The two books about the revolt read the same events differently, and the difference turned out to matter doctrinally. 1 Maccabees explains the victory politically and militarily. God does not intervene on stage; there is no angel in the sky, no resurrection, no afterlife worth the name. Deliverance comes through a family that fought, and the book's purpose is to establish that this family was the right one to rule and to hold the high priesthood, a contested claim rather than an obvious one, since the Hasmoneans did not belong to the line from which high priests had been drawn.
2 Maccabees is the reverse. Its centre is the martyrdoms: Eleazar the scribe refusing to eat pork or even to pretend to, and the seven brothers tortured to death one after another in front of their mother, each declaring as he dies that the King of the universe will raise them up to an everlasting renewal of life. This is among the clearest statements of bodily resurrection in Jewish literature before the New Testament, and it aligns with the Pharisaic position against the Sadducean one.
Two further passages carried great weight later. Judas is described taking up a collection and sending it to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of soldiers who had died wearing forbidden amulets, with the comment that it is a holy and pious thought to pray for the dead. Judas is also shown a vision of the long-dead prophet Jeremiah praying for the people. Catholic theologians cited both for purgatory, for prayer for the dead and for the intercession of the saints; reformers who rejected those doctrines had a direct interest in rejecting the book, and said as much.