Maccabees - Concentration Camps
I'm amazed at how often history rhymes or repeats. As we enter into 3 Maccabees 4, we are seeing a registration scheme being put into place. I frequently think it's my own cleverness that tells me what to write and when, but I honestly have to give the credit to God.
Here's why....I delayed writing, thinking it was my own laziness. However, here we are talking about forced registration schemes and what they lead to just ONE DAY ahead of the ATF's deadline for registering your perfectly legal pistol brace. Was it my laziness or God's timing? Obviously, I'm not that clever. That kind of narrows it down, doesn't it?
As the chapter opens, the Greek Army begins to round up the Jews and transfer them all to a camp in Schedia, Egypt, just south of Alexandria. They were captured in the cities, put into ropes and chains and put on ships for the journey - much like the trains that would follow a few millenia later. One might say the King "concentrated" them into one camp....
When these people had been brought to the place called Schedia, and the voyage was concluded as the king had decreed, he commanded that they should be enclosed in the hippodrome that had been built with a monstrous perimeter wall in front of the city, and that was well suited to make them an obvious spectacle to all coming back into the city and to those from the city going out into the country, so that they could neither communicate with the king’s forces nor in any way claim to be inside the circuit of the city. - 3 Maccabees 4:11
When the King heard that some Jews had not registered and were secretly visiting the camp, he got outraged and demanded they be hunted, registered, tortured, and killed.
The entire race was to be registered individually, not for the hard labour that has been briefly mentioned before, but to be tortured with the outrages that he had ordered, and at the end to be destroyed in the space of a single day. - 3 Maccabees 4:14
But, as always, God was watching out for His people. While many suffered, He hampered the work of the scribes doing the registration. He made it impossible for them to get the job done:
But after the previously mentioned interval of time the scribes declared to the king that they were no longer able to take the census of the Jews because of their immense number, though most of them were still in the country, some still residing in their homes, and some at the place; the task was impossible for all the generals in Egypt. - 3 Maccabees 4:17-18
There's a lesson in there. If you didn't voluntarily register or otherwise make yourself known, you were in the clear. They weren't hiding or resisting, they just weren't rushing to comply in hopes of lenient treatment. The lesson is one I keep preaching: stop going along to get along. That doesn't mean be outwardly antagonistic to the powers that be, it means just stop playing by their rules. Don't volunteer to put yourself on their lists (Yeah, Ham radio guys, I said it). Don't rush out to get permission to do things, the government isn't where your rights come from.
Live your life without inviting the government into it at every opportunity.
As a reminder of who was at work, this chapter ends with this:
But this was an act of the invincible providence of Him who was aiding the Jews from heaven. - 3 Maccabees 4:21
Until next time, resist by not playing along.