Jewish people still celebrate this miracle every year during Hanukkah, which starts Thursday night. The holiday, also known as the festival of lights, lasts for eight nights. On every night, families pray, sing and eat together.
Some traditional Hanukkah foods are the latke, which is a fried potato pancake, and jelly doughnuts. Families also exchange gifts, like gold coins called gelt which are sometimes made of chocolate! And, of course, every night Jewish families light one more candle on a hanukkiah, which is commonly called a menorah. The lighting of the menorah is the tradition most closely related to that jar of oil that exceeded expectations thousands of years ago. Back then, a king named Antiochus ruled over Israel.
He didn't like the Jews, and he ordered that they pray instead to Greek gods. Angry, he sent his soldiers to ruin the Jews' Holy Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Jewish nonprofit PJ Library , the soldiers littered trash and mud in the temple, ripped up furniture and broke jars of oil Jews had used to light the temple's menorah. Judah Maccabee thought this was wrong, so he led a group of Jews, later called the Maccabees, to fight against Antiochus' army.
When the Maccabees finally succeeded, they began cleaning up the temple. They built a new menorah for the temple, but could not find enough oil to light it. At last, they found one little jar, enough to light it for only one night.
But miraculously, the menorah kept burning and burning for eight nights. Kids Cooking Series Jul. Kids Cooking Series May. The eight-day Jewish celebration known as Hanukkah or Chanukah commemorates the rededication during the second century B. Often called the Festival of Lights, the holiday is celebrated with the lighting of the menorah, traditional foods, games and gifts. The events that inspired the Hanukkah holiday took place during a particularly turbulent phase of Jewish history.
Around B. His son, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, proved less benevolent: Ancient sources recount that he outlawed the Jewish religion and ordered the Jews to worship Greek gods. In B. Led by the Jewish priest Mattathias and his five sons, a large-scale rebellion broke out against Antiochus and the Seleucid monarchy. When Matthathias died in B. Judah called on his followers to cleanse the Second Temple, rebuild its altar and light its menorah—the gold candelabrum whose seven branches represented knowledge and creation and were meant to be kept burning every night.
This wondrous event inspired the Jewish sages to proclaim a yearly eight-day festival. The first Book of the Maccabees tells another version of the story, describing an eight-day celebration that followed the rededication but making no reference to the miracle of the oil.
Some modern historians offer a radically different interpretation of the Hanukkah tale. In their view, Jerusalem under Antiochus IV had erupted into civil war between two camps of Jews: those who had assimilated into the dominant culture that surrounded them, adopting Greek and Syrian customs; and those who were determined to impose Jewish laws and traditions, even if by force.
Jewish scholars have also suggested that the first Hanukkah may have been a belated celebration of Sukkot, which the Jews had not had the chance to observe during the Maccabean Revolt. The Hanukkah celebration revolves around the kindling of a nine-branched menorah, known in Hebrew as the hanukiah.
Jews typically recite blessings during this ritual and display the menorah prominently in a window as a reminder to others of the miracle that inspired the holiday. In another allusion to the Hanukkah miracle, traditional Hanukkah foods are fried in oil. Furthermore, why should this holiday be eight days? While today we are familiar with the story of the miracle of the oil, this story does not appear in any source until the Babylonian Talmud source 3, right hand column , which was compiled in the fifth century C.
If this event was so well-known, why would it have taken so long to be recorded? There are many sources from before the composition of the Bavli that discuss Hanukkah.
In this shiur I will show how ancient sources grappled with these two questions. The Hanukkah story with which we are familiar is one of several explanations made in the ancient world as to why Hanukkah is an eight day fire holiday. We shall see how this tradition developed in rabbinic sources. This shiur is based on a Hebrew article by Vered Noam which appeared in the Hebrew journal Zion 67, Throughout my career as a teacher of Talmud, one of my goals has been to make Hebrew academic scholarship available to a broader audience.
It is my hope that this e-shiur will serve as another example of how academic study can enrich our Jewish religious lives. While it might seem like there are several independent rabbinic sources that explain why Hanukkah is an eight day holiday associated with fire, there is in essence only one source that exists in several different forms. Many of these holidays are associated with Jewish military victories over Greeks and Romans during the Second Temple period.
However, the most famous of these holidays is still observed. The date records the victory of the Hasmoneans over Antiochus Epiphanes, and it is the basis of the Hanukkah holiday. The text of the Scholion has remained somewhat open to insertions, embellishments and changes throughout its history. There are several different manuscript traditions for this Scholion, each of which is very distinct from the other.
The first tradition we will examine is found in source 1. Section one of this source seems to know that Hanukkah is associated with oil and the menorah the lamps. But the author does not mention any particular miracle that occurred. There is no mention of finding only enough oil for one day and having it last eight days. The Jews just found pure oil—good news perhaps, but not quite a miracle. In section two, the author of the Scholion asks why this rededication is eight days when the earlier Temple dedications were seven days [1].
To answer this question, the author cites another story that explains the connection of fire with Hanukkah. In this story, when the Hasmoneans take back the Temple, they have to forge a make-shift Menorah see also source 4a , presumably because the Greeks stole the original gold one.
This story explains the association of Hanukkah with fire, but it does not explain at all why Hanukkah is eight days. After all, the menorah has only seven branches! Source 2 is the other basic manuscript of the Scholion, the commentary on Megillat Taanit.
Thus the original version of this manuscript read as did the other manuscript of the Scholion—Hanukkah is associated with fire because the Hasmoneans came to the Temple and found that the Menorah was missing. So the Hasmoneans built a new Menorah — great news, but again hardly a divine miracle! He adds these two facts together and comes up with the story that it took eight days to build this altar. The third version of the Scholion is the version quoted in the Bavli, source 3, right hand.
In other words, this is a case where the Babylonia Talmud quotes a tradition from a separate text with which it is familiar. This is the version of the story with which we are familiar. The author of this version seems to have embellished upon the source in the left hand column, the earlier version of the Scholion source 1 and left hand column of source 3 , with which he was familiar.
The author uses the basic story of finding pure oil but adds some key elements. First of all, he explains why the holiday is eight days—there was only enough oil for one day but it lasted eight.
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