true faith; on the other hand, 2 Maccabees was probably interested in promoting that “true faith” especially among Jews of the Diaspora and particularly in encouraging them through historiography and martyrology to embrace Hanukkah as a feast of liberation. All the same, these two works may be treated together, for they both engage in their different political and theological agendas by narrating (to admittedly different degrees) events from the same period in Jewish history.