1 Maccabees: The Hammer and the Holiday

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer in Jerusalem, a supporter of the family it is about. He wrote in Hebrew. Only the Greek translation survives.

When: About 100 BC, in the time of John Hyrcanus or soon after his death in 104 BC.

Where it fits: From Alexander the Great’s conquest (333 BC) to the death of Simon in 134 BC, but mostly the forty years from 175 to 134 BC: the Greek king Antiochus IV’s war on my people’s religion, the revolt led by Judas Maccabeus, and the rule of his brothers.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha, and most later dropped it.

Where you hear it in your Bible: I was in the Temple for its holiday, the Feast of the Dedication (John 10:22–23). Its abomination of desolation (1 Maccabees 1:54) is the one Daniel speaks of, and I spoke of (Mark 13:14).

How close it stays to me: Close in refusing to bow to the empire. Far in trusting the sword, and in trusting Rome.

If you only read three chapters: 1 Maccabees 1, 1 Maccabees 2 and 1 Maccabees 4.

Words to Know

Maccabee — the nickname of Judas, the leader of the revolt. It probably means the hammer. His whole family came to be called the Maccabees.

Hasmoneans — the family’s other name, from an ancestor called Hasmon. It is the name of the kings and high priests who came from them.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes — the Greek king of Syria who, from 167 BC, outlawed the Jewish religion. Epiphanes means god made visible.

Hanukkah — Hebrew for dedication: the eight-day festival that remembers the cleansing of the Temple in 164 BC.

The Book in Brief

Chapter 1 begins with Alexander the Great, whose empire is divided among his generals. Out of them comes Antiochus Epiphanes. Some Jews in Jerusalem want to live like Greeks, build a gymnasium and hide their circumcision. Antiochus plunders the Temple, and then orders every people in his kingdom to give up its own laws. Sacrifices to the God of Israel are stopped, a pagan altar is set up on the Temple altar, books of the law are burned, and mothers who circumcise their sons are killed with their babies.

In chapter 2 an old priest named Mattathias, in the village of Modein, refuses to sacrifice to the king’s gods, kills a Jew who steps up to do it and the king’s officer, and flees to the hills with his five sons. A thousand faithful people who refuse to fight on the Sabbath are massacred, and Mattathias’s group decides to fight even on the Sabbath. Before he dies, he hands the leadership to his son Judas.

In chapters 3 to 9 Judas, the Maccabee, wins battle after battle against far larger Greek armies, retakes Jerusalem, cleanses the Temple, builds a new altar, and dedicates it with eight days of celebration. He makes a treaty with Rome. He is finally killed in battle.

In chapters 9 to 12 his brother Jonathan leads, playing rival Greek kings against one another, and is made high priest by one of them. He is captured by treachery, and in chapter 13 he is killed.

In chapters 13 to 16 the last brother, Simon, wins full independence. The people decree that he shall be their leader and high priest forever, until there should arise a faithful prophet, and the land has peace. Simon is murdered at a banquet by his son-in-law, and his son John Hyrcanus takes his place.

When the people of Nazareth turned on me, they listed my family: the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon (Mark 6:3).

Judah and Simon. In my time, those were two of the most common names in the land, and for one reason. Judah, or Judas, was the Maccabee, the hammer, who drove the Greek armies out of Jerusalem and cleansed the Temple. Simon was his brother, who made the country free. Families named their sons after them the way people today name their sons after a great general or a president.¹

This book is their story. It is a war story, written by a man who loved them. And it is the story my people told themselves about how to survive an empire.

The king who wanted one people

It begins with a king who had a simple plan. And king Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom, that all should be one people, and that each should forsake his own laws (1 Maccabees 1:41–42).

One empire, one culture, one set of gods. Most of the nations went along. And so did many of my own people, before the king ever forced them. In those days came there forth out of Israel transgressors of the law, and persuaded many, saying, let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles that are round about us (1 Maccabees 1:11). They built a Greek gymnasium in Jerusalem, where men exercised naked, and some of them tried to hide their circumcision (1 Maccabees 1:14–15).

Then came the force. Antiochus stripped the Temple of its gold. In December of 167 BC, his men built an abomination of desolation upon the altar (1 Maccabees 1:54), a pagan altar on top of the altar of God. They burned the books of the law. The women that had circumcised their children they put to death according to the commandment. And they hanged their babes about their necks (1 Maccabees 1:60–61).

And people chose to die rather than eat what the law forbade. They chose to die, that they might not be defiled with the meats, and that they might not profane the holy covenant: and they died (1 Maccabees 1:63).

