Posted by: Joe Yudin | December 12, 2009

The story that every Jewish child should learn in Hebrew school is a pretty straight forward one. Here is a short refresher course from this Israeli tour guide:

The Greeks came to the land of Israel in 332 BCE with Alexander the Great. Alexander had been trained by Aristotle himself, and the Greek historian Herodotus alludes to Aristotle's admiration of "the nation of philosophers" who lived in the hills of Judea. Alexander had in turn been kind to the Jews but one of his successors, Antiochus IV wasn't. Antiochus Epiphanes could not comprehend why these Jews did not want to become good Greek citizens. Hellenism was spreading all over the world and most people embraced it. They loved the naked wrestling matches, the drunken orgies, the complete immodesty of a beautiful society and most of all the gods and festivals that came with them. After a large rebellion led by the deposed High Priest Jason against him, Antiochus decided to force the Jews to become good assimilated Greeks once and for all. He executed many Jews and then, outlawed circumcision (the Jewish covenant between man and God), the study of Torah and ordered the Jews to erect naked statues to the Greek gods throughout their villages and cities and inside the Temple in Jerusalem itself. Finally Antiochus ordered the sacrifice of pigs in the Jewish Temple and synagogues. By 167 BCE one Jewish family from the city of Modiin outside of Jerusalem believed that this forced assimilation into Hellenism had gone far enough.

The Syrian-Greek army came to town and asked the local priest (in Judaism, the Cohen family was the priestly class), a man called Mattathias, (Matitiyahu or Matisyahu in Hebrew, Matthew in English) the Hasmonean. When Matitiyahu Mattathias refused an assimilated Jew stepped forward to sacrifice the pig in the local synagogue. When this assimilated Jew raised his sword to sacrifice the pig, Mattathias killed this would be sacrificer himself while Mattathias' sons, Judah, Simon, Eliezer, Jonathan and Yochanan took care of the rest of the Syrian-Greek soldiers. They then headed for the wilderness of Judea and  called for all those who followed the Torah to join the revolt. To make a long story short, Judah the Maccabee and his brothers defeated the vastly stronger Syrian-Greek army by using the local terrain that they knew intimately and military tactics that are still studied in military colleges to this day. There is even a statue of Judah the Maccabee at West Point!

After the defeat of the Greeks, the Maccabees stormed the Temple Mount, striking down the statues and other graven images erected by Antiochus, cleansed the whole Temple area of impurities and rededicated the Temple. And that is what "Hannukah" means "Dedication".

How do we know all this? Various sources like the Four Books of Maccabbes which are not part of the Hebrew Bible but an Apocryphal work, Josephus Flavius, the Jewish general turned Roman historian and also an immense amount of archaeological excavations from the time. See here: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1260447412570&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

So you may be asking me if that's the whole story where does the whole "Festival of Lights" and menorah come into play? That's Talmudic…and controversial. Tune into this blog later in the week and we'll delve into that.