Hanukkah meaning

Meaning

Inauguration, Dedication

Etymology

From the root חנך (hanak), to inaugurate or train.

Related names

• Via חנך (hanak): Enoch, Hacaliah, Hanoch

The festival of Hanukkah is mentioned only once in the Bible, namely in John 10:22, where it's referred to as εγκαινια (egkainia), literally meaning Renewal. This unique word is formed from the rather common adjective καινος (kainos), meaning new (which occurs 44 times in the New Testament; see full concordance).

The festival of Hanukkah ties into the restoration of the Jewish Kingdom, which lasted about a century, until the Romans annexed Judea in 63 BC. Concerns about an autonomous Jewish state strongly influenced the political background and thus the very format of the New Testament: Jesus was known as the Christ, which was the signature title of the Jewish king. Hence certain factions (most likely the original "Christians") aimed to make him the political king of the Jews, which was something Jesus diligently avoided (John 6:15).

The festival of Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid tyrants, who had desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem with idols and such. The first thing the victors did was to re-ignite the temple's Ner Tamid, or Eternal Lamp, which signifies the synthetic light of reason, science and technology, which is the light that separates modern humans from our most remote ancestors. The Great Light of the Word of God (Isaiah 9:2) becomes the many lights of the enlightened minds of man (Daniel 12:3). And the Word came to humanity first through speech (words don't grow on trees and are thus as synthetic as a pair of sneakers), then script (see our article on YHWH) and the highly technological tabernacle plus its Menorah and other implements (see Exodus 31:1-11).

In our article on the name Aenon we explain that the "human nature" of Jesus has nothing to do with his biological descent and everything with law and algorithmic thought, and thus with science and technology — his earthly profession was that of τεκτον (tekton), meaning assembler, which is a word that is tellingly closely related to our English words "text" and "technology". There is, of course, nothing "unnatural" about science and technology because science and technology are typically very much based on natural law. But where unenlightened man is slave to natural law, enlightened man masters natural law. And that makes the difference between a caveman and an astronaut.

In our modern world, the feast of Hanukkah offers an alternative to Christmas, which is on all accounts a pagan festival and easily marks the most godless time of the year. Christmas is when four separate streams of unholiness combine into a vast river of collective lunacy:

(1) Probably the least damaging pagan tributary of the "spirit" of Christmas is the festival-of-lights part, the little lights that are put up everywhere, in Christmas trees and windows and all that. It produces a lovely sight that brightens up the dark winter days, and there's no real need to abandon this custom, but there is also no harm in reminding ourselves that it is the domesticated version of animism: the idea that autonomous spirits inhabit trees and rivers and mountains, and that the forests are peopled by elves and fairies and such. Just like a friendly game of football is essentially the domesticated version of bloody warfare, so Christmas trees are the domesticated version of polytheism, and while football may seem like a joke, polytheism really isn't. This is because God is One, and therefore divinity is unity. The God-who-is-One is also the God of peace, love, cooperation and thus law and order, common society-wide standards and thus language, science and technology and even all forms of art. Polytheism is the antithesis of all that, so that's not immediately something anybody would want to celebrate.

The wilderness is cold and viciously cruel and animals live in constant dread of predators, sickness or getting left behind by an indifferent herd. There's nothing romantic about the natural world: it's hell for everybody. Romantic feelings come from having a sturdy house to safely live in, with a warm fire in the hearth, with plenty of food in the cupboards and equally generous neighbors to share it with. Romance comes from health and having access to scientifically informed doctors, and information and entertainment, from not having to be scared of being dragged off into the street and getting beaten of killed for being of the wrong leaning or persuasion or family or race or orientation. Enlightenment is not natural. It is synthetic and technological. That is why at Hanukkah we light a technologically manufactured Menorah, not a naturally animated tree.

(2) The second least detrimental aspect of Christmas is that it is typified as a festival one celebrates with one's family. There is of course nothing wrong with expressing one's love for one's family, but the whole point of Christmas is that it celebrates the "birth" of enlightenment, which is a global and collective thing and not a local or private thing, a destiny-oriented thing and not an origin-oriented thing.

Global enlightenment rather than local favoritism is why God called Abraham to leave his father's house and go to Canaan to be a blessing for all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3, Ephesians 3:15, John 12:32). It's also why Jesus said: "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26). Enlightenment is global and not local, which is why we share our heavenly citizenship with spiritual siblings that are not our biological siblings (Philippians 3:20).

