What are the theological implications of the First and Second Books of Maccabees, as well as their reception and interpretation in modern scholarship? Although these texts recount the same historical events—the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire—their differing portrayals have elicited distinct responses from historians and theologians within Christian and Jewish traditions.
See also, Ancient Jewish Historians and the German Reich (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024).
By Daniel R. Schwartz
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
August 2024
Although the First and Second Books of Maccabees deal, in large measure, with the same events, the stories they tell, and the meanings they ascribe to them, are very different, and even contradict one another. For historians, the differences between these books are quite attractive, insofar as they allow us to characterize the different types of Jews, of the second century BCE, who produced and presumably read these books. For Christians, however, for whom both books are Sacred Scripture, whether as full-fledged parts of the Catholic Bible or as second-rate (“deuterocanonical”) but nevertheless sacred parts of the Protestant Apocrypha, the differences are more of a problem, because God is one and therefore books that are divinely inspired should not contradict one another. This brief paper will illustrate the above by referring to three episodes in modern research concerning these works.
First, however, a brief presentation of the two books. They both tell the story of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids, from Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ decrees against Judaism and his establishment of a pagan cult in the Temple of Jerusalem and on to Judas Maccabee’s successful battles and eventual capture of Jerusalem and purification and rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE (1 Macc 4; 2 Macc 10). But while 2 Maccabees ends shortly thereafter, with another major victory by Judas Maccabee in 161 BCE, 1 Maccabees continues down to 135 BCE: after reporting Judas’s death (160 BCE – 1 Macc 9) it follows the continued Jewish revolt, led by his brothers Jonathan (chs. 9–12) and then Simon (chs. 13–16), and essentially documents Judea’s path along the way to becoming a sovereign state. The book ends, namely, after the Seleucids cease demanding taxes from the Judeans (1 Macc 13), which, reasonably enough, is taken to amount to independence (ch. 14), and the very last verse of the book, literally its bottom line, reports the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty: when Simon died, in 135/134 BCE, he was succeeded, as ruler of the fledgling state, by his son, John, who was to rule Judea for the next thirty years.
There are many differences between the two books. Some are external (such as the fact that 1 Maccabees was originally composed in biblical-style Hebrew, while 2 Maccabees was composed in Greek), some have to do with the details of the story (for example: 1 Maccabees 4–6 reports Judas’s rededication of the Temple two chapters before Antiochus’s death, while 2 Macc 9–10 reports Antiochus’s death before the rededication of the Temple), and some have to do with the values and beliefs the books express or assume. The present brief presentation shall focus on the latter, and how they functioned in three different scholarly contexts in the past two centuries.
1. 1–2 Maccabees: Two Types of Judaism. Modern scholarship on 1–2 Maccabees is, in large measure, based on two pillars erected in the 1850s: Carl L. W. Grimm’s detailed philological commentaries on both books (Grimm 1853, 1857) and Abraham Geiger’s chapter on the two books in his massive monograph on the history of the Bible (Geiger 1857). While Grimm (1807–1891) was a professor of theology and his volumes appeared in a routine context, namely, a series of commentaries on the Bible, the context of Geiger’s monograph invites more attention.
Geiger (1810–1874) was a German-Jewish scholar and rabbi whose life’s work was devoted to the establishment of liberal (“Reform”) Judaism, a movement that sought to update Judaism and allow Jews to become more a part of the world in which they lived. Germany was the cradle of Reform Judaism and Geiger was, more or less, its founder (Geiger 1962); whether one looks at the movement’s publications, its organizations, or its rabbinical seminary, Geiger was there at the outset. However, Geiger was also a trained historian, one especially interested in the history of religions; his prize-winning 1833 doctoral dissertation was on Judaism’s contribution to the development of early Islam. Quite naturally, Geiger’s understanding of the history of ancient Judaism, which will concern us here, had everything to do—whether as catalyst and cause, or as result, or as both—with his understanding of the proper path of Judaism in the modern world.
