by Bruce Feiler
But for the Israelites who did return to the Promised Land, the dream of re-creating God’s kingdom on his chosen land was still central. Judah, however, was in tatters. The population of native Israelites in the Promised Land was scarcely more than twenty thousand, confined to an area of less than twenty-five square miles. Israel was a speck of a nation, with hostile neighbors, limited arable land, and harsh weather. Worse, the remnants of Judah who had stayed behind had intermarried with locals and abandoned the rituals associated with the Temple. They knew little of the sacral observances introduced in Babylon. To the returnees, these natives were hardly Jews at all.
To reduce tensions, a group of returnees set about rebuilding the Temple, a project that took eighteen years. According to the Book of Ezra, the Temple was ultimately rededicated with an elaborate celebration in which locals and returnees together sacrificed one hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and twelve goats, one for each of the tribes of Israel. But the Temple hardly heralded the return of a Jewish state. If anything, since it was paid for by the Achaemenids, the Temple epitomized how Israel was a third-tier precinct under Persian hegemony. If Jews were going to survive, they needed more than a house of stones. They needed a way to remain intimate with the universal, nonterritorial God they had embraced in Babylon. They needed to elevate a new centerpiece of national identity, with an epic backstory and a code of values broad enough to serve both those living in diaspora and those living on the land.
They needed the Bible.
Sometime around 450 B.C.E., King Artaxerxes of Persia dispatched a Jewish scribe named Ezra to Jerusalem to instruct Jews in the teaching of Moses. Artaxerxes cared about the strength of the Jewish community because he needed their allegiance in his ongoing struggle with Egypt. Earlier, Artaxerxes had appointed a eunuch, Nehemiah, as governor of Judah. Nehemiah rebuilt the city walls, slashed taxes, and toughened laws on intermarriage. But while Nehemiah focused largely on the political life of the community, Ezra concentrated on the spiritual life. He was so disturbed by the Jews’ lack of faithfulness that he rent his garments and tore out his hair. In a manner prescient of modern American televangelists, Ezra held huge outdoor rallies where he read the Pentateuch from dawn to noon and exhorted Jews to divorce their pagan wives and tithe to assuage their sins. Jews stood in the rain to hear his rebuke.
Ezra’s innovation was profound. For the first time, he seized control of the sprawling Jewish community and began to regulate its internal affairs. With the dream of monarchical power collapsed, he shifted the organizing principle of the Jews away from being a nation and toward being a community of law, away from being a political entity and toward being an ism. “Ezra is the epitome of a new kind of leader,” Avner said. “He’s a priest, but he’s also a teacher. He’s everything but a king.”
By focusing on an increasingly canonized written text and encouraging others to read, reproduce, and study it, Ezra secured the place of the Bible in Jewish life. From then on, the distinguishing characteristic of being a Jew would be not membership in a state or observance of Temple rituals. It would be following the Laws of Moses as outlined in the Bible. Values had become the chief characteristic of the people.
The story of these years is presented in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the last two narrative books of the Hebrew Bible. At the end of Nehemiah, the story abruptly stops, practically in midsentence, as the Jews have gathered to listen to the law being read out loud and realize how far they have fallen. The chapter concludes, “O my God, remember it to my credit!” Why does the Bible, which has such a dazzling opening, have such a lifeless close?
“That has everything to do with canonization,” Avner said, referring to the process by which the rabbis decided which books would be included in the final Bible. “And we know nothing about those conversations.” The Bibles we use today are based on the Masoretic text, which was completed in the early centuries after Christ. But the version used by Greeks in the late first millennium B.C.E. contains books not in the Masoretic text. Many of these, including the four books of the Maccabees, outline the epic clash between the Jews and the Greeks, which helped define Western civilization.
No sooner did Judaism reach maturity under Ezra than it came under assault from the West. In 334 B.C.E., Alexander of Macedon, having inherited the remnants of Greece from his father, set out to liberate the Ancient Near East from the Persians. Crossing the Hellespont, he cut the legendary Gordian knot in Turkey, indicating he would conquer Asia. He promptly did, darting first into Egypt, where he was declared a god, then into Mesopotamia, where he faced Darius north of Baghdad. Using his versatile phalanx army, Alexander’s force of 40,000 defeated Darius’s 200,000. He then marched through Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis. He made it all the way to India before retreating to Babylon, where he became ill and died on June 13, 323, in a room within eyeshot of where Saddam later built his palace.
