The Lamp Relit

For four hundred years there was no prophet in Israel. Things kept happening all the same, starting with a young king and a fast army, a long way from Jerusalem.

His name was Alexander, and he came out of Greece. He marched east, beat Darius king of the Persians, took his kingdom, and kept going until there was nowhere left to go. The earth went quiet in front of him, and his heart grew proud. Then he took to his bed and knew he was dying. He had been king twelve years. He divided the kingdom among his officers while he could; and after he was dead they all put crowns on, and their sons after them. And they multiplied evils on the earth.

Out of that family of kings came a bad root: Antiochus, who called himself Epiphanes, which means God Showing Himself. He was king of Syria, and Judea belonged to him. And by then there were people in Israel who thought being different was the whole trouble. They said, “Let us make an agreement with the nations around us. Ever since we set ourselves apart from them, nothing but bad has come to us.” The king gave them leave gladly, and they built a Greek sports ground in Jerusalem, let the covenant go, and did their best not to look like Jews.

Antiochus took Egypt too; and coming back he turned aside to Jerusalem and walked into the holy place as though it were his own house. He took the golden altar, the lampstand and its lamps, the table for the bread of the Presence, the cups and bowls, the curtain, the crowns, and the gold off the front of the temple. He stripped it bare and went home. And Israel mourned: the old men groaned, the young men and the girls went thin and pale, and the bridegrooms sang sad songs. Two years later he sent his chief tax collector up with an army. The man came talking peace, and every word of it was a lie: he fell on the city without warning, killed many, burned the houses, and took the women and children away. Then his men rebuilt the old city of David and lived in it. It was called the citadel, and it looked down on the temple.

Then Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom: everyone is to be one people, and to give up his own ways. For the Jews that meant no offerings, no Sabbath, no feasts; idols’ altars in every town, with pigs killed on them and the people made to eat the meat; and no baby boy marked as belonging to the covenant. Whoever would not do it was to die. They hunted the books. Wherever anybody had a scroll of the law they tore it up and burned it, and killed the man who kept it. Women who had their babies marked with the covenant sign were put to death, and their babies with them. And in the middle of winter, on the fifteenth day of the month Chislev, they set an idol’s altar up on the great altar of God itself, and killed a sacrifice on it. And still a great many in Israel would not. They would rather die than treat the covenant as nothing. And they died.

In a town called Modein there lived an old priest named Mattathias, with five sons: John, Simon, Judas — the one everybody called Maccabeus — Eleazar, and Jonathan. When he saw what was being done he tore his clothes: “Why was I ever born, to see this? My people ruined, the holy city ruined, and me sitting here while she is handed over to enemies. Her babies are killed in her streets. She was a free woman; now she is a slave. Why go on living?”

Then the king’s officers came to Modein to make the town sacrifice, and picked Mattathias out of the crowd, because everybody knew him. “You are the great man here. Be the first: do what the king says, and you and your sons will be friends of the king, with silver and gold and gifts.” And Mattathias answered: “Every nation the king rules may obey him, and leave the worship of its fathers for his commands. But I and my sons and my brothers will walk in the covenant of our fathers. We will not listen to the king. We will not turn aside from our worship — not to the right hand and not to the left.” He had barely finished when a Jewish man walked out to sacrifice on the idol’s altar. Something in Mattathias broke open. He ran at the man and killed him there, killed the king’s officer with him, and pulled the altar down. Then he went shouting through the town: “Everybody who cares about the law! Everybody who stands by the covenant! Come with me!” And he and his sons went up into the mountains, and left all they owned behind.

Others hid in the caves of the wilderness with their wives and children; and when soldiers attacked them on the Sabbath they would not so much as throw a stone on the holy day, and about a thousand of them were killed. When Mattathias heard it he wept. Then he made a rule that stood: if they come against us on the Sabbath, we fight back, or they will wipe us off the earth.

Mattathias did not last long. When the day came to die he called his sons in and said, “Be on fire for the law, my children, and give your lives for the covenant of our fathers. Remember what our fathers did. Abraham was tested and found faithful. Daniel had done nothing wrong, and the lions’ mouths were shut. Nobody who puts his hope in God is ever left with nothing. Simon your brother has good sense; listen to him, and he will be a father to you. And Judas Maccabeus has been a fighter since he was a boy. He will be the commander of your army.” Then he blessed them and died, and all Israel mourned him.

