Everyone agrees that the Maccabean revolt was a watershed in Jewish history. In 167 BCE, when Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed the practice of the Jewish way of life—banning circumcision, ordering the destruction of copies of the Torah, setting up a pagan altar in the Jerusalem Temple, and forcing Jews to sacrifice to other gods—he set in motion a popular revolt led by Judas the Maccabee and his four brothers. The Temple was rededicated in 164 BCE. Twenty-two years later Judaea became an independent state for the first time since before the exile, and Judas’s brother Simon became the first ruler in a Hasmonean dynasty that governed for almost a century.
Joseph Sievers sums up the long-term consequences this way:
"It was the tenacity of the martyrs and the courage of Judas Maccabeus and his companions that saved monotheism for Judaism and thus for humanity …. The development of distinct Jewish groups, or Judaisms, in the late Second Temple period occurred partly in response to some of the later Hasmoneans. Thus the influence of the Hasmoneans reaches well beyond their own time" [1].Like most scholarly discussions of the Hasmoneans and the Maccabean revolt, Sievers has little to say about what Jews in the later Second Temple period thought about the events leading up to the revolt. It is this question—about the revolt’s perceived impact rather than its historical effects—that I want to pursue here.
The changes that modern historians attribute to the Maccabean revolt were not necessarily grasped by those who lived a couple centuries downstream from these decisive events. It is, in fact, hard to imagine that Jews in the first century CE were aware of the extent to which their daily practices and beliefs owed their specific shape to a crisis in the second century BCE, and not, for instance, to the commands given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
So what did Jews in the first century think about the Maccabean revolt? How close to the surface of their consciousness was it? I begin with two ways of addressing the question that I find problematic.
(1) The Apocryphal Maccabees: Perhaps the answer to my question about Second Temple memories of the Maccabean revolt is so obvious it doesn’t need saying. Since we have easy access to our most important sources for the Maccabean revolt in the Apocrypha, it is easy to imagine that most Jews in the first century CE knew the stories 1 and 2 Maccabees preserve. In a recent essay Gerbern Oegema concludes that Paul, as someone with “a Jewish background and … a Jewish and Greek education,” would have been “familiar with the contents of 1 and 2 Maccabees” [2]. He also supposes that Paul’s Diaspora audience would have known the texts too because the “Septuagint”—including 1 and 2 Maccabees—was the “Bible” of the “Greek speaking churches founded and visited by Paul” [3].
In my view, such confidence about the scriptural status of 1 and 2 Maccabees is unwarranted. To be sure, allusions to and citations from 1 and 2 Maccabees in Christian writings as early as the late second century indicate that 1 and 2 Maccabees were viewed as divinely inspired Scripture by some Christian writers. It is possible, as Henry Swete proposed in 1900, that early Christian canon lists, which tend to exclude the Apocrypha, reflect a later attempt to align the Christian Old Testament with what had become the Hebrew canon, and that the great codices of the fourth and fifth century preserve an earlier more expansive view inherited from Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who regarded 1 and 2 Maccabees and other apocryphal books as Scripture [4]. Nevertheless, our earliest canon lists begin with Origen in the early third century, while our earliest evidence for the inclusion of 1 and 2 Maccabees among other books from the Hebrew Bible comes from the fourth and fifth-century codices א and A. It is far from clear that 1 and 2 Maccabees or the other works now included in modern editions of the Septuagint were widely regarded as Scripture by Greek-speaking Jews and early Christians during the first century [5].
Concrete literary evidence for knowledge of either of these two quite different books—let alone both together—is scant before the end of the first-century CE. Josephus paraphrased much of 1 Maccabees, but appears not to have known 2 Maccabees [6]. 4 Maccabees reworks 2 Maccabees, Hebrews 11:35 refers to 2 Maccabees 7, but neither the author of 4 Maccabees nor the author of Hebrews seem to be aware of 1 Maccabees [7]. Even if a handful of other possible references to 1 or 2 Maccabees in Philo, 3 Maccabees, the Additions to Esther, and the New Testament is included [8], it will show only that some Jews knew these primary sources. We can hardly conclude on the basis of this slim evidence that educated Jewish readers in the Greco-Roman world would have known 1 or 2 Maccabees as a matter of course.
