How Jesus Fulfills the Hopes of Hanukkah

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Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah) is a Jewish festival commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BCE.

In this article, we’ll look at Hanukkah’s history, its New Testament significance, and what its message of faithful light means for believers today.

The Bible & Hanukkah

Unlike Passover, Pentecost, or Tabernacles—festivals explicitly commanded in the Torah—Hanukkah emerges from the history of Israel rather than the law of Moses. For this reason, it receives only brief attention within the canonical Scriptures.

In fact, the only explicit reference to Hanukkah in the Protestant Bible appears in John 10:22–23, where we read: “Then came the Feast of Dedication [τὰ ἐγκαίνια] at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple courts in Solomon’s Colonnade.” The Greek word ἐγκαίνια literally means “renewal” or “dedication”—the exact meaning of the Hebrew חֲנֻכָּה (chanukah). The Gospel writers assumed their Jewish readers would immediately recognize the setting: Yeshua (Jesus), the Jewish Messiah, present in the temple during the festival commemorating its cleansing and restoration.

Although Hanukkah has no direct Torah command, its origins are rooted in the lived experience of the Jewish people as they struggled to survive culturally, spiritually, and physically under the pressures of foreign empires. Our clearest historical accounts of these events appear in 1 and 2 Maccabees, preserved in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon (included in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, though not in most Protestant or Jewish canons).

Daniel’s prophetic visions also speak with remarkable precision of a tyrannical ruler, a coming abomination, and a desecrated sanctuary (Dan 8, 11). Those descriptions largely match the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king whose brutal persecution sparked the Maccabean revolt.

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The meaning of Hanukkah

Understanding Hanukkah, therefore, invites us into the world Jesus inhabited.

Hanukkah focuses us on a world where Israel is living between empires. In the second century BCE, the Jewish people found themselves squeezed between the northern Seleucid (Syrian-Greek) Empire and the southern Ptolemaic (Egyptian-Greek) Empire. Two powers, both heirs of Alexander the Great, fought for control of Judea as if it were merely a pawn on a geopolitical board.

The Maccabean revolt was not simply an ethnic uprising, but a battle of faithfulness: a stand for Torah, covenant identity, and the holiness of God’s dwelling place.

By the time Jesus walked into the temple at Hanukkah nearly two centuries later, the oppressive northern empire was long gone—but another empire, far larger and more brutal, had taken its place. Rome now ruled Judea with iron authority. Once again, the Jewish people found themselves living between empires, with a calling to resist assimilation and hold fast to the covenant promises God had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Into this world stepped the Light of the World, who celebrated the Feast of Dedication not merely as a historical memory, but as one who fulfills its deepest meaning. Hanukkah becomes a window into the heart of Jesus’s mission: to cleanse, to restore, to rededicate, and to reveal God’s kingdom in the midst of darkness, on earth as it already is in his presence.

Hanukkah becomes a window into the heart of Jesus’s mission: to cleanse, to restore, to rededicate, and to reveal God’s kingdom in the midst of darkness.

The story of Hanukkah is not just ancient history but an opportunity for God’s people to rehearse his saving deeds in history. So while the timing and prominence of this holiday just so happens to align with celebrating the Messiah’s birth, Hanukkah is not a Jewish alternative to Christmas. Hanukkah represents an opportunity to reveal and expose the cyclical clash between the kingdom of God and the empires of this world. Hanukkah illuminates the clash between Israel and the political powers that seek to erase the people and land of the covenant. This Feast of Rededication points us to the conflict between the light of God’s presence and the darkness that resists it.

As we will explore, this ancient festival carries profound relevance for the global church today, especially as the Spirit purifies the bride of Messiah from centuries of inherited anti-Jewish bias. Hanukkah invites Christians to stand with the Jewish people, to recognize the continuity of God’s covenant, and to shine as faithful witnesses in a darkening age.

