racism, systemic discrimination or anything like that," said Terrasi, who presented to the LENS organizations at a convening last October. "We know so much more now than we did about trauma when this study was originally conducted in the late '90s."
Roy Wade, a doctor at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, co-authored a 2014 study of urban youth that included a more diverse sample and studied many of the things Terrasi mentions. That study found additional categories of adverse childhood experiences, including single-parent homes; exposure to violence, adult themes, and criminal behavior; personal victimization; bullying; economic hardship; and discrimination.
Systemic racism and complex trauma
When the trauma is in response to a series of events, as in the case of Black and Brown kids who live in conditions created by the compounded effects of slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, it results in something called complex or developmental trauma.
"It's what happens when you're living in an unfavorable situation and you experience toxic stress, day after day after day," Terrasi said. "And that can lead to a pernicious, deleterious, and harmful type of trauma, which we see now affecting children in a major way in our schools every day."
These students often also experience another kind of trauma, historical trauma, because their parents might have grown up in these conditions and the trauma those parents experienced in schools and the community went unaddressed.
"They are still suffering from those effects," said Jason Marshall, a national education consultant who presented to LENS alongside Terrasi. "So we think about our young people and the families that they go home to every day. What are they still holding in those homes? What have been their parents' experiences in school? [Do] they still have trauma from their past days in school as marginalized students who don't have a lot of access to resources?"
Kids can "catch" this trauma from caregivers as if it were contagious, Marshall said. And it can mean students have difficulty with trust and perceive the school environment as threatening.
"We need to work with students to create a sense of community, a sense of belonging, so that students, and I mean all students, feel that they belong, that their presence is valued in the community," Terrasi said.
Creating community to heal trauma in Edgecombe County
Terrasi says most schools are not trauma-informed spaces, but every school should be. In fact, he says, they should be trauma-sensitive spaces. Trauma-informed means adults in the building are educated on trauma. Trauma-sensitive means they are doing something about it.
"We try to do that by focusing on relationships, the establishment of routines and rituals, creating venues for honest communication with students — to not only listen to the words that students are saying to us but to understand and to be sensitive to the emotions that underlie those words," he said.
That's what Harding is doing now at Tarboro High, where he's the defensive coordinator for the football team. About five years ago, while attending a conference with Tarboro's head football coach, he began learning how to show up in trauma-sensitive ways for his students and players, he says. From the conference, he extracted lessons about discipline that prioritizes growth and healing over punishment.
Last year, he said, he realized he could build on that experience after meeting ROI co-founder Seth Saeugling, who told him about the group's work in training resiliency leaders and creating healing environments in schools.
"And I texted our head football coach and said, dude, this is the next steps for everything we've been talking about," Harding said. Now, Harding joins a group of community members, including school leaders and teachers, who are taking the next steps together to put healing ahead of punishment.
When ROI co-founders Saeugling and Vichi Jagannathan began their work in Edgecombe, they focused on human-centered design (HCD). They wanted to help communities help themselves by defining their own problems, discovering their own needs, and working toward their own solutions.
ROI has performed several rounds of HCD interviews in Edgecombe, and "what people largely named were stories of unaddressed trauma and stories of stress," Saeugling said. "And so we really focused on ACEs and resilience."
As part of the LENS initiative, ROI focuses on learning, healing, and connecting.
"What can we do to positively impact ourselves and the people around us?" Saeugling said.
Through the LENS work, the community has helped more than 25 school and community leaders to become resilience trainers. Another team under the LENS project started by helping the school system develop a new code of conduct, and is now working with schools to create healing spaces.
Much of the work is aimed at shifting the school climate and default responses from punishment and isolation toward healing and safety. It also involves families in the restorative process.
"We all agreed that good discipline maintains and even strengthens relationships, and doesn't negatively impact learning," said Na'im Akbar, who is helping to lead the LENS efforts in Edgecombe. "Our data also tells us that while we want grace and understanding in our everyday lives, we sometimes have a hard time extending that grace … to the parents of the school."
Posters are going up in school halls to remind students of ways to cope with trauma. Educators are creating safe spaces for students to come when they are having trouble regulating. And a group of students is starting a youth podcast to share experiences with trauma and countermeasures that have helped.
Giving kids safe spaces to learn
The community approach is similar in Wake County, where LENS member Education Justice Alliance is fighting to make schools restorative spaces.
In the Wake County Public School System, the largest district in the state, Black students received 62% of all short-term suspensions in 2018-19, even though they made up less than 23% of the student population.
The data on school-based referrals to the criminal justice system are even more staggering. Black students represented 73% of referrals that school year.
"So much of our work is around really telling the truth as we know it to be," EJA Executive Director Letha Muhammad said. "And even uncomfortable truth."
The truth, Muhammad and Marshall say, is that many students of color do not feel safe in the presence of police officers.
"And so we know that our young people currently are living within this world; this is their truth," Marshall said. "That police is not safe for them, and a lot of times they have police at their schools, so they're in classrooms that are trauma-induced spaces, or actual sites of oppression."
EJA has advocated for the removal of school resource officers from Wake County. It wants district schools to use peace builders instead. PeaceBuilders is a program that focuses on discipline prevention and positive response. Participants use de-escalation techniques and are trained to assist with school social emotional learning efforts.
"We can address trauma and make sure that students are in a place where they feel safe and they feel valued," Muhammad said.
Through LENS, EJA is expanding its advocacy and organizing work. The group is working with Wake County's board of education to gain access to better data to inform advocacy efforts. Last month, EJA's efforts resulted in school board approval of collection of more detailed data about students with disabilities and English language learners.
"This is significant because we have always known Black and Brown students are disproportionately referred to the school resource officers," Muhammad said. "But we suspect that students with disabilities or IEPs are also. So with this new mandate to collect data, this will give us more information and to continue to push to remove school resource officers from all Wake County Public Schools, as well as across North Carolina."
Muhammad said these aren't the first steps her group has taken, and they aren't the last. The goal is to continue naming problems, particularly for students of color with learning differences, so that more people understand that the school experience, itself, is a traumatic experience for many marginalized students.
Marshall says creating this awareness is important, but it must be met by productive action on the other end.
"What we know about the U.S. school system, because we're in a country that oppresses most marginalized people consistently, is that those same schools are sites of oppression," Marshall said. "And so you're either going to maintain that site of oppression, that learning space for a young person and for yourself, or you're going to choose to start doing practices that are moving everyone toward being in a liberative space. That is a decision that has to be made, make no bones about it."
Can schools reach students without engaging families? These groups say no, so they're building connections
by Rupen R. Fofaria | September 8, 2021

