Books of the Maccabees

The shared name is a convenience rather than a description. 1 Maccabees was written in Hebrew, probably late in the second century BCE, and survives only in Greek translation. It narrates the persecution under Antiochus IV, the refusal of the priest Mattathias and his sons, the campaigns of Judas Maccabeus, the cleansing of the Temple, and the succession of Jonathan and Simon, closing as Simon's son John Hyrcanus takes power around 134 BCE. Its manner is that of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible: dated by Seleucid regnal years, sparing with the miraculous, and committed to the legitimacy of the Hasmonean house.

2 Maccabees was composed in Greek and is explicitly a condensation. Its author says he has boiled down the five books of Jason of Cyrene, a work otherwise entirely lost. It covers a shorter period, ends before Judas dies, overlaps 1 Maccabees rather than continuing it, and is written in an emotional rhetorical Greek full of heavenly apparitions and temple wonders. Two festal letters addressed to the Jews of Egypt stand at its head.

3 Maccabees has nothing to do with the revolt. It is a Greek novella about the Jews of Egypt threatened with mass execution by elephants under Ptolemy IV Philopator, decades before Antiochus, and delivered at the last moment. 4 Maccabees is not a narrative at all but a philosophical discourse, Stoic in vocabulary and thoroughly Jewish in commitment, arguing that devout reason is master of the passions and using the martyrs of 2 Maccabees, the aged Eleazar, the seven brothers and their mother, as its demonstration.

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.

The canonical position is untidy and worth stating exactly. Catholic Bibles contain 1 and 2 Maccabees, defined as canonical at Trent in 1546 and placed at the end of the historical books. The Eastern Orthodox churches receive 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, and Greek Bibles commonly print 4 Maccabees in an appendix as valuable rather than canonical; the Georgian tradition has included all four. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon contains books called Meqabyan which share the name and almost nothing else, being different compositions rather than translations of these. Protestant Bibles class 1 and 2 Maccabees as Apocrypha, printed in Luther's Bible and in the King James version and absent from most later editions. Judaism includes none of them in the Tanakh.

That last point yields the sharpest fact about these books. Hanukkah is a Jewish festival, kept for eight days every year, commemorating the rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE, and the only substantial near-contemporary accounts of the events it commemorates sit in books that Judaism does not treat as scripture and that were preserved for two thousand years by Christians copying Greek manuscripts.

The rabbinic tradition tells the story by its own route, through a short passage in the Talmud about a single sealed cruse of oil that burned for eight days, a miracle neither Maccabean book mentions. 1 Maccabees accounts for the eight days quite differently, by reference to the festival of Booths the defenders had been unable to keep while the Temple was defiled. Festival and earliest history come down separate channels, and they do not quite meet.