Derisive laughter and shame in 4 Maccabees

Abstract

Fourth Maccabees recounts the torture and execution of nine pious Jews by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV. It mentions laughter at key moments in the text, sometimes showing that anybody who disagrees with its thesis earns derisive laughter, and others dramatizing the laughter thrown at Jews for no good reason. As one Jewish hero faces execution, he tells Antiochus that he will not abandon his dietary laws to escape death, because that would make him a laughable hypocrite. “You will not laugh this laugh against me,” he exclaims. I situate 4 Maccabees within discourses of laughter from Jewish and Stoic sources of the early Roman empire to identify what Eleazar means by “this laugh” that he will prevent Antiochus from having. I argue that 4 Maccabees synthesizes a general view that laughter punishes wrongdoing with a Stoic distinction between earned and unearned derisive laughter. This resolves the tension of simultaneously knowing that derisive laughter should function as a consequence for impropriety and that Roman Jews face such laughter without impropriety. Fourth Maccabees provides Roman Jews an escape from the shame of laughter, even if it cannot plot an escape from the laughter itself.