The Books of the Maccabees are books concerned with the Maccabees

Maccabees

The Maccabees were a Jewish rebel army who took control of Judea, which had been a client state of the Seleucid Empire. They founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 164 BCE to 63 BCE, reasserting the Jewish religion, expanding the boundaries of the Land of Israel and reducing the influence...

, the leaders of the Jewish

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 rebellion against the Seleucid dynasty

Seleucid dynasty

The Seleucid dynasty or the Seleucidae was a Greek Macedonian royal family, founded by Seleucus I Nicator , which ruled the Seleucid Kingdom centered in the Near East and regions of the Asian part of the earlier Achaemenid Persian Empire during the Hellenistic period.-History:Seleucus was an...

, or related subjects.

The term mostly refers to two deuterocanonical books contained in some canons of the Bible:

• 1 Maccabees
  1 Maccabees
  The First book of Maccabees is a book written in Hebrew by a Jewish author after the restoration of an independent Jewish kingdom, about the latter part of the 2nd century BC. The original Hebrew is lost and the most important surviving version is the Greek translation contained in the Septuagint...
  
  , originally written in Hebrew and surviving in a Greek translation, relates the history of the Maccabees from 175 BC
  Anno Domini
  and Before Christ are designations used to label or number years used with the Julian and Gregorian calendars....
  
   until 134 BC.
• 2 Maccabees
  2 Maccabees
  2 Maccabees is a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, which focuses on the Jews' revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes and concludes with the defeat of the Syrian general Nicanor in 161 BC by Judas Maccabeus, the hero of the work....
  
  , a Greek abridgment of an earlier history in Hebrew, relating the history of the Maccabees down to 161 BC, focusing on Judas Maccabaeus, talks about praying for the dead, offerings.

The term also commonly refers to two further works:

• 3 Maccabees
  3 Maccabees
  The book of the 3 Maccabees is found in most Orthodox Bibles as a part of the Anagignoskomena, while Protestants and Catholics consider it non-canonical, except the Moravian Brethren who included it in the Apocrypha of the Czech Kralicka Bible...
  
  , a Greek book relating to a 3rd century BC persecution of the Jews of Egypt.
• 4 Maccabees
  4 Maccabees
  The book of 4 Maccabees is a homily or philosophic discourse praising the supremacy of pious reason over passion. It is not in the Bible for most churches, but is an appendix to the Greek Bible, and in the canon of the Georgian Bible...
  
  , a philosophic discourse praising the supremacy of reason over passion, using the Maccabean martyrs as examples.

The term may also refer to:

• 5 Maccabees
  5 Maccabees
  The Fifth book of the Maccabees is an ancient Jewish work relating the history in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC.-Content:The book chronicles the events from Heliodorus' attempt to rob the Temple treasury in 186 BC to the death of Herod the Great's two sons about 6 BC...
  
  , an Arab language history from 186 BC to 6 BC. The same title is also used for a Syriac version of 6th book of Josephus
  Josephus
  Titus Flavius Josephus , also called Joseph ben Matityahu , was a 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian and hagiographer of priestly and royal ancestry who recorded Jewish history, with special emphasis on the 1st century AD and the First Jewish–Roman War, which resulted in the Destruction of...
  
  ' Jewish War
  The Wars of the Jews
  The Jewish War , in full Flavius Josephus's Books of the History of the Jewish War against the Romans , also referred to in English as The Wars of the Jews and The History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, is a book written by the 1st century Jewish historian Josephus.It is a description of Jewish...
  
  .
• 6 Maccabees, a Syriac poem which possibly shared a lost source with 4 Maccabees.
• 7 Maccabees, a Syriac work focusing on the speeches of the Maccabean Martyrs and their mother.
• 8 Maccabees, a brief account of the revolt drawing on Seleucid sources, preserved in the Chronicle of John Malalas
  John Malalas
  John Malalas or Ioannes Malalas was a Greek chronicler from Antioch. Malalas is probably a Syriac word for "rhetor", "orator"; it is first applied to him by John of Damascus .-Life:Malalas was educated in Antioch, and probably was a jurist there, but moved to...
  
   (§§ 206-207).

The three books of Meqabyan

Meqabyan

I, II, and III Meqabyan are three books in the Ethiopian Orthodox Old Testament Biblical canon....

 from Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

are similar in name but quite different in content.