Chanukah: The Feast of Dedication and the Light That Would Not Go Out

The Name and the Dates

The Hebrew root chanach (חנך) means “to dedicate” or “to inaugurate”. The Torah uses the phrase chanukat ha-mizbe’ach, “the dedication of the altar”, for the twelve days on which the princes of Israel brought their offerings when the Mishkan was set up (Numbers 7:10, 84, 88). Shlomo’s Temple was dedicated with a great feast (1 Kings 8), and the returning exiles “kept the dedication of this house of God with joy” (Ezra 6:16). Psalm 30 bears the heading “A Psalm and Song at the dedication of the house of David”, and many communities recite it during the festival.¹

Chanukah begins on the evening before 25 Kislev and lasts eight days. Because Kislev may have 29 or 30 days, the festival ends on 2 or 3 Tevet, and it always includes Rosh Chodesh Tevet. As a festival of rabbinic institution it is kept for exactly eight days in Israel and the diaspora alike: there is no “second day of yom tov” question, and no day of Chanukah forbids work. Josephus, writing in the late first century, gives it another name:

And from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights.

The History: Hellenism, Persecution and Revolt

A world turned Greek

After Alexander the Great’s conquests (332 BCE), the Land of Israel passed to the Ptolemies of Egypt and then, around 200 BCE, to the Seleucid kings of Syria. Greek language, athletics and philosophy spread through the region, and many in Jerusalem’s upper classes were drawn to them. Hellenism was not simply evil: Alexandrian Jews produced the Septuagint and later Philo, who read the Torah in Greek with deep devotion. The question was whether Israel would remain a holy people, distinct by Hashem’s covenant, or dissolve into the culture around it.

The books of the Maccabees describe how that question became a crisis. Jason, brother of the faithful high priest Onias III, bought the high priesthood from King Antiochus IV and built a gymnasium in Jerusalem (2 Maccabees 4:7–15). Some “made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant” (1 Maccabees 1:15), and priests left the altar to watch the games (2 Maccabees 4:14). Menelaus then outbid Jason, and the high priesthood became a commodity for sale.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes

Antiochus IV (reigned 175–164 BCE) styled himself Theos Epiphanes, “God Manifest”; the historian Polybius preserves the mocking nickname Epimanes, “the madman”.² After Rome halted his invasion of Egypt in 168 BCE, he turned on Jerusalem. Historians debate the causes: some stress the king’s own policy, others the civil strife in Jerusalem and the radical Hellenizers who may have urged the decrees on him.³ The result is not in doubt. The Temple was plundered, a fortress garrisoned in the city, and decrees issued forbidding circumcision, Shabbat and the festivals and commanding sacrifice to idols. On 15 Kislev in the 145th year of the Seleucid era (late 167 BCE):

They set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar.

Ten days later, on 25 Kislev, pagan sacrifice was offered on that altar (1:59). Mothers who circumcised their sons were put to death with their infants (1:60–61). Second Maccabees tells of the aged scribe Eleazar, who refused even to pretend to eat pork (6:18–31), and of a mother and her seven sons tortured before the king (chapter 7). The second son’s words are among the clearest statements of resurrection hope from the Second Temple period:

The King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.

Matityahu and his sons

Resistance began in the village of Modi’in. When the king’s officers demanded that the priest Matityahu (Mattathias), of the family of Hasmon, lead the town in pagan sacrifice, he answered, “Yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers” (1 Maccabees 2:20). He struck down a Jew who stepped forward to sacrifice, and the king’s officer with him, and cried, “Whosoever is zealous of the Torah, and maintaineth the covenant, let him follow me” (2:27). After pious refugees who would not defend themselves on Shabbat were massacred, Matityahu’s band resolved to fight if attacked on that day (2:29–41), anticipating the later principle that saving life overrides Shabbat.

