MACCABEES, two apocryphal books of Scripture, containing the history of Judas and his brothers, and their wars against the Syrian kings in defence of their religion and liberties, so called from Judas Mattathias, surnamcd Maccabaeus, as some say from the word '□□n, formed of the initials of .'nrτ ’ ∙ öbĸa rτ□n□ -n, Who is like unto thee, O Lord, amongst the gods, which was the motto of his standard; and hence those who combated under his banner were called Maccabees, and the name was generally applied to all who had suffered in the cause of the true religion, under the Egyptian or Syrian kings. The first book of the Maccabees is an excellent history, and comes the nearest to the style and manner of the sacred historians. It was originally written in the Chaldaic tongue, and was extant in that language in the time of St Jerome. From the Chaldaic it was translated into Greek, from the Greek into the Latin. It is supposed to have been written by John Hyrcanus, the son of Simon, who was prince and high priest of the Jews for nearly thirty years, and began his government at the time where this history ends. It contains the history of forty years, from the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes to the death of Simon the high priest; that is, from the year of the world 3829 to the year 3869, or 131 years before Christ. The second book of the Maccabees begins with two epistles sent from the Jews of Jerusalem to the Jews of Egypt and Alexandria, to exhort them to observe the feast of the dedication of the new altar erected by Judas on his purification of the temple. The first was written in the 169th year of the era of the Seleucidae, that is, 144 before Christ; and the second in the 188th year of the same era, or 125 before Christ. After these epistles follows the preface of the author to his history, which is an abridgment of a larger work, composed by one Jason, a Jew of Cyrene, who wrote in Greek the history of Judas Maccabaeus and his brethren, and the wars against Antiochus Epiphanes, and Eupator his son. The second book does not by any means equal the accuracy and excellence of the first. It contains a history of about fifteen years, from the execution of the commission of Heliodorus, who was sent by Seleucus to fetch away the treasures of the temple, to the victory obtained by Judas Maccabaeus over Nicanor; that is, from the year of the world 3828 to the year 3843, or 147 years before Christ.

There are in the Polyglot Bibles, both of Paris and London, Syriac versions of both these books; but they, as well as the English versions which we have amongst the apocryphal books in our Bible, are all derived from the Greek. There is also a third book of the Maccabees, containing the history of the persecution of Ptolemy Philopator against the Jews in Egypt, and their sufferings under it, which appears to have been written by some Alexandrian Jew in the Greek language, not long after the time of Siracides. It is in most of the ancient manuscript copies of the Greek Septuagint, particularly in the Alexandrian and the Vatican, but was never inserted into the vulgar Latin version of the [7:13:619] Bible, nor consequently into any of our English copies. Moreover, Josephus’s history of the martyrs who suffered under Antiochus Epiphanes is found in some manuscript Greek Bibles, under the appellation of the fourth “book of the Maccabees.