The historical origins of Hanukkah

The roots of Hanukkah reach back into one of the most turbulent periods of Jewish history—a time when foreign domination threatened not only Israel’s political freedom but the very core of its covenant identity.

After the death of Alexander the Great, his vast empire fractured into rival kingdoms. Judea was wedged between two of the most powerful: the Seleucids in the north and the Ptolemies in the south. For generations, Judea oscillated between these empires, often suffering not because of anything it had done, but simply because of its strategic, God-given location. Israel has always been more than a patch of land; it is the center stage of redemptive history, the place where heaven touches earth. For this reason, empire after empire fights to dominate it.

This geopolitical tension reached a crisis under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a Seleucid ruler who epitomized arrogant tyranny. He did not merely seek political control, he attempted to erase Jewish covenant life altogether. Torah scrolls were burned. Sabbath observance and circumcision were outlawed. The temple was desecrated with pagan sacrifices, including the infamous offering of a pig on the altar, an “abomination that causes desolation” (Dan 11:31; see also 8:13; 9:27; 12:11) as anticipated in Daniel’s visions. Antiochus understood that if he could sever Israel from Torah and from the temple, he could sever them from the God who had called them. This was not merely persecution: It was a spiritual and tactical assault against the covenant itself.

In response, a priestly family from the Judean town of Modi’in—Mattathias and his sons, known as the Maccabees—rose in defiance. Their resistance began not with armies but with fidelity: a refusal to bow, a refusal to offer illicit sacrifice, a refusal to betray the God of Israel. What followed was a remarkable guerrilla uprising in which a small, outmatched Jewish force pushed the Seleucids out of Jerusalem and reclaimed the temple.

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When the Maccabees entered the defiled sanctuary in 164 BCE, they tore down the desecrated altar, rebuilt it, and purified the courts. The temple was rededicated (chanukah) to the Holy One of Israel.

This rededication not only restarted temple service, it also galvanized people’s commitment to their covenant calling. It was a declaration that, even when surrounded by powerful empires, Israel would remain God’s cherished possession. They might be small. They might be oppressed. But they would not be extinguished.

Jesus & Hanukkah

It is into this story that Jesus steps in John 10. Nearly two ocenturies years after the Maccabean victory, he walks through the same temple courts that had once been filled with idols and pagan sacrifices. He stands in Solomon’s Colonnade, the very location where Jewish teachers and leaders would gather during the Feast of Dedication to remember God’s faithfulness. And there, during Hanukkah, Yeshua proclaims, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), asserting not only Messianic identity but divine unity.

In this setting, Hanukkah’s themes of light, purity, and holy resistance come into sharp focus. Jesus does not merely celebrate the memory of the temple’s rededication: He embodies its ultimate fulfillment. Where the Maccabees cleansed the physical altar from idolatrous corruption, Jesus cleanses the spiritual temple—the hearts of his people. Where the Maccabees restored the sanctuary lamp, Jesus declares, “I am the Light of the World.” Where Antiochus sought to sever Israel from its covenant, Jesus reveals the faithfulness of God’s covenant love, made flesh and walking among his people.

Jesus does not merely celebrate the memory of the temple’s rededication: He embodies its ultimate fulfillment.

Hanukkah thus becomes a kingdom lens through which we see Jesus stepping into Israel’s story of oppression and bringing true deliverance. He lives within the rhythm of Israel’s festivals. He fulfills the hopes those festivals anticipate. The Feast of Dedication becomes a remembrance of God’s dedication to his people in love and an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to his service.

And yet, the story does not end in the first century. The same forces that sought to suppress Jewish identity in the days of Antiochus did not evaporate with the rise of Rome—or the rise of Christianity. Just as the Jewish people faced the empires of Greece and Rome, so the early church soon found itself confronting the temptation to align with empire rather than kingdom. Darkness wears many faces, but it is animated by the same spiritual hostility—a hostility toward the God of Israel, the people of God, and the purposes of his irrevocable calling to the Jewish people.