Tutored by Aristotle, Alexander set the goal of uniting East and West under the aegis of Greek civilization. He ended the multiculturalism of the Pax Persica and replaced it with one universal, cosmopolitan culture, which other nations were allowed to embrace but not improve. Greek became the lingua franca, Greek sports became the leading cultural activity, Greek gods became the primary deities. Even after Alexander died and his political empire collapsed, his cultural legacy thrived. The Hellenists told local populations across Asia they could keep their barbarian religions if they wished, but if they wanted to join the West they should give their gods Greek names, give themselves Greek names, and intermarry with Greeks.
Jews, in particular, embraced Hellenism. Adopting a pattern that would continue through today, many Jews chose assimilation over confrontation. Hellenism, they felt, not only didn’t threaten their faith but provided many benefits, including a shared love of intellectual pursuits, wider career opportunities, and more fun, especially with athletics. For nearly two centuries Judaism and Hellenism thrived side by side. But confrontation seemed inevitable in the early second century B.C.E., when Hellenist rulers began pressuring Jews to abandon the Torah.
The resulting clash produced one of the most controversial holidays of the Jewish calendar.
We arrived in Modiin, a thriving settlement begun in 1996 that bills itself as the fastest-growing city in the world other than Las Vegas. After seven years it had a population of 50,000, with 10,000 people moving in every year. A map in the town showed an ambitious plan to expand to 250,000. As part of that dream, the mayor passed a ruling declaring Hanukkah the official holiday.
On the outskirts of town, at the crest of a mostly barren hill, with scattered pistachio and cypress trees nestled into cracks, is a small park. Peeking out of the bedrock were a dozen man-made caverns large enough to hold two corpses. Nearby were large boulders that Avner said would have been rolled over the pits, both to protect the dead from wild animals and to serve as tombstones. “Like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” Avner said, speaking of where Jesus is said to have been buried, “this was once a quarry that was later converted into a cemetery.”
I lowered myself into a pit, which was about eight feet deep. No writing was visible, because families wealthy enough to afford such tombs would not have wanted robbers to identify them. These graves are reputed to have held the most famous residents of Hellenistic Israel, the Maccabees, heroes of the Hanukkah story. “There is no evidence to support that claim,” Avner said, “and most probably they are from later. Archaeologically speaking, they do not fit the Maccabean period.”
“Then why the tradition?”
“Ancient Modiin was known to be in this area, and the Maccabees were from Modiin. For early Zionists looking for heroes, the Maccabees seemed a good fit: they were young, they were bold, they fought for what they believed in.”
The death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. quickly tore his kingdom in two, as his successors divided the world between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. But the Seleucids struggled to maintain power from Persia to Palestin
e and fought off rebellions from their subjects. Antiochus IV, who seized the Seleucid throne in a coup in 175 B.C.E., faced hostility on all fronts. A lavish despot nicknamed “the maniac,” Antiochus did what many leaders before and since have done in times of crisis: He used religion to unify the public. He issued edicts enforcing the status of Zeus as the common god of his heterogeneous people.
Many citizens, including wealthy, well-educated, urban Jews in Jerusalem who enjoyed their association with Hellenism, welcomed his moves. Some Jews were so desperate to join the ultimate Hellenist club, the gymnasium, which promised exclusive access to the Olympic Games, that they submitted themselves to an unimaginable procedure. Since athletes competed in the nude, Jewish men who hoped to participate had to undergo a reverse circumcision, or epispasm, to stretch their foreskin to cover their penises. The surgery became so widespread that the Talmud was later forced to condemn it as being so sinful that it could not be tolerated, even by praying for forgiveness on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Buoyed by the rapid Hellenization of the Jews and needing funds, Antiochus stormed Jerusalem and, on the twenty-fifth of Kislev 167 B.C.E. (roughly December), plundered the Temple, removed its sacred furniture, and stripped the gold leaf from the façade. Further, he burned the Bible, ended circumcision, and converted the Temple into a shrine of Zeus, in front of which Jews were required to sacrifice pigs. The date, the twenty-fifth of Kislev, was likely chosen because it was a pagan holiday, immediately following the winter solstice, celebrating the rebirth of the sun.
