Elephant

The elephant appears in the UPDV in 1 Maccabees, where the Seleucid army's war elephants are a recurring fixture of the campaigns against Judea. They enter the narrative with Antiochus's Egyptian expedition: "And he entered into Egypt with a great multitude, with chariots and elephants, and horsemen, and a great number of ships" (1Mac 1:17). When Antiochus later turns his armies on Judah, Lysias is given "half the army, and the elephants" with charge over Judea and Jerusalem (1Mac 3:34).

Lysias's Elephant Corps at Bethzacharam

The fullest description comes in 1 Maccabees 6, where the king's forces march south against Judas. "His forces included elephants trained for battle" (1Mac 6:30). Before the engagement at Bethzacharam the handlers "showed the elephants the blood of grapes, and mulberries to provoke them to fight" (1Mac 6:34). Each beast is set in the line with its own detachment: "there stood by every elephant a thousand men in coats of mail, and with helmets of brass on their heads: and five hundred horsemen set in order were chosen for every beast" (1Mac 6:35), "ahead of wherever the beast would be" (1Mac 6:36). On every animal stood a wooden tower holding "thirty valiant men who fought from above; and an Indian to rule the beast" (1Mac 6:37).

Eleazar Under the King's Elephant

The corps is also the setting for Eleazar the Auran's death. Seeing one of the beasts harnessed with the king's harness and taller than the rest, "it seemed to him that the king was on it" (1Mac 6:43); he ran in, struck through the legion, "went between the feet of the elephant, and put himself under it: and slew it, and it fell to the ground on him, and he died there" (1Mac 6:46).

The UPDV does not use "elephant" elsewhere — Job 40:15, where some older versions glossed the creature as an elephant, reads "behemoth" in UPDV.