When I spoke, near the end of my life, about the abomination of desolation … standing where it ought not (Mark 13:14), every person listening knew this story. It was the worst thing that had happened to their Temple in living memory of their grandparents’ grandparents.

The old priest at Modein

Then the king’s officers came to a village called Modein, west of Jerusalem, to make the people sacrifice. They asked the local priest, Mattathias, to go first.

He refused. If all the nations that are in the house of the king’s dominion hearken to him … yet will I and my sons and my kindred walk in the covenant of our fathers (1 Maccabees 2:19–20).

Then another Jew stepped forward to sacrifice. And Mattathias saw it, and his zeal was kindled … and ran, and killed him upon the altar. And the king’s officer, who compelled men to sacrifice, he killed at that time (1 Maccabees 2:24–25).

That is how the revolt began. Not with a speech, but with an old man killing a neighbor at an altar.

The Sabbath massacre

Then comes the scene in this book that I find hardest to read.

A thousand faithful people went into the wilderness to hide, with their wives, children and animals. The king’s soldiers found them and attacked on the Sabbath. The people would not fight on the holy day. They did not even block the entrances to their caves. Let us die all in our innocency: heaven and earth witness over us, that you put us to death without trial (1 Maccabees 2:37). And they died, they and their wives and their children, and their cattle, to the number of a thousand souls (1 Maccabees 2:38).

Mattathias and his followers mourned them. Then they made a decision. If we all do as our kindred have done, and fight not against the Gentiles for our lives and our ordinances, they will now quickly destroy us … whoever shall come against us to battle on the Sabbath day, let us fight against him (1 Maccabees 2:40–41).

That is the question at the heart of this book. The thousand in the caves died without lifting a hand. Mattathias decided that if everyone did that, there would soon be no one left to keep the law at all. He chose to fight.

I understand his choice. I want you to see that there was another one, and that this book honors it before it turns away from it.

Go deeperWritten in Hebrew, by a friend of the family

1 Maccabees survives only in Greek, but almost every scholar agrees it was written in Hebrew. Its Greek reads like a close translation, keeping Hebrew turns of phrase. The Christian scholar Origen, around 230, gave its Hebrew title, a garbled name that has never been fully explained. Jerome, about 400, said he had seen the first book of Maccabees in Hebrew.²

Its writer was a strong supporter of the family. He presents Mattathias and his sons as the ones by whose hand deliverance was given to Israel (1 Maccabees 5:62), and is hard on any Jew who made peace with the Greeks. He ends with Simon’s son John Hyrcanus, and writes as if Hyrcanus’s reign were already finished or nearly so, which puts the book around 100 BC.²

That means it is not a neutral history. It is the official story of a ruling family, written when that family was in power. It is still one of the best sources we have for these years, and it is careful with dates and names. But when you read it, remember who wrote it and why, as you would with any history written by the winners.

Another history of the same years, 2 Maccabees, tells the story with different emphases and a different hero. That book has its own chapter in this volume.

The hammer

Mattathias died, and his son Judas, called Maccabeus, took command. He was outnumbered in nearly every battle. It is an easy thing for many to be shut up in the hands of a few … for victory in battle stands not in the multitude of an army; but strength is from heaven (1 Maccabees 3:18–19).

He won. Within three years his small army had beaten the king’s generals and taken back Jerusalem.

What they found there was terrible. They saw the sanctuary laid desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burned up, and shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest (1 Maccabees 4:38).

They tore down the defiled altar and built a new one. On the five and twentieth day of the ninth month, which is the month Chislev (1 Maccabees 4:52), three years to the day after the first pagan sacrifice on that altar, they offered sacrifice again. And they kept the dedication of the altar eight days … And Judas and his kindred and the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their seasons from year to year by the space of eight days (1 Maccabees 4:56, 59).

That is Hanukkah.

I was there for the holiday

John’s gospel puts me in Jerusalem for it. It was the Feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in Solomon’s porch (John 10:22–23).

So I kept this festival. I walked in the Temple that Judas had cleansed, in the season when my people remembered the day the empire’s altar came down. The people around me asked me there, If you are the Christ, tell us plainly (John 10:24). At Hanukkah, with the memory of the Maccabees all around them, they wanted to know if I was the next one.

Go deeperThe oil that lasted eight days

If you have ever been told the story of Hanukkah, you were probably told about a miracle of oil. When the Maccabees cleansed the Temple, the story goes, they found only one small jar of pure oil for the great lamp, enough for one day. It burned for eight, until new oil could be made. That is why the festival lasts eight days, and why candles are lit.

