The Miracle of Chanukah

At the heart of Chanukah is the concept of pirsuma d’nisa, the “publicizing of the miracle” that lies at the heart of the Chanukah story. The lighting of the menorah itself is explained with reference to that concept: we light our Chanukah lamps and then display them in a public place specifically to remind passers-by about the Chanukah miracle and presumably, in so doing, to make them sensitive to God’s role in the world as the Author of history. Nor should the way this works be obscure, for what are miracles really other than instances of direct divine intervention in the unfolding of human history to push the story along in a different direction than the one in which it might otherwise have gone off?

But what precisely was the miracle we exert ourselves so intensely to publicize? That sounds like a ridiculous question even to bother asking out loud—if there is one thing everybody knows about Chanukah it’s the story of the miracle that rests at the center of its best-known ritual. Even children in kindergarten know that story! Or do they?

Weirdly few and many at the same time are the historical sources from antiquity that relate the story of the Chanukah miracle. Few, because we are talking at most about five or six reliable contemporary (or nearly contemporary) texts written by authors who knew the events under consideration firsthand or almost firsthand. But also many, because none of the afore-referenced sources seem to agree—really not even slightly—about what the miracle actually was. And therein, as I hope to show, lies a very interesting tale indeed.

The story we all know has to do with the tiny cruse of oil that had somehow survived the Hellenists’ occupation of the Temple with its tiny seal—the seal of the High Priest of Israel—intact. When the Maccabees liberated the Temple Mount and began the process of restoring the Temple to its pristine state, they wished first of all to kindle the olive-oil lamps that sat at the top of each branch of the great golden candelabrum that stood—along with the golden incense altar and the golden table on which were displayed the weekly showbread—in the anteroom just outside the Holy of Holies. The jug of oil should have contained enough for just one day’s use, but—miraculously—there continued to be oil in the jug day after day no matter how much they poured out of it until, eventually, new oil could be prepared for daily use. It’s a good story, a famous one. But it only appears for the first time in the Talmud, a work finally published about seven centuries after the events under discussion. It is true that the Talmud presents the story as one deriving from the period of the Mishnah, so only two or three centuries after the Maccabean revolt. But it’s still a bit fishy, the whole idea: a remarkable story about a miraculous event that somehow avoided being mentioned by anyone in any surviving literary work for centuries upon centuries after it allegedly occurred.

And then there is Jason of Cyrene. Cyrene is on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Libya and there lived a man named Jason, known to us solely as the author of a five-part work that has not survived and the title of which also is unknown. In point of fact, we know nothing at all about Jason other than his name and his place. But the same cannot be said for his lost work because someone—whose name is also unknown—took on the job of creating a summary volume that would reduce the five tomes of the original to one, much shorter work. And that work, the summary volume, did survive and is known, confusingly, as Second Maccabees. (To make the matter even more confusing, Second Maccabees has no relationship at all to the book known as First Maccabees, an entirely different work.) 

And this Jason—who lived decades, not centuries, after the Maccabees seized control of the Temple—he also had a miracle in his story, just not the one we’ve all heard of.

In Jason’s book, the miracle has to do with one Nehemiah—not the Nehemiah who later became a book of the Bible, but rather the man, otherwise unknown to history, charged with restoring the Temple when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon.

He starts by recalling that “the pious priests of that time took some of the fire of the altar and secretly hid it in the hollow of a dry cistern, where they took such precautions that the place was unknown to anyone.” That seemed unlikely to work—how could the fire have possibly burned for the half century the Jews were away? But, hoping for a miracle, this Nehemiah then sent the descendants of those original priests who hid the first to retrieve it. But when they went to that secret place, they found not fire but some sort of “thick liquid” instead. Not sure what to do, but somehow inspired to take a huge chance, Nehemiah then ordered the priests to pour out liquid on the carcass of a sacrificial animal that had been set atop the wood set atop the newly re-inaugurated altar. And, indeed, a great miracle did occur: as soon as the sun shone on the liquid, it burst into flames and consumed the sacrifice that had been set atop the wood. And so the miracle was that this thick liquid—which Jason tells us the locals called naphtha—somehow allowed the sanctity of the fire that had burned permanently atop the altar in the First Temple to be transferred to the Second, thereby creating an unbroken link of sacrificial offering interrupted only temporally, but not really physically. Later on, Jason tells about the restoration of the Temple in the days of the Maccabees, but he mentions the menorah only in passing, saying merely that they “purified the sanctuary, built a new altar and then, “striking fire from flint, they offered sacrifices for the first time after a lapse of two years, burning incense as well and lighting [the] lamps [of the great candelabrum] and setting out the showbread.”

So Jason has the Maccabees restoring the golden Menorah, but his miracle is the one that connects the First Temple with the Second. And that actually does make sense: the appurtenances in the Second Temple were all new, whereas the sacred appurtenances present when the Maccabees restored the Temple were the same ones present a few years earlier when the traditionalists lost control of the Temple. So for Jason the miracle is that the fire that illuminated the Sanctum of the Temple in his day went back—physically and not just theoretically—to the days of David and Solomon. Same concept, same elements (oil, fire, menorah)—just a different story entirely.

And then there is the anonymous author of a different book, the one known to us as First Maccabees. He almost definitely wrote in Hebrew, although his book survives only in Greek. He was a near contemporary of Jason of Cyrene, perhaps a bit older but still a contemporary. And he was closest of all to the events at hand: a Hebrew-speaking Jew living in the Land of Israel relating the story of the Maccabees as he knew it.

But he has no miracle at all in his account. Just to the contrary, for this author the victory of the Maccabees was itself a miracle…and, at that, one that did not need to be enhanced with other, lesser wonders. He writes that they weren’t sure what to do with the altar now that it had been defiled with impure worship (he almost certainly means now that pigs had been sacrificed upon it), but that they eventually decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one. And so “they rebuilt the sanctuary and the interior of the Temple, then consecrated its courtyards. Then they made new vessels, bringing [a new] Menorah, a new incense alter, and a new table [for the showbread] into the sanctum. They then burnt incense on the altar and lighted the lamps of the Menorah so that these  could light up the Temple.” And the first day they initiated the renewed service of sacrificial worship was, indeed, the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the day we celebrate as the first day of Chanukah.

So those are our choices. The story we all know is also the most distant from the events and in every way the least likely. (Of course, aren’t all miracles highly unlikely? Otherwise, in what sense would they be miracles?)  Jason’s story is charming in its own way, but is set a few centuries too early to be the point of Chanukah observance. And First Maccabees omits the oil/Menorah theme entirely and sees instead in the great victory of the Maccabees a true miracle. As, indeed, it truly was.

And then we the evidence of our prayerbook. Who wrote the Al Ha-nissim paragraph added to the Amidah during Chanukah, no one knows. But that liturgist sided with the author of First Maccabees, ignoring the Talmud’s story and speaking instead of the Maccabees merely “lighting lamps in the Temple courtyards” (which is specifically not where the great Menorah stood—which was inside the sanctum and not outdoors in one of the courtyards) and instead finding the miraculous in the woof and warp of Jewish history itself, in the story of how God “stood by the Jews in their time of distress, waged their battles, defended their rights, and avenged the wrong done to them.” That is the miracle we mention in our prayers daily. And it’s also the one on which to focus: the role of God in history—and specifically in Jewish history—is the miracle…and a far more impressive one than keeping the oil pouring out of a magic pot that just couldn’t run dry.