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See Table at Bible.

Mac′ca·be′an adj.


1. (Biography) a Jewish family of patriots who freed Judaea from Seleucid oppression (168–142 bc)
2. (Bible) any of four books of Jewish history, including the last two of the Apocrypha


(ˈmæk əˌbiz)

1. (used with a plural v.) a priestly Jewish family who ruled Judea in the 1st and 2nd centuries b.c., esp. Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, who defeated the Syrians in 165? and rededicated the Temple.
2. (used with a sing. v.) either of two books of the Apocrypha, I Maccabees or II Maccabees, that contain the history of the Maccabees.
References in periodicals archive ?
In 1959 Sir Patrick Devlin, then a judge of the Queen's Bench Division, delivered his Maccabaean Lecture on 'Morals and the Criminal Law'.
Among those topics are the Exilic Period as an urgent case for a historical reconstruction without the biblical text: the neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions as a primary source, the relation between Samaria and Jerusalem in the early Maccabaean Period revisited: a case study about the reception of Phinehas, and from Philadelphius to Hyrcanus: the alternative approach to the formation and canonization of the Deuteronomistic historiography.
(73) Weisgal, who came to New York as a young boy, and who was a close associate of Lipsky's and Samuel's in the Zionist monthly magazine, The Maccabaean, and the executive council of the ZOA, spoke of Levin as a close friend with whom he conferred regularly.
(56.) Israel Zangwill, "Zionism and England's Offer," The Maccabaean 7.6 (December 1904), 281.
The American Jewish Zionist Newspaper, the Maccabaean, termed the Balfour Declaration, 'The Jewish Magna Carta,' The American Jewish Chronicle, "A Turning Point in Jewish History," The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, the "The End of the Galut."
Earlier versions of this Article were delivered at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Cambridge University, and the British Academy, where it was presented as the Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence.
Baron Patrick Devlin fired the first shots in this battle with his 1959 Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence to the British Academy, the arguments of which were later refined in The Enforcement of Morals.
The inscriptions cast new light not only on the Yahwistic community in Samaria, he says, but also on the politics of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid rulers in the southern Levant after Alexander and before the Maccabaean revolt.
The range of topics includes basic problems of historical relevance, such as the relationship between Biblical, Near Eastern, and Greek history writing (chapter 1), the place of ancient Israel in the Near East (chapter 2), the status of foreigners (chapter 3), the role (both negative and positive) of Babylon in the Jewish exile (chapter 6), the conflicting Jewish and Roman ideologies in the Maccabaean period (chapter 7), religious persecutions under the Maccabees (chapter 8).
Zionist monthly, The Maccabaean, exploring how it presented Zionist ideas to the fledgling American Zionist movement and how, in turn, it reflected the perspective of the emerging movement.
"Though a century divides these two legal writers," Hart observed, referring to Lords Stephen and Devlin, "the similarity in the general tone and sometimes in the detail of their arguments is very great."(41) In his defense, Devlin responded that at the time he delivered the Maccabaean lecture he "did not then know that the same ground had already been covered by Mr.
An important observation corrects Paulinus' biography in locating at Callinicus the gnostic chapel vandalized after the sectaries had molested monks on an annual march to a shrine of the Maccabaean martyrs.