Women, girded with sackcloth under their breasts, thronged the streets: The adult women of Jerusalem were bare-breasted, wearing sackcloth wrapped around the lower part of their bodies. They did this to show their distress. A wall painting in the ancient synagogue of Dura in Syria illustrates this. In this illustration the mother whose child has died is bringing him to Elijah. She appears just as described here, in a long skirt, presumably of sackcloth, but bare from the waist up (see Goodenough, volume 11, plate VIII). For sackcloth see the comments on 1Macc 2.14. An alternative model for this sentence is “Women, wearing only cloths made from goat’s hair around their waists, crowded the streets.”

Some of the maidens who were kept indoors ran together to the gates, and some to the walls, while others peered out of the windows: Young girls were often confined to their houses (Sir 26.10-12; 42.11-12). Good News Bible translates the maidens who were kept indoors as “Young girls whose parents had never allowed them to be seen in public.” But in languages that do not have the passive voice, we may say “Young girls whose parents had never allowed people to see them in public.” Good News Bible misunderstands the last half of this sentence. With New English Bible and Goldstein, we understand the gates, the walls, and the windows to be those of the young girls’ own houses, not the city. Out of curiosity, some of them took a chance on being seen in order to see what the commotion outside was about, but they still did not venture from their own homes. Ran together does not mean that a group of girls got together and ran somewhere, only that the girls in the different houses did the same thing. The gates refers to the doors that opened from the houses to the streets. The walls refers to the balconies or rooftops of the houses. The last half of this verse may be rendered “ran to the doorways or to the rooftops or even to the windows of their houses to see what was happening.”

An alternative model for this verse is:

• Women, wearing only coarse cloth around their waists, crowded the streets. Young girls, who were never allowed to be seen in public [or, whose parents had never allowed people to see them in public], ran to their doorways or to their rooftops or even to the windows of their homes to see what was happening.

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.