The Festival Is Jewish, the Books Are Not

The canonical position is untidy and worth stating exactly. Catholic Bibles contain 1 and 2 Maccabees, defined as canonical at Trent in 1546 and placed at the end of the historical books. The Eastern Orthodox churches receive 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, and Greek Bibles commonly print 4 Maccabees in an appendix as valuable rather than canonical; the Georgian tradition has included all four. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon contains books called Meqabyan which share the name and almost nothing else, being different compositions rather than translations of these. Protestant Bibles class 1 and 2 Maccabees as Apocrypha, printed in Luther's Bible and in the King James version and absent from most later editions. Judaism includes none of them in the Tanakh.

That last point yields the sharpest fact about these books. Hanukkah is a Jewish festival, kept for eight days every year, commemorating the rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE, and the only substantial near-contemporary accounts of the events it commemorates sit in books that Judaism does not treat as scripture and that were preserved for two thousand years by Christians copying Greek manuscripts.

The rabbinic tradition tells the story by its own route, through a short passage in the Talmud about a single sealed cruse of oil that burned for eight days, a miracle neither Maccabean book mentions. 1 Maccabees accounts for the eight days quite differently, by reference to the festival of Booths the defenders had been unable to keep while the Temple was defiled. Festival and earliest history come down separate channels, and they do not quite meet.