1 Maccabees

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First Maccabees is a Jewish historical narrative of the revolt that broke out in Judea under Seleucid rule in the 160s BCE, covering the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the guerrilla war led by the priestly family of the Maccabees, and the founding of the Hasmonean dynasty that followed. It is counted as scripture by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, placed among the apocrypha by Protestants, and is not part of the Hebrew Bible.

The book opens with Antiochus IV outlawing the practice of Judaism — banning circumcision and Sabbath, rededicating the Jerusalem Temple to Olympian Zeus, and forcing pagan sacrifice on pain of death. Resistance gathers around the priest Mattathias and his sons, above all Judas, called Maccabeus, “the hammer.” The narrative follows their campaigns against Seleucid armies, the recapture and purification of the desecrated Temple in 164 BCE — the event later commemorated as Hanukkah — and, after Judas falls in battle, the rule of his brothers Jonathan and Simon, under whom Judea wins effective independence and a hereditary priest-kingship.

Scholars place the book’s composition late in the second century BCE, probably under Simon’s son John Hyrcanus, and read it as a work written to legitimate Hasmonean rule. It survives in Greek, as part of the Septuagint, but its idiom is so close to biblical Hebrew that most hold it was composed in Hebrew and translated early; the Hebrew original is lost. Its account is broadly sober and annalistic, and historians treat it as a principal source for the period, weighed against the very different telling in 2 Maccabees, which covers part of the same events in a more overtly theological register.

The book’s religious temper is distinctive. God is never named directly in it — the text uses “Heaven” and circumlocutions — and it contains no miracles, no angelic deliverance, and no doctrine of resurrection of the kind 2 Maccabees makes central. Deliverance comes through fidelity to the Law and through arms; the heroes are zealots for the covenant who fight rather than wait. That reserve has been read as a deliberate stance, the author crediting the Hasmoneans’ success to faithful action under providence rather than to wonder.

For later tradition the book’s lasting bequest is the festival it grounds. The eight-day rededication it reports became the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, whose familiar miracle of the single cruse of oil burning eight days belongs not to this text but to much later rabbinic sources. The book itself records a victory, a cleansing, and a dynasty — and a people that chose to fight for the right to keep its own law.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: 2 Maccabees · Apocrypha