A Day Like No Other
The first night of Hanukkah fell on Christmas Day this year. It only happens every 20yrs or so (explanation below if you’re curious).
I grew up Jewish, celebrating eight days of Hanukkah with little gifts from our parents each day. I still light the menorah in my Christian household as a cultural reminder of mine and my sons’ roots. I also make potato latkes fried in coconut oil! But this year’s alignment has allowed me to reflect on these practices.
Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of Judah Maccabee and his followers who led a revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, a Syrian king who was in control of the Land of Israel (Judea). Antiochus had outlawed the Jewish religion and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem by erecting an alter to Greek gods. After two years of fighting, the rebels recaptured the temple in the year 166BC. They relit the candelabras which were meant to burn around the clock, but they only had enough olive oil for a single night. The festival celebrates the miracle that the oil burned continually for eight nights until they could obtain a fresh supply.
The story of Hanukkah is an actual historical event. It is not recorded in the Old Testament (OT) of the Bible though as the events it refers to happened after the OT writings had been completed. But it is referred to in the New Testament (NT) as the Feast of Dedication (John 10:22). God in all his wisdom stayed silent for the 400 years we call the “intertestamental period” between the end of the OT and the start of the NT perhaps in order to strengthen the evidence that many geopolitical events that came to pass during this period were written down centuries before they occurred but that’s a discussion for another day.
Nowadays we tend to take celebrations like Hanukkah and Christmas as cultural events rather than celebrations of history like the end of World War II or the founding of a nation. We forget the historical significance or maybe there is a deeper-seated need to ignore the veracity of the Bible’s account. Do we assume it is mere folklore that one day’s worth of oil could burn for eight days? Is this because we have a set bias against events that we don’t understand? Events or actions that we put into the realm of the supernatural or the fanciful like fairies and leprechauns?
I’d argue we need to overcome this bias. We don’t fully understand gravity but we know it exists. The concept of dreams, intuition, near death experiences, communication between identical twins miles apart, or between plants and their environment; how the offspring of monarch butterflies end up back in the garden where their grandparents were born, or how sunlight on human skin creates the molecule we named vitamin D that acts on hundreds of different genes and processes in the body.
We don’t understand these phenomena but skeptics assume that God is a lazy excuse for our ignorance. It’s quite the opposite – God IS the explanation. There is overwhelming evidence from a wide variety of scientific and philosophical disciplines. God does not expect blind faith. Throughout the Bible we are called to test the scriptures. Truth stands up to any scrutiny.
The story of Christmas then is the ultimate historical event: the day when God sent His son to earth to live a human life to then be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. This plan was told throughout the OT and reiterated in the four eye-witness accounts in the NT. We call the first four books of the NT the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Gospel – meaning the Good News – told from four points of view enriching our understanding of what took place. Other books tell of the growth of the Christian church, instructions for the church and for God’s people, but all are historically accurate as proven against other written sources and archaeological findings.
The Jewish Messiah, Jesus, was more than just a helpful teacher. There is plenty of evidence for his divine nature. Not least the many accounts of his death and resurrection but on a secular level, have you ever wondered how a single man with no political platform, no military command, no social media, no home address, no children, who lived his life within a 200 mile radius of where he was born, could have had such an impact on the world across all aspects of culture, education, architecture, literature and just about every scientific discipline?
Perhaps take the opportunity this Christmas season or as part of your new year plans to look into the historical claims of the events depicted in the Bible and what it means. Even if you acknowledge there is a God and Jesus was probably his son, He asks for a relationship with you. The implications for ignoring the offer transcend any other new year’s resolutions you might be considering.
Why Does Hanukkah move Around the Calendar? The Jewish festivals are set by the Jewish/Hebrew calendar which is lunar-based. Hanukkah falls on the 25th of Kislev. While most of the rest of the world follows the Gregorian (or Christian) calendar (reset for the common era at the time of Christ’s birth) it adds an extra day to the month of February (almost) every four years. In order to align the Hebrew calendar with the solar year it instead adds a whole month (a second Adar) during its periodic leap years.