Judas Maccabeus stood up in his father’s place, and in the fighting he was like a lion. Apollonius came against him out of Samaria; Judas beat him and took his sword, and fought with that sword the rest of his life. Then Seron, commander of the Syrian army, came up the pass of Beth-horon to make a name for himself. Judas went out with a handful of men, and seeing the army come they said, “How can we fight that, when there are so few of us — and worn out, and nothing to eat all day?” And Judas said, “It makes no difference to Heaven whether he saves by many or by few. Winning a battle is not a matter of the size of the army; the strength comes from Heaven. They are coming to destroy us and our children. Do not be afraid of them.” He went straight at them, and Seron’s army broke and ran down the pass, and eight hundred fell. After that the countries round about feared Judas, and the king heard his name.

Antiochus was furious — and nearly out of money after all the ruin he had made. He went east to Persia for silver, and left a man named Lysias in charge with half the army and the elephants, and his orders about Judea: break Israel, blot out Jerusalem, give the land to strangers. Lysias sent forty thousand foot soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to camp at Emmaus; and the slave traders came out with silver and chains, to buy the Jews — before the battle was even fought.

Before they marched, the Jews gathered at Mizpah to fast and pray, and spread the book of the law open on the ground and searched it for their answer, the way the nations go to their idols for one. Then Judas sent home every man who had just built a house, or was just married, or was afraid, as the law says.

In the night Gorgias slipped out with six thousand men to fall on the Jews in the dark; but Judas heard of it and went for the camp at Emmaus while half its soldiers were away in the hills. At daybreak he came onto the plain with three thousand men who had neither armor nor swords enough, and said, “Do not be afraid of how many there are. Remember how our fathers were saved at the Red Sea, when Pharaoh came after them. Cry out to Heaven now, and all the nations will know that there is one who ransoms Israel and saves her.” The trumpets sounded and his men went in, and the great camp broke and ran, and three thousand fell. Judas called his men back from the chase, because Gorgias was still on the mountain; and just then Gorgias’s men came out on the ridge and saw their own army gone and their camp burning, and ran too. So Judas took the camp, and going home they sang, “For he is good; for his mercy lasts forever.”

The next year Lysias came himself with sixty thousand men, and Judas met him at Beth-zur with ten thousand and beat him there too; and Lysias went back to Antioch for more soldiers. Then Judas said to his brothers, “Our enemies are crushed. Let us go up and make the holy place clean, and open it again.”

So the whole army went up to Mount Zion; and when they came in they stopped and stood still. The sanctuary was empty and desolate, the gates burned to charcoal, and weeds were growing in the courts the way weeds grow on a hillside where nobody comes. The soldiers tore their clothes and fell on their faces and mourned there with a great mourning. Priests who had kept the law carried every stone that had been used for the idols out to an unclean place. Then they looked at the great altar itself, and could not decide. They could neither leave it standing nor throw it away. So they pulled it down, stone by stone, and stacked the stones on the temple hill, and left them there — until a prophet should come who could say what to do with them. There had been no prophet for four hundred years. So the stones waited. They built a new altar of whole stones, as the law says. They mended the holy place, made new holy vessels, and carried in the lampstand and the table and the loaves. Then they lit the lamps — and the lamps gave light in the temple.

They were up early on the twenty-fifth day of the month Chislev and made the offering on the new altar. It was three years to the day since the king’s men had killed their sacrifice on the idol’s altar in that place. On the same day of the same month it was made new, with songs and lyres and harps and cymbals, and all the people on their faces blessing Heaven. They kept it eight days — eight days of offerings and gladness and singing, with crowns of gold and little shields along the front of the temple. And Judas and his brothers and the whole assembly of Israel made a decree: these eight days are to be kept every year, with gladness and joy.

The war did not end there. Antiochus heard in Persia that his armies were beaten, and he took to his bed and fell sick from grief and died. Judas fought on for years, and fell at last in a battle he would not run away from; and Israel mourned him: “How the mighty one has fallen — the one who saved Israel!” Jonathan led them next, until an enemy took him by a trick and killed him. Then Simon, the last of the five, led them, and in his time the yoke of the nations was lifted off Israel — until Simon too was murdered, at a banquet, by his own son-in-law.

But the eight days were kept. They are kept still. Hundreds of years later, on a cold winter day, a man was walking up and down in the temple, in the porch called Solomon’s, at the feast of the Dedication — these eight days, the ones Judas began, when the lamps were lit again. The man’s name was Jesus.