1 Maccabees reads less like scripture and more like a war history: a Jewish revolt against a Greek empire that tried to stamp out their religion by force, fought out across 16 chapters of sieges, betrayals, and a family of brothers who go from guerrilla fighters to kings. It’s also the book behind the story of Hanukkah, told here with a lot more bloodshed and a lot less oil. We covered all 16 chapters.
A quick note on what this book even is: 1 Maccabees isn’t part of the Hebrew Bible or most Protestant Old Testaments, but it is included in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons as part of the Apocrypha (also called the deuterocanonical books). We covered it the same way we covered everything else: chapter by chapter, unstudied, reacting as we went.
You’ll also see 3 episodes marked Dig Deeper below. The show’s format is an unstudied first read, reactions and all, so those episodes are where the hosts go back into a book or chapters they already covered to chase down their own questions and pick up what they missed the first time through. They’re not listener Q&A, just the hosts grading their own homework.
19 episodes (16 read-through + 3 Dig Deeper) • Chapters 1–16 (complete) • Recorded 2025–2026
Every Episode, In Order
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 1
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 2
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 3
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 4
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 5
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 6
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 7
- [Dig Deeper] 1 Maccabees Chapters 1–7
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 8
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 9
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 10
- [Dig Deeper] 1 Maccabees Chapters 8–10
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 11
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 12
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 13
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 14
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 15
- [Dig Deeper] 1 Maccabees Chapters 11–15
- 1 Maccabees Chapter 16
Contradictions We Found in 1 Maccabees
We didn’t catalog any standalone contradiction posts for 1 Maccabees specifically. It’s a much less-scrutinized book than the rest of the Old Testament, but plenty of the same questions about violence, divine favoritism, and historical accuracy come up in the episodes themselves.
Browse everything we’ve covered on 1 Maccabees →
Keep Exploring
- Biblical Studies & Early Christianity: background and scholarship on the books we cover
- Science & Source Library: the sources behind our commentary
- Browse all Books of the Bible →
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