Before we get started, I've got a quick invitation for you. If you happen to be in Rapid City, South Dakota, this Sunday, November 9th, I'm going to be guest preaching at Bible Fellowship Church at 9.45 in the morning. We're going to be talking about stuff from Galatians 3, Abraham, the Man of Faith, some Old Testament stuff. It's going to be fun. Come by, we'll go to church together.

We'll say hello. It'd be awesome. All right, let's get on with the episode.

Hey, everybody, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and we are working through the story of the Maccabeean Revolution from the Intertestamental Books of First and Second Maccabees.

Yesterday, we looked at how oppressive and horrible Antiochus the Fourth Epiphanies and his stool pigeons were in Jerusalem and the horrible things they did to people and how when they finally went out to the rural folk who still believed in God and tried to make one dude in particular, Mattathias, sacrifice to the Greek gods. He was like, no way.

Blood was shed and the beacon was lit. Revolution was in full swing. Well, when that happened,

Mattathias was not a young man. And so he dies pretty early in the story of First Maccabees.

But his most prominent, competent son, Judah Maccabees or First Maccabees, but his most prominent, competent son, Judah

Maccabees, or Judas Maccabees, which means the hammer. He's always portrayed as wielding

like a warhammer as well, even though we know that he took up a sword. I mean, dude is just

awesome in the way he's described in these books, And he is the main hero of this story, a military liberating leader, very William Wallace-like.

And over the next few chapters of First Maccabees, we get an account of him conducting this guerrilla-style swamp-fox sort of warfare in the hill country.

But Judas the Hammer is smart.

He knows how the Greeks fight.

The Greeks, all the way back to the time of when they were fighting the Persians during

the book of Esther in the 480s, BC, they were able to beat much bigger armies using this

fighting formation called a phalanx.

Surely you've seen this in a

movie or something else, but they got those round shields. The Spartans had the Greek lambda on

those shields. Maybe you can picture it. And then they had long spears and maybe like a sidearm,

a short sword on their hip. The long spears and the shields would all overlap. They'd create like a hedge.

They could basically just push their enemies because you couldn't hit them with projectiles.

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