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


31 Awesome Petit Meuble Mural Wc is free HD wallpaper. This wallpaper was upload at September 8, 2017 upload by Diane Garcia in meubles.
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Guess all those bouncy-castles, ping-pong tables paid off. New stats belie the assumption that millennials are manic job hoppers. According to the Economist, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that men between the ages of 25 and 34 spend a median of 2.9 years with each employer, down slightly from 3.2 years in 1983. The Economist says this shows that the propensity to job hop is more about the age of the employee, not the era they were born in.
Tomorrow's CEOs better know tech. Fortune talks to Marc Feigen, a "CEO Whisperer" for dozens of A-list bosses about what boards today are looking for in a chief executive. Technology know-how, he says. "A generation of management, mainly top execs, could get skipped over because they're not comfortable enough with technology," he tells Fortune. Mr. Feigen predicts that within five years, the typical new CEO will be tech-savvy, and in his or her 40s.


One of many vintage texts on information constructions and algorithms! Examples are in Pascal.
A textual content that actually embodies its identify, CHEMISTRY: rules AND perform connects the chemistry scholars research within the school room (principles) with real-world makes use of of chemistry (practice). The authors accomplish this by way of beginning every one bankruptcy with an software drawn from a chemical box of curiosity and revisiting that program through the bankruptcy.
Info layout is the visualization of data via photograph layout. This precious consultant offers an inventive, informative, and sensible advent to the final ideas of knowledge design.
With chapters on figuring out the viewers, constitution, legibility and clarity, collection of media, experimentation and multi-platform supply, An advent to info layout supplies a whole evaluate of this basic point of visible communication.
Fully illustrated case reviews from prime designers supply expert perception into the demanding situations fascinated by developing info layout for print, interactive and environmental media. functional routines and counsel allow the reader to place this studying into perform. This makes it the precise publication for photograph layout scholars in addition to layout lovers.
An cutting edge time-tested undertaking of the indian academy of pediatrics, already offered greater than 10,000 copies contributions from greater than 2 hundred nationwide specialists and luminaries of their respective fields of curiosity and services unfold over 21 chapters whole textual content revised and up to date conserving in view the current wishes and attainable destiny requisites of practitioners and scholars of pediatrics crisp, concise and but complete textual content provides the topic in a simplified and useful demeanour contains info of advised development charts, consensus tips about immunization and lap nationwide immunization agenda 2012, urged through the lap committee on immunization presents present protocols for administration of assorted infectious and non-infectious illnesses, as advised by means of quite a few chapters and teams of the indian academy of pediatrics significant thrust on preventive pediatrics, so that it will familiarize the younger pediatricians with present in addition to destiny options during this box a ebook of significant software for the scholars, lecturers and practitioners of pediatrics in india and south asian organization for nearby cooperation (saarc) nations devoted to teenagers and adolescents-the destiny voters of india whose care and nurture are our objective, predicament and dedication.
Note several shapes of epithelial cells: columnar cells with well-defined borders in the collecting duct (CD), squamous cells in the thin segment (TS) of the nephron, and even more flattened cells lining blood vessels, the vasa recta in the kidney (VR). ϫ380. b. Dorsal root ganglion cells. Note the large size of these nerve cell bodies and the large, pale (euchromatic) nuclei (N) with distinct nucleoli. Each ganglion cell is surrounded by flattened satellite cells (S). The size of the ganglion cell and the presence of a euchromatic nucleus, prominent nucleolus, and Nissl bodies (rough-surfaced endoplasmic reticulum visible as darker granules within the cytoplasm) reflect the extensive synthetic activity required to maintain the exceedingly long processes (axons) of these cells.
Ice crystal formation is prevented by the use of cryoprotectants, rapid freezing, and extremely small tissue samples. The frozen tissue is then placed in a vacuum in the freeze fracture apparatus and struck with a knife edge or razor blade. The scanning-transmission electron microscope (STEM) combines features of the TEM and SEM to allow electronprobe X-ray microanalysis. CHAPTER 1 of immunocytochemical methods to transmission electron microscopy. Similarly, routine EM autoradiography techniques have been refined for use with transmission electron microscopy (see Fig.
Indd 18 Routine preparation of specimens for transmission electron microscopy begins with glutaraldehyde fixation followed by a buffer rinse and fixation with osmium tetroxide. Glutaraldehyde, a dialdehyde, preserves protein constituents by cross-linking them; the osmium tetroxide reacts with lipids, particularly phospholipids. The osmium also imparts electron density to cell and tissue structures because it is a heavy metal, thus enhancing subsequent image formation in the TEM. Ideally, tissues should be perfused with buffered glutaraldehyde before excision from the animal.


text:
Bindu Panicker is an Indian actress who has more than 200 films to her credit. She has played both comedy and character roles in Malayalam cinema. She won the Kerala State Film Award for the best supporting actress in 2001 for Soothradharan. She was a member of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists executive committee.

Awards and nominations

Filmography

Television

1995: Moharavam (Doordarshan)
2005: Sahadharmini (Asianet)
 Ellam Mayajalam (Asianet)
Santhanagopalam (Asianet)
Snehathinte Mullukal (Doordarshan)
Ayyadi Maname (Kairali TV)
Snehasammanam
Manalnagaram
Naalukettu
Vamsham
Roses in December

References

External links

Actresses from Kochi
Living people
Actresses in Malayalam cinema
Indian film actresses
20th-century Indian actresses
Kerala State Film Award winners
21st-century Indian actresses
Actresses in Malayalam television
Indian television actresses
Actresses in Tamil cinema
Year of birth missing (living people)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Engine oil and oil filter renewed after flushing the oil sump. Fuel system cleaner added. Lights, fluid levels, steering, suspension, exhaust, ancillary drive belts and general vehicle condition all checked. Visible condition of brakes checked. (call for full details).
As annual service plus pollen filter, fuel filter, air filter and spark plugs renewed. Brake drums (if fitted) removed for inspection. Diagnostic health check. (call for full details).
Tyre condition/pressure, anti freeze content, battery performance, lights, wipers and brake pads checked. These free checks only valid where vehicle design allows easy access without disassembly.


This is a photo I got by e-mail from my Australian friend, Llew. It is a part of the saga of disaster and rescue in our Country that claims unity in diversity.
It shows the resourcefulness of Indian soldiers – stationwise the least paid central government employees – when resources are rare. This is also what soldiers do "in peace" while two politicians from Andhra were assaulting each other for credit to be the first to ferry Telegus from the site of disaster.
The soldiers laid steel cables across the raging river. Then they lay down shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to hip to make a temporary bridge so that the stranded villages could walk or crawl over their backs to get across the raging river.
You probably never saw this photo on TV or in a newspaper or a Tabloid.
You saw the photos of those politicians fighting on a tarmac for getting credit for being the first to airlift people from a particular state.
You heard about Narendra Modi taking pains to pick out Gujaratis to rescue them.
Those soldiers didn't care where the stranded people came from. What were their religions? You would not know.


