The Spiritual World of Ancient Israel and Greece: Biblical Background to the Novels Judah Maccabee – Parts 1 & 2

By Brian Godawa

The Spiritual World of Ancient Israel and Greece: Biblical Background to the Novels Judah Maccabee – Parts 1 & 2
1st Edition
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Copyright © 2025 Brian Godawa

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-963000-68-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-963000-69-6 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-963000-70-2 (Large Print)

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001, unless otherwise indicated in the verse citation.

Other Bible versions cited:

NRSV: The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989).

LES: Rick Brannan et al., eds., The Lexham English Septuagint (Lexham Press, 2012).

NASB95: New American Standard Bible, 1995 Edition: Paragraph Version (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995).

Chapter 1 
The Maccabees and the Bible

The Septuagint

When I decided to write a novel about the Maccabees for this Chronicles series, I knew I would have to explain some things to readers who believe the Bible to be God’s written Word as I do. This is because even though the story of the Maccabees is about events in ancient Jewish history, they are not events recorded in the Bible. To be more accurate, they are not in some Bibles but are in others. Some Bibles, like the King James Version (KJV) before 1666, the Revised Standard Version (RSV) after 1957, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Bibles have several books of Maccabees in them, along with other books, often called Apocrypha, which means “hidden things.” The idea there is that early church authorities hid these books because of their questionable authenticity.

But there is some nuance to those inclusions that require explanation. Some traditions (Eastern Orthodox, Syriac) consider the Apocrypha, including Maccabees, to be sacred Scripture, while others (Roman Catholic and the translators of the KJV and RSV) consider them to be helpful and edifying, though not canonical Scripture.

I want to explain some of this nuance by giving a little background on the origin and nature of the Apocrypha and the books of Maccabees without boring the reader with a lengthy academic dissertation, so bear with me. I think it is rewarding.

Before I focus in on the actual books of the Maccabees, I want to start with their origin in a broader manuscript tradition called the Septuagint. The Septuagint broadly refers to ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures, to which Christians refer as the Old Testament. The term Septuagint, also called The Translation of the Seventy, is derived from the Latin word septuaginta, meaning “seventy.” It comes from a Jewish legend recorded in an apocryphal manuscript titled The Letter of Aristeas, which claims that 72 Jewish scholars, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, translated the first five books of Moses—the Torah, or Pentateuch—into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 BC. The term Septuagint simply rounds down 72 to 70 and, therefore, is often referred to by LXX, its Roman numerical equivalent.

The legend was rooted in the historical fact of Greece’s imperial cultural dominance caused by Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world by the time of his death in 323 BC. His surviving empire was divided between four of his generals, whose reigns competed for the next couple of centuries until Rome rose to dominance. The “Greekification” of everything became known as Hellenism—even today, Greece’s official name is the Hellenic Republic—and it influenced everyone’s lives economically, culturally and linguistically. The Greek language became the lingua franca of the empire, the common language everyone spoke to be able to interact between their various ethnicities and languages.

Though the Hebrews kept their own language and ethnic culture, they adopted the Greek language and some of the culture as well. As the legend goes, around 250 BC, the Greek Pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, commissioned 72 Jewish scribes to come to Alexandria from Jerusalem to translate the Hebrew scriptures for his own library. They did so for the first five books of the Law (Torah). Over the following decades, Jewish translators translated into Greek the other two “parts” of the Hebrew Bible, the Prophets and the Writings.

This is of significance for the Christian reader because many mistakenly believe that the Hebrew text that we currently have of the Old Testament is always the most accurate representation of the original text. After all, the original writings were in Hebrew, not Greek, right? 

