Greek Historiographical Techniques in the First Book of Maccabees: Evidence of Exemplarity, Enargeia, and Immersive Historiography

Abstract

The First Book of Maccabees is widely regarded as an instance of conservative, biblically oriented historiography in which Hellenistic influence on narrative composition is minimal or absent. This article challenges that consensus through a close analysis of two key passages. (a) The farewell speech of Mattathias (1 Macc 2:49–68) is shown to reflect the Hellenistic conventions of the dynastic Abschiedsrede, the paradeigma list, and the exitus illustrium virorum more closely than any biblical model: the structural architecture of the speech, the rhetorical function of the ancestral exempla as stimuli to mimesis, and the valorization of honorable death as civic immortality all belong to the Greek tradition, even as their content is drawn from the sacred history of Israel, a form of “Jewish exemplarity.” (b) The battle narrative of 1 Macc 9 is analyzed as an instance of what recent scholarship has termed “immersive historiography.” The article argues that these features are integral to the original compositional program of the work, not the product of the Greek translator’s intervention. Through them, the Jerusalem elite deployed the culturally dominant historiographical syntax as a political instrument. Calculated pathos acts as advocacy, guiding the reader’s judgment against the Seleucids and justifying Hasmonean dynastic power. In this sense, 1 Maccabees appears not as a protest against Hellenistic influences but as a key example of the complex nature of Hellenistic Judaism.