After Matityahu’s death, leadership passed to his son Yehudah, called HaMaccabi (2:4, 66), a name usually explained from the word for “hammer”; the acrostic reading from Mi chamocha ba’elim Hashem (Exodus 15:11) is a lovely homily but not the historical origin.⁴ Against heavy odds Yehudah defeated a series of Seleucid generals (1 Maccabees 3–4), telling his outnumbered men that “with the God of heaven it is all one, to deliver with a great multitude, or a small company” (3:18; compare 1 Samuel 14:6).

The rededication

Yehudah and his brothers went up to the Temple and found it desolate, with shrubs growing in the courts “as in a forest” (1 Maccabees 4:38). They chose blameless priests, cleansed the sanctuary and dismantled the defiled altar, laying its stones aside “until there should come a prophet to shew what should be done with them” (4:46). They built a new altar of whole stones as the Torah commands (Exodus 20:25; Deuteronomy 27:6), made new vessels and lit the menorah.

On 25 Kislev in the 148th year, exactly three years after the first pagan sacrifice, they offered the tamid again (4:52–54). Most historians date this to December 164 BCE; some argue for 165, depending on how the Seleucid years in 1 Maccabees are reckoned and whether the rededication came before or after Antiochus IV’s death in late 164.⁵ Then:

Judas and his brethren with the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness.

Why eight days? The testimony of 2 Maccabees

Second Maccabees, an abridgement of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene, gives the earliest explanation of the eight days:

And they kept the eight days with gladness, as in the feast of the tabernacles, remembering that not long afore they had held the feast of the tabernacles, when as they wandered in the mountains and dens like beasts.

They carried branches and palms and sang psalms (10:7), and the letters prefaced to the book call the festival “the feast of tabernacles in the month Casleu” (1:9). The earliest sources thus present Chanukah as a delayed Sukkot, kept at the dedication because the faithful had been unable to keep the eight days of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret in the Temple. The model is biblical: Shlomo dedicated his Temple at the festival of the seventh month (1 Kings 8:2, 65), and Chizkiyahu kept a delayed Pesach after cleansing the Temple (2 Chronicles 30).⁶ Many scholars regard this as the most likely historical reason for the festival’s length.

Megillat Ta’anit and the oil miracle

Megillat Ta’anit (the “Scroll of Fasts”), an Aramaic list of days on which fasting was forbidden, compiled in the late Second Temple period, records: “On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the eight days of Chanukah, on which one does not eulogize.”⁷ The Babylonian Talmud adds the story most Jews know:

What is Chanukah? … When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary. And when the royal house of the Hasmoneans prevailed and defeated them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that lay with the seal of the high priest, and it contained only enough to light for one day. A miracle was done with it, and they lit from it for eight days. The following year they established them as festival days, with Hallel and thanksgiving.

The books of the Maccabees and Josephus do not mention the cruse of oil. That silence does not prove the story false, but it is honest to say that the oil miracle is first attested centuries after the events, while the earlier sources explain the eight days by Sukkot. A faithful reading can hold both: the victory and rededication are documented history; the cruse of oil is the tradition through which Israel has remembered that the deliverance was Hashem’s doing and not merely the strength of Yehudah’s arm. The haftarah the sages chose for Shabbat Chanukah says it plainly: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit” (Zechariah 4:6).

Why the Mishnah barely mentions Chanukah

The Mishnah, edited by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi around 200 CE, has a tractate for Purim but none for Chanukah. It mentions Chanukah only in passing: the Torah reading (Megillah 3), the prohibition of fasts (Ta’anit 2:10), the messengers sent out for the new moon of Kislev (Rosh Hashanah 1:3), mourning practice (Moed Katan 3:9), and a merchant’s liability when a camel carrying flax catches fire from “a Chanukah lamp” outside a shop (Bava Kamma 6:6).⁸ The lighting was clearly familiar.

