The Other Maccabees Nobody in the West Has Read

Imagine opening the Ethiopian Bible to the Books of Maccabees expecting a familiar story. In the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, Maccabees means one thing: the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BC, Judas Maccabeus leading a guerrilla war against Antiochus IV, the cleansing of the Jerusalem temple, the origin of Hanukkah. It is one of the best-documented resistance stories in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Open the Ethiopian Bible to Meqabyan, and none of that is there.

The First Book: A Family's Refusal

Instead, you find a Benjaminite named Meqabis and a tyrannical king named Tsirutsaydan who orders his subjects to worship idols. Meqabis and his sons refuse. They argue, with real theological sophistication, that a god of wood and stone cannot compare to the one true Creator. The king responds with torture and fire. The sons face their deaths with the same steady resolve found in the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, insisting on resurrection and divine justice even as the flames close in.

The Second and Third Books

That is only the First Book of Meqabyan. The Second tells a different story entirely, about a Moabite king named Meqabis who wages war against Israel, has a change of heart, and ends up teaching the Israelites God’s own law. The Third is shorter still, a compact set of moral exhortations built around familiar figures like Adam, Job, and David, focused on themes of punishment, salvation, and perseverance.

Where the Name Actually Comes From

None of these three books have any historical connection to the Hasmonean revolt. There is no Judas Maccabeus, no Antiochus IV, no actual Maccabean dynasty. Scholars believe the books were composed in Ge’ez, likely in the 4th or 5th century, by an Ethiopian church defining its own identity as it took shape. The name Meqabyan borrows the fame and the meaning of the word Maccabee, associated with faithful resistance under persecution, and builds an entirely new set of stories around it, rooted in Ethiopian Christian theology rather than Second Temple Jewish history.

Why would a church invent its own Maccabees rather than simply translating the existing ones? One reasonable explanation, offered by scholars who study Ethiopian canon formation, is that a newly established Christian community facing its own pressures wanted stories of resolute faith they could call their own, told in their own language, reflecting their own theological concerns around idolatry and resurrection rather than a specific Hellenistic war fought centuries earlier and thousands of miles away.

Whatever the reason, the result is three books that exist nowhere else in Christendom, canonical only in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, untranslated into English for the general public until the 21st century.

The Complete Ethiopian Bible includes all three books of Meqabyan in English, the Ethiopian church’s own Maccabees, alongside the 88-book canon they belong to. Meet the other Maccabees here.