To understand that, we must realize that the main challenge faced by any attempt to reform Judaism, that is, to introduce changes in Jewish practice and belief in light of the world’s move from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the modern era, and in light of the Jews’ move from the ghettoes into emancipation and fuller participation in the world, was the authority of Jewish tradition. Although Jews knew that some of their legal traditions were of scriptural origin and some rabbinic, that distinction was mostly of only academic significance, for all of the legal traditions were accepted as obligatory. Indeed, that notion was formalized by dogmatic terminology: already ancient rabbinic literature referred to “Oral Torah” alongside the “Written Torah,” namely the Pentateuch, and both were equally binding; both, it was posited, were given to Moses at Mt. Sinai. According to that belief, the ancient rabbis, who formulated Judaism as it came to be after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), passed down traditions that had been given to Moses at Mt. Sinai and had remained the same ever since then. Accordingly, anyone who rejected those traditions or modified them was simply a heretic, one who rejected that which had always been accepted by all other Jews and their legitimate authorities. Thus, the obvious response by traditionalists (the “Orthodox”), to any attempt to reform Judaism, would be to condemn the Reformers by equating them with the ancient Sadducees who, according to Josephus and rabbinic literature, rejected the authority of non-Scriptural traditions.
Geiger, however, in line with human experience, took the difference between the written transmission of Scripture and the oral transmission of tradition to mean that the latter was far from immutable. Material that is transmitted orally, among people who do not necessarily share the same knowledge, values, and interests, and who live in different historical contexts, tends to change. This is true (as anyone who has ever played “Telephone” knows) even when something is short and is transmitted from one individual to another; all the more so, when a large body of tradition is transmitted over centuries. Recognition of this opened up the way for Geiger to view the ancient rabbis as allowing and/or introducing changes into the Judaism they inherited—and if they could do that, then, he and other Reformers argued, they could too.
Geiger’s main scholarly work (1857), which, unfortunately, never appeared in English (for some excerpts in English, see Geiger 1962), states its thesis clearly in its title: “The Original Text and Translations of the Bible in Their Dependence upon the Inner Development of Judaism.” That thesis, that the text and interpretation of Scripture changed over time as a result of the development of Judaism, was revolutionary enough in its day. But beyond that, it is clear that if even written Scripture changed over time, oral tradition certainly could, and did. That opened the way for Geiger and other Reformers to argue that the early and authoritative rabbis were not merely custodians of ancient tradition. Rather, they changed it, or allowed it to change, in accordance with the changing needs and changing values of changed times.
Geiger argued his case in a number of ways. Here we shall focus on two: especially on his chapter on 1–2 Maccabees, but first, briefly, on his chapter on two ancient Jewish sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees. That chapter opens the second section of the monograph, after much of the first section was dedicated to underlining the importance of the priestly establishment in ancient Israel; its first chapter is on “The Zadokites,” referring to the clan that, since the days of David and Solomon, supplied the high priests. On that background, the second section is dedicated to showing struggles about that establishment’s primacy in the Second Temple period—and that is how, in the first chapter of Part 2, Geiger characterizes the difference between Sadducees and Pharisees. He portrays the Sadducees (derived from “Zadokites”) as aristocratic priests who were hidebound holdovers from the past; far from heretics who ignored what was well-established, in fact (so Geiger argued) the Sadducees represented traditional Judaism of their day, a fossilized relic of the past that refused to change with the times and became irrelevant. The ancient rabbis, in contrast, according to Geiger, were democratic and innovative—as their adherence to “Oral Torah” allowed them to be.
Geiger argued his case on the basis of numerous passages in Josephus, the Gospels and Acts, and rabbinic literature, which both show the priestly nature of the Sadducees (e.g, Acts 5:17: “the high priest and all who were with him, that is, the party of the Sadducees”) and examples of differences between Pharisees and Sadducees. But those passages are, for the most part, quite sporadic, and they also suffer from another weakness: while some of the evidence comes from putatively Pharisaic sources (especially rabbinic literature, assuming, as is usual, that the rabbis may be viewed, mutatis mutandis, as heirs of the Pharisees), none comes from any Sadducean work. Obviously, there is room for doubt about the reliability of portrayals of the Sadducees written by outsiders, especially if those outsiders were actually hostile competitors. Moreover, the fact that much of the rabbinic evidence about the Sadducees is also relatively late, from centuries after the destruction of the Temple and the virtual disappearance of the Sadducees, makes dependence upon it all the more precarious.
Here is where Geiger’s work on 1–2 Maccabees is so important. Namely, Geiger’s chapter on these two books (Urschrift, Part 2, ch. 4) is devoted first to pointing out the manifold differences between them and then to arguing, in detail, that 1 Maccabees is a Sadducean work and 2 Maccabees is a Pharisaic response. Thus, in one fell swoop, Geiger proposed quite a significant expansion of the dossier on the Sadducees, one that includes not just sporadic passages by others, many late, but, rather, sixteen chapters by a Sadducee writing in their heyday under the Hasmoneans.