Actually, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament that we had until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1946-1956), were from the Middle Ages of the 10th and 11th centuries AD. These handwritten manuscripts were based on what is today called the Masoretic Text (MT), a textual tradition whose name derives from the Masoretes, a community of Jewish scribes who standardized the text of the Hebrew scriptures and copied and distributed them between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. With the scrolls uncovered from the Dead Sea caves of Qumran, we discovered Greek and Hebrew texts that were as much as a thousand years older than the earliest known Hebrew manuscripts at the time. And scholarship soon discovered that these earlier manuscripts sometimes correlated with the Septuagint and sometimes with the Masoretic Text. This means that sometimes the Greek translation of the Old Testament was based on an older, and possibly more accurate, Hebrew manuscript tradition than the MT.[1]

Here’s where a historical twist comes in that makes the story fascinating. By the time of Christ, during the second Temple period, the Jewish community accepted the Greek translations of the Old Testament texts as inspired by God. But it was not just the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees who did so. Both Jesus and the Apostles who wrote the New Testament, more often than not, quoted from the Greek translation (not the Hebrew text) as God’s Word![2]

This is significant for the Christian, because it establishes that the Hebrew MT is not always the best or most original language upon which we can rely. And the LXX was therefore based on an older, and sometimes different, Hebrew text. The modern bias toward the MT as more “original” than the LXX text is then unfounded.

As it turns out, the MT has many significant theological problems that we cannot ignore because they affect biblical theology. A well-known case is the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” 

The word for “virgin” in the Hebrew MT is almah, which does not mean virgin, but simply young maiden. Whereas, in the Greek LXX, the word for “virgin” is parthenos, which assuredly means virgin. The Gospel of Matthew quotes from the Greek text (Matthew 1:23) to validate the claim that a virgin gave birth to Jesus. As much as one wants to say that a young maiden could be a virgin, it is not intrinsic to the Hebrew word. So the Apostle Matthew considered the Greek translation as virgin as God’s inspired Word. Not so much to modern Jews who seek to deny Jesus’s Messiahship.

Another example of theological variation in the MT can be found in the translation of Deuteronomy 32:43. The LXX renders it, 

Delight, O heavens, with him 
       and worship him, you sons of God. 
Delight, O nations, with his people 
and prevail with him, all you angels of God.[3]

The MT simply translates that verse as, “O nations, rejoice His people.” That’s it. Nothing else. It ignores the spiritual “heavens” and only mentions the natural “nations.” It also completely cuts out the references to the divine sons of God, a clear example of the anti-Christian bias of Jewish scribes trying to delete the plurality of divinity in the text.

Interestingly, a Dead Sea Scroll fragment of this text, much older than the MT, confirms the LXX’s supernatural flavor,

O heavens, rejoice with Him
Bow to Him, all gods.[4]

In fact, the Jewish community standardized the MT’s text to distinguish its translation of the Hebrew Scriptures from that of the Greek version adopted by the Church, despite the fact that Second Temple Jews before them, as well as the first Christians that formed part of that Jewish community, had accepted the LXX as inspired! With the destruction of Israel and the temple in AD 70, Christianity successfully outgrew Judaism and overshadowed its Old Covenant origins. Anti-Christian Jews did not want the same Bible as their enemies.[5]

I use these two cases out of many to prove that Christian apologists are not being truthful when they argue that the translational differences of the Old Testament are negligible and do not really affect theological content. That is simply not true. There are entire books itemizing the many significant theological translational differences between the LXX and the MT, as well as variations within those traditions.[6] This is not to disparage the MT or to always prioritize the LXX over it. And it does not discredit the Old Testament’s authority. My point is that the LXX translation has a distinguished authoritative tradition used by Jesus (as quoted in the four gospels), the Apostles, and the early Church. So we must afford it due respect.

And if that is the case, then what do we make of the fact that the apocryphal books of the Maccabees are part of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures quoted by Jesus and the Apostles as God’s written Word?

The Apocrypha

I’m sorry to complicate things a bit more, but that previous claim I just made above is what many people think, but it’s not entirely true. We are not sure that the books that are in our modern versions of the LXX were actually in the Greek corpus that Jesus and the Apostles quoted. The reason is that our modern versions of the LXX are collections of books into one volume that goes back only to about the second century AD at most. Before that time, and during the time of Jesus and the Apostles, there was no codified single book called “the Septuagint” that included specific books beyond the first five books of Moses. When Jesus and the Apostles quoted from the Greek Old Testament, they were quoting from Greek scrolls, but we do not have those scrolls and they were not collected into a single book called “the Septuagint.” 

