23
Judas pressed the pursuit with the utmost vigor, putting the sinners to the sword, and destroyed as many as thirty thousand.
24
Timothy himself fell into the hands of Dositheus and Sosipater and their men. With great guile he begged them to let him go in safety, because he held the parents of most of them, and the brothers of some, to whom no consideration would be shown.
25
And when with many words he had confirmed his solemn promise to restore them unharmed, they let him go, for the sake of saving their kindred.
26
Then Judas marched against Carnaim and the temple of Atargatis, and slaughtered twenty-five thousand people.
27
After the rout and destruction of these, he marched also against Ephron, a fortified town where Lysias lived with multitudes of people of all nationalities. Stalwart young men took their stand before the walls and made a vigorous defense; and great stores of war engines and missiles were there.
28
But the Jews called upon the Sovereign who with power shatters the might of his enemies, and they got the town into their hands, and killed as many as twenty-five thousand of those who were in it.
29
Setting out from there, they hastened to Scythopolis, which is seventy-five miles from Jerusalem.
30
But when the Jews who lived there bore witness to the goodwill that the people of Scythopolis had shown them and their kind treatment of them in times of misfortune,
31
they thanked them and exhorted them to be well disposed to their race in the future also. Then they went up to Jerusalem, as the festival of weeks was close at hand.
32
After the festival called Pentecost, they hurried against Gorgias, the governor of Idumea,
33
who came out with three thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry.