First and Second Maccabees: Faith Under Persecution
Short answer: First and Second Maccabees are ancient historical books that tell how faithful Jews under Greek rule were tortured and killed for refusing to abandon God's law, and how a family of priests led armed resistance against a king who desecrated the temple. The church has not received them as Scripture, but they are valuable historical background for the world between the Old and New Testaments. Hebrews 11:35-38 speaks of people who were tortured and did not accept deliverance, and many readers see the Maccabean martyrs behind that description. The books also explain the origin of the Feast of the Dedication, which John 10:22-23 places in the ministry of Jesus.
What First Maccabees Records
First Maccabees is a historical account of the crisis that fell on Judea when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes moved against the Jewish faith. The writer describes how the king's officials pressured Jews to abandon circumcision, the Sabbath, and the food laws, and how some complied while others refused. The book then follows Mattathias, a priest from the family later called the Maccabees, and his sons, especially Judas, Jonathan, and Simon. It narrates battles, treaties, and the rededication of the temple. The style is sober and annalistic, closer to the historical books of the Old Testament than to prophecy. It never claims to be prophetic revelation, and its interest is in what happened and how the nation survived.
The book is careful to connect military success to covenant loyalty rather than to numbers. Again and again the smaller force wins because the people have returned to the law and trust God to defend his own name. The writer does not hide the cost. Battles are lost, leaders die, and the fighting lasts for years. This is not a tidy story of inevitable victory but a record of endurance. For readers of Scripture, First Maccabees supplies the political and religious background of a period the Old Testament leaves largely silent. It shows how the pressure to conform to a dominant culture worked in practice, and what resistance cost the people who chose it.
The author wrote in Greek and appears to have used earlier sources. He dates events by Seleucid regnal years and names kings, generals, and high priests, which is why historians can compare his account with other ancient records. That does not make the book inspired, and the church has never treated it as such. What it does make is a usable witness. When we read about the desecration of the sanctuary and its restoration, we are reading the backdrop to the hope expressed in later Jewish and Christian writings. Careful readers should treat it as evidence to be weighed, not as a book that settles doctrine. Its value lies in the window it opens.
One striking feature is the absence of explicit miracles. God is at work, but mostly through ordinary means: courage, strategy, diplomacy, and the loyalty of people who would not bend. Some readers find this disappointing after the dramatic deliverances of Exodus and Kings. Others find it realistic. The book does not promise that faithfulness will always be rewarded with visible rescue in this life. It promises that faithfulness matters, and it shows the nation's survival as evidence. That sober tone prepares the reader for the harder material in Second Maccabees, where the focus moves from battles to the inner convictions of people who died rather than deny their God.
What Second Maccabees Records
Second Maccabees covers part of the same period but from a different angle. It is not a sequel but a parallel account, and it opens with letters to Jews in Egypt inviting them to keep the festival of the temple's cleansing. The narrative then focuses on two figures, the priest Onias and Judas Maccabeus, and on the suffering of Jews in Jerusalem and beyond. Where First Maccabees gives campaigns, Second Maccabees gives scenes of martyrdom and vivid stories of deliverance. The author claims to be condensing a larger work by Jason of Cyrene. He also tells readers openly that his aim is pleasure and profit for those who hear, not exhaustive record.
The most famous material in the book is the account of the elderly scribe Eleazar and of a mother and her seven sons, all executed for refusing to eat pork and violate the law. These scenes are written with deliberate rhetorical force. The tortures are described, the officials offer escape, and the martyrs refuse. The point is not the cruelty for its own sake but the confession that God's law is worth more than life. These are the kinds of stories that shaped Jewish identity for generations, and they are the kinds of stories that stand behind the compressed sentence in Hebrews 11:35-38 about people who were tortured and would not accept release. Even readers who do not receive the book as Scripture can see why the memory endured.
Second Maccabees also contains material that has no parallel in the other book. It prays for the dead in one passage, it describes Judas and his men finding hidden items and turning to prayer, and it reports visions and heavenly riders appearing to defend Jerusalem. These are exactly the features that made the Reformers hesitant and that still divide readers. A careful reader should not pretend the book is something it is not. It is a pious historical narrative with theological convictions woven through it. It is not on the same footing as the Law, the Prophets, or the apostolic writings, and it should not be used to overturn clear teaching elsewhere.
