Words of wisdom, words of war : a study of terms and concepts in IV Maccabees

Abstract

In the words of Jan Willem van Henten (1997:296), the fourth book of Maccabees “presents itself to the reader, from the very beginning of the work, as a philosophical discourse about the dominance of devout reason over the emotions”. Despite the fact that the terminology and phraseology employed in this initial portrayal keeps recurring at various points throughout the book, several scholars have noticed a disturbing mismatch between the prologue and the main body of the work. This paper addresses the question whether or not IV Maccabees is structured according to a thematically unified plan, and attempts to find an answer by focusing on some philosophical terms and concepts and the ways in which these feature in the composition as a whole.