Hanukkah appears in the New Testament,
but nowhere in the Old.Take a moment to digest that startling fact. Now come along, and we’ll unravel this mystery, piece by piece… No Hanukkah in the Old TestamentFirst, a quick refresher on the sequence of ancient Near Eastern conquests: The Israelites conquered Canaan. Then the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. Then the Babylonians conquered the southern kingdom of Judah. Then the Persians conquered the Babylonians. Then the Greeks conquered the Persians.
One good conquest deserves another! The Greeks who conquered the Persians were none other than the armies of Alexander the Great. After Alexander passed on to whatever eternal reward awaited him, the Syrian section of his conquered territory passed to General Seleucus. Seleucus and his descendants were super-duper boosters of all things Greek. In fact, Hellenism held such allure that the Romans used Greek for a long time before they got around to imposing Latin. That’s why the New Testament was ultimately composed in Greek. In due course the Seleucids annexed Judea to their holdings, but for all their hysterical Hellenism they were fairly enlightened despots. One thing conquerors had already learned was that the Jews were extremely stubborn about their religion. It was better to grant them their eccentric monotheism than to waste time trying to get them to sacrifice to the god-king-du-jour. Much later the Romans would adopt the same policy (though such religious toleration did not prevent them from razing Jerusalem and its temple to the ground… but that’s getting ahead of our story). In fact, it seems that Greek culture was so compelling, the opportunities it brought so enticing, and the Seleucids so easygoing, that some not-insignificant faction of Jews got a little weak in the knees. Wobbly. Fuzzy. Not to say accommodating, syncretizing, and colluding. This was only one segment of the Jews in the Seleucid empire, though. Another not-insignificant faction was radically devoted to the Lord God of Israel and disinclined to bend a hair, much less a knee, to the latest idol in fashion. And, as usual, there was every possible shade of cooperation and resistance in between these two extremes. All this may have remained an internal dispute among the Jews, were it not for the lavishly named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. A.IV.E. was right up there with Nero in his craziness and power-trippiness. His appellation of Epiphanes, “The One Made Manifest” (i.e., like God) was popularly amended to Epimanes, “Madman.” Undoubtedly a spell as a hostage of Rome—still a republic in those days, not yet an empire—did some lasting psychological damage. But a few reversals of fortune later, A.IV.E. captured the Seleucid throne on the extremely spurious plan of co-reigning with the real heir to the throne, who had the terrible misfortune of being a baby. A.IV.E. was no fool; he murdered that kid. Then he tried to capture Egypt, but Rome expressed its displeasure and A.IV.E. backed off. Arriving back home in an irritable mood, A.IV.E. made to the Hellenized Jews, the weak-wobbly-fuzzy ones, an offer they couldn’t refuse: he’d back them against the fanatically monotheistic ones. They gladly went along with his new and hyper-intolerant edict to outlaw all Jewish rites of worship. “In those days certain renegades came out from Israel and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since we separated from them many disasters have come upon us.’ This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king, who authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.”
(I Maccabees 1:11–15) Things unraveled from there. A.IV.E. invaded his own territorial city of Jerusalem, and its temple in particular. “He arrogantly entered the sanctuary and took the golden altar, the lampstand for the light, and all its utensils. He took also the table for the bread of the Presence, the cups for drink offerings, the bowls, the golden censers, the curtain, the crowns, and the gold decoration on the front of the temple; he stripped it all off. He took the silver and the gold, and the costly vessels; he took also the hidden treasures that he found. Taking them all, he went into his own land.”