Still, dismissing the book entirely would be a mistake. It preserves the memory of people who died rather than renounce their covenant. It gives us the vocabulary and imagery that show up later in Jewish and Christian hope. It explains why a festival of dedication existed for Jesus to attend centuries afterward. Read as a witness to history and to courage, it has real value. Read as a source of doctrine, it must be handled with care and tested against the books the church has always recognised. That distinction, fairly applied, keeps both honesty and usefulness intact.
Why Hebrews 11:35-38 Sounds Like the Maccabean Martyrs
Hebrews 11 lists people who lived and died by faith, and near the end the tone shifts. It begins with women who received their dead back by resurrection, and then it turns to those who were tortured and refused release. The text is worth reading slowly, because the second half is not about triumph but about endurance to the point of death. There is no other place in the Old Testament narratives where a mother and her sons are tortured for refusing a king's command and where deliverance is deliberately refused in hope of something better. The fit with the Maccabean accounts is close, and many readers, ancient and modern, have noticed it.
Notice the shape of the argument. The writer does not say these people were rescued. He says they refused the rescue that was offered, because accepting it would have meant denying their hope. That is precisely the choice the martyr accounts describe: an open door to escape, and a firm refusal to walk through it. The motive given is that they might obtain a better resurrection. So the passage holds together two things that we often separate: the reality of present loss and the certainty of future vindication. Faith here is not optimism about circumstances. It is confidence that God will raise the dead, strong enough to make the torturer's bargain worthless.
This is why the passage matters for how we read the Maccabean books. It shows that the earliest Christian readers were not embarrassed by those stories. They included them in the great cloud of witnesses. The writer of Hebrews is not quoting the books or commanding their use in worship. He is drawing on a shared memory of faithful suffering that his readers would recognise. If we want to understand what he meant, we can benefit from knowing the stories he had in mind. That is the proper use of these books: background that illuminates Scripture, not a rival authority that competes with it.
There is a further point in the wording. The passage goes on to describe people who wandered in deserts and mountains, in caves and holes in the ground, and it says the world was not worthy of them. These are exiles, not victors. The portrait is deliberately unglamorous. It prepares readers for a letter that will go on to call them to endure hardship and to fix their eyes on Jesus. Whatever we conclude about the exact identity of these sufferers, the pastoral purpose is clear. Faithfulness is measured by what you are willing to lose for God, not by what you visibly gain in this age.
The Feast of Dedication and John 10
John 10:22-23 says, "It was the Feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem." That festival commemorated the cleansing and rededication of the temple after its profanation, the event at the heart of First Maccabees. The Gospel writer does not explain the feast, which suggests his first readers knew it. He simply notes the season and moves on to the dialogue in the temple courts. This small detail is a strong argument for the usefulness of the Maccabean books. Without them, a reader has no idea why this festival existed or what it celebrated. With them, the setting comes alive.
The timing matters for the passage that follows. Jesus is walking in the portico of Solomon during a feast that recalled a great deliverance from a pagan king who set up an abomination in the sanctuary. In that setting he speaks about his works bearing witness to him and about his sheep hearing his voice. The crowds ask him plainly whether he is the Messiah, and the conversation turns on evidence and belonging. The festival of national deliverance becomes the backdrop for a claim that deliverance is found in a person, not merely in a restored building or a recovered political order.
It is worth noting that the temple cleansed in the Maccabean crisis was later rebuilt and eventually destroyed. The writer of Hebrews says elsewhere that God's people look for a better and lasting possession. The feast that Jesus attended pointed backward to one cleansing; his ministry pointed forward to something greater. The Maccabean story is a genuine deliverance, and it is still a partial one. Its value for the church is not that it provides the pattern we must repeat, but that it shows how God preserved his people and his worship across a dark period, and how the memory of that preservation became part of the calendar into which the Messiah was born.
Reading John 10:22-23 alongside the Maccabean books also guards us against a common error. Some readers treat the festival as if it were commanded in the Law, and others treat it as if it were an invention of a corrupt priesthood. Neither view fits the evidence. It is a historical commemoration of a real event, kept by the time of Jesus, and mentioned in the Gospel without criticism. That is a useful lesson in how to think about traditions: some are neither commanded nor condemned, and their value lies in what they help us remember. The remembrance of God's faithfulness in a hard generation can serve the church long after the original crisis has passed.
