Who Let There Be Light?

Every winter, Jews recount how, after the Maccabees regained access to the Temple in Jerusalem, the priests were only able to locate a single flask of pure olive oil with which to light the menorah. Marvelously, the oil continued to burn for eight long days, and so each year we commemorate this by lighting our own menorahs and eating oily foods.

This a charming story, but its origins are a total mystery. There is no mention of the miracle tale in our earliest historical sources, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, which were written only decades after the Hasmonean victory in 164 BCE. References to the marvel are also absent in classical rabbinic sources from the Land of Israel, like the Jerusalem Talmud and the al hanisim prayer, which is still recited to this day. As it turns out, the tale first appears in the Babylonian Talmud, some seven hundred years after the miracle of the oil was supposed to have occurred.

Scholars have searched for the first spark of this miracle story by suggesting that the non-militaristic rabbis wanted to deemphasize the Maccabean military victories. To that end, they supplemented tales of Hasmonean heroism with a spiritual story about resilient light. That may be true, but it doesn’t explain where this peculiar tale may have come from.

Interestingly, an ancient epistle appended to the beginning of 2 Maccabees relates a story reminiscent of the talmudic account. Addressed to the Jews of Egypt, the letter encourages Egyptian Jewry to celebrate the newly established temple rededication festival. Along the way, it shares some edifying stories of the temple, including one about how Nehemiah restored sacred fire to the altar upon Babylonian Jewry’s return to Jerusalem from exile:

When our forefathers were being carried off to Persia, the pious priests of that time secretly took some fire from the altar and hid it in a pit which was like a dry well and shut it up securely so that the place remained unknown to all. Many years went by, and then, in God’s own time, Nehemiah received his commission from the king of Persia and sent the descendants of the priests who had hidden the fire to recover it. When they reported that…they had found no fire but a viscous liquid, Nehemiah ordered them to draw it up and bring it to him. After the sacrificial offerings had been placed upon the altar, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid over the firewood and over the offerings laid upon it. When that had been done, after a while the sun, which had been covered by clouds, began to shine, and a great fire blazed up, to the astonishment of all.

(2 Maccabees 1:19–22, Anchor Bible translation)

As with the Hanukkah story, Nehemiah was faced with a dilemma—how to return to temple service after being exiled from the temple precincts and losing key sacred materials. And just like in the Talmud’s account, something that should not naturally have burned miraculously ignited. Finally, in both cases, the stories are associated with the Babylonian diaspora, either in the form of the main character (Nehemiah) or the work in which it is preserved (the Babylonian Talmud).

It’s possible that stories about sacred fires may have been particularly meaningful to Babylonian Jews, who lived alongside Zoroastrians and their fire cult. Thus, the Talmud’s emphasis on the menorah and its central place in the Hanukkah story corresponds to a religious world in which fire possesses special spiritual significance. Apparently, this notion is reflected in a coda that 2 Maccabees relates about the aftermath of Nehemiah’s restoration of fire to the altar:

The news of the phenomenon spread. The king of the Persians received the report that the liquid had been found in the place where the priests being led into exile had hidden the fire and that by means of it Nehemiah and his followers had burned the sacrificial offerings. After verifying the phenomenon, the king had the place fenced in and declared it holy. (2:33–34)

Of course, the story about Nehemiah is not about Hanukkah but an earlier miracle that the letter’s writer thought was worth including. That earlier story, which is just as ahistorical as the common Hanukkah tale, seems also to have circulated as a folktale among Babylonian Jews before being cited in an epistle written by Jews in Judea to Egyptian Jews. Regardless, both stories deliver a beautiful, comforting message about the persistence of tradition, even when breaks and gaps might threaten the connection with the past. That’s a lesson that ancient Jews across the Middle East, and contemporary Jews today, can readily appreciate.