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Miguel de Silveira's El Macabeo (Naples, 1638), a sacred epic in Gongorine style based on the biblical Books of Maccabees, has generally been read in terms of the New Christian author's supposed crypto-Judaism or, conversely, his Catholic orthodoxy. Through a case study of a single lyrical episode, the lamentation of an allegorical Jerusalem as a grieving widow, the article goes beyond this binary to demonstrate how the poem appeals to a readership not defined by adherence to one faith or another. This passage's complex layering of allusions to the prophetic and poetic books of the Old Testament, the epics of Tasso and Lope, and the major poems of Góngora from the 1610s, primarily his Soledades, are united by dense imagery of seafaring and drowning. They articulate a penitential vision of exile accompanied by an apologetic promise of redemption in dialogue with the sacred history of the period. Methodologically, the analysis also proposes an appraisal of literary biblical adaptation, which brings into consideration the affective resonance of the reader's experience of public performance of sacred texts—in this case, through the Tenebrae liturgy and music—in the reception and exegesis of an open-ended text.