In fact, the very ancient form of the book with which we are familiar is called a codex, pages bound between two covers. It wasn’t until the second century that Christians preferred the easily transportable and referenceable codex for the purpose of gathering sacred writings together into single volumes. The oldest manuscript we currently have of a single-volume Greek translation of the Old Testament that includes the Apocrypha is Codex Vaticanus, dated to the 4th century AD.

Nevertheless, what we call the Septuagint was compiled by the first Christians based on beliefs about which texts were God’s written Word to man and not merely spiritually edifying. This is where the word canon comes in. The biblical canon is defined as the list of books Christians consider authoritative as God’s written Word. Now, the biblical canon also has a long history of scholarly debate that goes beyond the scope of this little book. But it suffices to say that it took several centuries to solidify that biblical canon within the Christian Church. Part of the questioning involved the very books in the LXX that some Jews or Christians accepted as authoritative while others did not. 

So what books are in the Septuagint? The oldest full manuscript we have, called Vaticanus, contains the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi (with some variations of nomenclature and order), but also includes the apocryphal books of Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (or Wisdom of Ben Sirach), Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. The careful reader will notice that the books of the Maccabees are not in this list of added texts.

Vaticanus may be the oldest full manuscript of the Septuagint we have, but it is not the only one, and the oldest does not always mean the most accurate, if it is based on lesser quality copies. These are things scholar fuss over, but the short of it is that we have two other significant codexes of the Septuagint, Sinaiticus (also 4th century) and Alexandrinus (5th century), which have other apocryphal books included in their texts, such as the Odes of Solomon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the four individual books of 1-4 Maccabees, the latter of which serve as the foundation of my novels, Judah Maccabee: Part 1 and Part 2. 

So the books of the Maccabees were part of the Greek texts over which Christians debated in the first centuries of the canonization process, with reputable Church fathers and scholars on both sides of the debate. Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen were just some of those most respected who considered at least some of the Apocrypha to be inspired Scripture. But as Francis Beckwith concludes, support for the Apocrypha’s canonicity was not monolithic: “All that was agreed was that the Apocrypha were to be read and esteemed, not that they were to be treated as Scripture.”[7] Later, Martin Luther expressed a common Reformed position when he described the Apocrypha as “books which are not to be equated with Holy Scripture and yet which are useful and good to read.”[8]

Bible scholar John Bartlett adds, 

In England the Calvinist-inspired Geneva Bible (1560) included the apocryphal books, accepting them ‘for their knowledge of history and instruction of godly manners’, a phrase taken up in the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, which state that ‘the other [i.e. apocryphal] books…the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine’.[9]

In a sense, this standard still holds today. Even though Protestants may not agree with the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox views of the Apocrypha as canonical or deuterocanonical, scholarship maintains they are nevertheless worthy of respect to be studied and afforded esteem for basic historical purposes. And that is the position that I took as author of the Judah Maccabee novels. God is sovereignly involved in all history, not only in biblically canonical history.

So let’s take a closer look at these books of 1-4 Maccabees to see what we can learn from them as part of God’s redemptive narrative (His-story).

Books of the Maccabees

Though the books of the Maccabees are not included in the Hebrew canon, Jews annually celebrate certain narrative events in 1 and 2 Maccabees to this day in the holiday of Hanukkah, a festival the Bible does not explicitly command. 

Though our extant manuscripts of the Maccabees books are in Greek, most scholars believe that 1 Maccabees was translated from an original Hebrew text.

Here are what the four books are about:

1 Maccabees. This book describes Jewish efforts to withstand the oppression of the Hellenistic Seleucid empire against their ethnic identity during the period of c. 175-134 BC. It describes the actions of king Antiochus IV Epiphanes and others against the Jews and the wars spawned when the sons of Mattathias ben Johannan rose to defend Israel. Scholars consider the books as propaganda for the Hasmonean dynasty of priests that would lead up to the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. 

My Judah Maccabee novels cover this main narrative surrounding the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus and ends with the recovery and cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC. Though the battles between the Jews and the Seleucids were far from over after that event, it nevertheless marked a significant victory and historical turning point that resulted in the commemoration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah mentioned above. Many scholars also believe 1 Maccabees may very well reflect Sadducean theology because it avoids any description of spiritual warfare or resurrection.

