Article: "What is Hanukkah?".

The Talmud famously asks, "What is Hanukkah?" (mai hanukkah, what does "dedication" mean?), and responds with the familiar story of the one-day cruse of oil that burned for eight (see Shabbat 21a). This account survives in no earlier source than the Babylonian Talmud, a document not compiled till centuries after the time of the Maccabees. The story may be earlier, but the historian Josephus never mentions it and neither do the Books of the Maccabees, which are as close to an official history of those heroes as we are likely to have. This raises two questions: what did those earlier writers think the holiday was all about, and what are we now to make of the story about the ...

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