(I Maccabees 1:21–24) From this point on, A.IV.E. knuckled down on his assimilationist policy. Two years later he plundered Jerusalem and burnt it to the ground. He took the people captive and ordered total conformity to the Hellenistic way of life according to the deceitful civic wish that “his whole kingdom… should be one people” (I Maccabees 1:41). As was to be expected, some Jews collaborated, while others resisted. The culmination of the horrors was that on 25 Chislev, A.IV.E’s forces erected a “desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering” (I Maccabees 1:54) and offered it up to Zeus. The sacrificial animal? A pig. To those who remained loyal to the Lord God of Israel, nothing worse could be imagined. It was like Nebuchadnezzar all over again. The loyalists fled the city and hid out in the wilderness, as if they’d never conquered Canaan. The Jews who were so loyal that they wouldn’t even fight on the Sabbath were exterminated in short order by the Seleucid army, which had no such religious compunctions. Cannier than their counterparts though just as devoted, a certain priestly family of five brothers under father Mattathias decided that they’d have to break Sabbaths to give Sabbaths a chance of surviving at all. Not long after, Mattathias died, but his son Judas “the Hammer” Maccabeus took up the torch, gathered allies, and, in a series of battles that echo all the great battles of the Old Testament, drove A.IV.E.’s armies out of Jerusalem for good. With that, the Maccabees established a new Jewish kingdom, known as the Hasmonean monarchy. When it was all over, the Maccabees cleaned the temple top to bottom, replaced the despoiled altar and the stolen altarware, and again on 25 Chislev offered sacrifice as they hadn’t been able to do in years. “There was very great joy among the people, and the disgrace brought by the Gentiles was removed. Then Judas and his brothers and all the assembly of Israel determined that every year at that season the days of dedication of the altar should be observed with joy and gladness for eight days, beginning with the twenty-fifth day of the month of Chislev.”
(I Maccabees 4:58–59) And that is how the festival of Hanukkah came to be. With so many resonances to themes from the Pentateuch to the prophets, and maybe even some direct allusions in Daniel (see 9:27, 11:31, and 12:11), you’d think the books that record this story, I and II Maccabees, as well as the holiday therein established, would be solid gold—a no-brainer in the assembling of the Jewish Bible (or “Tanakh”) and the evolution of rabbinic Judaism. But that’s not how things turned out. As a matter of fact, the Maccabean writings weren’t accepted by the larger Jewish community as Scripture, not least of all because they were composed in Greek. That’s right: the book enshrining as heroes the Jews who resisted Greek temptations was itself composed in Greek. Rabbinic Judaism still doesn’t regard the Maccabean literature as part of the Tanakh. The warmest reception these books got was among Alexandrian Jews; you won’t be surprised to hear that those particular Jews were pretty well Hellenized themselves. There was another likely obstacle to acceptance of the Maccabean literature—namely, its enthusiastic description of resistance, revolt, and revolution against imperial overlords. Such a strategy worked for a while, but it met its match with Pompey’s siege of Jerusalem in 63 BC, not to mention the Great Revolt of 66–73 AD and the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132–136 AD. By this time, it seems, the Jewish people gave up on nationalist dreams for nearly nineteen centuries, and their religious attention turned from unattainable land and temple to eminently doable rites of home and synagogue. As for the Maccabean writings, it was the early Christians who preserved these books, though even in the church their status has wavered from canonical to deuterocanonical to pretty darn suspect. So that’s why there’s no Hanukkah in the Old Testament. Yes Hanukkah in the New TestamentBut by now you are surely racking your brain, trying to figure out just where exactly Hanukkah makes its one subtle appearance in the less likely of the two testaments. Is it stashed away in the odd little letters you never read, like Jude or III John? Does Paul rail against it in his tirades against Judaizers? Maybe it’s tucked into the sacrificial deconstructions of the Epistle to the Hebrews? Nope—it’s hiding in plain sight. Hanukkah appears in the Gospel of John, embedded in Jesus’ extended meditation on his calling to be the Good Shepherd. If you attend a lectionary-following church, then you’ll hear it mentioned every third year on the fourth Sunday of Easter. Still at a loss? I’ll keep you in suspense no longer. Here’s John 10:22–23: At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. There you have it. “The Feast of Dedication” is Greek-speak for Hebrew “Hanukkah,” which literally means “dedication.” The underlying Greek term enkaínia means “renewal,” as in renewing the temple for its proper worship purposes after the desecration by A.IV.E. The reason I even noticed this accurate-yet-misleading translation of the holiday’s name is that, years ago, I got curious about the fate of the temple across the wide swath of time covered by the Bible—from the temple’s prehistory in the wilderness tabernacle to its posthistory (so to speak) in the body of Jesus, the body of the church, and in the New Jerusalem. In so doing, I also finally realized that the way we know that Jesus’ ministry in John lasts three years, as opposed to what appears to be only one year in the Synoptics, is by the recurrence of Jesus’ visits to the temple over the course of three Passovers (2:23, 6:4, 12:1). Passover is, of course, the best-known of Jewish festivals to Christians (barring Hanukkah, which we know for reasons that have little to do with either Testament, of which more in a moment), but Passover is