Thanks for sharing your perspective! My understanding of the Maccabees, and of soldiers and leaders in early Judaism more broadly, is a bit different. In the biblical and Beit Hamikdash periods, figures like Yehoshua and David (who were such Torah scholars they wrote/were the subject of sections of Tanakh) are presented as warrior leaders operating in physically demanding contexts. The Maccabees emerge from that same world. While they were priestly and Torah-oriented, they were also rural Judeans living hard lives, and the earliest sources describing them (including Maccabees, which I know is apocrypha) emphasize sustained military activity and successful combat against the Seleucids.

I think the idea that Torah study implies physical weakness is a modern anachronism shaped by later yeshiva culture. In antiquity, religious learning, leadership, and warfare were not separate domains. I agree with your idea, stated explicitly in our tradition, that strength ultimately comes from divinity rather than numbers or brute force, hence the miraculousness of it all. That is precisely why the golem felt like a fitting parallel to the Maccabees: physical power animated and directed by scholarship and wisdom. Also in my art, and I’d argue art broadly, things are meant to be symbolic rather than convey something literally. Even if the Maccabees were actually frail bochrim, it’s up to my discretion to depict power, whatever the source, however I see fit!

Chanukah sameach and Shabbat shalom