On the face of it, there is much to recommend Geiger’s thesis. First, it is obvious that 1 Maccabees is a pro-Hasmonean work; it is meant to justify the Hasmonean dynasty. But the Hasmoneans were high priests, the class with which Geiger associated the Sadducees, and Josephus and the rabbis indeed report, correspondingly, that when the Hasmonean state became stabilized, its rulers made an alliance with the Sadducees. So it is likely that a pro-Hasmonean book is Sadducean. Second, according to Josephus, the rabbis, the Gospels, and Acts, the Sadducees denied resurrection, and while 1 Maccabees makes no allusion to resurrection, 2 Maccabees polemically asserts and underlines, at 12:40–45, its belief in resurrection. That suggests, as Geiger argued, that that Pharisaic work (as he characterized it) was arguing with the Sadducees. Third, similarly, Acts 23:8 reports that the Sadducees do not believe in angels, and indeed none (apart from an allusion to an ancient story, at 7:41) is mentioned in 1 Maccabees, while 2 Maccabees 3 has heavenly horsemen rescuing the Temple and 11:6 reports that Judas Maccabee and his men besought God to send a good angel to help them. Altogether, moreover, while 2 Maccabees is full of evidence for the belief that God is currently active in human history, there is just about none of that in 1 Maccabees (especially after ch. 4), and that corresponds to Josephus’s characterization of the Sadducees as holding that “all things lie within our own power, so that we ourselves are responsible for our well-being, while we suffer misfortune through our own thoughtlessness” (Antiquities 13.173, trans. Marcus).
This is not the place to detail Geiger’s theses or debate their strengths and weaknesses, although one of the latter will be mentioned below. Here it is enough to underline that it was Geiger’s engagement as a Reformer of modern Judaism that supplied the context of his scholarly work. It was Geiger’s need, as a Reformer, to show the legitimacy of change within Judaism that led him to posit, as a scholar, that the accepted form of Judaism that survived antiquity, namely rabbinic Judaism, was itself characterized by innovation; and it was his need to supplement the evidence for that claim that led him to a thorough study of 1–2 Maccabees, one that fleshed out the differences between the two. Whatever one thinks about his specific characterization of the books, respectively, as Sadducean and Pharisaic, and about his thesis that the second responds to the first, Geiger’s identification of the manifold differences between the two books was a very lasting achievement, one upon which much subsequent work was and continues to be built.
2. Israelis’ 1 Maccabees. One major problem with Geiger’s thesis is the virtually complete lack of evidence for Pharisees and Sadducees in the Jewish diaspora. That is a problem because 2 Maccabees presents itself (at 2:23) as an abbreviated version (“epitome”) of a longer work by one Jason of Cyrene (in Lybia), and there is other good reason as well to view the work as one reflecting the interests and needs of the Jewish diaspora (see Schwartz 2008 and 2022). Here are three points, among many: it was originally in Greek; it demonstratively asserts that the people is more important than the holy place (2 Macc 5:19); and although its story is about events in Judea, it includes no geographical details about Judea; “the map of Eretz Israel was entirely foreign to the epitomist” (Bar-Kochva 1989: 185). Accordingly, while it is relatively simple to characterize 2 Maccabees as a book that expresses what is expected from Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora, there is little basis for the specific characterization of the author as a Pharisee. Similarly, although 1 Maccabees focuses on a dynasty of high priests, it is nevertheless true that “of high priesthood one notices [in 1 Maccabees] nothing but the title” (Arenhoevel 1967: 45–46); as 10:21 indicates, for the Hasmoneans, as represented by their dynastic history, “high priest” meant simply “ruler.” That is not what we would expect from any variety of Judaism, even Sadduceeism.
If, then, Geiger nonetheless characterized the two books, respectively, as Sadducean and Pharisaic, that had a lot to do with the fact that, in his day, Jews were defined simply as adherents of Judaism, so differences among Jews were (so it seemed) naturally to be characterized as differences among types of Judaism. In the century following Geiger’s day, however, another option rose to the fore. With the rise of nationalism in Europe, and, correspondingly, of Zionism among Jews, it became more and more popular to think of the Jews as members of a people, one that had a land of its own in antiquity and was now striving to recover and revive it. Within this context, and given the characterization (as above) of 2 Maccabees as a Jewish work of the Hellenistic diaspora, it became natural to view 1 Maccabees as a work that expressed the point of view of the ancient Jewish state.
