stave off any succession challenges to the new boy king Antiochus V Eupator, who was only 9 years old. As such, regardless of how many casualties the Maccabees inflicted at Beth Zur, he had to withdraw and cede the field to the rebels. Similarly, the Maccabees may have intentionally declined to attempt to conquer Jerusalem earlier in the knowledge that doing so would have provoked a fierce response from Antiochus IV. The resulting succession struggle enabled the Maccabees time to establish new "facts on the ground" by taking Jerusalem, cleansing the Temple, and making clear they were in control of Judea, although they did not challenge the Acra immediately with its garrison of Greeks and Hellenist-friendly Jews. Analysis Historians distrust the figures given to the size of the Seleucid army in 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees as implausibly large. 1 Maccabees claims that the Seleucids had 60,000 infantry and 5,000 horsemen, while 2 Maccabees claims it was 80,000 infantry and "all" of their cavalry; these numbers seemingly exceed the troops available even during an unrealistic mass mobilization of all of the troops in the western half of the Seleucid Empire, even ignoring that many troops had been sent east with Antiochus IV. An army that size would also have been a logistics nightmare to feed in the Judean hillside. Still, as Lysias was the regent, the Seleucid force was surely quite large and likely larger than the force sent during the Battle of Emmaus a year prior, just not to the degree depicted in the books. In the same way, the casualty figures are likely too high; 1 Maccabees claims 5,000 Seleucid soldiers fell in battle, and 2 Maccabees claims 11,000 Seleucid soldiers fell. 1 Maccabees does not describe the Seleucid army collapsing in a panic-driven retreat, though, the likely result of such catastrophic casualties had they truly been inflicted. Angelic ally of the Maccabees According to 2 Maccabees, God directly sent an angel armed with weapons of gold to aid the Maccabees. Since 1 Maccabees does not mention an event such as a mysterious helper that surely the pro-Hasmonean author of the book would have eagerly proclaimed had it had any basis, the claim is not considered historical. Still, it proved a popular motif for art and literature afterward. It appears in the "Book of Dreams" in the Book of Enoch, chapters 83-90 (the Animal Apocalypse), where the angel