(2) Maccabees in the Air: Another approach identifies ideological parallels between those who resisted the Hellenistic reforms in the second century BCE, and ordinary Jews living two centuries later. In 1956 William Farmer defended the existence of a Maccabean-inspired “national resistance movement” in the first century on the basis of links he identified between the zeal of the Maccabees and the Zealots described in Josephus [9]. More recently Anthony Cummins has constructed a “Maccabean model of Judaism,” which he then presupposes as a background against which to interpret Paul [10]. Farmer and Cummins also discuss positive evidence, such as the celebration of Hanukkah, to support their claims that the Maccabean revolt was popular in the first century, so perhaps it is unfair for me to try to distinguish this hard evidence, which I will assess in a subsequent post, from ideological parallels, when they treat them both together. In the case of ideological parallels, however, I am inclined to assume that much of what is isolated as distinctively “Maccabean” was in fact common to first-century Jews in general, and that it had no necessary connection to the Maccabean revolt in the thinking of Jews themselves. Zeal for the law, to take one example, was not the preserve of the Maccabees alone, and the existence of such zeal need not have always evoked the Maccabean revolt.
In any case, I am looking for hard evidence. What else besides Hanukkah points to first-century memories of the Maccabean revolt? And what evidence is there for the celebration of Hanukkah anyway? More on this in the next post.
Other Posts in This Series
Part 2: First-Century Memories of the Maccabees Part 2: The Origins of Hanukkah
Part 3: First-Century Memories of the Maccabees Part 3: Hanukkah in the First Century
Part 4: Memories of the Maccabees in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Part 5: The Maccabean Revolt and the Success of Hasmonean Propaganda
Footnotes
[1] Joseph Sievers, in Dictionary of New Testament Background, ed. Craig A. Evans and Stanley E. Porter (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2000), 438-442, here 441.
[2] Gerbern S. Oegema, “1 and 2 Maccabees in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” in Die Makkabäer, ed. Friedrich Avemarie et al., WUNT I 382 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 345–60, here 345, 352.
[3] Gerbern S. Oegema, “Portrayals of Women in 1 and 2 Maccabees,” in Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-Viewed, ed. Ingrid R. Kitzberger, Biblical Interpretation Series 43 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 245–64, here 263.
[4] Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 219-226.
[5] For similar reservations about the use of fourth and fifth-century Christian evidence to determine first-century Jewish views about Scripture, see Roger Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 383; Julio Trebolle, “Canon of the Old Testament,” New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible 1:548–63, here 552.
[6] For Josephus’s lack of knowledge of 2 Maccabees, see Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, CEJL (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 86–87; as well as Isaiah M. Gafni, “Josephus and 1 Maccabees,” in Josephus, the Bible, and History, ed. Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 130 note 39, responding to Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees: A New Translation, with Introduction and Commentary, AB (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 56–57. For other analyses of Josephus’s use of 1 Maccabees, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 44–47; Louis H. Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrayal of the Hasmoneans Compared with 1 Maccabees,” in Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman World: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith, ed. Fausto Parente and Joseph Sievers (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 41–68; Étienne Nodet, “Joséphe et 1 Maccabées,” Revue Biblique 122.4 (2015): 507–39.
[7] On the use of 2 Maccabees in 4 Maccabees and Hebrews see Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 85–90; Frank Shaw, “2 Maccabees,” in The T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint, ed. James K. Aitken (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015), 287–88. David A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus, Septuagint Commentary Series (Leiden: Brill, 2006), xxix–xxxi, makes no mention of 1 Maccabees in his discussion of the sources of 4 Maccabees. Craig R. Koester, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 36 (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 116, notes that Hebrews “used the deuterocanonical stories of the Maccabean martyrs (2 Macc 5-7; Heb 11:35-38) and perhaps the Wisdom of Solomon (Wis 7:25; Heb 1:3).”
[8] For the “influence” of 2 Maccabees on 3 Maccabees and the Additions to Esther, see Robert Doran, Temple Propaganda: The Purpose and Character of 2 Maccabees (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1981), 111–12; in his recent commentary, 2 Maccabees: A Critical Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 14, 17, Doran speaks more cautiously of “correspondences.” Schwartz, 2 Maccabees, 86–87 discusses and discounts the possibility that 3 Maccabees was influenced by 2 Maccabees and that the description of torture in Philo, Every Good Man is Free 89 drew on 2 Macc 7:4-5; 9:9. Michael Tilly, 1 Makkabäer, HTKAT (Freiburg: Herder, 2015), only cites Josephus among early Jewish writings before the end of the first century CE, and notes “Zwar finden sich keine direkten Zitate im Neuen Testament oder bei den Apostolischen Vätern” (52).
[9] William Reuben Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: An Inquiry into Jewish Nationalism in the Greco-Roman Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956), see esp. pp. 189-191.
[10] Stephen Anthony Cummins, Paul and the Crucified Christ in Antioch: Maccabean Martyrdom and Galatians 1 and 2, SNTSMS 114 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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