Happy Eighth Day of Hanukkah!

This year Hanukkah extended over two secular years - into January 1 and 2, 2025. A few years ago the first day of Hanukkah was on Thanksgiving - so it is a moveable feast, as a friend of mine said today when we talked.

Links to a couple of interesting articles about Hanukkah from the Torah.com website -

Chanukah: The Greek Influence of Martyrdom.

On Chanukah we celebrate the miraculous military victories of the “few over the many,” and of Jewish culture over Greek. Ironically, however, Chanukah has also bequeathed to us a new genre of Jewish literature, one that has been in frequent use ever since: Greek-style stories of bravery in defeat and dying for the cause.

Megillat Antiochus: The Biblical Chanukah Scroll 

The medieval Scroll of Antiochus does more than enrich Chanukah with details. It models the holiday after Purim by telling the story in the biblical language and idiom of Daniel, Ezra, and Esther.

For a minor Jewish festival with no biblical command or account as its origin, Chanukah plays a major role in the Jewish yearly cycle. It includes a highly visible formal ritual —the lighting of the chanukiah/menorah—its own liturgy, folk practices like spinning the dreidel and eating latkes, jelly donuts, and chocolate coins, and the singing of catchy tunes. For many diasporic Jews, Chanukah is the Jewish answer to Christmas while, for many Israelis, it provides an opportunity to reflect upon Jewish military might. 

What does Chanukah celebrate? The books of 1 and 2 Maccabees present the earliest and most comprehensive versions of the story, but as they were not accorded canonical status by Jews, they were soon lost to Jewish tradition—though preserved by Christians in the Apocrypha. In contrast to Purim, whose story is told in the biblical book of Esther, traditional Jews for millennia relied mostly on bits and pieces preserved in the Chanukah liturgy, the Talmud, rabbinic midrash, and collective memory. Thus, most Jews throughout the ages were aware of some form of persecution, Judah Maccabee, a hard-fought war won, and something about a miracle involving oil. 

To fill this gap, an author living in the mid to late first millennium C.E. composed the Megillat Antiochus (The Scroll of Antiochus; also known as “The Greek Scroll” and “The Scroll of the House of the Hasmoneans”), which presents itself as the narrative explaining the events leading up to Chanukah. The author has little direct access to more historical sources like 1 and 2 Maccabees, and he uses biblical and rabbinic ones as well as his own expansions and Jewish collective memory to tell the story.

Megillat Antiochus was written in something akin to Late Jewish Literary Aramaic, yet, at the same time, anyone familiar with Biblical (i.e., imperial) Aramaic would sense that the text wishes to give a feel as if it were composed in that dialect, by deploying words and forms that characterize Biblical Aramaic but were no longer used in later Aramaic dialects. In addition, it copies, draws on, riffs upon, and develops the language and narrative style of Daniel, Ezra, and the book of Esther to enrich and inform its overarching narrative.