A re-evaluation of the battles that Judas Maccabaeus led against the Seleucid troops – in the light of the historical circumstances, the information we have on the Seleucid army, and our familiarity with the battlefields – indicates that I Maccabees describes the course of most of the battles with considerable accuracy, and suggests that the author was an eye-witness of some of them (Ammaus, Beth Zacharia, and perhaps Elasa). The final passages of the book testify to its having been written a generation after the events. On the other hand, an examination of the book's character and purposes, hints, ‘slips of the pen’ in the two Books of the Maccabees, as well as external information on the size and movements of the Seleucid army, and an analysis of the course of some of the battles according to the conditions of the terrain, can repudiate absolutely most of the information contained in the book on the relative strength of the two sides. The same negative evaluation applies also to the battle orations attributed to Judas Maccabaeus. The great discrepancy in credibility between the figures of the armies as well as the battle orations on the one hand, and the descriptions of the course of the battles on the other, is well known from the historiographic literature of antiquity.

The pattern of the Hasmonaean Revolt is identical to that of revolutionary wars and struggles for freedom, as analysed by military theoreticians on the basis of the experience in such wars in the twentieth century. Like them, it is divisible into two main stages.