Pagan Christmas declares that enlightenment comes from the satisfaction of one's physical desires (hence the food) and the glorification of one's animal origins: one's tribal community (hence the giving of gifts) and the primacy of one's own over strangers. The Bible, to the contrary, teaches that enlightenment has to do with transcending the confines of one's origin, with breaking the walls and opening doors, and lifting up from the animal grounds by giving one's life for strangers (Romans 5:6-8) and being a blessing for the whole of mankind.

(3) Enlightenment supervenes like a blanket on people's natural origin, and our minds breathe it in like air from an atmosphere that sits atop and pervades our entire earthly planet. So no, the Christmas story is not designed to cater to the Grecco-Roman genre of hero-origin stories. Jesus is not a Hercules or an Apollo, whose miraculous lives had to be explained by miraculous births. Instead, Jesus embodies something that is deeply human, something that rises out of the most human of human sentiments, namely the desire to cooperate and make peace with whatever stranger wanders into our valley from over the hills. This most human of sentiments is what caused very early humans to politely imitate strangers, rather than show immediate aggression. That in turn created the first standard greetings, from which arose more complex language, from which grew all law and literature and ultimately the very mind of modern man.

Jesus is very typically not extra-terrestrial or alien to anything human but entirely human, brought about from humanity's very depths the way anything young originates in perfect unity deep within the most intimate belly of its mother. Jesus embodies the whole of all of us as we are enlightened with a knowledge that supersedes all emotion and a love that transcends all knowledge.

At Christmas we commemorate the birth of Jesus, the Word who is also the Light, which makes the shortest day of the day an excellent day to commemorate that. But that does not mean that the birth of Jesus actually took place on that day! The story tells of Joseph and Mary who were on a long journey, and of shepherds who were with their flocks in the field: both things one did not do in the dead of winter. Then, the birth of Jesus took place before the death of Herod the Great (according to the gospel of Matthew), which happened in 4 BC, and after the installment of Quirinius as governor of Roman Syria (says the gospel of Luke), which happened in 6 AD. That means that the story of the birth of Jesus was never about a baby born to a couple of peasants, but rather a people movement that took at least a decade to get going.

Jesus is also Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8), and the purpose of the Sabbath was to wean humans off the natural cycles (day, night, summer, winter) to which the whole natural world is subdued, and create a world based on the calendar, which is an utterly synthetic thing since there is nothing in the natural world that corresponds to a seven-day week. The week forces people to count and to plan their entire lives according to a rhythmic scheme that is entirely disconnected from natural reality.

Unlike a perfectly stable synthetic light, natural light turns on and off every day, and becomes stronger and weaker every summer and winter. Our modern human world, with its cities and wonders, is of course based wholly on light that stays the same always, and can be truly counted on. Hence Moses sang: "Teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). That has nothing to do with counting one's birthdays. It has to do with developing a lifestyle that is not forcibly subjected to the cycles of the sun, but rather to the permanence of collective reason and intelligence.

The word Ner Tamid, or Eternal Lamp, signifies precisely that — and note that the word Ner, or נר (ner), lamp, is the same as the name of the grandfather of Saul, whereas Tamid or תמיד (tamid) relates to the verb מדד (madad), meaning to measure. The Ner Tamid is not simply the Eternal Lamp, it's the Light of Measurement, the Light of Science and Technology. King David called God's Word a lamp (Psalm 119:105), which is a synthetic device that keeps going when properly maintained. He did not call God's Word a sun, which every evening sets and leaves the creatures of the world in an inescapable darkness.

The light of technology is not based on natural cycles, nor on emotions, vague suspicions or the biased will of some tyrant, but rather on verifiable measurements and theories that can be confirmed by everybody who is able to make the same measurements and has the same know-how of what's going on.

(4) Christmas primarily commemorates the turn of the natural cycles of the sun and glorifies ignorance, superstition, gluttony and ultimately fascism, the victory of the mighty and the extermination of the weak. Christmas commemorates the birth of emperor Augustus, who was nicknamed the Light, the Savior of the World, the King of Kings, and the Son of the Divine, and whose birth was called the Evangel or Good News (see the "Calendar Inscription" of Priene, of 9 BC). Emperor Augustus, and his lasting legacy, obviously represents everything that the Ner Tamid opposes (and in case you are wondering: the only actual difference between Augustus and Hitler is that Augustus won — also see our article on Gog and Magog).