A recent review of literature suggested that interactions between support workers and people with learning disabilities with congenital deafblindess were lacking both in quantity and in quality. The authors of the current small study wanted to look in more detail at the perspectives of the support staff on their interactions with this group of people.
The authors analysed data from interviews with 8 disability support workers to identify common themes.
They found three key themes emerging from the interviews which they suggest support and elaborate on the findings of previous studies.
imperatives of the staff role.
The authors conclude from their discussion of these findings that there is a need for provider organisations responsible for services to people with congenital deafblindness to develop very clear policy and procedure documents to make the importance of social interaction between staff and clients explicit.


text:
Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study
Ellis Owusu-Dabo, Ann McNeill, Sarah Lewis, Anna Gilmore, John Britton
Background: The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a World Health Organization treaty, has now been ratified by over 165 countries. However there are concerns that implementing the Articles of the treaty may prove difficult, particularly in the developing world. In this study we have used qualitative methods to explore the extent to which the FCTC has been implemented in Ghana, a developing country that was 39th to ratify the FCTC, and identify barriers to effective FCTC implementation in low income countries.
Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 20 members of the national steering committee for tobacco control in Ghana, the official multi-disciplinary team with responsibility for tobacco control advocacy and policy formulation, were conducted. The Framework method for analysis and NVivo software were used to identify key issues relating to the awareness of the FCTC and the key challenges and achievements in Ghana to date.
Results: Interviewees had good knowledge of the content of the FCTC, and reported that although Ghana had no explicitly written policy on tobacco control, the Ministry of Health had issued several tobacco control directives before and since ratification. A national tobacco control bill has been drafted but has not been implemented. Challenges identified included the absence of a legal framework for implementing the FCTC, and a lack of adequate resources and prioritisation of tobacco control efforts, leading to slow implementation of the treaty.
Conclusion: Whilst Ghana has ratified the FCTC, there is an urgent need for action to pass a national tobacco control bill into law to enable it to implement the treaty, sustain tobacco control efforts and prevent Ghana's further involvement in the global tobacco epidemic.
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
Dive into the research topics of 'Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Ghana Medicine & Life Sciences 100%
nicotine Social Sciences 76%
Tobacco Medicine & Life Sciences 76%
International Cooperation Medicine & Life Sciences 27%
treaty Social Sciences 17%
bill Social Sciences 8%
adequate resources Social Sciences 6%
ratification Social Sciences 5%
Owusu-Dabo, E., McNeill, A., Lewis, S., Gilmore, A., & Britton, J. (2010). Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study. / Owusu-Dabo, Ellis; McNeill, Ann; Lewis, Sarah et al.
In: BMC Public Health, Vol. 10, No. 1, 01.01.2010.
Owusu-Dabo, E, McNeill, A, Lewis, S, Gilmore, A & Britton, J 2010, 'Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study', BMC Public Health, vol. 10, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
Owusu-Dabo E, McNeill A, Lewis S, Gilmore A, Britton J. Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study. BMC Public Health. 2010 Jan 1;10(1). doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
Owusu-Dabo, Ellis ; McNeill, Ann ; Lewis, Sarah et al. / Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study. In: BMC Public Health. 2010 ; Vol. 10, No. 1.
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title = "Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study",
abstract = "Background: The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a World Health Organization treaty, has now been ratified by over 165 countries. However there are concerns that implementing the Articles of the treaty may prove difficult, particularly in the developing world. In this study we have used qualitative methods to explore the extent to which the FCTC has been implemented in Ghana, a developing country that was 39th to ratify the FCTC, and identify barriers to effective FCTC implementation in low income countries. