refuse to violate the law. Such Jews, notably the woman and her seven sons who are tortured and killed, obviously suffer. But as 2 Maccabees makes plain, so do the Jews who agree to abandon Jewish law. There are no guarantees of life for one who fears the consequences of antagonizing those with authority over one's life.
Importantly, 2 Maccabees equates individual conscience with observant Judaism. The figure of Judas Maccabeus surfaces with an unshakable commitment to the demands on conscience of Jewish law and with an army of what today would be called guerrillas. Despite murders of his family and friends, and despite a series of military setbacks, Judas persists. The text attributes defeats of the Jews in various battles to the failure of their faith, as for example after the battle of Adullam, where Judas's men come upon slain Jews bearing Syrian amulets, "which the law forbids the Jews to wear. So it was clear to all that this was why these men had been slain" (2 Mac. 13:40).
While 2 Maccabees does not particularly deal with the problems of individual conscience in a life-vs.-belief situations, it does explain Judas's eventual victory as evidence that the wrath of God will be visited on those who abandon conscience. Compare this with Antigone, in which through personal tragedy, the laws of the universe reveal their power. The confrontation of conscience and life is far more personal in Antigone than in 2 Maccabees, with Creon standing for state authority when he orders Polyneices to remain unburied and Antigone (1) making a claim for the fundamental respect for the dead and (2) putting herself in the position of acting as an agent of natural law. Antigone's initial concern in burying Polyneices in defiance of Creon is an adherence to universal law, not a defiance of Creon's law, which cannot "override the laws of heaven" (Sophocles 14). Creon, thinking only in moralistic arguments and state terms, declares that ...