The Rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees

In 164 BCE, Judah Maccabee led a Jewish revolt to a decisive victory against the forces of the Seleucid Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had several years earlier moved to suppress Jewish religious practice in Judea, banning circumcision, Sabbath observance and possession of Torah scrolls, and had desecrated the Second Temple in Jerusalem by erecting an altar to Zeus within it and, according to Jewish tradition, ordering the sacrifice of pigs on the temple altar, an animal considered ritually impure in Jewish law.

Upon recapturing the temple, Judah and his followers cleansed and rededicated it, removing the pagan altar, building a new one, and restoring the temple's ritual functions, an event the books of First and Second Maccabees describe in considerable narrative detail as the culmination of the revolt's religious purpose, distinct from its military and political dimensions, which continued for some years afterward under Judah's successors.

The rededication took place on the twenty fifth day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, and the books of Maccabees describe the following celebration as lasting eight days, deliberately modeled on the Festival of Sukkot, which the Jewish community had been unable to properly observe during the period of Seleucid religious suppression.

The most widely known element of the modern Hanukkah observance, the story of a single day's supply of ritually pure oil miraculously lasting eight days while the temple menorah was relit, does not appear in either First or Second Maccabees, the earliest surviving detailed accounts of the rededication, but emerges considerably later in rabbinic literature, most notably in the Talmud, compiled centuries after the events themselves.

Historians of the period generally read this gap as reflecting a shift in emphasis over time: the books of Maccabees, composed closer to the events, present the rededication primarily as a story of military and religious victory against oppression and desecration, while the later rabbinic tradition, writing in a different political context under Roman rule, developed the oil narrative as a way of emphasizing divine miracle over the military triumph the earlier militant Maccabean history had celebrated, a shift some scholars connect to rabbinic caution about celebrating armed revolt too openly within Roman controlled Judea.

Hanukkah developed over the following centuries into a widely observed eight day festival marked by the nightly lighting of a nine branched menorah, one additional candle each night alongside a helper candle, the recitation of specific prayers, and customs including fried foods commemorating the oil and, in modern practice, gift giving, particularly within diaspora Jewish communities.