Maccabees

Wojciech Stattler's "Machabeusze" ("The Maccabees"), 1844.

The Maccabees (/ˈmækəˌbiːz/), also spelled Machabees (Hebrew: מַכַּבִּים‎, Makabīm or מַקַבִּים, Maqabīm; Latin: Machabaei or Maccabaei; Ancient Greek: Μακκαβαῖοι, Makkabaioi), were a group of Jewish rebel warriors who took control of Judea, successfully ejecting the Seleucid Empire during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The victorious Maccabees founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled Judea from 167 BCE to 37 BCE, being a fully independent kingdom from about 110 to 63 BCE. They reasserted the Jewish religion, partly by forced conversion, expanded the boundaries of Judea by conquest and reduced the influence of Hellenism and Hellenistic Judaism.

The Jewish holiday festival Chanukah celebrates the recovery of Jerusalem and subsequent rededication of the Second Temple at the beginning of the Maccabean revolt

Maccabees in "No Period"

A Jewish-American writer contemplated his failed first marriage, and wondered if it might have worked in some alternate timeline. After considering and discarding a number of possibilities, he considered imagined a world where the Maccabees fell to the Seleucids. This would mean the end of Judaism, and by extension, prevent Jesus and Christianity. That would mean he would have been a Zeus-worshipper rather than a Jew, and his ex-wife would have been a Wotan-worshipper than a Lutheran. Then he realized religion wasn't the problem between them, and that the substance of their real arguments would have been the same in this world.