Story

The Rededication and the Oil

164 BCE

Biblical Narrative

When Judah, surnamed Maccabee, and his brethren had vanquished the armies of Lysias at Bet-Zur, and the way to Jerusalem lay open before them, they went up unto Mount Zion to behold what they should find. And they saw the Sanctuary desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burned up, and shrubs growing in the courts as in a forest, and the priests' chambers thrown down. Then they rent their garments, and made great lamentation, and cast ashes upon their heads, and fell flat to the ground upon their faces, and blew with the trumpets of alarm, and cried unto Heaven.

Then Judah appointed certain men to fight against those who were in the citadel until he should have cleansed the holy place. So he chose priests of blameless conversation, such as had pleasure in the Law: and they cleansed the holy places, and bare out the defiled stones into an unclean place. And as for the altar of burnt offerings, which was profaned, they took counsel what to do with it: and a good thought came into their minds — to pull it down, lest it should be a reproach to them, because the heathen had defiled it. So they pulled down the altar, and laid up the stones in the mountain of the Temple, in a convenient place, until there should come a prophet to give answer concerning them.

Then they took whole stones according to the Law, and built a new altar after the fashion of the former; and made up the sanctuary, and the things that were within the Temple, and hallowed the courts. They made also new holy vessels, and into the Temple they brought the candlestick, and the altar of burnt offerings, and of incense, and the table. And upon the altar they burned incense, and the lamps that were upon the candlestick they lighted, that they might give light in the Temple.

Now on the five and twentieth day of the ninth month, which is the month Kislev, in the hundred forty and eighth year of the Greek kingdom, they rose up early in the morning, and offered sacrifice according to the Law upon the new altar of burnt offerings which they had made. Look, at what time and what day the heathen had profaned it, even in that day was it dedicated with songs, and citherns, and harps, and cymbals. Then all the people fell upon their faces, worshipping and praising the God of heaven, who had given them good success. And they kept the dedication of the altar eight days; and Judah and his brethren and the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year, by the space of eight days.

Look, at what time and what day the heathen had profaned it, even in that day was it dedicated with songs, and citherns, and harps, and cymbals.1 Maccabees 4:54

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The rededication of the Temple altar took place on 25 Kislev 148 of the Seleucid era — corresponding to mid-December 164 BCE — exactly three years after Antiochus IV Epiphanes had erected an altar of Zeus Olympios upon it (1 Maccabees 4:52–59; 2 Maccabees 10:1–8). The deliberately symmetrical date is one of the chief reasons scholars regard 1 Maccabees as a Hasmonean court chronicle: the festival of Hanukkah was instituted to commemorate, and to ritualise, an act of dynastic legitimation.

Two distinct festival etiologies survive in the Maccabean literature. 1 Maccabees 4:59 establishes an eight-day commemoration without giving a reason for the number eight. 2 Maccabees 10:6 supplies one: the Maccabean fighters celebrate Hanukkah as a delayed Sukkot, the eight-day autumn festival they could not keep in the wilderness. Megillat Antiochus, an Aramaic scroll of uncertain date (perhaps 7th or 8th century CE) read in some communities until the Middle Ages, blends both traditions and adds further legendary embellishments.

The famous rabbinic miracle of the single cruse of pure oil that burned for eight days — נֵס פַּךְ הַשֶּׁמֶן — appears nowhere in the Maccabean literature, in Josephus, or in Megillat Antiochus. Its earliest attestation is the sugya at Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 21b, redacted in the late Sasanian period. The miracle replaces the military victory at the heart of the holiday with a more inward providential miracle, suiting a diaspora community that had no Temple and no army.

Archaeologically, the Hasmonean redesign of the Temple Mount is partly visible in the masonry beneath Herod's later expansion. Hasmonean ashlar courses, identifiable by their distinctive fine drafted margins, appear in the eastern wall of the Temple Mount — the so-called ׳straight joint׳ in the southern stretch, where Herodian and pre-Herodian masonry meet, marks the southern limit of the Hasmonean enclosure. Yigal Shiloh's City of David excavations (1978–85) and the more recent Givati parking-lot excavations have steadily expanded the corpus of Hasmonean Jerusalem material culture.

The miracle of the cruse of oil is rabbinic, not Maccabean; it transforms a victory festival into a providence festival — exactly the transformation that exilic Judaism needed.Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity (1998), paraphrased