The Books of the Maccabees are a series of books that are part of the biblical Apocrypha. They concerned with the Maccabees, the leaders of the Jewish rebellion against the Seleucid dynasty, or related subjects. The term mostly refers to two deuterocanonical books contained in some canons of the Bible: The term also commonly refers to two further works: * 3 Maccabees, a Greek book relating to a 3rd-century BCE persecution of the Jews of Egypt. * 4 Maccabees, a philosophic discourse praising the supremacy of reason over passion, using the Maccabean martyrs as examples.