As forced Hellenization spread, the policy reached Modiin, where a priest, Mattathias, lived with his sons: John, Simon, Judah, Eleazar, and Jonathan. Asked to lead a sacrifice to Zeus, Mattathias refused and fled with his sons and supporters to the hills. “Why was I born to witness the ruin of my people and the ruin of the Holy City?” he asked. The family began a stealth campaign, attacking Hellenists and their Jewish sympathizers, burning altars to Zeus, and forcibly circumcising children. When Mattathias died, leadership passed to Judah, nicknamed Maccabeus, or “the Hammer,” likely from his mallet-shaped head, who turned the guerrilla war into a full-scale fight for independence.
Antiochus, bogged down in Persia, sent only minimal forces to squash the revolt. Judah eluded them and marched into Jerusalem, shuttered the gymnasium, and cleansed the Temple. On the twenty-fifth of Kislev 164, three years after the original desecration, the Temple was rededicated. The Book of Maccabees says the Jews celebrated for eight days, a number chosen because the new holiday made up for the eight-day holiday of Sukkot (designed to mark the dedication of the First Temple), which had not been held while the Temple was under pagan control. The Maccabees ordained that the dedication be honored each year “with gladness and joy.”
Later the rabbis named the holiday Hanukkah, or “Dedication,” and began the annual festivities on the twenty-fifth of Kislev. Similarly, in the third century C.E., church officials transferred the date of Christmas from the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December in what some suggested was a move to appropriate the still-popular pagan practice of celebrating the passing of the darkest days of the year. Long before twentieth-century consumerism brought them into union once again, Hanukkah and Christmas shared one theme in common: both were crafted in part to move the world from paganism to monotheism.
By the time I emerged from the cavern, a stirring scene had unfolded on the hilltop. At least three extended families had swarmed over the tombs, spilling forth with squealing children, parents carrying cookies and juice cartons, grandmothers toting babies. A father struggled to rouse more enthusiasm from a group of eight-year-olds apathetically singing a holiday song. A mother retold the Maccabees story as she lit the candles on a tin menorah, the nine-branch candelabra in which each arm represents a different night and the ninth is the master that lights the others.
As I watched, a woman invited me to join her party. She had curly blond hair with a hint of gray and was wearing a lavender T-shirt and matching eye makeup. She carried a two-year-old girl. The forty-eight-year-old Yael Simckes was born on Long Island. She had first visited Israel in 1973. A second visit, in 1981, inspired her to move. She married an expatriated American, and the two live with four children in a settlement called Elazar, named after the fourth Maccabee, who was trampled by an elephant. I asked her why she had brought her children here.
“My kids know this is where the Maccabees are from,” she said, “and that they were buried here—” A sound caught her attention, and she turned toward the tomb. “Watch out for the scorpions and snakes!” she cried. She turned back and apologized.
“I find the story of Hanukkah is more complicated than the version I grew up with,” I said. “I never realized the Jews were fighting other Jews as well as the Greeks. Forced circumcision seems pretty brutal. Is the story you tell your kids different from the story you were told growing up?”
“No. I’m a schoolteacher, and what I tell my kids has more to do with the fact that the Greeks came and said, ‘You can’t be Jewish anymore. Be like us.’ And a few Jews were courageous enough to say, ‘No, we want our freedom.’ Being Jewish is being different. It’s standing up to that pressure, which has always been around us, and saying, ‘We don’t bow down to idols. We have Jewish values. We dress differently. We eat different foods.’ ”
“So the message is self-confidence.”
“It’s confidence in your own identity, no matter how difficult it may be. There’s real pressure, even in Israel, to conform. All the young people want to look like they’re on MTV. They go to extremes, with the piercings, the tattoos, trying to be like everyone else.
