Maccabees
/ˈmakəbiːz
/plural noun historical
1The members or followers of the family of the Jewish leader Judas Maccabaeus.The second miracle, mentioned in our Chanukah prayers, was the miraculous defeat of the Greek army by the much smaller Jewish forces under the Maccabees....
- But it was also a civil war among Jews, because - as in the time of the Maccabees - the Jewish upper class, largely Hellenized, was identified with the sins of the Greeks.
- That's the promise the Maccabees made to the Jews of their time.
1.1 (in full the Books of the Maccabees) Four books of Jewish history and theology, of which the first and second are in the Apocrypha and feature Judas Maccabaeus.
Derivatives
Maccabean
/ adjective ...- The book of Daniel, written at the height of the Maccabean revolt, dwells on the same themes of cultural and religious resistance to foreign invaders and their customs.
- Still, given the distinctiveness of each text and the likely Maccabean context of the Animal Apocalypse, a tentative proposal can be offered.
- Such an identification may indeed have had rhetorical effect if the Animal Apocalypse was written sometime during the Maccabean revolt.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin Maccabaeus, an epithet applied to Judas, perhaps from Hebrew maqqeḇeṯ 'hammer' (by association with the religious revolt led by Judas).