Texts · 6 · Jehu and Elisha
The Bible's curators left out the Maccabees
Five centuries later, the Maccabees founded a new Jewish kingdom. Yet the sages who shaped the Hebrew Bible left out the books about them.
The canon chose peoplehood over statehood.
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Those books celebrated state power and political martyrdom. The collection the sages kept focuses on the first kingdoms, the provinces that replaced them, and the families and clans who came before, a community built to survive the fall of any kingdom.
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. 96
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