“I thank God I came here and didn’t assimilate,” she continued. “I went to Vassar College, and I was like a Jew turning into a WASP. And I didn’t know until I came to Israel and saw proud, normal people who were Jewish that I didn’t have to be ashamed. I didn’t realize until I came to Israel that every time we’d be in a restaurant and a Jewish subject would come up I kind of lowered my voice. It’s not that we were afraid, but that we felt we had to keep quiet. We were hiding. Three-quarters of the people I grew up with did assimilate in the end.”
“One thing about Israel,” I said. “Here you can speak as loudly as you want.”
“Absolutely!” she said, beaming. “That’s what everyone does!”
We said good-bye, and Avner and I made our way back toward Jerusalem, where we had been invited to join the lighting of Israel’s equivalent of the National Christmas Tree, the menorah at the Western Wall. The elevation of Hanukkah to a focal point in contemporary Judaism was by no means guaranteed. If anything, the story of the Maccabees was almost erased from Jewish history.
The Jews gained nominal independence from the Seleucids in 142 B.C.E. But once the heirs to the Maccabees, known as the Hasmoneans, became leaders of the Jewish nation, they quickly descended into tyranny, ransacking the countryside for mistresses, hiring mercenaries, and plundering David’s tombs to fund foolish military excursions. The Jewish values that had inspired the original revolt were subverted to vulgar corruption. By the time they lost power in the first century B.C.E., the Hasmoneans represented yet another failed experiment in political leadership in a line that stretched across the entire biblical era.
Perhaps for this reason, the books of the Maccabees have a curious relationship with the Bible. Two of the four books were included in the Greek Bible, which Christians adopted from the Jews of Egypt. The rabbis, though, excluded them from the Jewish canon, perhaps because they didn’t approve of the Hasmoneans, or perhaps because the story glorifies a war begun by humans, not God. We don’t know. As Avner notes, scholars have unearthed little about the process of canonization.
The church eventually dropped the Maccabees from its canon, too, though Christians continued to embrace the story, in part because Judah Maccabee embodies the believer who is willing to use violence to defend his faith. Pope Urban II, when he called for the Crusades in the eleventh centur
y, brandished the sword of the Maccabees. Judah Maccabee is one of “nine worthies” carved into the doors of medieval churches; the other two Old Testament figures on the doors are also warriors: Joshua and David.
Jews also continued to love the story, despite its noncanonical status. Josephus notes that in the first century C.E. the holiday was being called the Festival of Lights, “I think from the fact that the right to worship appeared to us like a flash of light at a time when we hardly dared hope for it.” The Talmud downplays the holiday, but the rabbis, convinced it would endure anyway, introduced a divine spin. When the Maccabees entered the Temple, the Talmud says, they found only one cruse of olive oil to light the seven-branch menorah that had stood in the Temple since the time of Solomon. With no time to make more oil, they lit the menorah, and it burned for eight days. This story, unmentioned in the books of the Maccabees, brought the Hanukkah tale in line with other biblical stories, including Moses’ dedication of the tabernacle and Solomon’s construction of the First Temple, both of which were accompanied by fire miracles.
Hanukkah remained a minor holiday through the Middle Ages, with no respite from work and no gift giving. Jewish families would light eight oil lamps to commemorate the miracle, but in the sixteenth century families began to replace the oil with tallow and wax candles. Menorahs were placed outside, to the left of the door, to be visible to neighbors returning home after sunset.
Hanukkah began to emerge as a major holiday in the late nineteenth century, on the backs of the two new forces in world Jewry: Zionists and Americans. Early Zionists latched onto the story because it showed the power of Jews seizing independence through military action. Zionists renamed the festival the Holiday of the Maccabees and wrote a popular song that boasted, “No miracle happened here.” Jews won this victory, they insisted.
In the United States, meanwhile, Hanukkah was elevated as a counterpart to Christmas and a way for Jews to participate in the American winter sport of competitive consumption. This Christianized Hanukkah is the one I grew up with, and I loved it. My family lit candles every night, and my mother, who believed all gifts had to be earned, hid presents and made my siblings and me find them before we could open them.