The Courage of Those Who Would Not Comply
The strongest material in these books is not the battle scenes but the settled refusal of ordinary people. An elderly scribe is offered a face-saving compromise and declines it. A mother watches seven sons die one after another and urges each of them to stand firm. The offers of escape are real; the pressure is not abstract. These are people who could have saved their lives with a small compliance, and they judged that the small compliance was not small at all. Their reasoning was that the law of God is not negotiable, and that loyalty to him outranks the preservation of the body.
Their confidence rested on resurrection. The martyr accounts in Second Maccabees repeatedly express the hope that God will raise the faithful, and one of the brothers speaks of his body being restored by the Creator. Whatever we decide about the book's authority, this hope is not foreign to Scripture. Daniel 11:32-35 says, "but the people who know their God will be strong, and take action." That verse comes from a vision of a king who corrupts some by flattery while others resist. It describes the same kind of pressure and the same kind of resolve: knowledge of God producing courage that does not depend on favourable circumstances.
It is important not to romanticise this. The books do not present suffering as good in itself, and they do not teach that every sufferer will be visibly vindicated. They present a choice between two kinds of loss: the loss of comfort now, or the loss of the hope that matters most. The martyrs choose the first and refuse the second. That choice is what Hebrews 11:35-38 honours when it says they would not accept their deliverance in order to obtain a better resurrection. The church has always had people in that position, in every century, and their testimony is not that they were strong in themselves but that they knew their God.
For readers today, the application is not to seek persecution but to prepare for pressure. Most of us will not face a king's officials with a choice of pork or death. We will face smaller invitations to keep our faith private, to bend on clear teaching, to let the surrounding culture set the terms. The Maccabean stories train us to see that the small compromises are not small. They also train us to keep resurrection hope central, because without it the bargain of the torturer looks reasonable. Daniel 11:32-35 puts it plainly: those who know their God are strong and take action. That strength is not personality. It is knowledge of the God who raises the dead.
How the Church Has Received These Books
The church's history with these books is mixed, and honesty requires saying so. They appear in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that many early Christians used, and some early writers quoted them with respect. Catholic and Orthodox traditions include them among the deuterocanonical books and read them in worship. The Reformers, following Jerome's distinction, treated them as useful for reading and edification but not as authoritative for doctrine. Protestant Bibles have generally placed them in a separate section or omitted them. The disagreement is real, and sincere believers hold different positions in good conscience.
What everyone can agree on is the narrow historical point. These books do not claim to be prophecy, and they are not cited as Scripture by any New Testament writer. Even where the language of Hebrews 11:35-38 sounds like the martyrs, the writer does not name the books or quote them as he quotes the Old Testament elsewhere. That silence is significant and should not be explained away. At the same time, the events they describe are part of the real history of God's people, and knowing that history helps us read our Bibles better. Historical value and canonical authority are two different things, and confusing them creates needless arguments.
A balanced approach is to read them as background and illustration, never as a foundation for doctrine. When a passage in Second Maccabees appears to support a practice that Scripture elsewhere does not teach, we should not build on it. When a passage illustrates courage, resurrection hope, or the cost of covenant loyalty that other passages clearly teach, we can be helped by it. This is the same way we might use a reliable church history or a missionary memoir: useful, instructive, and subordinated to the word of God. That posture keeps the books in their proper place and keeps our conscience clear.
It is also worth remembering that the period they describe was formative. The centuries between the last Old Testament prophets and the first Christian preachers were not empty. They shaped the language of resurrection, the expectation of a Messiah, the institution of the synagogue, and the calendar of festivals. Someone who wants to understand the world into which Jesus was born does well to know this material. The Maccabean books are part of that world. They are not the voice of God to us in the way the prophets are, but they are a faithful record of people who trusted him in a terrible time, and that record has its own kind of witness.
