Blood of the Maccabees

Jason (Yehoshua), a young boy living in Jerusalem during the Seleucid conquest, abandoned his Judaism and was swept away by Greek culture.

After his father was executed and his mother was brutally murdered, he resolved to join the Hasmoneans in their struggle against the Greeks in order to avenge his parents' deaths. Jerusalem is under heavy siege, and life there becomes unbearable. At the height of his journey, Jason finds unexpected love and returns to Judaism, loyal to his people and to the God of Israel.

Blood of the Maccabees is a gripping and surprising novel that tells the story of young people coming of age during a turbulent era, when time and circumstance forced them to make fateful decisions that affected both their own lives and the destiny of their people.

With masterful skill and flowing prose, the author, Asaf Golan, vividly portrays the dilemmas faced by his heroes and paints a rich picture of the kings and young people who ruled the land during that period. This is a story about good and evil, childhood and death, friendship and victory--whose price became an inseparable part of Jewish history.

Blood of the Maccabees is a stirring and thought-provoking book, based on real events, describing humanity's ability to fight and persevere in a changing world. The heroes of the story overcome divisions, unite to battle those who seek to destroy them, and against all odds, they ultimately prevail. The way I described it (though my wife disagrees) is "This is a story of a king, betrayed by his love (aka Rome) and takes out his anger on a group of people who rise in revolt against him, with the help of a girl; torn between her wicked family (aka Tobiads) and besieged people whose ways she was taught to hate. This is the story of the rise of Imperial Rome and the collapse of the Greek kingdoms. Alternatively it is the story of Hannuka."
My wife's description is "Blood, fire, and pillars of smoke."

I spent fifteen years in research for this book, using all historical sources such as The First and Second Books of Maccabees, Josephus' Jewish Wars, Polybius's Histories, and more. I read and spoke to the leading professors on the topic including the biographer of Judas Maccabaeus, and analyst of the Seleucid (Syrian Greek) armies, and the world of the Hellenistic kingdoms. This was a work of fiction, but one which tries to honestly answer "What exactly happened to the best of our knowledge and in good faith?" The original name of the novel was "from Rome to Jerusalem" but Jacob De Haas already took that one. Then I learned about the flower Helichrysum sanguineum, also known as "the blood of the Maccabees" that grows in Israel whose legend has it that it grows everywhere the Maccabees bled.