People beg for vitamin C, and the merchants of the world sell them orange flavored candy and teach them how to sing in perfect harmony. Likewise, people beg for technology (writing is information technology) to truly liberate them from the cruelty of the natural world and its principle of survival of the fittest, and the merchants of the world sell them the glorification of the legacy of a man who pretended to be God, who governed the world through his own best but disastrously flawed intentions and who centralized the world upon human madness — and that is Augustus, not Jesus.

The real Jesus Christ of the real Gospel represents a humanity of which every individual has enough wisdom and maturity to be wholly responsible and wholly free (see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law); a humanity that has done away with centralization and all forms of human tyranny (1 Corinthians 15:24), that forms a collective world that comprises a living network based on equity, and which guarantees the survival of everybody, including the weak.

All over our modern world, people begin to realize that Jesus did not celebrate Christmas but Hanukkah, and that followers of Jesus likewise reject tyranny, fascism, fear, slavery, ignorance and superstition, and thus Christmas, and thus Father Christmas or Santa Claus — whose iconography derives directly from that of the Trinitarian Father (have another coke, everyone!).

Santa Claus is a glorified tyrant who controls all resources and all production, who obtains even the most sensitive and private information via a vast and pervasive intelligence network. Santa's judgements are absolute and can't be appealed by a court of law. And his judgements solely reflects a person's compliance and willingness to pay homage to the system and its beloved leaders. Most troubling, and especially in the older European traditions of Santa Claus, children who are deemed "bad" are separated from their parents and carted off to unknown facilities to never be seen again. In Germany and Austria, Santa Claus is aided not by friendly green elves but horned devils called Krampus who punish bad children with birch rods. And what's with the birch rods? In the Netherlands (up to a few years ago), Santa Claus arrived from Spain with an army of inquisitive black "Petes" ("zwarte Pieten"), who are not black because of their gene pool but because of soot from fires whose use is never openly explained.

Santa abruptly rejects "bad" children and sends them off to eternal doom, whereas Jesus died for "bad" children and continues to teach them until his own last breath. Christmas glorifies holocaust. Hanukkah glorifies Light.

Hanukkah is rather alike Pascha (which celebrates Israel's escape from Egypt), and Purim (which celebrates Esther's victory over Haman) in that it commemorates the victory of Judas Maccabee over the Seleucids (= Greeks who ruled post-Alexander Persia and environs, including Palestine) in 164 BC. Enlightenment makes government superfluous, which is why tyrannical governments fight it. True to form, the Seleucids had outlawed Judaism (i.e. proto-science and information technology) and persecuted and murdered Jews. King Antiochus IV Epiphanes had seen fit to turn the temple of YHWH into a shrine for Zeus, complete with an altar dedicated to Zeus.

After the Maccabean revolt, the temple was cleansed and rededicated and Israel became an autonomous kingdom for the first time in centuries. This new kingdom was lost to the Romans, but when Jesus began to speak of his kingdom, the initial association of his audience was to an armed revolt on a par with that of the Maccabees.

The festival of Hanukkah is not simply a celebration of a military victory of eons ago. It ties into the rest of Scriptures by two main strands of symbolism:

First of all, Hanukkah commemorates the ongoing effort of all of us to remove falsehoods and tyranny from the Holy Place and replace it by adherence to God's Law (1 Peter 2:5), so as to become partakers of the very divine nature of God Himself (2 Peter 1:4, John 17:20-24, Ephesians 4:24, Hebrews 12:10).

The name Maccabee means Hammer, and although hammers may be used to create the temple's utensils (Exodus 25:18, 1 Kings 6:35, Nehemiah 10:2), hammers may not be used to hew the temple's stones (1 Kings 6:7) and that includes the stones of the altar (Exodus 20:24-25). The apocryphal book of First Maccabees tells the story of the Maccabean restoration: "They pulled down the altar [dedicated to Zeus] and stored away the stones in a suitable place on the temple hill, until there should arise a prophet to give decision about them. They took unhewn stones, as the Law directs, and built a new altar on the model of the previous one" (1 Maccabees 4:45b-47).

Whether the prophet Daniel had accurately predicted this particular pagan altar or whether this altar was a manifestation of a greater inevitability can't be said with certainty, but Jesus refers to an abomination that causes desolation, spoken of by Daniel (Matthew 24:15, Daniel 9:27 and 11:31, and note that Daniel's use of the title Messiah does not necessarily refer to Jesus Christ but may refer to any king, including those of the Hasmonean, that is Maccabean, dynasty).

