The Septuagint version of the Maccabees in English.

1 Maccabees: Although the book presents the Jewish leaders Judas, Jonathan, and Simon as devout people and has little sympathy for people who favor Hellenization, it must be noted that he nowhere mentions divine intervention. The author must have been a cultivated Jew living in Judah, and can be dated to c.100 B.C.E.

2 Maccabees is not as well-written and has a less polished form. The pagans are defined as "blasphemous and barbarous nations" in 10.4, but there are also severe censures of apostate Jews, of whom there must therefore have been considerable numbers. We find theological features in 2 Maccabees such as the resurrection of the body in 7.11; 14.46. This stands in stark contrast first to Wisdom and Philo, both of which teach the immortality of the soul. In 7.28, there appears for the first time in Hebrew thought that the doctrine, which will later be called creatio ex nihilo, which is the belief that creation, and thus all things created, was brought about out of nothing.

3 Maccabees: The title of 3 Maccabees is a misnomer because the book has nothing to do with the Maccabees, who are never mentioned in it. The book is a story about a situation in which the Jewish people, this time in Egypt, were in danger of being annihilated by a Hellenistic monarch, who was attempting to top their religious convictions and practices. The book was composed in Greek and relates a story set in the time of Ptolemy IV Philopater (221-203 B.C.E).

4 Maccabees belongs to the Maccabees series only because it deals with the beginning of the persecution of Jews by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. It possibly was written during the reign of the emperor Caligula (C.E. 37.) The work's main religious theme is that the martyr's sufferings expunged the sins of the entire Jewish people through a type of propitiation. The Maccabees books were preserved only by the Christian church.