The Books of Maccabees: Containing the Books of 1, 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees

1 Maccabees Although the book presents the Jewish leaders Judas, Jonathan, and Simon as devout people and has little sympathy for people who favor hellenization, but it must be noted that he nowhere mentions divine intervention.The contents of the book can be summarized as follows: Chapter 1-2: The hellenization of Judah and the non-violent resistance by Mattathias; Chapter 3-9: Military actions by Judas the Maccabaean ('battle hammer'): after 166, he defeats the Seleucid armies three times and liberates Jerusalem, where the temple is purified; Chapter 9-12: Continued warfare, led by Judas' brother Jonathan (160-143), who, benefiting from wars of succession in the Seleucid Empire, restores the fortunes of the Jewish nationalists and adds to their territories; Chapter 13-16: The third brother, Simon, achieves political independence, and founds the Hasmonaean dynasty.2 Maccabees.2 Maccabees is not as well written and has a less polished form. The pagans are defined as 'blasphemous and barbarous nations' in 10.4, but there are also severe censures of apostate Jews, of whom there must therefore have been considerable numbers. We find a theological features in 2 Maccabees such as the resurrection of the body in 7.11; 14.46. This stand in stark contrast first to Wisdom and Philo, both of which teach the immortality of the soul.3 Maccabees The title of 3 Maccabees is a misnomer because the book has nothing to do with the Maccabees, who are never mentioned in it. The book is a story about a situation in which the Jewish people, this time in Egypt, were in danger of being annihilated by a Hellenistic monarch, who was attempting to top their religious convictions and practices.4 Maccabees 4 Maccabees belongs to the Maccabees series only because it deals with the beginning of the persecution of Jews by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. It possibly was written during the reign of the emperor Caligula (C.E. 37.) The work's main religious theme is that the martyr's sufferings expunged the sins of the entire Jewish people through a type of propitiation. The Maccabees books were preserved only by the Christian church.