The gospels of Mark and Luke convey the same or a similar passage, which they, quite tellingly, prologuize with the disciples admiring the stones of the temple (Mark 13:1, Luke 21:5). Jesus' famous response also seems to include a reply to the Maccabean question on what to do with the stones of the demolished old altar: they will be joined by the stones of the to be entirely demolished temple (Matthew 13:2). No matter how careful people construct their new temple, it will always be a continuation of the old one. "Something greater than the temple is here," said Jesus (Matthew 12:6).

Jesus goes on to speak of the sun, the moon and the stars (Matthew 13:24-25), which brings us to the second symbolic strand:

According to Josephus, Hanukkah was initially known as the Feast of Lights and he supposed it was called that way because of the achieved "liberty beyond our hopes" (Antiquities XII.7.7.323).

In 2 Maccabees 1:18 we are told that the people celebrated the temple's purification in honor of the fire which appeared to Nehemiah. The legend had it that just prior to the exile, priests hid the fire of the altar in a dry well. When seventy years later Nehemiah searched for it, he found not a fire but a thick liquid. This liquid was poured onto the restored altar and combusted when the sun came out. A remnant of the liquid was poured out over some other stones, combusted again, but burned out when the fire on the altar outshone it (2 Maccabees 1:32).

The common Hebrew word for lights, however, is מאור (ma'or), from the verb אור ('or):

Hanukkah was originally called the Feast of Lights, because it commemorated the fourth creation day, the Day of Lights. Daniel tied the abomination that causes desolation to (a) seven weeks (Daniel 9:25), and (b) the middle of the week (Daniel 9:27) and also said, "those who have insight will shine brightly like the brightness of the expanse of heaven, and those who lead the many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever" (Daniel 12:3).

The story goes that when the Maccabees liberated the Temple and reignited the Eternal Lamp, they only had enough oil for one day. They quickly sent runners to obtain more oil, but their trip took eight days to complete. Miraculously, the one-day supply of oil burned for eight days, and the lamp never extinguished. This story obviously ties into the stories of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:14) and the prophet's widow's oil (2 Kings 4:1-7), which in turn are retold as the stories of Jesus' miraculous feeding of the masses (Matthew 15:32-39, John 6:1-14).

From its very beginning, the feast of Hanukkah lasted eight days (1 Maccabees 4:56), and eight days is the age at which a baby-boy is circumcised (Luke 2:21). Eight days ostentatiously surpasses one week and marks the beginning of a new era of creation. If we then recall that Pentecost, or the Feast of Weeks, is celebrated seven weeks after Passover, we may surmise that only very few witnesses of the flames that appeared on the disciples (Acts 2:3) did not tie this event to the Day of Lights, the purification of the temple and the great commission to reach all people under the heavens with Truth (Genesis 22:18, Zechariah 8:23, Matthew 28:19).

The name Hanukkah is the same as the feminine noun חנכה (hanukka), meaning dedication, from the verb חנך (hanak):

The name Hanukkah is commonly understood to mean Dedication, but where our word dedication primarily conveys a devotion or consecration, the Hebrew word hanukka primarily describes a new beginning, or the initiation into a wholly renewed situation. As such our name means New Beginning or Initiation.

Note that Hanukkah relates to Enoch (who walked with God and was no more; Genesis 5:22) the way Israel relates to Jacob, and the Body of Christ relates to Jesus Christ. In each instance, the many (which is feminine) comes from the one (which is masculine). The very same relationship exists between Adam and Eve, who was called the "mother of all the living" (Genesis 3:20); what we moderns call the biosphere (hence Jeremiah 31:22). With all this we want to emphasize that both Hanukkah and the Gospel of Jesus Christ are natural phenomena, which can be studied and learned from what can be observed and what has been created (Romans 1:20), whereas Christmas and the gospel of Emperor Augustus (and his wretched seed) are unnatural, beastly and ultimately doomed.

Santa Claus personifies the polar opposite of God, and Christmas glorifies the birth of satan in human form (which is Augustus, the human emperor of the global empire). The birth of Jesus, who is the Word in human form, is celebrated wherever anyone renounces the cycles of their own feelings and embraces the authority of algorithmic thought, which is the same everywhere and for everyone. God is the harmonic oneness of all things (Deuteronomy 6:4, Romans 8:28-30), and no one comes to the Father than through Him in whom are all treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), who fulfils all Law (Matthew 5:17-19, Romans 13:8-13), whose love surpasses all knowledge (Ephesians 3:19) and whose peace surpasses all comprehension (Philippians 4:7).

Happy Hanukkah!