Catholic Commentary
Antiochus's False Repentance and Hollow Vows
11Therefore he began in great part to cease from his arrogance, being broken in spirit, and to come to knowledge under the scourge of God, his pains increasing every moment.12When he himself could not stand his own smell, he said these words: “It is right to be subject to God, and that one who is mortal should not think they are equal to God.”13The vile man vowed to the sovereign Lord, who now no more would have pity upon him, saying14that the holy city, to which he was going in haste to lay it even with the ground and to make it a common graveyard, he would declare free.15Concerning the Jews, whom he had decided not even to count worthy of burial, but to cast them out to the animals with their infants for the birds to devour, he would make them all equal to citizens of Athens.16The holy sanctuary, which before he had plundered, he would adorn with best offerings, and would restore all the sacred vessels many times multiplied, and out of his own revenues would defray the charges that were required for the sacrifices.17Beside all this, he said that he would become a Jew and would visit every inhabited place, proclaiming the power of God.
2 Maccabees 9:11–17 describes the dying tyrant Antiochus IV making increasingly extravagant vows of restitution to the Jews and their temple after physical suffering forces partial acknowledgment of God's supremacy, though the author indicates God's mercy has already been permanently withdrawn from him. Antiochus promises to free Jerusalem, elevate Jews to citizenship, restore the temple, and convert to Judaism, but these coerced confessions represent desperation and self-deception rather than genuine repentance.
The tyrant confessing under torture is not repenting—he is negotiating with God, and the author makes clear that such bargaining forecloses mercy itself.
Commentary
2 Maccabees 9:11 — Broken Spirit, Not Broken Will The Greek verb underlying "broken in spirit" (ταπεινωθείς) carries the sense of being forcibly brought low — a humiliation imposed from without, not embraced from within. The phrase "under the scourge of God" (ὑπὸ τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ μάστιγος) deliberately echoes the covenantal vocabulary of divine chastisement familiar from Deuteronomy and the prophets. Antiochus's "pains increasing every moment" are presented not as random misfortune but as providential, escalating correction — the same God he defied in Jerusalem now presses upon his very body. Critically, the author says he "began in great part to cease from his arrogance" — the cessation is partial and circumstantial, not total or willed.
2 Maccabees 9:12 — A Correct Statement, Corruptly Motivated The words Antiochus utters here are theologically orthodox: "It is right to be subject to God, and that one who is mortal should not think they are equal to God." This is precisely the sin he had committed — he had styled himself Epiphanes ("God Manifest") and installed idols in the Temple. His statement is therefore a devastating self-indictment. Yet the author signals the corruption at its root: the admission is wrenched out of him by agony, not offered in freedom. Augustine would later distinguish between confessio laudis (confession of praise, freely given) and confessio peccati (confession of sin, which must be voluntary to be saving). Antiochus produces a grotesque parody of the latter: the correct words, coerced by the body's suffering, unaccompanied by any love of God.
2 Maccabees 9:13 — "Whom He Now No More Would Have Pity Upon" This is the theological hinge of the entire passage. The author does not suspend judgment until the vows are completed; he pronounces in the very moment of the vow that God "now no more would have pity upon him." This is not divine arbitrariness but the recognition that mercy rejected repeatedly hardens into a foreclosed possibility. Antiochus had been warned, had witnessed miracles, had heard the witness of the martyrs (chapters 6–7); mercy had been extended and contemptuously refused. The language anticipates the Pauline teaching on the "hardened heart" (Romans 1:24–28) — a condition in which God permits the sinner to inhabit the consequences he has chosen.
Verses 14–16 — The Escalating Extravagance of the Vows The three vows move in ascending order of what Antiochus had most sinfully desired to destroy: (1) Jerusalem — which he had rushed to raze — he now promises to declare free; (2) the Jews themselves — whom he had planned to leave unburied and feed to animals — he now promises to elevate to the status of Athenian citizens (the highest civic honor of the Hellenistic world); (3) the Temple — which he had plundered — he now promises to adorn magnificently and restore with multiplied sacred vessels at his own expense. The escalation reveals the psychology of coercive bargaining: each promise outbids the last. But the reader of 1–2 Maccabees has already encountered the sacred vessels desecrated (1 Macc 1:21–23) and the martyrs left unburied (2 Macc 7:4). The vows register not as hope but as the measure of the crimes.
2 Maccabees 9:17 — The Most Preposterous Vow: Conversion The climax is Antiochus's promise to "become a Jew" and travel proclaiming God's power to "every inhabited place" (the oikoumene). This would have struck the original Jewish reader as simultaneously absurd and sacrilegious — the man who had forced Jews to abandon their faith under torture now claims he will adopt it to escape torment. The promised missionary journey parodies the vocation of God's genuine witnesses. The author presents it not as inspirable but as the nadir of the tyrant's self-deception: even his repentance is grandiose and self-referential, a performance for God rather than a gift to God.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition has always distinguished between two fundamentally different responses to suffering: the contrition of the saints, which moves through pain toward love of God, and the mere attrition of the unrepentant, which uses the language of repentance as an instrument of self-preservation. The Council of Trent (Session XIV, De Paenitentia) taught that genuine contrition requires not only sorrow for sin but a firm purpose of amendment and love of God — even if imperfect charity (attritio) can be the starting point of conversion when paired with the sacrament. Antiochus's case illustrates the opposite: words of sorrow paired not even with imperfect love, but with manifest self-interest.
St. John Chrysostom, commenting on Pharaoh's similar pattern in Exodus, noted that the tyrant who confesses under plague only to harden again is not repenting but negotiating — treating God as a political adversary to be managed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1431) teaches that "interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart." Antiochus offers a reorientation of his words; his heart, the text makes clear, is untouched.
The passage also carries a deeply Catholic teaching about the limits of divine mercy once freely refused. The Catechism (§1864) speaks of the sin against the Holy Spirit as consisting precisely in the impenitent refusal of God's mercy — not because God's mercy is limited, but because the free refusal to receive it forecloses the very channel through which it works. Antiochus's trajectory — from the Temple's defilement through the martyrs' deaths to these hollow vows — is presented as the culmination of a long and freely chosen rejection of the living God.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics encounter Antiochus's pattern not primarily in tyrants but in themselves — in the promises made during illness, crisis, or grief that evaporate when the crisis passes ("Lord, if you heal me, I will..."). This passage is a mirror held up to what spiritual directors call "foxhole religion": the instrumentalization of God as a problem-solver rather than the worship of God as Lord. The author's blunt insertion — "whom he now no more would have pity upon" — is a sobering reminder that repeated, willful contempt for grace is not without consequence. For Catholics preparing for the Sacrament of Penance, this text is a powerful examination tool: Am I confessing because I love God and hate the sin? Or am I confessing because I fear the consequences and wish to manage them? The difference is not academic — it is the difference between a sacrament received fruitfully and one received as a kind of spiritual bargain. Antiochus warns us that God is not bargained with; He is loved, or He is not had at all.
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