Catholic Commentary
Rome's Letter Affirming the Jewish Alliance (Part 2)
23to all the countries, to Sampsames, to the Spartans, to Delos, to Myndos, to Sicyon, to Caria, to Samos, to Pamphylia, to Lycia, to Halicarnassus, to Rhodes, to Phaselis, to Cos, to Side, to Aradus, Gortyna, Cnidus, Cyprus, and Cyrene.24They also wrote this copy to Simon the high priest.
1 Maccabees 15:23–24 records a Roman Senate decree that lists nineteen Mediterranean nations and cities receiving notice of Rome's friendship and protection for the Jewish people under Simon the high priest. The exhaustive catalogue demonstrates that Jewish sovereignty received international recognition, with Simon acknowledged as the legitimate civil, military, and religious leader of the Jewish nation.
Rome's letter of protection to nineteen Mediterranean powers was not hidden diplomacy but a public announcement to the whole world that Israel was now under sacred protection.
1 Maccabees 15:23 — The Catalogue of Nations
The extraordinary list of nineteen named recipients in verse 23 is not mere diplomatic formality; it is a theological statement embedded in historical prose. Each name represents a distinct political entity across the eastern Mediterranean: Sampsames (likely Samsun on the Black Sea coast), the Spartans (with whom the Jews claimed a legendary kinship, cf. 1 Macc 12:2–23), Delos (the sacred Aegean island and major trading hub), Myndos, Sicyon, Caria, Samos, Pamphylia, Lycia, Halicarnassus, Rhodes (a major naval power), Phaselis, Cos (famed for its Jewish diaspora community), Side, Aradus (a Phoenician island city), Gortyna (in Crete), Cnidus, Cyprus (home to a significant Jewish population), and Cyrene (in North Africa, also home to many Jews).
The author of 1 Maccabees is doing something quite deliberate in preserving this list in full. By cataloguing the recipients so exhaustively, he demonstrates that the Roman declaration of friendship and protection for the Jewish people was not a private bilateral treaty but a publicly proclaimed covenant witnessed by virtually every significant power in the Mediterranean world. For Jewish readers under Seleucid pressure, this would have been enormously encouraging: the whole inhabited world (the oikoumene of Roman influence) had been notified that Israel stood under Roman protection.
The list also maps diaspora geography. Cos, Cyprus, and Cyrene were not merely Greek powers; they housed large Jewish communities. The letter thus served the dual function of diplomatic dispatch and diaspora protection notice — any ruler or city receiving this document now knew that attacking or oppressing Jews would constitute an affront to Rome.
The enumeration resembles the "table of nations" literary device found in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 10; Acts 2:9–11), where the listing of peoples itself communicates the universal scope of an event or proclamation. Here, the "event" is the legitimization of Hasmonean Jewish sovereignty.
1 Maccabees 15:24 — The Copy Sent to Simon
The final verse of this section is deceptively simple: "They also wrote this copy to Simon the high priest." Yet this brief statement carries enormous weight in its context. Simon bar Mattathias, the last surviving son of the Maccabean family, is here acknowledged by the Roman Senate as the legitimate high priest of the Jewish people — their civil, military, and religious head. Receiving a copy of the circular letter places Simon in explicit fellowship with Rome's client-allies and protectorates.
The word "copy" (Greek antigraphon) indicates this is an officially authenticated duplicate of the senatorial decree, not a summary. Simon thus holds in his hands a document whose text has been simultaneously delivered to nineteen other sovereign powers. He is, in the eyes of Rome, their peer and partner. This brings the long Maccabean struggle — begun by his father Mattathias in the hills of Judea — to a moment of extraordinary international recognition.
On a typological level, this verse anticipates the reality of the Church receiving the authoritative word that has been proclaimed to all nations. Just as Simon, as high priest, received the letter that had gone out to the whole Mediterranean world, so the Church, led by the successor of Peter, receives and guards the word that is proclaimed urbi et orbi — to the city and to the world.
From a Catholic theological perspective, this passage illuminates several interlocking themes rooted in Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium.
The Universal Scope of Covenant Witness. Catholic tradition has always understood Israel's covenantal life as ordered toward universality. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate (§4) affirms that the Church "received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God... concluded the Ancient Covenant." The dispatch of Rome's protective letter to nineteen nations anticipates the missionary structure of the New Covenant, where the Gospel goes to all peoples as a public, witnessed proclamation — not a private arrangement.
The Role of Civil Authority in Protecting God's People. The Catechism teaches that "political authority... must always be exercised... as a moral force" ordered to the common good (CCC §1902). Rome's letter, whatever its strategic motivations, served as an instrument of genuine justice for a people under existential threat. St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book II), reflects that earthly states can, at their best, reflect ordered justice — and this episode shows pagan Rome functioning in precisely that capacity toward Israel.
The High Priest as Sign of Unity. That the copy goes specifically to Simon "the high priest" is theologically significant. The high priest in Israelite religion was the mediating figure between God and the people, and between Israel and the nations (cf. Sirach 50). Catholic tradition, following the Letter to the Hebrews, reads the Aaronic high priesthood as a type of Christ's eternal priesthood (Hebrews 4:14–5:10). Simon's reception of the letter as the point of convergence between Israel and the wider world prefigures Christ as the one in whom all the nations find their covenant relation with God ratified and fulfilled.
The image of nineteen disparate nations receiving a common declaration about God's people speaks directly to Catholics living in a religiously plural, globally connected world. It is a reminder that the protection and dignity of a faith community is legitimately a matter of public, international concern — not merely a private affair. Catholics today are called to advocate publicly for persecuted Christian and Jewish communities worldwide, recognizing that silence in the face of religious persecution is a failure of justice, not merely charity.
More personally, Simon receiving his copy of a letter already sent across the world is an image of the Catholic's relationship to Sacred Scripture and Tradition: the word of God has gone forth to the whole world, and each believer receives it not in isolation but as part of that vast, multi-national company. To read Scripture is to hold in your hands what the whole Church — across centuries and continents — has received and transmitted. This should banish spiritual loneliness and cultivate a sense of belonging to something immeasurably larger than oneself. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium (§272), speaks of the joy that comes from knowing we are part of a people: this passage makes that joy geographic, historical, and concrete.