Notes on Some Historical Aspects Relating to Chanukah and the Hasmoneans in the Second Temple Period

Popularization of the Torah; Rise of Mikvaot and Bathouses in Eretz Yisrael; Quietism in Josephus and the Talmud; Chanukah and the Book of Daniel

R’ Natan Slifkin has a great recent piece on Chanukah, relating it to current events: “The New Importance of Chanukah” (December 7, 2023). I appreciated this historical nuance: 

“This is one of the reasons why Chanukah is so crucial. With other Jewish festivals, their historical veracity cannot be proven to others. But the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Greeks - and more fundamentally, the Jewish sovereignty in Judea over which they were fighting - is a historical fact that is not contested by any serious historian.”

Not only that, but the Hasmonean era was a watershed moment for Judaism as a popular religion as we know it, according to the recent important book by archeologist Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (2022). The top review on Amazon summarizes the book as follows (bolding mine): 

In 'The Origins of Judaism', Professor Adler quite expertly argues through an extensive overview of archaeological and historical sources that the Laws of the Torah were not widely known or put into practice earlier than the late 2nd Century BCE. It is at this time, and this time alone, that we begin to see solid historical evidence for most of the practices that would come to be seen as normative to Judaism (ritual immersion, tefillin, aversion to figurative imagery, celebration of major holidays, strict practice of kosher laws, the institution of the synagogue, etc).

Though the Torah was likely canonized much earlier and known to a minority of 'literati', before this period, we have no solid evidence that the majority of the Jewish people either knew or practiced its Laws as authoritative at any time in Jewish or First Temple Israelite history before the Late Hellenistic period, probably around the period that the Hasmoneans took power. In fact, there is quite a lot of historical and literary evidence to the [contrary]!

Though I was familiar with many of the claims of critical scholarship before reading this book, Professor Adler made me re-evaluate my own position that the Laws of the Torah must have become known in the Persian period as portrayed in the book of Ezra-Nehemiah in the Bible, perhaps under Imperial Persian patronage.

Mikvaot and Bathouses in Eretz Yisrael in the Greek and Roman periods

Onn the origin of ritual immersion (tevillah) in the Hellenistic era, by Dr. Hayah Katz, “Biblical Purification: Was It Immersion?” at TheTorah.com (2014):

Only from the period of the Second Temple onwards—the earliest miqvaot we find date from the second century B.C.E.—do we witness a change in the manner of ritual washing, such that purification comes to require immersion of the entire body, all at once, in running water. The change is expressed in the Second Temple period in archaeological findings that include dozens of immersion baths. These changes find written expression in the Mishnaic texts that detail the way in which purification is to be carried out (Mishnah Miqvaot).

It seems fair to infer that this process should be linked to the full range of changes that took place in Jewish society during the time of the Second Temple. We see during that time a series of cultural changes grounded in even-increasing strictness regarding the laws of purity and impurity. That increasing stringency manifested itself in many areas of life, including an insistence on full bodily immersion as the exclusive means for achieving purification.

In addition, during the Roman period, washing in a bathhouse became the most common form of washing, and that was the case in Jewish society as well. It is reasonable to assume that, in combination, these factors could have led to a change in how ritual washing was carried out and to the requirement of full-body immersion. First, bathhouses became popular during the Roman period. Until then, baths are rare in this area (as opposed, for example to Mesopotamia or the Mycenaean world.) Second, the requirement to be strict in purity and impurity matters became an “issue” only during the Second Temple period. Although each factor originated distinctly, the confluence of both may explain the origin of the miqvaot and their importance and ubiquity in late Second Temple times.

On bathhouses in Talmudic literature, in the context of the Greco-Roman world, see the excellent accessible book by Yaron Eliav, A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse: Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean (2023)

Scholarly literature in the last few decades (especially starting from the seminal work of the famous British anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her 1966 book Purity and Danger) has correctly focused more and more on the central importance of purity in Jewish literature in antiquity. See especially Vered Noam’s book (in Hebrew), From Qumran to the Rabbinic Revolution: Conceptions of Impurity (2010 - מקומראן למהפכה התנאית: היבטים בתפיסת הטומאה),  and Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (2004).