That story is not in 1 Maccabees, or in 2 Maccabees, or in Josephus, who also tells of the dedication. It first appears in the writings of the rabbis, best known from the Babylonian Talmud, in a passage written down several centuries after the events, which asks, What is Hanukkah? and answers with the jar of oil.³

The books of Maccabees give a different reason for eight days. 2 Maccabees says the people kept the dedication eight days with gladness in the manner of the feast of tabernacles (2 Maccabees 10:6), the eight-day harvest festival they had not been able to keep while the Temple was defiled. Josephus calls the festival simply Lights, and says he thinks it got the name because freedom shone on them unexpectedly.³

Many scholars think the rabbis, who lived after Rome had crushed later Jewish revolts and who distrusted the Hasmonean kings, preferred to remember Hanukkah as a miracle of God rather than a victory of soldiers. The festival you know is the same festival. Its story was retold to say something about where deliverance comes from.

The friend who became the master

Here is something in this book that should make you uneasy.

When Judas heard of the Romans, he admired them. They are valiant men … whoever they will to succour and to make kings, these do they make kings; and whoever they will, do they depose (1 Maccabees 8:1, 13). The writer praises Rome’s senate, where three hundred and twenty men sat in council, consulting always for the people (1 Maccabees 8:15). Judas made a treaty with Rome against the Greeks.

The writer did not know what was coming. In 63 BC, a Roman general named Pompey marched into Jerusalem, walked into the Holy of Holies, and kept the country for Rome. Rome made and deposed kings in my land, as this chapter says it does. It made Herod king. It sent Pilate. It nailed me to a cross. And forty years after me, it burned the Temple that Judas had cleansed.

The empire my people invited in as a friend against the last empire became the next master. That has happened to many small nations since. It is worth knowing it happened to mine.

Until a prophet should arise

The book ends in peace. Under Simon, the last brother, the land was free. The ancient men sat in the streets … and they sat each man under his vine and his fig tree, and there was none to make them afraid (1 Maccabees 14:9, 12). That is the old promise of the prophet Micah (Micah 4:4), come true for a while.

And the people decreed that Simon should be their leader and high priest forever, until there should arise a faithful prophet (1 Maccabees 14:41).

Notice that. They gave Simon power until there should arise a faithful prophet (1 Maccabees 14:41). Earlier, when Judas cleansed the Temple, they did not know what to do with the stones of the old altar, so they stored them until there should come a prophet to give an answer concerning them (1 Maccabees 4:46). The book knew there had been no true prophet for a long time (1 Maccabees 9:27).

My people were waiting for a prophet. John the Baptizer came out of the wilderness, and then I came. We were the answer some of them had been waiting for, and the Hasmonean high priests were the thing we answered.

Where the Maccabees and I part

Here is what this book does not tell you, because it was written while the family ruled.

The family that won freedom became kings, and the kings became like the kings they had driven out. Simon’s grandson, Alexander Jannaeus, ruled as king and high priest at once. When his own people rose against him, the historian Josephus says, he crucified eight hundred of them in Jerusalem, and had their wives and children killed before their eyes while he feasted with his concubines.⁴ The hammer’s great-nephew used the Romans’ favorite punishment on his own people.

That is what happens when a holy war wins. The men who take power with the sword keep it with the sword.

The Maccabees fought for a kingdom of this world, and won one, for a while. I told Pilate, My Kingdom is not of this world. If my Kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight (John 18:36). When one of my friends drew a sword to defend me, I said, Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). And I told my followers that the kings of the nations lord it over them … But not so with you (Luke 22:25–26).

The people who hoped I was another Judas Maccabeus were disappointed in me. I did not come to cleanse the Temple with an army. I did not come to make Simon’s family kings again. I came to show a kingdom where no one lords it over anyone, and that is a kingdom no sword can win.

Check It Yourself

Look up: 1 Maccabees 2:29–41.

You will find: a thousand people who would not fight on the Sabbath, killed in their caves, and Mattathias deciding to fight.

Then read John 10:22–24 and 1 Maccabees 4:52–59, and 1 Maccabees 8:1–16 beside what you know of what Rome did next.

The Short Version

• 1 Maccabees tells how a Greek king, Antiochus IV, outlawed my people’s religion, and how the family of Mattathias led the revolt against him.
• A thousand people who would not fight on the Sabbath were killed. Mattathias chose to fight.
• Judas the Hammer retook Jerusalem and cleansed the Temple in 164 BC. The eight-day feast became Hanukkah, and I kept it in the Temple (John 10:22). The oil miracle is a later story.
• Judas made a treaty with Rome, the empire that would later conquer the land, make Herod king and crucify me.
• The family that won freedom became kings who crucified their own people. My kingdom is not of this world, and its servants do not fight.