not the only occasion for Jesus’ temple visits. He also takes it upon himself to cleanse the temple in dramatic fashion; to heal in the temple on the Sabbath; to observe the Festival of Booths or Tabernacles (Sukkoth in Hebrew); and to hang out at the temple during the Feast of Dedication. An extra clue about Hanukkah lies herein as well: John 10:23 is the only verse in the Gospels where the time of year is identified as “winter.” Then as now, Hanukkah took place near to the winter solstice. Its assignment to 25 Kislev not only commemorates the reinstitution of temple worship; it also guarantees observance at the darkest time of the year and the darkest time of the lunar month, when the moon has waned away. Jesus’ visit to the temple for this festival fits with the larger concern of the Gospel in which it appears. John is generally more interested in Jerusalem than Galilee, coping as it does with the traumatic shock of the final parting of the ways between Jesus-believing-Jews and Jesus-disbelieving-Jews. While Paul and Luke are distressed by Jew-Gentile disunity, John is totally unfazed by the appearance of Gentiles on the horizon. John’s Jesus even declares that his hour has at last come the moment he hears that some Greeks are inquiring after him (12:23). All the traumas of John are internal to the people of Israel. It’s only Jew-Jew disunity that bothers John. So it’s hardly surprising that the temple is, in a sense, the lightning rod for their competing claims. And yet, I can hardly overstate the shock I felt when I unearthed this little detail about the Dedication for the first time. I had a sudden vivid image of Jesus eating latkes with sour cream, absurd as it sounds—not least of all because there were certainly no potatoes in the eastern hemisphere during the first century. But I think it was the first time I really grasped that my Lord Jesus was a Jew. The Slow Burn of HanukkahIf Jewish believers quietly ignored the Maccabees and their politically volatile holiday, and Christian believers in time forgot it altogether, how did it become such a notable part of the Jewish rotation of holidays? Whence its fame as the counterpart to Christmas? Part of it is exactly that—a counterpart, not to say a rival, to Christmas. Starting in the nineteenth century, and picking up steam in the postwar period, American Judaism suddenly had to cope with religious freedom. That meant no more pogroms, but also the enticement of Jewish youth by other religious options. Hanukkah provided a compelling alternative to Gentile neighbors’ strings of colored lights and piles of gifts under the tree. That Hanukkah was theologically thin at best may actually have been an asset. It remains the likeliest occasion for nonobservant Jews today to reconnect, however briefly, with their religious heritage. In fact, you don’t have to be religious at all to make use of Hanukkah. The other interested party in the festival’s modern promotion was secular Zionism. Zionists became keenly interested in exactly what the post-biblical rabbis weren’t: namely, the image of the powerful Jewish warrior. A mighty class of new Maccabees could carve out a future in the long-lost promised land. Or if not warriors, then at least athletes—hence the Maccabiah Games or “Jewish Olympics.” Still, Hanukkah would not have been available for either commercial or Zionist reinterpretation if the rabbis hadn’t somehow allowed this latecomer a tiny toehold. The oldest substrate of rabbinic Judaism—aside from the Tanakh, of course—is the Mishnah: legal traditions on all matters of Jewish life, preserving parts of what is called the “oral Torah.” It has next to nothing to say about Hanukkah. Why that is the case remains a topic of hot debate. But the Gemara does. This rabbinic commentary records debates among the rabbis regarding the proper interpretation of the Mishnah. (Mishnah + Gemara = Talmud.) However, unlike Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkoth, each of which gets its own tractate in the Mishnah, Hanukkah has none and is mentioned only in passing in the Gemara’s commentary on the Sabbath tractate §21b. The topic arises when a distinction is made between lighting Sabbath candles and lighting Hanukkah candles. Then there is a discussion as to whether one must relight an extinguished Hanukkah candle and in how much time. Meticulous observers of the festival will make sure that a candle is lit for every member of the family. Rabbis Hillel and Shammai disagree (as usual) about whether you should start with eight candles on the first day of Hanukkah and decrease the number over the eight days, or whether you should start with one and work up to eight by the final day of the festival. Hillel, who holds the latter opinion, wins (also as usual). The reason: “One elevates to a higher level in matters of sanctity and one does not downgrade.” Further discussion concludes that the Hanukkah menorah should be displayed in public—unless doing so would endanger the household “in a time of danger” amidst Gentiles—and that an extra candle should be used to light it, not one of the eight main candles. That’s why a hanukiyah has a holder for a ninth candle, often in the middle and set apart from the others, unlike the seven holders on a standard menorah. Then and only then does the question arise: What is Hanukkah, anyway? You can’t imagine the question being asked of Yom Kippur. The answer: On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the days of Hanukkah are eight. One may not eulogize on them and one may not fast on them. What is the reason? When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary by touching them. And when the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest, undisturbed by the Greeks. And there was sufficient oil there to light the candelabrum for only one day. A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays with recitation of hallel and special thanksgiving in prayer and blessings.
