1 Maccabees 7:19–20

After withdrawing from Jerusalem, the Seleucid general Bacchides executes Jewish apostates and loyalists alike, discarding them in a mass grave, before installing the illegitimate high priest Alcimus as his political surrogate. These two verses capture the twin mechanics of foreign domination: savage elimination of opposition and the cynical use of a collaborator to lend local legitimacy to alien power. Together they mark a dark consolidation of control over the holy land and the holy office of the high priesthood.

Verse 19 — The Pit at Bezeth

Bacchides does not linger in Jerusalem but withdraws strategically to Bezeth (likely Beth-zaith, a location north of Jerusalem in the hill country of Judah), transforming it into a command post from which he can administer violence at arm's length from the holy city. The detail that he "seized many of the deserters who were with him" is striking: these were Jews who had defected to the Seleucid cause, presumably expecting protection or reward. Instead, Bacchides eliminates them — presumably to prevent them from becoming future liabilities or double agents — demonstrating the ruthlessness inherent in collaboration. The text adds "and some of the people," broadening the massacre beyond just apostates to include ordinary Judeans, underlining that this is not merely political housekeeping but terroristic repression of a subject population.

The image of the large pit (Greek: bothros megas) is both physically and symbolically resonant. Mass graves were instruments of psychological terror in antiquity, denying the dead the burial rites that Jewish law considered sacred (cf. Tobit 1:17–18; 2:3–8). To be cast unburied into a pit was to be treated as refuse — stripped of human dignity even in death. The author of 1 Maccabees, writing for a Jewish audience that knew Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones (Ez 37) and the psalms of lament over the unburied dead (Ps 79:2–3), would expect his readers to feel the full horror of this image. It is not a neutral military report; it is an indictment.

Verse 20 — Alcimus Installed

The installation of Alcimus as ruler "in charge of the country" (epi tēs chōras) with a Seleucid military garrison marks a crucial development in the narrative of 1 Maccabees. Alcimus was of priestly lineage (cf. 7:14) and had been appointed high priest by the king, but his legitimacy was poisoned from the start by his dependence on foreign military force and his earlier apostasy (7:5–7). The Maccabean author is deliberately ironic: the man placed in charge of the country — the land promised to Abraham and his descendants — rules only because a pagan general propped him up with soldiers before departing. True authority over the holy land, the text implies, belongs to God alone and to those who faithfully serve him.

Bacchides' departure "to the king" (Demetrius I Soter) completes a cycle of delegated imperial control. The general does the dirty work, installs the puppet, and returns to the imperial court, leaving the consequences to fester. This pattern — distant empire, local collaborator, occupying garrison — is rendered with economical precision by the author, who wants the reader to understand that Alcimus is not a leader but a functionary, not a shepherd but a hireling.

From a Catholic perspective, these verses illuminate two intertwined theological realities: the desecration of sacred office and the dignity of the human person in death.

The Corruption of Sacred Office. The Catechism teaches that sacred office exists for service, not domination (CCC 876), and that those who hold authority in God's name bear a grave responsibility to exercise it in fidelity to God rather than to human power. Alcimus represents a persistent temptation in salvation history: the coopting of priestly or religious authority by political power. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on the priesthood (De Sacerdotio), warned that the priest who acquires his position through base means becomes an instrument of destruction rather than sanctification. Pope Gregory VII, echoing this tradition, fought the Investiture Controversy on precisely this ground — that sacred office cannot be the gift of secular rulers. The scene in 1 Maccabees 7:20 is, in this light, an Old Testament prototype of the very crisis the Church had to confront repeatedly in its history.

The Dignity of the Dead. The mass pit at Bezeth is a violation of what Catholic teaching affirms as the dignity owed to the human body even after death. The Catechism (CCC 2300) calls for respect for the bodies of the dead as an act of faith in the resurrection. The Book of Tobit, considered deuterocanonical by the Catholic Church, presents the burial of the dead as a corporal work of mercy (Tb 1:17–2:8). Bacchides' pit is the antithesis of this — a desecration that the Maccabean author presents not merely as cruelty but as sacrilege. Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§160), speaks of the human body as having an ecological and spiritual dignity that must never be treated as disposable. The pit is disposability made literal.

Contemporary Catholics encounter the dynamic of these verses whenever religious institutions are pressured to align themselves with political or ideological power in exchange for survival or influence. The figure of Alcimus — a man of genuine priestly lineage who nonetheless owes his position to a foreign general's sword — is not a relic of the second century BC. He appears whenever church leaders trim doctrine to please governments, when parishes adopt the language and priorities of whatever movement promises them cultural relevance, or when individual Catholics trade the prophetic voice of faith for social acceptance.

The practical challenge these verses pose is one of structural honesty: Who really controls what I call "my" faith? Is my religious practice rooted in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of the Maccabees — or has it been quietly colonized by the approval of the surrounding culture? The pit at Bezeth is also a call to examine how we treat the marginalized and the dead in our own communities. Do we give dignified burial and remembrance to those the world discards? The corporal work of mercy remains urgent. Pray for those who hold sacred office under worldly pressure, and examine your own allegiances honestly.