Is Hanukkah in the Bible?

One line in John

Hanukkah gets a single sentence in the New Testament, and half of it is about the weather.

It was the Feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in Solomon’s porch.

Hanukkah is Hebrew for “dedication,” and John’s Greek word, enkainia, means the same. Solomon’s porch was a roofed colonnade on the Temple’s east side, a sheltered place to walk in the cold. Did Jesus celebrate Hanukkah? John says only that he was there, walking and teaching in the Temple while the city kept the feast. It is one of the Jewish feasts John uses to set the clock of his story, with Passover and the Feast of Booths.

What happened in 164 BC

In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, heir to one of Alexander’s generals, outlawed Jewish practice and built a pagan altar on top of the Temple’s altar: “an abomination of desolation” (1 Maccabees 1:54). A priestly family from the village of Modein rebelled. Its leader, Judah, was nicknamed the Maccabee, probably “the hammer.” In 164 BC he retook Jerusalem, built a new altar and relit the lampstand.

Judas and his kindred and the whole congregation of Israel ordained that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their seasons from year to year for eight days, from the twenty-fifth day of the month Chislev, with gladness and joy.

The twenty-fifth of Kislev falls in late November or December. That is why Hanukkah comes in winter, and why John mentions the cold.

Why eight days?

1 Maccabees gives the eight days but no reason. 2 Maccabees gives one: the rebels had spent the autumn Feast of Booths hiding in the hills, and they made up for it.

They observed eight days with gladness in the manner of the feast of tabernacles, remembering how not long before, during the feast of tabernacles, they were wandering in the mountains and in the caves like wild animals.

The Feast of Booths runs seven days with a solemn eighth (Leviticus 23:36). So the first Hanukkah was, in a sense, a late Booths, kept with palm branches and hymns (2 Maccabees 10:7).

The oil came later

The story most people know is in neither book. In the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 21b), compiled centuries later, the rabbis tell of one small jar of pure oil, still sealed by the high priest, enough for a single day, that burned for eight. Josephus, writing about AD 93, already calls the feast “Lights,” but he tells no oil story (Antiquities 12.325).

The lamp changed too. The Temple’s lampstand had seven lamps (Exodus 25:37); the Arch of Titus in Rome shows it carried in Rome’s triumph after AD 70. The nine-branched Hanukkah lamp, eight lights and a helper candle called the shamash, came much later. In Jesus’s day the feast had its lamps, but not that one.

Which Bibles include it

• Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include 1 and 2 Maccabees, inherited from the Septuagint, the Greek Bible of the early church.
• Most Protestant Bibles leave them out or print them among the Apocrypha, as the King James Bible of 1611 did.
• The Hebrew Bible does not include them. Hanukkah’s customs come from the rabbis, not from the Torah.

So whether Hanukkah is “in the Bible” depends partly on whose Bible. Purim, the other joyful feast born after Moses, has a whole book of the Hebrew Bible to itself: Esther.