(Shabbat 21b.10) You’ll recall that in the passage from I Maccabees above, there was nothing about the oil that lasted eight days—only the rededication of the cleaned-up temple. Nor is anything said of the oil in II Maccabees. Nor is it reported by Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian (and frank Roman sympathizer). The Gemara is as far back as the oil story goes in written records. It’s also the inspiration behind oily treats to celebrate the occasion, latkes being only one of several such dishes. From here on out, the Gemara’s discussion attends to other practical matters related to the candles but shows no further interest in the origin or meaning of Hanukkah. It’s notable also for its disinterest toward the military aspect of the first Hanukkah. The miracle of oil and its ritual remembrance takes precedence instead. Despite its lowly status, Hanukkah stayed the course, awaiting rediscovery many centuries later. It’s the only festival that calls for eight days straight of Torah readings—Numbers 7 and 8, to be exact, on the dedication of the tabernacle—with supplements from Zechariah 2:14–4:7 and I Kings 7:40–50 for the Sabbath(s) that fall within the eight-day period. The Dedication of the Third TempleBut the written versions of Mishnah and Gemara that survive to the present didn’t come onto the scene until the 200s AD. They undoubtedly preserve older traditions, but they also preserve the editorial opinions of the hands that stitched them together. Which is another way of saying: the only place we’ll find the reasons for mentioning Hanukkah in the Gospel of John is, ultimately, in the Gospel of John itself. So let’s pull back on the wider story. Two major crises struck the first-century AD Jewish community. The first was Jesus: is he or isn’t he? Even those who said yes, he is experienced him as a crisis—a tearing in the fabric of ordinary reality as well a tearing of the curtain in the temple. Paul was struck blind; Stephen was stoned; and the Johannine community found itself expelled from the synagogue, as alluded to in John 9:22. The second crisis was the destruction of the temple by the Roman army in 70 AD. Even for those who believed in Jesus, this was a crisis—and perhaps the reason that, so far as we can tell, all the Gospels got written down after, not before, the temple crisis. Temple was still home to the earliest Jewish Christians. Throughout the history recounted by the Book of Acts, Paul and the Jerusalem disciples drop by the temple regularly, despite mounting objections from local leaders. It’s entirely possible that dissociation of faith in Jesus from the practice of temple sacrifice was an after-the-fact interpretation, as pioneered in the Epistle to the Hebrews. But whosever side you were on in the Jesus question, whatever you felt about temple traffic or polity, it was a fixture. It was God’s temple, miraculously rebuilt by Zerubbabel after the exile and miraculously restored by the Maccabees after Seleucid desecration. You could count on it being there—until it wasn’t. Jesus was crucified, but the Father raised him from the dead. What about the temple? Time ticked on and there was no sign that the temple would ever be rebuilt. And it never has been. So now what? The rabbinic Judaism we know today arose as one response to this double crisis. Deprived of its temple and expelled from its land, it drew on the already vast and deep resources of rabbinic reflection in both the land of Israel and further abroad in the former Babylonia to shape a practice of faith and worship orbiting the twin foci of home and synagogue. It prayed for return home to the promised land and rebuilding of the temple someday, but in the meanwhile prepared itself for a much longer exile than it had ever known before. Johannine Christianity responded to not only the Jesus crisis but also the temple crisis differently: it reassigned the location of temple. This had happened once before, after all. The mobile tabernacle of the tribes was converted by the Davidic kings into the fixed temple in Jerusalem, though it was a slightly uneasy compromise: “I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle,” God points out to David in II Samuel 7:6. With the destruction of the second temple, John inferred that God had returned to His former mobility, but this time around not in a shelter. Instead, the third temple was a house of human flesh. John alludes to this shift of location in his very first chapter, when he asserts that the Word became flesh and “tabernacled” (ἐσκήνωσεν) among us. Note the preference for the mobile house over the fixed one! In the very next chapter, Jesus makes his first of