Why so little? Some suggest that Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, a descendant of David, disapproved of the Hasmoneans for taking the kingship that belonged to Yehudah’s line. Historians point to the failed revolts against Rome: a festival of armed victory was politically dangerous, and the sages had learned the cost of militant messianism. Others note that the Mishnah is not a complete code. When the Talmud records that Megillat Ta’anit’s festive days were annulled after the destruction, it makes an exception for Chanukah and Purim (Rosh Hashanah 18b), and its own discussion in Shabbat 21b–24a became the foundation of all later law.⁹

The Hasmonean dynasty: a sober ending

Yehudah fell in battle in 160 BCE. His brothers Yonatan and Shimon combined military leadership with the high priesthood, and in 140 BCE an assembly confirmed Shimon as leader and high priest “for ever, until there should arise a faithful prophet” (1 Maccabees 14:41), a revealing admission that the arrangement was provisional. Shimon’s descendants became kings. Yochanan Hyrcanus forcibly converted the Idumeans; Alexander Yannai, according to Josephus, crucified eight hundred Jewish opponents, whom many scholars identify as Pharisees.¹⁰ Civil war between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II opened the door to Pompey, who took Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and Herod destroyed the last of the house.

The Ramban, on Genesis 49:10, sees the dynasty’s fall as the consequence of priests seizing a kingship promised to Yehudah.¹¹ Chanukah therefore carries a warning as well as a joy: those who begin in zeal for the Torah can end in the worldliness they once resisted. The festival honors the faithfulness of Matityahu and his sons, not every later act of their house.

Chanukah in the Tanakh: Prophecy and Pattern

Daniel’s vision

Daniel describes a king arising from the divided Greek empire who would cast down the sanctuary and take away the daily sacrifice (Daniel 8:9–14, 23–25). Daniel 11:21–35 traces the career of “a vile person” who obtains the kingdom by flatteries, invades the south, is turned back by “the ships of Chittim” (often identified with Rome’s intervention in 168 BCE), and returns in fury against “the holy covenant”:

And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate. And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.

Josephus and, later, Jerome read these chapters as fulfilled in Antiochus IV.¹² Verses 33–35 describe “they that understand among the people” who “shall instruct many” and fall by sword and flame, helped by “a little help”, often read as the early Maccabean resistance. Critical scholars date the final form of Daniel to the crisis itself; traditional readers hold that Daniel saw it in advance. Either way, Daniel was the lens through which the faithful understood their suffering, and verse 32 may be the best one-line summary of Chanukah in the Bible.

Haggai and the twenty-fourth of Kislev

Centuries earlier, Haggai fixed attention on the eve of 25 Kislev, when the foundation of the Second Temple was laid in the days of Zerubbabel:

Consider now from this day and upward, from the four and twentieth day of the ninth month, even from the day that the foundation of Hashem’s temple was laid, consider it.

From that day, Hashem promised, “will I bless you” (2:19). Haggai’s ninth month is Kislev, and the Maccabees rededicated that same house on the following day. First Maccabees says they chose the date as the anniversary of the defilement (4:54); the nearness to Haggai’s date is a reflection many teachers have drawn out, not a proof.

Keeping Chanukah: Halacha and Custom

The mitzvah of lighting

The core mitzvah, defined in Shabbat 21b, is ner ish u-veito, “a light for each man and his household” each night. Those who “beautify the mitzvah” (mehadrin) light one for each member of the household, and the most scrupulous vary the number from night to night. Here the Talmud records a famous dispute:

• Beit Shammai: light eight on the first night and decrease by one each night, corresponding to the bulls of Sukkot, which decrease day by day (Numbers 29:12–34).
• Beit Hillel: light one on the first night and add one each night, because “we increase in holiness and do not decrease” (ma’alin ba-kodesh ve-ein moridin).