Thus, Hanukkah continues to shine as a prophetic signpost. It reminds us that the kingdom of God advances through costly faithfulness; that light is never neutral; and that imitation of empire, whether ancient or modern, remains a danger for God’s people. It calls both Jews and Christians into the same story of holy resistance and covenant loyalty.

Israel & Hanukkah

The clash between Israel and the empires of this world did not end with Antiochus, nor did it cease with Rome’s rise or Rome’s fall. If anything, history reveals a sobering pattern: Every age produces its own Antiochus, its own empire, its own ideological machine determined to standardize, assimilate, silence, or erase the Jewish people. From medieval Christendom to modern nationalism, from Enlightenment rationalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism, a strange and terrible consistency emerges. The powers of this age, however advanced or sophisticated, continue to stumble over the people whom God has chosen as a witness to his covenant fidelity. The central city in Israel remains, as Zechariah says, “a cup that causes staggering” for the nations and “a heavy stone” they cannot lift without injuring themselves (Zech 12:2–3).

This ongoing clash is not simply political. It is spiritual at its core. The same darkness that animated Antiochus still resists the purposes of God today. It resists covenant in favor of comfort. It resists particularism as if it nullifies universalism. It resists the idea that God has bound himself in faithfulness to a specific people and a specific land for a specific purpose—the ultimate and universal restoration of all things.

And in every generation, empire reappears under new names, sometimes in secular guise, sometimes clothed in religious rhetoric, sometimes appealing to progress, sometimes to power, sometimes even to peace. But beneath its varied forms lies the same ancient impulse: to redefine, absorb, or eliminate the people whose existence testifies that God is real and that he is not finished rescuing this world.

This means that Hanukkah is not an antiquated Jewish holiday or quaint cultural remembrance. It is a prophetic reminder of what faithfulness costs in a world hostile to covenant light. And it is here—precisely at this intersection of Israel, empire, and the kingdom of God—that the church is summoned into its own moment of rededication.

The church & Hanukkah

For nearly two millennia, large portions of the church did not stand with Israel in the clash; instead, the church often became entangled with empire. After Constantine, Christian identity merged with political power, and the church slowly inherited the empire’s suspicion, then rejection, of Jewish presence and Jewish continuity. The tragic result was that the followers of the Jewish Messiah often opposed the people he came from (and came to), the Scriptures he affirmed, and the gifts and calling he declared irrevocable.

But in our generation, something remarkable is happening. The Holy Spirit is cleansing the bride of Messiah. He is exposing the theological sediment that accumulated through centuries of anti-Jewish bias—supersessionism, contempt, blame, caricature, and historical amnesia. He is reminding the global church that the God of Abraham has not abandoned his people, and that the kingdom Jesus proclaimed is not an empire that replaces Israel, but the fulfillment of Israel’s calling extended to the nations.

This is where Hanukkah speaks with renewed power. Hanukkah invites the church to recognize the light that came through Israel—the Messiah who is the Light of the World—and to honor the people through whom that light first shone. It calls Christians to renounce every impulse, explicit or subtle, that aligns with the “spirit of empire” rather than the Spirit of God. It urges the bride to rededicate herself to the purposes of the kingdom: humility instead of triumphalism; covenant loyalty instead of theological erasure; solidarity instead of suspicion.

And perhaps most importantly, Hanukkah reminds the church that its calling is not merely intellectual but embodied. The Menorah was not hidden in a back room. It was placed in the Holy Place to shine. In the same way, the church is called to bear witness publicly, joyfully, and courageously to the God who keeps his promises. In an age where darkness grows more emboldened, the people of Jesus must shine with renewed and rededicated conviction. We must shine as a faithful remnant in a darkening world.

For just as the temple was purified and rekindled in the days of the Maccabees, so the Spirit is purifying and rekindling the church today. Hanukkah invites us to participate in that work—to reject the patterns of empire, to embrace the ways of the kingdom, and to let the Light of the World burn brightly through a people who have been cleansed, rededicated, and sent into the darkness with holy fire.