several trips to Jerusalem for Passover. No sooner does he approach the temple than he cleanses it—an action the Synoptics reserve for the final act, just before his arrest and crucifixion—which prompts the irritated locals to demand of him, “What sign can you show us for doing these things?” Jesus famously replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (2:19). They protest on engineering technicalities, but John makes sure we draw the correct conclusion: “But he was speaking about the temple of his body” (2:21). Jesus returns to Jerusalem for an unidentified “feast of the Jews” in ch. 5, maybe Shavuot (better known to Christians as Pentecost) since it’s also a pilgrimage festival. But the temple-related action really picks up in ch. 7. Jesus at first declines his brothers’ apparently sarcastic urging to put himself on display for Sukkoth, but later he goes anyway and provokes lots of disputes among the people—is he or isn’t he?—on account of his teaching about Moses and the Sabbath. On “the last day of the feast, the great day,” Jesus announces himself to be the source of living water. From here, John makes an immensely clever but subtle move. Hanukkah is a deliberate echo of Sukkoth. The Maccabees had to forego Sukkoth for two years while fighting their guerilla battles against A.IV.E., so the eight days of Hanukkah are a kind of rerun of Sukkoth’s seven days plus one. (There is an abundance of festivals to choose from for the conclusion of Sukkoth, including the “great” one John alludes to: it could be either Hoshanah Rabba, Shemini Atzeret, or Simchat Torah, depending on how you construe their relationship to one another. Or you could figure the eight days correspond to the eight days of consecration of the first temple, as recorded in II Chronicles 7:8–10.) II Maccabees even calls Hanukkah “the Festival of Booths in the month of Chislev” and specifies that the Maccabees “celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the Festival of Booths” (1:9, 10:6). To drive the point home still further, both the first and the second temples were consecrated at Sukkoth, and Solomon’s colonnade was thought to date back to the temple-constructing king himself—a good place to make a strong point. Thus John, who for all his disappointed-lover labeling of “the Jews” as some category other than himself, does the literary equivalent of echoing Sukkoth with Hanukkah, just like an observant Jew would. The action from ch. 7 never really stops but wends through further disputes in chs. 8 and 9 before arriving, almost seamlessly, at Hanukkah in ch. 10. It appears that Jesus never leaves Jerusalem all this time but spends the whole autumn in the capital until the wintry echo of Sukkoth arrives in the form of Hanukkah. The disputes have not ceased all this time. At Sukkoth the crowds are still undecided, but leaning toward a favorable verdict. By Hanukkah, the ante has been upped. Jesus no longer pulls his punches in accusing the religious leaders of having failed in their duties as shepherds toward the sheep of Israel, resounding the same themes as an enraged Ezekiel (ch. 34). Nor could it have escaped the notice of “the Jews” that Hanukkah commemorates the elimination, not just of a pagan invader, but also of the compromised temple clerics who let the invasion happen in the first place. The tension mounts until Jesus finally utters the unpardonable: “The Father and I are one” (10:30). This contested Hanukkah is Jesus’ last visit to the temple, his last festival, until the final Passover that will take his life. Renewal, enkaínia, will take more than a cleansing after the fashion of either the Maccabees or even Jesus himself back in ch. 2. Dedication of the new temple requires first another great blasphemy like A.IV.E.’s—but will it be the blasphemy of claiming equality with God? Or the blasphemy of taking the life of one who is God’s equal? That is the dispute at the core of Jesus’ Hanukkah. The double crisis of Jesus raised and temple razed reverberates down through the centuries. It remains the point of unresolved dispute between Christianity and rabbinic Judaism to this day. Unintentionally misled by John’s language of “the Jews,” Christians have often read the controversy the wrong way, to the detriment and death of the Jews who drew the other conclusion. But Christians forget at the peril of their very faith that, even after the resurrection, the third temple is housed—tabernacled—in the body of a
Jew. All the more reason, then, to be startled by the apparition of Hanukkah in the New Testament. And all the more reason to prepare latkes for Jesus.
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