What These Books Cannot Do
There is a limit to what these books can carry. They cannot establish doctrine, because they are not the rule of faith. They cannot settle disputes about worship or the sacraments, because the church does not receive them as canonical. They cannot be used to silence the clearer teaching of the Law, the Prophets, or the apostles. Where they appear to contradict, the recognised Scriptures govern. Anyone who leans on them to overturn what the rest of the Bible plainly teaches has moved beyond what the books themselves claim and beyond what the church has historically allowed. That is a line worth marking clearly, because the value of the books is reduced when they are asked to do work they cannot do.
They also cannot guarantee that faithfulness will be rewarded with visible success in this life. First Maccabees shows a measure of national recovery, but the story ends with the rise of new powers and with leaders who fail. Second Maccabees shows martyrs who die regardless of their courage. If we read them as a promise that standing firm always produces a good outcome on earth, we will misread them and mislead others. They are honest about loss. Their hope is resurrection hope, which by definition is not fulfilled in the present. Reading them well means letting them be what they are rather than forcing them into a formula.
Finally, they cannot replace the person of Christ. It is possible to become absorbed in the drama of resistance and to forget that the deliverance of the Maccabean period, real as it was, pointed forward to a greater salvation. The temple they cleansed was destroyed. The nation they freed was later conquered. The hope they died for was fulfilled in someone they did not know. That does not diminish them; it makes their witness more poignant. They are among the great cloud of witnesses who testify that God keeps faith, and they call us to run the same race with the same hope, looking to the one they did not see.
Biblical fidelity check
The supplied passages establish specific things. Hebrews 11:35-38 states that some believers were tortured, refused their deliverance to obtain a better resurrection, and endured mockings, scourging, chains, imprisonment, stoning, and wandering. Daniel 11:32-35 states that a king corrupted some by flattery while those who knew God were strong and took action. John 10:22-23 states only that it was the Feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem. None of these passages names the Maccabees, quotes First or Second Maccabees, or commands the church to receive those books as Scripture. What the passages do is describe a kind of faithful suffering that matches the Maccabean accounts closely and a festival that those books explain.
A common misreading is to treat Hebrews 11:35-38 as proof that the Maccabean books are canonical Scripture. That does not follow. The writer can allude to events and to the memory of faithful sufferers without ruling on which books are inspired, and he never cites these books the way he cites the Law and the Prophets. Another misreading, on the other side, is to dismiss the books as worthless because they are not canonical. That also fails, since historical background can illuminate Scripture without carrying Scripture's authority. The honest position is that they are valuable, non-canonical witnesses, and readers differ in good conscience about how to use them.
Other passages that speak to Hebrews 11:35-38
These studies trace related themes of witness, endurance, and hope in Scripture: James and John in Scripture: A Scripture-First Bible Study Guide, 1 John Bible Study: Seeing Jesus in 1 John, 2 John Bible Study: Seeing Jesus in 2 John, and John the Baptist in Scripture: A Scripture-First Bible Study Guide.
Frequently asked questions
Are First and Second Maccabees part of the Bible?
That depends on the tradition. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include them among the deuterocanonical books and read them in worship. Protestant Bibles usually place them in a separate section or omit them, treating them as useful for edification but not authoritative for doctrine. The New Testament never cites them as Scripture, and the books do not claim prophetic status. Faithful Christians differ on this question, and both positions can be held with a good conscience. What matters is that no one uses them to overturn the clearer teaching of the recognised Scriptures.
Does Hebrews 11:35-38 refer to the Maccabean martyrs?
Many readers think so. The description of people tortured, refusing deliverance, and hoping for a better resurrection closely matches the martyr accounts in Second Maccabees, and no other Old Testament narrative fits as well. But the author does not name them, so we cannot be certain. What is certain is the pastoral point: faith is sometimes measured by what a person refuses to surrender, even at the cost of life, because of confidence that God raises the dead. Whatever the exact reference, the application is the same for every generation.
Why does the Feast of the Dedication matter in John 10?
It supplies the setting for Jesus walking in Solomon's portico and speaking about his works and his sheep. The feast commemorated the cleansing of the temple after its desecration, an event recorded in First Maccabees. Without that background, a reader misses what the festival meant to the crowd and why the conversation about the Messiah was charged with hope for deliverance. John 10:22-23 simply notes the season, assuming readers knew it. The detail shows how knowing the history between the testaments can open up a Gospel scene.