2 Maccabees. This book covers the similar time period and events as 1 Maccabees of the Jews under Seleucid rule but ends with the fall of the Seleucid empire in 161 BC. It is considered a stark, contrasting view from 1 Maccabees because it charges Israel with spiritual guilt for disobedience to God resulting in heaven’s punishment of Israel. If 1 Maccabees is pro-Hasmonean and Sadducean, many scholars consider 2 Maccabees anti-Hasmonean and Pharisaic because it affirms spiritual warfare of angels as well as personal bodily resurrection.

3 Maccabees. This book deals with similar themes as 2 Maccabees but addresses Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy IV fifty years before the events of the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BC. 

4 Maccabees. This book is not historical but more of a philosophical treatise about the superiority of reason over emotions, a specifically Hellenistic view. But it gives some narrative expansion to the martyrdom accounts of Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes detailed in 2 Maccabees (e.g., Eleazar, and a woman and her seven sons). Early Christians drew heavily from these reports for encouragement in facing their own martyrdom. My Judah Maccabee novels also drew from this book for its martyr stories.

Another source for the novels is the respected first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who used 1 Maccabees and other ancient historical sources to write about the Maccabean Revolt as a primer to the Jewish Revolt against Rome of AD 66-70.[10]

About the Author

Brian Godawa is a respected Christian writer and best-selling author of novels and biblical theology. His supernatural Bible epic novels combine creative imagination with orthodox Christian theology in a way that transcends both entertainment and preachiness.

His love for Jesus and storytelling was forged in the crucible of worldview apologetics and Hollywood screenwriting, as he began a career in movies and eventually expanded into the world of novels.

His first novel series, Chronicles of the Nephilim has been in the Top 10 of Biblical Fiction on Amazon for more than a decade, selling over 350,000 books. His popular book Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment is used as a textbook in Christian film schools around the country. His movies To End All Wars and Allegedhave won multiple movie awards such as Cannes Film Festival and the Heartland International Film Festival.

He lives in Texas with the most amazing wife a man could ever pray for and is accountable to a local church. He reads too many books and watches too many movies. He knows, he knows, he should get out more.

Find out more about his blog and his other books, lectures, and online courses for sale at his website, www.godawa.com.

[1] Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, (Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Academic, 2000), 167-182.

[2] Scholars have itemized all the Old Testament quotations and allusions. Moises Silva and Karen Jobes explain that most of the scriptural quotations in the Gospels and Acts follow the LXX, a few follow the MT, and others don’t match up with either. Richard Longenecker chronicles that in the letters of Paul in particular, “of the approximately one hundred Old Testament passages quoted by Paul in his letters (disengaging the conflated texts and the possible dual sources, and treating each separately), over half are either absolute or virtual reproductions of the LXX, with almost half of these at variance with the MT. On the other hand, four are in agreement with the MT against the LXX (Job 41:11; 5:13; Ps 112:9; Num 16:5), and approximately forty vary from both the LXX and the MT to a greater or lesser degree.” Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI; Vancouver: W. B. Eerdmans; Regent College Pub., 1999), 96–97.

[3] Rick Brannan et al., eds., The Lexham English Septuagint (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), Dt 32:43.

[4] Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, The JPS Torah Commentary, 516 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 314

[5] Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), 382.

[6] Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Second Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 2001); Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[7] Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), 386, 394. One of the strongest arguments for the Apocrypha not being considered canonical is that Jesus and the Apostles never quoted from those books as Scripture. But this is not an absolute proof, because there are nine other Old Testament books never quoted in the New Testament as well: Judges, Ruth, Ezra, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Obadiah, and Zephaniah. Obadiah and Zephaniah, however, were considered a part of the singular category called “The Twelve” in reference to the twelve minor prophets, so they may be assumed under that category. And it must be remembered that the New Testament also quotes from many sources that are not considered canonical but nevertheless considered relevant or truthful.

[8] Thomas Fischer, “Maccabees, Books of: First and Second Maccabees,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman, trans. Frederick Cryer (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 439.

[9] John R. Bartlett, 1 Maccabees, Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 14.

[10] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 12.5 – 13.7