This book explores the period from the 160s to 63 B.C.E., when the Maccabees ruled the Jews, up to the publication of the Mishnah in the second century C.E.

The volume contains essays on various problems of the early Jewish works: the Books of the Maccabees. Authors include renowned international specialists in the literature and thinking of early Judaism.

These accounts of the Maccabean revolt, by which the sons of Mattathias reclaimed the temple of Jerusalem, tell an important story of the founding of the Jewish people. "The Hammerers" is the meaning of the nickname "Maccabees," given to Mattathias's sons, who lived in a time of revolution. Empires struggled for control of Greece, Egypt, and Asia, and the small population of Jews tried to preserve their claim to Judea. The five brothers also made heroic contributions to the practice of Judaism. Their rededication of the temple establishes the annual celebration of Hanukkah, and the martyr stories in Second Maccabees emphasize faithfulness to the law of Moses. The books of First and Second Maccabees are also important for Christians, as in them is told how the Jewish people established the political and religious culture into which Jesus was born. The martyr stories inform the early Christian martyrdoms, and the books are written in Greek, the language in which the Jews of Jesus' time read the Scriptures. As Father Harrington notes, without the Maccabees "the fate of Judaism (and with it Christianity and Islam) was uncertain."

This volume publishes papers delivered at the Second International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books (Pápa, Hungary). This conference dealt with the Books of the Maccabees. As such, this was the most extended discussion of these books that ever took place at a scholarly meeting. The volume contains articles on the textual forms, traditions, theology and ideology of the books, and demonstrates the books’ relationship with the contemporary literature of early Judaism.

1 MaccabeesAlthough 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 MaccabeesThe 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 Maccabees4 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.

This book examines texts and materials, ranging from the eastern Mediterranean to northwestern Europe, related to the Maccabean martyrs. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski demonstrates that Christian thinkers constructed memories of the Maccabean martyrs that simultaneously appropriated Jewish traditions and obscured the Jewish origins of Christianity.