When I was a child we had a large Catholic Bible with beautiful colored photographs of paintings in it. My favorite was of a man charging an elephant with a spear. The story was in the book of Maccabees, and the man attacking and killing the elephant was Eliezar Maccabee. On the top of the elephant riding in a hut was a general who fought for the Greek King Antiochus Epiphanes IV. The general was shooting arrows at Eliezar. The elephant, having been pierced by the spear was falling on Eliezar. I loved that painting and would gaze at it often.

When I grew up and "got saved," as I would read the King James Bible (that all Protestants said was without error and nothing had been added to it or taken from it), I often wondered where the elephants went.

Later when I became interested in ancient manuscripts, I learned that the first English Bibles, and Luther's original German Bible, had the elephants in them. Somewhere in the 17th Century the Books of the Maccabees and a dozen others were removed. I have yet to find out who did it. Was it one man? Who was it? Was it a committee? Who were they? By what authority did they remove books that had been in the Bible for thousands of years? How did it happen? No one seems to know.

Often in Bible studies teachers would make references to Antiochus Epiphanes IV being a type of the Anti-Christ. So wouldn't that make the elephant the totem symbol of Anti-Christ?


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