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 20 members of the national steering committee for tobacco control in Ghana, the official multi-disciplinary team with responsibility for tobacco control advocacy and policy formulation, were conducted. The Framework method for analysis and NVivo software were used to identify key issues relating to the awareness of the FCTC and the key challenges and achievements in Ghana to date. Results: Interviewees had good knowledge of the content of the FCTC, and reported that although Ghana had no explicitly written policy on tobacco control, the Ministry of Health had issued several tobacco control directives before and since ratification. A national tobacco control bill has been drafted but has not been implemented. Challenges identified included the absence of a legal framework for implementing the FCTC, and a lack of adequate resources and prioritisation of tobacco control efforts, leading to slow implementation of the treaty. Conclusion: Whilst Ghana has ratified the FCTC, there is an urgent need for action to pass a national tobacco control bill into law to enable it to implement the treaty, sustain tobacco control efforts and prevent Ghana's further involvement in the global tobacco epidemic.",
author = "Ellis Owusu-Dabo and Ann McNeill and Sarah Lewis and Anna Gilmore and John Britton",
doi = "10.1186/1471-2458-10-1",
journal = "BMC Public Health",
T1 - Status of implementation of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Ghana: a qualitative study
AU - Owusu-Dabo, Ellis
AU - McNeill, Ann
AU - Lewis, Sarah
AU - Gilmore, Anna
AU - Britton, John
N2 - Background: The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a World Health Organization treaty, has now been ratified by over 165 countries. However there are concerns that implementing the Articles of the treaty may prove difficult, particularly in the developing world. In this study we have used qualitative methods to explore the extent to which the FCTC has been implemented in Ghana, a developing country that was 39th to ratify the FCTC, and identify barriers to effective FCTC implementation in low income countries. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 20 members of the national steering committee for tobacco control in Ghana, the official multi-disciplinary team with responsibility for tobacco control advocacy and policy formulation, were conducted. The Framework method for analysis and NVivo software were used to identify key issues relating to the awareness of the FCTC and the key challenges and achievements in Ghana to date. Results: Interviewees had good knowledge of the content of the FCTC, and reported that although Ghana had no explicitly written policy on tobacco control, the Ministry of Health had issued several tobacco control directives before and since ratification. A national tobacco control bill has been drafted but has not been implemented. Challenges identified included the absence of a legal framework for implementing the FCTC, and a lack of adequate resources and prioritisation of tobacco control efforts, leading to slow implementation of the treaty. Conclusion: Whilst Ghana has ratified the FCTC, there is an urgent need for action to pass a national tobacco control bill into law to enable it to implement the treaty, sustain tobacco control efforts and prevent Ghana's further involvement in the global tobacco epidemic.
AB - Background: The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a World Health Organization treaty, has now been ratified by over 165 countries. However there are concerns that implementing the Articles of the treaty may prove difficult, particularly in the developing world. In this study we have used qualitative methods to explore the extent to which the FCTC has been implemented in Ghana, a developing country that was 39th to ratify the FCTC, and identify barriers to effective FCTC implementation in low income countries. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 20 members of the national steering committee for tobacco control in Ghana, the official multi-disciplinary team with responsibility for tobacco control advocacy and policy formulation, were conducted. The Framework method for analysis and NVivo software were used to identify key issues relating to the awareness of the FCTC and the key challenges and achievements in Ghana to date. Results: Interviewees had good knowledge of the content of the FCTC, and reported that although Ghana had no explicitly written policy on tobacco control, the Ministry of Health had issued several tobacco control directives before and since ratification. A national tobacco control bill has been drafted but has not been implemented. Challenges identified included the absence of a legal framework for implementing the FCTC, and a lack of adequate resources and prioritisation of tobacco control efforts, leading to slow implementation of the treaty. Conclusion: Whilst Ghana has ratified the FCTC, there is an urgent need for action to pass a national tobacco control bill into law to enable it to implement the treaty, sustain tobacco control efforts and prevent Ghana's further involvement in the global tobacco epidemic.
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
U2 - 10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
DO - 10.1186/1471-2458-10-1
JO - BMC Public Health
JF - BMC Public Health


