Topic 16 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Hanukkah and the Rededication
Hanukkah - the Festival of Dedication - commemorates the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 164 BCE, three years after Antiochus IV Epiphanes had desecrated it by erecting an altar to Zeus and offering pig sacrifices on it. The festival lasts eight days and is observed by the lighting of a nine-branched menorah (the hanukkiah), with one additional light added each night. It falls in late November or December on the lunar Hebrew calendar, and its proximity to Christmas in Western cultures has given it a cultural prominence in the modern Jewish calendar that its traditional religious significance does not quite warrant - it is a minor festival by the standards of the Jewish liturgical year.
The primary historical sources for the Maccabean revolt and the rededication are 1 and 2 Maccabees, books in the Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal collection. First Maccabees gives a sober historical account: after the Maccabees recaptured the Temple, they cleansed it, removed the defiled altar stones, built a new altar, made new sacred vessels, and rededicated the Temple on the 25th of Kislev, 164 BCE - exactly three years after its desecration. They celebrated for eight days and decreed that the anniversary should be observed annually. No miracle of oil is mentioned in 1 Maccabees.
The famous miracle of the oil - a single day's supply of ritually pure oil burning for eight days - first appears in the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 21b), written centuries after the events. Its absence from 1 and 2 Maccabees has led some scholars to regard it as a later legendary addition that gave the festival a more explicitly miraculous character. The eight-day duration in 2 Maccabees 10:6 is explained as a belated celebration of Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles), which the Maccabees had been unable to observe during the fighting. Whatever the precise historical basis of the oil miracle, it has been the dominant popular understanding of Hanukkah for well over a millennium.
Hanukkah appears in the New Testament in John 10:22-23: "Then came the Festival of Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was in the Temple courts walking in Solomon's Colonnade." The passage places Jesus at the Temple during Hanukkah, immediately before the discourse in which he says "I and the Father are one." Whether this temporal setting is theologically intentional - placing Jesus's self-identification as God's Son in the context of the festival celebrating the Temple's rededication - is debated, but many scholars think John's Gospel rarely places narrative details without theological intention.