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December 6, 2021

The Two Books of Maccabees Show a Familiar Israel-Diaspora Divergence

Where a Libyan Jew from the 2nd century BCE saw the hand of God, his counterparts in Judea saw human courage.

While the first and second books of Maccabees are the basis for the Hanukkah story, the rabbis excluded them from the Jewish canon. The first of these books is a Greek translation of a no-longer-extant Hebrew work; the second, according to its own preface, was composed in Greek and is an abridgment of an earlier work by a Jew living in what is now Libya. Examining the theological differences between the two, Daniel R. Schwartz argues that one represents the attitudes found in the newly independent kingdom of Judea, and the other those of the Diaspora:

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