Chanukah: The Oily Miracle That Never Was

Sorry I’ve been on hiatus for so long from the blog.  When you start a new blog, you begin by posting all the time and then it slows down.  But I never meant for it to grind to an absolute halt for six days!

My only excuse is that work has been manic and I’m pushing to finish a whole bunch of projects before I leave for my December trip to Israel.  I hope to regularly post while there.

So now to the topic at hand, Chanukah.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of teaching about the holiday’s history to a small group of b’nai mitzva students at Beth Adam in Boca Raton.  I’ve taught about Chanukah a million and one times, but this was the first time I was ever free to tell the entire story to a group of kids.

Most of you probably already know that there was no miraculous cruse of oil that lasted for eight days following the Maccabean victory.  I remember the first time I started to teach that to adults, expecting that they would be mature enough to handle the truth.  After all, the factual narrative is widely known and documented.  Some of them actually freaked out.  Why is it that when it comes to real life, most liberal Jews are rational and empirical, but when it comes to religious fairy tales they act like they’re five years old?

We have great source materials on Chanukah’s origins and there’s hardly a non-Orthodox Jewish educator who doesn’t know this.  The book of First Maccabees was almost certainly written by a contemporary of the events.  Though lost to us in the original Hebrew, the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Jewish bible) preserved it.

There’s no mention of any oily miracles (I Maccabees 4):

And they arose before the morning on the five and twentieth day of the ninth month (which is the month of Kislev) in the hundred and forty-eighth year.  And they offered sacrifice according to the law upon the new altar of holocausts which they had made.  …And they kept the dedication of the altar eight days, and they offered holocausts with joy, and sacrifices of salvation, and of praise.

Why eight days?  The book of Second Maccabees, written a bit later, offers this:

It happened that on the same day on which the sanctuary had been profaned by the foreigners, the purification of the sanctuary took place, that is, on the 25th day of Kislev. They celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the Feast of Booths, remembering how not long before, during the Feast of Booths, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals. Therefore bearing ivy-weathered wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm….

So it was quite possibly a late Sukkot celebration.  Others have suggested that the Sukkot connection came from the fact that Solomon dedicated his Temple on Sukkot.  Maybe it was for both reasons.  One thing is for sure, it wasn’t because of any miraculous oil.  Hundreds of years later Josephus still hasn’t heard of any such miracle.  He writes in the Antiquities:

[The Maccabees] were so very glad at the revival of their customs when after a long time of intermission they unexpectedly had regained the freedom of their worship, that they made it a law for their posterity, that they should keep a festival on account of the restoration of their Temple worship for eight days. And from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights. I suppose the reason was, because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us….

Where the legend began no one can know, but by the Talmudic age, it was recorded in Babylonian Talmud Tractate Shabbat:

For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils in it, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed against and defeated them, they [the Hasmoneans] searched and found only one cruse of oil which possessed the seal of the High Priest, but which contained sufficient oil for only one day’s lighting; yet a miracle occurred there and they lit [the lamp] for eight days.

It’s always been obvious to me that, however the story began, it was heavily propagated by the Sages in order to put a cold blanket over any future Jewish militancy.  It was probably a pretty good decision given the post-Maccabean military track record of the Jews.

I always struggle with the holiday because of my fondness for those “modern” Hellenistic Jews who were attacked by the Maccabees .  Of course there can’t be any real comparison between Jewish Hellenists of yore (did I just write “yore”?) and secular Jews of today.  The whole world is different now.  It still doesn’t make me want to love the Maccabees.

So I just keep celebrating Chanukah with the knowledge that when all is said and done Jews deserve a solstice holiday just like everyone else.  And the candles are pretty.