The halacha follows Beit Hillel.¹³ Sephardi practice, following the Shulchan Aruch, is one set of lights for the household; Ashkenazi practice, following the Rema, is that each member lights his or her own.¹⁴

Pirsumei nisa: publicizing the miracle

The purpose of the lights is pirsumei nisa, “publicizing the miracle”. The lamp is placed at the entrance of the house, on the outside, on the left of the doorway so that the mezuzah is on the right; one who lives upstairs places it in a window facing the street; in a time of danger it may be placed on the table inside (Shabbat 21b–22a). It is lit at sunset or nightfall and should burn at least half an hour, “until feet cease from the marketplace”.¹⁵ In Israel many light in glass boxes by the door; in the diaspora most light in a window. On Friday the lights are kindled before the Shabbat candles and must last into the night.

The Talmud ranks this mitzvah remarkably high: a poor person who must choose between wine for Kiddush and oil for Chanukah buys the oil, “because of publicizing the miracle”; but between the Shabbat lamp and the Chanukah lamp, the Shabbat lamp comes first, because it brings peace to the home (Shabbat 23b). The Rambam calls the Chanukah lamp “an exceedingly beloved mitzvah”, and adds that peace is greater still, for the whole Torah was given to make peace in the world.¹⁶

The shamash and the blessings

The lights are holy and not for use; the Talmud forbids reading or working by them, so an extra light is added (Shabbat 21b–22a). This became the shamash (“servant”), which in Ashkenazi custom also kindles the others. After lighting, HaNerot Hallalu is recited: “these lights are holy, and we have no permission to make use of them, but only to look at them.”¹⁷

Three blessings are said on the first night and two thereafter (Shabbat 23a): “who has sanctified us by His commandments and commanded us to kindle the light of Chanukah”; “who performed miracles for our fathers in those days, at this season”; and, on the first night, Shehecheyanu. How can a rabbinic festival say “and commanded us”? The Talmud answers from Deuteronomy 17:11, which commands Israel to follow the rulings of its judges (Shabbat 23a). For a congregation that honors those who “sit in Moshe’s seat” (Matthew 23:2), this is a meaningful lesson. Ashkenazim then sing Ma’oz Tzur, a medieval hymn whose acrostic spells the author’s name, Mordechai.

In the synagogue: Hallel, Al HaNissim and the readings

• Hallel. The complete Hallel (Psalms 113–118) is recited on all eight days (Arakhin 10a), as on Sukkot.
• Al HaNissim. A thanksgiving paragraph is added to the Amidah and the Grace after Meals (Shabbat 24a). It begins, “In the days of Matityahu son of Yochanan, the high priest, the Hasmonean, and his sons”, and thanks Hashem for delivering “the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few”. It speaks of the victory and the cleansing of the Temple and does not mention the oil.¹⁸
• Torah reading. Each day a section of Numbers 7 is read, the princes’ offerings at the dedication of the altar, ending on the eighth day with the command to light the menorah (Numbers 8:1–4). The eighth day is called Zot Chanukah, from “this was the dedication of the altar” (7:84). On Rosh Chodesh Tevet the new-moon reading comes first; on Shabbat the weekly portion is followed by the Chanukah portion. See the readings for Chanukah.
• Haftarah. On the first Shabbat of Chanukah the haftarah is Zechariah 2:14–4:7 (2:10–4:7 in English Bibles), the vision of the golden menorah fed by two olive trees:

Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith Hashem of hosts.

On a second Shabbat the haftarah is 1 Kings 7:40–50, on the vessels of Shlomo’s Temple.

Fasting and formal eulogies are not permitted. Many women refrain from work while the lights burn, honoring their part in the miracle (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 670:1). The Rema adds the custom of eating cheese, linked to the story of Yehudit (see Chag HaBanot).¹⁹

Customs: oil, sweets and the dreidel

• Foods fried in oil recall the cruse: latkes (potato pancakes, a later Eastern European form of earlier cheese pancakes) among Ashkenazim, and sufganiyot (jam doughnuts) and many fritters among Sephardim and in Israel.
• The dreidel (Yiddish) or sevivon (Hebrew) is a four-sided top whose letters נ ג ה ש (nun, gimel, hei, shin) are read as Nes Gadol Hayah Sham, “a great miracle happened there”; in Israel the last letter is פ (pe), for Po, “here”. The letters also match Yiddish gambling words (nisht, gants, halb, shtel: nothing, all, half, put in), and the game closely resembles the European teetotum. The popular story that children played with tops to hide Torah study from Greek soldiers has no ancient source and should be told, if at all, as folklore.²⁰
• Chanukah gelt, coins given especially to children and teachers, is an old custom.
• Charity, so that every household can light, is a long-standing obligation (Rambam, Hilchot Chanukah 4:12).

Messianic Witness: Yeshua at the Feast of Dedication

“And it was winter”

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Yeshua walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch.

The Greek ta enkainia (“the renewal”, “the dedication”) is the usual Greek name for Chanukah. John’s Gospel is built around Israel’s festivals. It does not say that Yeshua came to Jerusalem in order to keep Chanukah, and we should not overstate it; but it places him in the very Temple whose rededication the festival celebrated, during the festival, at a turning point of the story.²¹

The questioners ask, “If thou be the Messiah, tell us plainly” (10:24). The question fits the season: Chanukah remembered the last time Israel had been delivered from a pagan king, and messianic hopes ran high. Yeshua points to the works he does “in my Father’s name” (10:25) and to the sheep who hear his voice.

“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30)

This verse has long been read as a claim to be God Himself. Read in its Jewish setting and its own context, it says something different and no less profound. The Greek hen is neuter, “one thing”, not “one person”. Yeshua has just said that no one can snatch the sheep out of his hand, because no one can snatch them out of his Father’s hand (10:28–29). Father and Son are one in will, purpose and work: the Son does what the Father gives him to do and keeps those the Father has given him. The same Gospel uses the same language of the disciples: “that they may be one, even as we are one” (17:22). Unity of will and mission is the plain sense.²²

Yeshua’s own answer to the charge of blasphemy confirms it. He cites Psalm 82:6, “I said, Ye are gods”, where human judges are called elohim because the word of God came to them, and argues from the lesser to the greater:

Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?

He claims to be the Son of God, the one the Father “sanctified and sent”. “Sanctified” (hēgiasen, “consecrated, set apart”) is a dedication word, spoken at the Feast of Dedication. The Maccabees had sanctified the Temple anew; here stands the one whom the Father Himself consecrated and sent into the world, the Father’s dedicated emissary, whose works all point back to the One who sent him (John 5:19, 30; 14:28).

The light of the world

Two other sayings resonate with Chanukah, though neither was spoken at the festival. “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12) was spoken at Sukkot, probably against the background of the great lamps lit in the Temple court during that feast (Mishnah Sukkah 5:2–4). “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:5) introduces the healing of a man born blind. Linking them to the Chanukah lights is a homiletical reading, though a natural one, since 2 Maccabees itself ties Chanukah to Sukkot. Yeshua also turns the image toward his disciples:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

This is pirsumei nisa in the mouth of the Messiah: the light is placed where it can be seen, and the glory goes to the Father. It comes just before his declaration that he did not come to destroy the Torah or the Prophets (5:17).

The martyrs and the resurrection

Hebrews 11 counts among the faithful those who “were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection” (11:35). Commentators widely see an allusion to the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 6–7: the verb for “tortured” (etympanisthēsan) recalls the instrument (tympanon) of Eleazar’s death (2 Maccabees 6:19, 28), and the hope of resurrection is exactly what the mother and her sons confessed.²³ They belong to the “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) who held fast to the Torah unto death.

The Maccabees fought for the Temple and won; Yeshua, at the Feast of Dedication, spoke of laying down his life for the sheep (John 10:11, 17–18). His first coming fits the pattern of Mashiach ben Yosef, who suffers, is rejected, is hidden among the nations and is raised by Hashem; the sages spoke of a Messiah son of Yosef who would be slain (Sukkah 52a, citing Zechariah 12:10), and Pesikta Rabbati of “Ephraim, My righteous Messiah” who bears suffering for Israel.²⁴ Chanukah’s light burns in the darkest season of the year, a fitting image for a Messiah whose light was first kindled in rejection, and who will return as Mashiach ben David to gather, rebuild and reign.

The Prophetic Horizon

The abomination of desolation as a pattern

Yeshua took Daniel’s language and pointed it forward: “When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place … then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains” (Matthew 24:15–16). Spoken two centuries after Antiochus, this shows that Yeshua did not regard Daniel’s prophecy as exhausted by the Maccabean crisis. Antiochus became a pattern: a ruler who exalts himself “above every god” (Daniel 11:36), suppresses the Torah, defiles the holy place and persecutes the faithful. Paul describes the “man of sin” who “exalteth himself above all that is called God … so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). Many interpreters see the events of 70 CE as one fulfillment of Yeshua’s words and a final fulfillment still to come.

We read these texts with sobriety: no date-setting (Mark 13:32), no naming of modern figures as the Antichrist, no headlines read into prophecy.

Resistance to assimilation

The danger in Matityahu’s day came less from swords than from the gymnasium. Yeshua warned that in the last days “the love of many shall wax cold” because iniquity abounds (Matthew 24:12). Chanukah calls Jew and Gentile disciple alike to keep the covenant when it is costly, to remain distinct, and to refuse to bow when the culture demands it: “the people that do know their God shall be strong” (Daniel 11:32).

A dedicated house and a light to the nations

The rededication of 164 BCE was not the last dedication of Hashem’s house. Ezekiel 40–48 describes a Temple into which the glory of the God of Israel returns from the east, “and the earth shined with His glory” (Ezekiel 43:2), and from which a river flows that brings life wherever it goes (47:1–12). The stones the Maccabees laid aside “until there should come a prophet” stand as a quiet symbol of what Israel still awaits: final clarity and final restoration in the days of Mashiach.

The light of Chanukah also points outward. Hashem says to His Servant:

I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be My salvation unto the end of the earth.

And to Zion:

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of Hashem is risen upon thee. … And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Shimon in the Temple greeted the infant Yeshua as “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel” (Luke 2:32), and Paul took Isaiah 49:6 as his own commission (Acts 13:47). The festival that began with Israel refusing to become like the nations ends, prophetically, with the nations coming to Israel’s light to learn Hashem’s ways (Isaiah 2:2–3), and with those who “sleep in the dust of the earth” awakening (Daniel 12:2), as the mother of the seven sons believed. Revelation’s city, whose lamp is the Lamb and by whose light the nations walk (Revelation 21:23–24), is the final dedication, never again to be defiled.

Keeping Chanukah at Home

1. Get a chanukiyah, a nine-branched lamp with eight lights in a row and a shamash. Oil and wicks are the most beautiful way to fulfil the mitzvah; candles are fully acceptable.
2. Light at the right time on each of the eight evenings, adding one light each night: the new light is placed at the left and kindled first. On Friday, light before the Shabbat candles with candles that will last into the night; on Saturday night, light after Havdalah. See our calendar for the dates.
3. Place it where it can be seen, in a window or by the door, for at least half an hour, and do not use its light for reading or work.
4. Say the blessings and sing HaNerot Hallalu and Ma’oz Tzur, or read Psalm 30. Read 1 Maccabees 1–4 aloud over the eight nights, and John 10:22–39 on one of them.
5. Pray Hallel and Al HaNissim, and add Al HaNissim to the Grace after Meals.
6. Give to the poor, so that no home is dark, and to children, so that they remember the miracles.
7. Tell the whole story: the faithfulness of Matityahu, the courage of the martyrs, the warning of the later Hasmoneans, and the hope of the Messiah whom the Father sanctified and sent.

The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.