As so much else that Zionism changed among Jews, so too did that change things in our corner. Namely, if for Geiger the identification of 2 Maccabees as Pharisaic made it the preferred work of the two, the one that aligned with the ancient rabbis and was therefore legitimate, the Zionist identification of 1 Maccabees as a state-oriented work made it the preferred work. This preference is clearly apparent in Zionist and Israeli literature. Suffice it to point to the introduction to 1–2 Maccabees in the standard modern Hebrew compendium of apocryphal works, which, in a chapter comparing the two works, emphasizes that they are, respectively, from the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, and, accordingly, characterizes the author of 1 Maccabees as a “patriot” and emphasizes his devotion to the cause of achieving independence for Judea and expanding to its borders (Kahana 1937: 84, 86–89).
Moreover, it was not only state-building that made 1 Maccabees so popular for Israelis. The Holocaust reinforced the same preference for 1 Maccabees. 2 Maccabees, a work of the Hellenistic diaspora, expresses confidence that although there are some unfortunate exceptions, such as Antiochus Epiphanes, nevertheless, as a rule, there is mutual respect between Jews and Gentiles; see especially the opening of the story of 2 Maccabees (after two prefatory chapters), which emphasizes the benevolence of Hellenistic kings. Indeed, the book underlines that it is natural for this to be the case for, after all, we are all “men” (4:35) and share the same basic moral values, such as “hatred of evil” (4:49). In post-Holocaust Israel, such views are nigh-universally taken to be naïve and self-deceptive; the author of 2 Maccabees and his Hellenistic-Jewish readers are easily taken as no more than an ancient version of German Jews who thought they were well at home in a civilized country. Rather, Israelis readily sign on to 1 Maccabees, of which the first chapter portrays all Hellenistic kings (of whom Antiochus Epiphanes is only an example) as being arrogant and barbaric and goes on to report, time and again, that “the Gentiles around us” were inveterately hostile, attacking Jews whether their fortunes were good (5:1) or bad (12:53)—views of which the proper conclusions are that solutions to the Jews’ problems are brought on by their wicked neighbors and may be resolved only by the Jews’ military victories. More specifically, if 2 Maccabees considered Jewish martyrs to be “saviors of the Jewish people” (Van Henten 1998), for the spilling of their innocent blood moved God to intervene and redeem them, in Israel it is usual to think that the fifth decade of the twentieth century, which began with the Holocaust and ended with the successful Israeli war for independence, proves that martyrs are useless (apart from proving how wicked Gentiles are) for God is unable or unwilling to intervene, and so the Jews must, militarily, take their future into their own hands. All of the latter can be read straight out of 1 Maccabees, which evinces scorn for the martyrs, lionizes military heroes, virtually never alludes to God and never mentions him.
Accordingly, Israeli scholarship tends to focus on 1 Maccabees; note especially Bar-Kochva’s 1989 volume on Judas Maccabee’s battles, also with Rappaport’s 2004 commentary on 1 Maccabees and 2013 general history of the Hasmonean state, of which the first half depends on 1 Maccabees. Battles and state-building are what 1 Maccabees is all about.
3. Christianizing 1 Maccabees: Ancient Jewish Rebels Did God’s Work. While Israelis might have no trouble about characterizing 1 Maccabees as a godless work about self-reliant Jewish military heroes and state-builders, or even welcome that, things are not so easy for Christians. 1 Maccabees is part of their Sacred Scriptures, and even for Protestants, for whom the book (as also 2 Maccabees) is only part of the Apocrypha, the absence of God is quite a problem.
But beyond that basic problem with 1 Maccabees, which has been around forever (note, for example, that the King James Version of 1 Maccabees, as also Luther’s German translation of it added numerous references to God without any basis in the Greek text), the twentieth century brought upon Christians, in a roundabout but nevertheless inexorable way, much more pressure to insert God into the work. To make a long story short: the Holocaust engendered, among Christians of conscience, much soul-searching about Christianity’s role in the fostering of anti-Semitism and the failure of Christians, and churches, to more actively oppose Nazism. That led, however, to a collision with Romans 13:1, “Let every person be subject to the ruling authorities, for there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God,” which seems to forbid opposition to any government. Among the many responses that problem (the clash of conscience and obedience to Scripture) elicited, in the post-Holocaust years, one prominent trend in scholarship was to argue that, whatever Paul thought, Jesus himself opposed Roman rule, so it must be legitimate for Christians too to oppose evil rulers. See esp. Cullmann 1956 and, for a review of such scholarship, Schwartz 1992.
