Open Question
The Books of Maccabees report casualty figures for a handful of individual battles, but modern military historians consider those ancient counts inflated for morale and legitimizing purposes, most of the revolt's many engagements across seven years have no surviving figures at all, and no historian has attempted to build a single reconciled war-wide death toll from what remains.
What would resolve this A study working from archaeological evidence, destruction layers and burial contexts in Judea dated to the revolt's decades, that could independently test or bound the ancient chronicles' battle figures rather than relying on the literary sources alone.
OpenSecond Temple Judaism; Near Eastern archaeologyBezalel Bar-Kochva, Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Seleucids
Cross-Tradition Connections
Question On
Bar-Kochva's military-historical study treats the ancient sources' individual battle counts as unreliable rather than reconciling them into one figure for the revolt as a whole.
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