text:
module Safemode
  class Scope < Blankslate
    def initialize(delegate = nil, delegate_methods = [])
      @delegate = delegate
      @delegate_methods = delegate_methods
      @locals = {}
    end

    def bind(instance_vars = {}, locals = {}, &block)
      @locals = symbolize_keys(locals) # why can't I just pull them to local scope in the same way like instance_vars?
      instance_vars = symbolize_keys(instance_vars)
      instance_vars.each {|key, obj| eval "@#{key} = instance_vars[:#{key}]" }
      @_safemode_output = ''
      binding
    end

    def to_jail
      self
    end

    def puts(*args)
      print args.to_s + "\n"
    end

    def print(*args)
      @_safemode_output += args.to_s
    end

    def output
      @_safemode_output
    end

    def method_missing(method, *args, &block)
      if @locals.has_key?(method)
        @locals[method]
      elsif @delegate_methods.include?(method)
        @delegate.send method, *unjail_args(args), &block
      else
        raise Safemode::SecurityError.new(method, "#<Safemode::ScopeObject>")
      end
    end

    private

      def symbolize_keys(hash)
        hash.inject({}) do |hash, (key, value)|
          hash[key.to_s.intern] = value
          hash
        end
      end

      def unjail_args(args)
        args.collect do |arg|
          arg.class.name =~ /::Jail$/ ? arg.instance_variable_get(:@source) : arg
        end
      end
  end
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub