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The revolt and the rededication

The Maccabean Revolt and Hanukkah

In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus the Fourth, who called himself Epiphanes, outlawed the worship of the God of Israel and defiled the temple in Jerusalem, setting up a pagan altar and sacrificing a pig on it. A priest named Mattathias and his sons rose in revolt, and under his son Judas, called Maccabeus, the Hammer, the rebels drove out the Seleucids. In 164 BC they cleansed and rededicated the temple, an event the Jews still celebrate as Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication. It is a true and stirring chapter of history, and Jesus himself kept the feast.

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.John 10:22 (KJV)

A king who called himself God made manifest

Around 200 BC the Seleucid kings of Syria took Judea from the Ptolemies of Egypt, and at first little changed. Then in 175 BC a new Seleucid king came to the throne, Antiochus the Fourth, who took the title Epiphanes, meaning God made manifest, a boast so brazen that some of his own subjects mocked it. Antiochus was ambitious, unstable, and desperate for money and unity in his kingdom, and he decided that the stubborn, separate religion of the Jews was an obstacle to be removed.

He found willing partners among the extreme Hellenizing Jews in Jerusalem, who bought the high priesthood from him and pushed to turn the holy city into a Greek town. Rivalries and violence followed, and after a failed campaign in Egypt, Antiochus turned on Jerusalem in fury. He plundered the temple of its gold, massacred many in the city, and then set out to abolish the faith of Israel by law.

The abomination of desolation

In 167 BC Antiochus issued decrees that struck at the very heart of Jewish life. He forbade the sacrifices in the temple, banned the keeping of the Sabbath and the feasts, ordered copies of the law destroyed, and outlawed circumcision, all on pain of death. Worst of all, he defiled the temple itself, erecting an altar to the Greek god Zeus over the altar of the LORD and, by the ancient accounts, sacrificing a pig, an unclean animal, upon it. This desecration is remembered as the abomination of desolation, a phrase drawn from the book of Daniel.

The persecution was savage. The books of First and Second Maccabees, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians receive as Scripture and Protestants read as trustworthy history, record mothers put to death for circumcising their sons and faithful Jews who chose to die rather than eat forbidden food or forsake the covenant. For the first time the very existence of the worship of Israel hung in the balance, and it hung there because one man had set himself against the God of heaven.

Many students of Scripture have seen this very king foretold in the book of Daniel, whose visions describe a later ruler who would magnify himself, speak against the God of gods, and take away the daily sacrifice, setting up the abomination that makes desolate. Whatever the full scope of Daniel's prophecy, its language fits Antiochus with painful exactness, and the Jews who suffered under him read it as speaking to their hour. Jesus himself would later take up the same phrase, the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel, and point it forward to judgments yet to come, so that the crisis of the Maccabean age became a lasting picture of the pattern of defiance against God and his eventual overthrow.

Mattathias and the Hammer

Resistance began in the village of Modein, where an aged priest named Mattathias refused the king's officers who came to enforce pagan sacrifice. When another Jew stepped forward to obey, Mattathias killed him and the officer at the altar, and cried out for all who were zealous for the law to follow him. He and his five sons fled to the hills and raised the standard of revolt. When the old priest died, leadership passed to his son Judas, who was surnamed Maccabeus, a name usually understood to mean the Hammer.

Judas Maccabeus proved a brilliant guerrilla commander. Outnumbered and poorly armed, his forces used the rough country of Judea, surprise, and sheer resolve to defeat one Seleucid army after another. The rebels are called the Maccabees after him, and the dynasty they founded is called the Hasmonean, after an ancestor of the family. Within a few years they had won enough to march on Jerusalem and reclaim the desecrated temple.

The rededication and the Feast of Lights

In 164 BC Judas and his men took the temple mount, tore down the defiled altar, built a new one, made fresh holy vessels, and cleansed the sanctuary. Then they rededicated the temple to the LORD with sacrifice, song, and joy, and decreed that the rededication should be kept every year. That festival is Hanukkah, which means dedication, celebrated to this day for eight days each winter, also called the Feast of Lights.

A later Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud centuries afterward, tells that when the temple was cleansed only one small jar of consecrated oil was found, enough for a single day, yet it burned for eight days until more could be prepared. This story of the oil is a beloved tradition rather than part of the earlier historical accounts, and it is fair to say so plainly. What the older histories celebrate is the greater wonder, that a small and faithful people, against a mighty empire, were able to cleanse the house of God and worship him again.

Jesus at the Feast of Dedication

The Maccabean story reaches quietly into the Gospels. The Gospel of John records that it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter, and that Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch. That feast is Hanukkah, the very festival the Maccabees had established. The Lord himself was present at the temple, keeping the memory of its cleansing, in the very courts his forefathers had fought to restore.

The victory did not bring lasting peace. The Hasmonean dynasty founded by the Maccabees ruled a largely independent Judea for about a century, but their line grew worldly and quarrelsome, combining the offices of king and high priest and feuding for power until, in 63 BC, their in-fighting invited Rome to march in and take the country. Honesty about history means admitting that the heirs of the Maccabees did not always keep the faith their fathers had fought for. Yet the essential thing endured. Because of the Maccabees the temple still stood and the worship of the true God still burned when Christ was born, and that is the gift the whole church remembers when it reads their story.

There is a deep fitness in this. The Maccabees cleansed a temple of stone. Jesus would speak of the temple of his body, and would cleanse his Father's house, and would make of his people a living temple in which God dwells by his Spirit. The victory of the Maccabees kept the worship of the true God alive through the darkest years of the silent centuries, so that the temple still stood, and the faith still burned, when the true Light came into the world. God had preserved a people and a place, and into that people and that place he sent his Son.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

Related: Hellenization and the Septuagint · The Jewish world of Jesus' time · What are the 400 silent years? · The 400 Silent Years hub