5 When a false rumor spread that Antiochus had died, Jason took no fewer than a thousand soldiers and made an unexpected assault on the city. When the troops on the wall had been defeated, and the city had been seized at last, Menelaus fled into the elevated fortress.
6 Jason mercilessly slaughtered his own citizens. He failed to realize military success against one’s own people is the greatest misfortune but thought that he was winning trophies from his enemies and not from his fellow citizens.
7 But he didn’t gain the government; instead, he received shame as a result of his plot and again fled as a fugitive into Ammonite country.
8 Finally, he came to a miserable end. Brought up on charges before Aretas the Arab tyrant, he fled from city to city, chased by everyone. Hated as a traitor to the laws and loathed as the murderer of his native land and citizens, he was cast ashore in Egypt.
9 He, who had exiled many from their homeland, died in a foreign land after he sailed to the Spartans to seek protection because of their kinship.
10 So the one who had cast out a crowd of corpses to lie unburied died without mourning and received no funeral or place in his ancestral burial plot.
11 When the news of these events reached the king, he thought Judea was in revolt. So he broke camp and marched from Egypt while wild with emotion, and took the city by force.