Maccabee campaigns of 163 BC

The Maccabee rebels fought multiple enemies: Seleucid garrisons and hired mercenaries under a commander named Timothy of Ammon, non-Jewish inhabitants hostile to the Maccabees and their Jewish neighbors, and possibly the Tobiad Jews, a clan that generally favored the ruling Seleucid government.

The Maccabees did not in general hold the territory they fought in during this period, but rather engaged in raids on opposing power centers and retributive attacks on anti-Jewish populations.

Lysias returned to the capital Antioch to stave off any succession challenges to the young boy king Antiochus V Eupator and thus defend his own authority as Regent of the entire Empire.

In this time period, only Judea truly had a strong majority of Jews; many outlying regions, while having substantial Jewish populations, had many non-Jews.

Like many of the conflicts in that year, these battles appear to have been closer to a raid than an invasion; 1 Maccabees describes the second attack as "He [Judas] struck Hebron and its villages and tore down its strongholds and burned its towers on all sides.

He pursued the local Gentiles "to the gate of Ptolemais" although did not besiege the city; he too escorted back a large group of Jewish refugees to Judea with him.

[4] The coast of the Eastern Mediterranean was in this era dominated by Greek-friendly cities who participated in the broader Greek world trading network; the Seleucids referred to the region as Paralia.

[5] The book of 1 Maccabees archaically refers to the area as the "land of the Philistines" for the same reason as calling the Edomites the "sons of Esau"; the Philistines were long relegated to ancient history, but it made for a Biblical allusion to describe the territory and frame the Maccabee expedition in the language of ancient Jewish heroes.

The author of 1 Maccabees also blames the priests killed near Marisa for disobeying orders out of a desire to do a brave deed.

John Grainger, a historian skeptical of the reliability of the books of Maccabees, argues these letters were potentially postfactum inventions made to provide additional justification for the expeditions.

The book 1 Maccabees was likely written under the reign of John Hyrcanus, an era where the Hasmonean state had expanded its borders beyond Judea.