WORD STUDY – HANUKKAH – הנוכה

John 10:22: “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.”

In Aramaic the word for dedication is chudatha which is equivalent to the Hebrew word Chanuka. Most people believe this was the celebration of Hanukkah which begins in month of Kislev 25 on the Jewish calendar. The verse also says it was winter which is strange because Kislev is often the month for autumn. Maybe autumn in the Middle East. Ah but Kislev is also the month of dreams. But the point here is that apparently Jesus celebrated Hanukkah.

Hanukkah is not one of the Biblical feasts that God commanded the Jews to celebrate. It was declared a holiday by the rabbis not God. Just as Christmas and Easter are not holidays that are commanded by God. The only thing we as Christians are commanded to celebrate by Jesus is communion and baptism. So, Hanukkah is really considered minor holiday but as it falls about the same time as a major Christian holiday, Christmas, Hanukkah gets a higher billing than the other more important feasts that the Jews celebrate. Hanukkah is not a Jewish Christmas and is not about peace on earth good will toward men. Gifts only started to be given during Hanukkah in the mid 1800’s as the Jewish children could not understand why their Christian friends got gifts at that time of year and they didn’t. So they started to give gifts after the lighting of each candle, eight gifts. Today the problem is, as a friend of mine points out whose kids had Jewish friends: “Now my kids are calling me a Catholic cheapskate.”

Don’t be shocked, there are many different spellings for Hanukkah. Some spell it Chanukah, some Hanukah. However, Hanukkah is the generally accepted spelling. The first letter is a Cheth and there is no English equivalent for the Cheth sound. So in English it can either a k or h sound, both are acceptable. The word basically means dedication. The Hebrew word Hanukkah as spelled in the title is really an acronym for “Eight candles and the Halakha is like the House of Hillel. There were two dominate schools of thought in Judaism, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The House of Shammai said you should lite all eight candles on the first day of Hanukkah and then seven on the next day and so forth. The House of Hillel said you should lite just one candle on the first day, two the next and so forth as this represented the miracle of the oil and the miracle was greater with each day.

We are all probably familiar with the story of Hanukkah. It is found in the apocrypha books of I and II Maccabees. These books are not considered to be the inspired Word of God but gives some good history. Anyway, we learn that the Jews in Judea were ruled by a Syria-Greek king of the Seleucid Empire of Syria who tried to get the Jews to accept the Greek culture. He outlawed the practice of Judaism, looted the temple and placed an idol of the god Zeus. The Jews revolted under the leadership of Judas Maccabee and ran the Greeks out of Jerusalem and Judea. In celebration they rededicated the temple and in the eights days of rededication they lit the eight candles on the menorah. Unfortunately, they had only enough oil for one day. However, by a miracle that oil lasted eight days so today they light the candles on the menorah for eight days to commemorate the dedication of the second temple and the miracle of the oils.

That’s cool and that is what most Christians think of when they think of Hanukkah, not to mention many Jews. Yet, the celebration of Hanukkah for many Jews means much more as it should for Christians. Not that we should celebrate Hanukkah but to stop and allow our Jewish friends to teach us something very important.

Historically and according to most scholars, including Jewish scholars the miracle of the oil never really happened, it is just a legend. Remember I said the books of Maccabees are not inspired. On top of that, this second temple which was rededicated in 168 BC lasted only about 250 years when it was totally destroyed by Rome in 70AD. So why do the Jews celebrate a temple that has been destroyed for over 2,000 years and light candles for an event that may not have happened?

Because Hanukkah reminds them and should remind us of something else. The Maccabean war was the first war in recorded history that was an ideological war. They didn’t fight to gain land, spoils or to rule as most wars. This war was fought for an idea, the right to worship God without compromise. You see, history records this war as a civil war between the Maccabean Jews and the Hellenistic Jews. The Greek policy of colonization and forcing assimilation into Greek culture is known as Hellenism. The idea is, why face persecution from our enemies who conquered us? Let’s just forget this Jewish thing, Jewish religion and join hand in hand with our conquerors and live in peace. Then the Maccabean Jews said: “Wait, we are the Chosen people of God, we are called to preserve the message of God Jehovah, we can never compromise.” So war broke out.

Throughout History things would have fared much better for the Jewish people had they assimilated. I mean after 70 AD they had no homeland, they were scattered throughout the world, living among foreign and pagan people. How do you maintain an identity? Worse yet, by insisting on maintaining an identity they were alienating themselves from the people they lived among. As a result they suffered much persecution. They were forced to live in separate villages, unable to own land, and the blame for everything that went wrong. When the Plague hit in the Middle Ages, the Jews were not affected because they followed Biblical sanitary laws. As a result they were blamed for causing the plague. All the way up to the Holocaust in World War II, the Jews were slaughtered because they insisted on keeping their identity.

Even today, the Jews insist on their identity in Israel. Many in the world see the Jew as the Middle East problem. The Jews could resolved the Middle Eastern conflict and threat simply by doing what the Hellenistic Jews demanded the Jews do 2,200 years ago. They should assimilate into the Middle Eastern culture and religion. They are after all Semitic people like everyone else in the Middle East, they look alike and even the Jewish religion is much like Islam. Islam worships the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and even follows many of the Mosaic laws of Judaism. How can the Jews be so stubborn as not to compromise a little and embrace Islam. Yes, it is all the Jews fault because they will not assimilate into Middle Eastern religion, throw off their Jewish identity and point to Jerusalem and say: “Look what we Arabic people have built.”

Of course it will never happen, Hanukkah reminds us of that. At the same time Hanukkah reminds me and should remind you that there is no room for compromise in our faith in God. Like the Jewish people we should be ready to face persecution and even death to defend our right to worship God according to our conscience, even if some people who disagree with us are offended. We should never compromise the blood of Jesus, the Biblical teaching of sin, of heaven and hell just to placate those who might find it offensive. Hanukkah reminds me to thank God for a country where we have the freedom to worship and to fight with our very lives to preserve that freedom and not compromise to protect our own gizzards. That is what the Jews are teaching us about Hanukkah.