The festival of Chanukah commemorates the extraordinary victory of the Maccabees, a relatively small and dedicated force of fighters, against one of the great imperial powers of classical antiquity, the Seleucid branch of the Alexandrian empire.
The story takes us back 2,100 years to 164 BCE, some 150 years before the birth of Christianity and 200 years before the destruction of the Second Temple, when Israel was under the rule of Alexander the Great. Then, Syrian ruler Antiochus the 4th Epiphanes ascended the throne and imposed his values on the Jews. He forbade the practice of Judaism, put statues in the Temple, and desecrated Jerusalem's holy sites. Jews caught practicing Judaism were tortured to death. This was tyranny on a … Read More »