That argument about Jesus began to crystalize in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s; for a summary, see Schwartz 1992. For evidence, it pointed to passages in the Gospels that suggest rebelliousness (e.g. the promise of a sword at Matt 10:34–36 and, more generally, the expectation of the Kingdom of God) and, especially, to the basic fact that Pilate had Jesus executed. Assuming that Pilate was well-informed, presumably that means that Pilate was convinced that Jesus opposed the Roman regime; in the post-Holocaust years it was no longer so easy to overcome those presumptions by positing, instead, in accordance with the Gospels (e.g. John 19:12), that wicked Jews browbeat Pilate into doing what he did not want to do. But there was one major problem to be faced: our other evidence for ancient Jewish rebels seems to point to them as godless, whether as mere criminals (so Josephus on the anti-Roman rebels) or as nationalists (so 1 Maccabees on its heroes). But associating Jesus with a godless movement was, of course, a non-starter for Christians.
Hence it is not surprising that when, in the 1950s, a German theologian wrote his doctoral dissertation on ancient Jewish rebels, his thesis, argued in great detail, was that, nonetheless, the ancient Jewish rebels were indeed religious people, motivated by religious considerations. Namely, Martin Hengel (1926–2009) argued at length in his The Zealots (1989, first published in German in 1961), especially against a Zionist historian (Joseph Klausner), that Josephus, more or less our only source about the Zealots, went out of his way to suppress the religious nature and motivation of the first-century rebels against Rome. Hengel argued that while Josephus, given his need to convince the Romans that Jews in general were passive and loyal subjects of the empire, had to portray the rebels as wicked and godless, hence non-representative of Jews at large, in fact, historians who read Josephus’s Judean War between the lines and “against the grain” can nevertheless discover the truth. Similarly, with regard to the Maccabees, Hengel’s successor at Tübingen, Michael Tilly, argued across the board, in his volume on 1 Maccabees in a series of theological commentaries, that when the book is read on the background of the Hebrew Bible, to which it often alludes, the religious meaning of the text comes through even if it is not explicit in the book as we have it (Tilly 2015).
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In sum, this brief account of something of modern scholarship on 1–2 Maccabees well illustrates the truism that “all history is contemporary history.” Historical scholarship is always bound up with the historian’s present; that is why each generation needs to rewrite history. That does not mean, of course, that the history they write is not valid. A historian’s contemporary interests can just as easily open up his or her eyes to see what others had no occasion to see as they can bring him or her to see things that are not there, so the validity of historical scholarship must be determined according to its conformance to what may reasonably be derived from the relevant sources and models. But without Geiger’s need to find ancient precedent for innovation in modern Judaism, without Zionists’ need to find ancient precedent for positing Jewish statehood, and without post-Holocaust Christians’ need to find ancient precedent for religious opposition to a wicked kingdom, much valuable scholarship might never have been produced.
Works Cited
Bar-Kochva, B. 1989. Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle against the Seleucids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cullmann, O. 1956. The State in the New Testament. New York: Scribner.
Geiger, A. 1857. Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der inneren Entwicklung des Judenthums. Breslau: Hainauer.
Geiger, A. 1962. Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century, ed. M. Wiener. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.
Grimm, C. L. W. 1853. Das erste Buch der Maccabäer. Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zu den Apokryphen des Alten Testamentes 3. Leipzig: Hirzel.
Grimm, C. L. W. 1857. Das zweite, dritte und vierte Buch der Maccabäer. Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zu den Apokryphen des Alten Testamentes 4. Leipzig: Weidmann.
Hengel, M. 1989. The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Henten, J. W. van 1997. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement 57. Leiden: Brill.
Kahana, A. 1937. HaSepharim HaHiṣonim, II/1. Jerusalem: Meqorot (in Hebrew).
Rappaport, U. 2004. The First Book of Maccabees: Introduction, Hebrew Translation, and Commentary. Between Bible and Mishnah: The David and Jemima Jeselsohn Library. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press (in Hebrew).
Rappaport, U. 2013. The House of the Hasmoneans: The People of Israel in the Land of Israel in the Hasmonean Period. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi (in Hebrew).
Schwartz, D. R. 1992. “On Christian Study of the Zealots.” Pages 128–146 in idem, Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 60. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck).
Schwartz, D. R. 2008. 2 Maccabees. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Schwartz, D. R. 2022a. I Maccabees. The Anchor Yale Bible 41B. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Schwartz, D. R. 2022b. “A Judaic Perspective on Judean Events: 2 Maccabees as a Diasporic Work.” Pages 231–268 in The Books of the Maccabees: Literary, Historical, and Religious Perspectives, ed. by J. W. van Henten. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 328. Leuven: Peeters.
Tilly, M. 2015. 1 Makkabäer. Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament. Freiburg: Herder.
A wonderful demonstration of not only that "all history contemporary," but that history is limited by the imagination the historian.