And when the Jews observed this … : The demonstrative pronoun this refers to Philopator, the elephants, and his soldiers all coming into the stadium. So we may begin this verse with “When the Jews saw what was happening….”

They raised great cries to heaven so that even the nearby valleys resounded with them means they prayed so loudly to God that the surrounding valleys echoed with their cries. It is not clear what the author means by valleys. Alexandria is located in a flat area of land; there are no valleys around there now, but cutting and filling in modern times has removed some very low hills that were once there. We must assume that the hollows in between these low hills are what is meant, although we would not ordinarily think of echoes bouncing off them. Since the writer was almost certainly from Alexandria, he surely knew the terrain. It is possible, of course, that this is simply an overstatement for effect. In the first model below we suggest a way around this problem, but translators who feel no problem here can keep the idea of valleys by saying “they prayed so loudly to God that the nearby valleys echoed with their cries” (similarly Contemporary English Version) or “… that their cries echoed in the nearby valleys.”

And brought an uncontrollable terror upon the army may be rendered “and because of the noise the soldiers could not control their terror” or “and the noise filled the soldiers with an uncontrollable terror.”

Here are alternative models for this verse:

• When the Jews saw what was happening, they began praying so loudly that the surrounding land [or, valleys] echoed with such a noise that the soldiers could not hold back their terror.

• … they began praying so loudly that their cries echoed so loudly in the nearby valleys that the soldiers could not control their terror.

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on 3-4 Maccabees. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2018. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.