The Scroll of Antiochus?

About five hundred years ago, a distinguished Spanish scribe added a book to the Bible. The twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible begin with Genesis and conclude, usually, with the book of Chronicles. But after Moshe ben Hayyim finished copying Chronicles, he copied the Scroll of Antiochus, a book that tells a richly furnished version of the Hanukkah story. His 1,356-page tome, known today as Codex Parma 1832, then ends.

The Scroll of Antiochus is not a biblical book. Nor is it an apocryphal one—that is, a text written before the biblical canon was closed and, for whatever reason, didn’t make the cut. It is not even the earliest or most accurate historical account of the Hasmonean Revolt (167–164 BCE). That honor belongs to 1 Maccabees, written close to 110 BCE, and 2 Maccabees, written sometime around 143 BCE (both apocryphal works). The Scroll of Antiochus was composed centuries later in Aramaic by an unknown author.

Whoever composed the Scroll of Antiochus was ignorant of Israel’s geography—in it, the Greek army flees a landlocked Jerusalem by boat. Textual clues also suggest that he knew enough Aramaic to mimic the dialects of Targum Onkelos and Biblical Aramaic. But beyond that it is hard to say much about the author.

We know much more about the text in its transmission. It appears in over thirty-six medieval handwritten copies and forty fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Translations of the book also abound. To date, the text has been rendered into Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Persian, several dialects of Judeo-Arabic, Latin, German, English, Hungarian, Italian, and Marathi, the language of the Bene Israel community in India.

Still, the Scroll of Antiochus was never part of anyone’s Bible. As Rabbi Assi of the Talmud memorably puts it, “Esther is the end of all miracles.” The Talmud immediately confirms that a miracle did happen on Hanukkah, but Esther’s story was the last to be considered canonical (Yoma 29a). Moshe ben Hayyim must have known that, so why does his Bible contain a text that rabbinic tradition explicitly excludes?

The Scroll of Antiochus tries hard to look like a biblical book. It uses unnecessarily archaic words. When Antiochus seeks counsel, he speaks to his haddabra, which names a specific type of Persian royal official, and appears only in the book of Daniel. It has no place in the Hellenistic administrative context of Hanukkah or use in the Aramaic dialect of the author. But it does go a long way in making a reader feel as if the scroll belongs alongside other indisputable biblical texts written centuries earlier.

The scroll’s prose has a biblical cadence: It is short and balanced, with minimal description. Consider a typical verse: “And he (Antiochus) built a great city by the bank of the river to be his capital. And he called it Antioch after his own name.” The story also feels biblical, moving from distress to salvation. The narrative begins by introducing us to Antiochus, who, after conquering many kingdoms, sets his sights on subduing Jerusalem by abolishing the Sabbath, Rosh Hodesh, and circumcision. He dispatches Nicanor, who slays Jerusalem’s populace and slaughters a pig on the temple’s altar, before Yohanan, son of Mattityahu rises up and assassinates him.

Antiochus then sends a second general, Bagras, who is repelled by the five sons of Mattityahu. Bagras’s army returns with armored elephants, breaches Jerusalem’s walls, and kills Judah, the son of Mattityahu. His victory, however, is short-lived. Mattityahu and his remaining children kill Bagras, defeat his army, and encourage Antiochus’s other provinces to revolt. Antiochus commits suicide. Finally, God blesses a single sealed jar of pure olive oil to last for eight days, and a new holiday is born.

Some of the narrative cribs from other biblical stories. For instance, when Yohanan seeks revenge against Nicanor, he fashions a short dagger and makes an ostensibly diplomatic meeting with him. After persuading Nicanor to dismiss his servants, he thrusts the short blade into his heart. The story is clearly lifted from the story of Ehud ben Gera (Judges 3:12–23), the Israelite judge who assassinated Eglon, the King of Moab, with a short dagger.

It is the book of Esther, however, which the Scroll of Antiochus most mimics. Both texts open with a description of a king and his glory, and both texts close with the establishment of a new holiday. The scroll also regularly riffs on Esther’s language: The reward for good behavior is to be dressed in the king’s clothes and to be mounted on the king’s horse (SA 19; Est 6:9); letters are “sent to all the provinces of the kingdom” (SA 46; Est 2:3); and the Jews are encouraged to accept new “days of feasting and rejoicing” (SA 65; Est 9:22).

The Scroll of Antiochus’s language, references, and allusions seem to be making an argument: If Purim is biblical, why not Hanukkah?

The author of Halakhot Gedolot, a ninth-century legal work, actually came just shy of calling the Scroll of Antiochus biblical. In addition to identifying its authors as “elders from the schools of Shammai and Hillel,” he suggests that the only thing that barred the scroll from entering the canon is that there was no high priest to ratify its inclusion when it was written.

Some communities seemed unfazed by the scroll’s lack of priestly or prophetic authority. Italian Jews (among others) included the Scroll of Antiochus in the liturgy of the Sabbath of Hanukkah. We hear both notes of approval and caution in the words of Rabbi Isaiah of Trani, who lived in thirteenth-century southern Italy: “So too, where the custom is to recite Megillat Antiochus on Hanukkah, one should not recite a blessing upon it, since there is no basis to the obligation at all.” Rabbi Isaiah’s protest suggests that some communities regularly recited the text with a blessing, as if it were part of the Bible.

Moshe ben Hayyim was a seasoned scribe. At least ten of his manuscripts survive today. Like many exiles of the Spanish Expulsion, he resettled in Italy, where he seems to have quickly taken to its customs. The extant prayerbooks he wrote all belong to the Italian Rite. And his complete Bible, written in Sephardic square script, assigns Torah portions and haftarot according to the Italian tradition.

Those who bought Moshe’s copy of the Bible seem to have been unperturbed by a twenty-fifth biblical text. In 1495, Menahem ben Meshullam Terracina acquired the manuscript, probably from Moshe, while in Pisa. By 1526, the copy was in possession of Mattathias David Portaleone. And in 1611, an anonymous owner recorded the birth of his son on the manuscript’s opening pages.

Although no printed Bible ever included the Scroll of Antiochus as the twenty-fifth biblical text, it continued to find a place in Jewish liturgy. Ruth Langer noted that Reform Rabbi J. Leonard Levy (1865-1917) translated a version of the scroll for his Hanukkah service. Some Yemenite communities continue to recite the scroll on the Sabbath of Hanukkah. The scroll was even a mainstay in some Orthodox Ashkenazic prayer books. It appears in Seder Avodat Yisrael, a siddur published by Rödelheim Press in 1868 and edited by the scholar Seligman Baer (1825–1897). Baer’s prayer book influenced subsequent editions of the siddur to include the Scroll of Antiochus among its pages, including Philip Birnbaum’s Ha-Siddur ha-shalem, which, until at least the 1980s, was widely used as the standard prayer book in many Orthodox and Conservative congregations.

One can still read the scroll in several languages and translations at Sefaria, that ethereal and boundless Jewish library. But one must look carefully. The scroll has worked its persuasive magic. It sits alongside 1 and 2 Maccabees as part of Sefaria’s collection of Second Temple apocrypha, a twenty-first-century win for its anonymous author.

The scroll concludes joyfully, telling readers that “the children of Israel observe these days in the lands of their dispersion, as days of feasting and joy, for eight days,” which remains blessedly true, even without a biblical anchor.