Quietism in Josephus and the Talmud

Prof. Steve Mason, “Josephus Rejected the Rebellion Against Rome, Why Did He Celebrate Chanukah?” atTheTorah.com (2022) discusses Josephus’s take on the Hasmoneans. It is quite striking when reading Josephus’s Wars that he starts 250 years before, from Hasmoneans, instead of where it would seem to be more logical to start, from Herod. This explains it well.

Mason writes:

Josephus’ view of history was basically quietist, a passive, non-military policy toward worldly affairs.  He saw the rise and fall of powerful nations as a matter reserved for God, and considered fidelity to Moses’s laws the only task for mortals. Such a view can be described as “Danielic”—following the ideology of the book of Daniel that pious behavior in the face of adversity is ultimately rewarded, and that what pious Jews should do is keep the law and wait for divine assistance [...]

The quietist view of Daniel, 2 Maccabees, and Josephus can be found already [...] in the book of Jeremiah, who argues that Judah should remain loyal to Babylon and not rebel.

Quietism, defined as “acceptance of things as they are without attempts to resist or change them” also seems to be the dominant paradigm in Talmudic literature, though it is mostly implicit. Probably the most explicit statement is that of the Three Oaths:

“The Three Oaths is the popular name for a midrash found in the Talmud, which relates that God adjured three oaths upon the world. The Jews [...] were sworn not to forcefully reclaim the Land of Israel and not to rebel against the other nations, and the other nations in their turn were sworn not to subjugate the Jews excessively.”

Until modern times, this source was mostly marginal (and somewhat contradicted by the main thrust in Talmudic literature, which stresses the high importance of living in Israel, see the Hebrew Wikipedia entry on the commandment to settle Eretz Yisrael). These Oaths were famously the central stated ideological precedent of the Satmar Rebbe against the modern state of Israel. On this, see my article reviewing a book that responds to these are arguments (includes a review of a different book on Satmar Rebbe as well): “The Satmar Rebbe, R' Yoel Teitelbaum: Reviewing his Biography, Beliefs, and Controversies” (May 29, 2023).

Chanukah and the Book of Daniel

Rabbi Evan Hoffman, “Chanukah, Daniel 11 and the Rabbis’ Limited Knowledge of Jewish History in the Greek Period” at TheTorah.com (2014, I added hyperlinks to Wikipedia):

The second half of the Book of Daniel, which is dominated by Daniel’s visions of the future, alludes to the early stages of the Chanukah story. Chapter 11 presents a history of the Near East from the conquests of Alexander, through the Ptolemaic-Seleucid wars, up to the religious persecutions in Judea under the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The author does not use proper names of the kings involved, instead referring to the northern king (Syria) and the southern king (Egypt) [...]

Despite the specificity of the description of the persecution leading up to Chanukah in Daniel, very few Jews, even among the learned, seem familiar with the connection between the Festival of Lights and this “obscure book” in the back of the Tanach. Moreover, even classical rabbinic literature itself, including the Talmud, fails to note the impressive correspondence between the geopolitical events of 332-167 BCE and Daniel’s vision. Why is that?

In my view, the best explanation for this silence is that the Talmudic sages had limited knowledge of world history from the Greek period. Thus, they didn’t notice the impressive correspondence because they didn’t know the history to which the prophecy corresponded. That the rabbis did not know history well is clear from an examination of the core rabbinic book of history/chronology, Seder Olam Rabbah. This book is filled with factual errors, most famously the shrinking of the length of the Persian period by approximately 160 years. It is likely that the Common Era sages had limited knowledge of pre-Hasmonean geopolitics as well.