Is the Hanukkah Story Really "Judaism vs. Greece?"
In which (almost) everything precious about the Hanukkah story is called into question
This is part one of a special two-parter that isn’t related to the parashah itself in which I end on a cliffhanger (how exciting!) that will not be resolved until next week’s email.
I.
Every year on Ḥanukkah I find myself taking every possible opportunity (like, for example, an email) to challenge the conventional understanding of the Ḥanukkah story: despite what we think, we oversimplify it by claiming that it was a battle between Judaism and Greece.
And while part of this lies in the simple fact that when we think of “Greece” we picture Athens, whereas the “Greeks” in the Ḥanukkah story were actually Semitic Seleucids from Syria/Turkey, a much greater issue is that it assumes that all the Jews were on the same side.
And this is simply untrue. Because not only were many of the Jews during the Ḥanukkah story Hellenists – that is, they embraced and desired a tighter meshing of Greek culture and Judaism – but even the Jews who rejected Hellenism were divided.
And the most celebrated aspect of this is described in the Book of Maccabees, which contrasts the Hasmoneans – the followers of Matityahu – with the ḥasidim, the pious members of the Jewish community who resolutely rejected Hellenism. Because, while both groups were united in their opposition to Hellenism, they were divided on one of the most central rules of Judaism: pikuaḥ nefesh, the principle that saving a life overrides the Torah’s commandments (Yoma 85b).
As the Book of Maccabees describes, though the ḥasidim went into hiding rather than follow the rules of Antiochus, they were pursued and besieged on Shabbat. Here, the ḥasidim made a decision: rather than violate Shabbat by picking up arms and defending themselves they, instead, willingly died as martyrs (I Macc. 2:31–38).
But Matityahu, upon hearing news of this, realized that if no Jew ever fought on Shabbat they would all be quickly wiped out. He thus decreed that it was a necessity to fight even on Shabbat (I Macc. 2:39–41).
There’s a lot to analyze here about the role of Torah she-be-al Peh in an earlier time in Jewish history, but all I want to highlight is the radical corollary to this episode: some of the Jews who resisted and rejected Hellenization also rejected the Oral Law.
This is the first blow to the idea that Ḥanukkah was simply “Judaism vs. Greece.” It is better expressed – with, admittedly, a little too much mathematical enthusiasm – as:
But that’s not all.
Because even if we ignore everything I’ve said and focus solely on the Hasmoneans, their actions quickly make us queasy. Because, not only does Matityahu willingly kill Hellenized Jews (I Macc. 2:23–28), but he also forcibly circumcises those Jews who had refused to observe the law in deference to Hellenistic values (I Macc. 2:45). And while we can all agree that Jews who refuse to perform brit milah out of deference to other societal values are doing the wrong thing, I hope we can all agree that the solution should never be Matityahu’s.
And my point here is not to erode our appreciation for the Hasmoneans – if there’s one thing we all learned from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, it’s that being a hero is a lot more complicated than we think – but my point is to question the facile way we all too often describe the Ḥanukkah story.
II.
But there’s a bigger issue, still. And it’s that the “Judaism vs. Greece” narrative implies that good Jews rejected all aspects of Hellenization – and that just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
And while there’s a litany of examples to be offered, I’ll share a few:
Names
Some members of Ḥazal have obviously Hellenistic names. The most famous being the great Sage Anṭigonos (mAvot 1:3), who lived before the Ḥanukkah story. And then there’s a Sage called Peleimu (Sanh. 10b) – known in the Yerushalmi as Penimon – whose name, per the notes in the Koren Gemara, is from Παλαίμων, Palaimon.
And this doesn’t seem to be a particularly rare phenomenon, as the gemara notes that the vast majority of Jews who live outside of Israel have non-Jewish names (Giṭṭin 11b). But the usual characterization of the Ḥanukkah story as “Judaism vs. Greece” is weakened when confronted by the fact that Jews – indeed, Sages – had Greek names.1
Language
It’s not just Greek names that the Jewish people adopted, Ḥazal borrowed many Greek words to express ideas and concepts. A few of my favorite include:
Ḥazal warn a person to not engage in an “afikoman” at the end of the Seder, though they do not define what it is (mPes. 10:8). But what’s clear is that it’s the Greek word ὲπικῶμιον, which we might read as “epikoman,” but would transliterate into Hebrew as אפיקומן, hence “afikoman.” And it’s worth noting that the opinion of Rav in the gemara (Pes. 119b) explaining what an afikoman is that is otherwise an outlier compared to the other explanations – “moving from one group to another” – is a faithful characterization of the ὲπικῶμιον in a Greco-Roman Symposium.
Every Friday night when we read Bameh Madlikin, the mishnayot from the second chapter of Masekhet Shabbat that details the laws of candle lighting, we read how a person might extinguish a lamp out of fear of lisṭim, “bandits” (mShabb. 2:5). This is a Greek word, ληστης.
And just one more example, noted by Rabbi Professor Yaakov (Gerald J.) Blidstein in his fantastic exploration of so many of these issues in his essay, “Rabbinic Judaism and General Culture” in Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter’s Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures: Rejection or Integration: some of the best-known midrashim are rooted in Greek-Hebrew puns.
Take the conclusion of the Kayyin-Hevel story, in which God provides Kayyin with an ’ot, “a sign,” to protect him from those who wish to kill him (Gen. 4:15). Among the many midrashic explanations of what the ’ot was is that of Rav, who claims it was a dog (Bereishit Rabbah 22:12). This is because the word ’ot can also mean, in Hebrew, a letter of an alphabet, leading Rav to claim that a letter was added to Kayyin’s name. Transliterating Kayyin’s name into Greek and then adding the Greek s gets you, per R. Blidstein, kunos – the Greek word for dog.
Works
Ḥazal recognize that Jews read Homer (ספרי המירם, “the Books of Homer”) they just stress that it isn’t holy (mYadayim 4:6). Indeed, while Rabbi Akiva cautions Jews from reading apocryphal works like Ben Sira, he declares the reading of Homer to be “like reading a letter” – in other words, it’s innocuous (Yerushalmi Sanhedrin 10:1).
But my favorite example of this was taught to me by Words of Myrrh’s resident expert on Ḥazal’s embrace of Greco-Roman culture, Rabbi Dr. A.J. Berkovitz. The Tosefta (Nazir 4:6) retells the story of Narcissus, only with Shimon ha-Tzaddik in the lead role!
III.
All of what I’ve said is to drive home a simple point and set up a cliffhanger: if the Ḥanukkah story is simply “Judaism vs. Greece” then our Sages – the rabbis who would go on to define Judaism and canonize Torah she-be-al Peh – never got the memo.
Greek culture abounds throughout Ḥazal – to the point that there’s a five-hundred-page book on the topic that still doesn’t exhaustively list all the examples.
But it’s clear that the heroes of the Ḥanukkah story rejected Hellenization. It’s clear that Judaism is not a religion that advocates the total embrace of wider society. So, where are the boundaries? What are the limits?
Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll explore this question – and see how it’s particularly relevant to the upcoming fast of Asara be-Tevet.
Yes, I am aware of the irony in making this point when I have the name of one of Jesus’ apostles (though, I should stress, that isn’t why my parents called me Mark).