They come against us in great pride and lawlessness: The pronoun They refers to Seron and his soldiers. Good News Bible makes this explicit by saying “Our enemies.” Great pride means that Seron and his soldiers were very arrogant, feeling that Judas and his troops were too weak to fight them. Lawlessness means that they were wicked people, not following God’s Law. For this whole clause Contemporary English Version has “Seron and his troops are arrogant sinners.” It combines great pride and lawlessness into “arrogant sinners.”

To destroy us and our wives and our children, and to despoil us: There is a grammatical difficulty here in Greek. The last and is not in the text, and it requires some good will to translate the line in this way, which most do. Goldstein takes another interpretation, and translates “intending to destroy us and take our wives and our children as spoil.” But this seems to require omitting the last pronoun us, which is in the text. Goldstein makes a point in saying that Judas’ men probably owned little that anyone would want to take as spoil, but it was common practice to take the wives and children of the dead as slaves. To be sure, Judas and his men probably had few desirable possessions on their persons, but if Judas is here speaking not just of his own men and their families (who were presumably hiding back in the hills somewhere), but of all the Jewish people, his statement could be understood in the following way (and the Greek can be understood this way with no problem): “They are coming to destroy us and our families so that they can despoil us [or, take all our possessions].” The second purpose clause, “so that they can despoil us,” depends on the first one, “to destroy us and our families,” and not on the verb “are coming.” We recommend this, and suggest the following model for the verse:

• Seron and his troops are arrogant and have no regard for the Law. They are coming so that they can kill us and all our families and then take everything we own.

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on 1-2 Maccabees. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2011. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.