On the Path of the Maccabees? : The Rhetoric of 'Holy War' in the Sermons and Pamphlets of 'Puritans' in the Run-up to the English Civil War (1620-1642)

Abstract

This chapter briefly considers the biblicism practiced in the Maccabean books themselves in order to demonstrate that the radical Protestants writing in England in the decades before the civil war's outbreak can be in any way conceived as heirs of the Maccabees. 1 Maccabees is, in fact, full of explicit references to older texts in the Old Testament together with inherited and established descriptive patterns. Both the Maccabees and the radical Protestant clerics before and during the English Civil War embraced what Jan Assmann has termed the "mosaic differentiation". Representatives of both the earlier and later movements transferred the narrative to the political situation of their own age, applying the "mosaic differentiation" to justify militancy vis-à-vis the political rulers. In this sense the Protestant preachers of the Civil War were of one mind with the Maccabees.