The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt

Elias J. Bickerman's The God of the Maccabees, Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt, published by E. J. Brill in 1979, is a scholarly study by a leading historian of the Hellenistic world arguing that the Maccabean revolt was triggered less by simple pagan persecution than by a specific, radical religious reform imposed with the cooperation of Hellenizing Jews themselves, reframing the conflict as partly an internal Jewish struggle over how far to accommodate Greek culture. Its strength is Bickerman's command of the Hellenistic political and religious context surrounding Judea, treating the revolt within the wider pattern of Seleucid religious policy rather than in isolation. Its limit is that Bickerman's specific reconstruction of how the reform was proposed and by whom remains debated among specialists in Second Temple Judaism, some of whom read the evidence differently, so a claim resting on his precise account of the reform's origin should be checked against the wider scholarly discussion it helped provoke.