We are reading stories from one of the books of the Macabees at morning prayer this week. There are a lot of elephants there.

Nuggats such as this are on offer: “They offered the elephants the juice of grapes and mulberries, to arouse them for battle.”

So far as I’m aware, elephants only appear in Macabees and in no other biblical text, leading to the obvious conclusion that elephants are apocryphal.