Next week we will celebrate Hanukkah.
My favorite holiday.
So at your disposal, eating a little head.
When we were children, we sang in the kindergarten the "Let us raise", or in its official name "The Feast of Victory", by Levin Kipnis: We will weave a large bouquet of flowers, to the head of the winner, Maccabi Gibor. "
Kipnis wrote the lyrics in 1936 but the melody is much older.
Of Handel.
Georg Friedrich Handel, the German composer who lived in London and composed the oratorio "Judah the Maccabee" in 1746 in honor of the English victory over the Catholic Jacobin rebels in Scotland.
It is a song of praise and praise to Prince William, Duke of Cumberland after his victory at the Battle of Caloden, the last battle to take place on British soil.
The libretto of the oratorio, that is, the text, was written by the Rev. Thomas Morel on the basis of Maccabees 1.
Ask and rightly so, what about Judas Maccabaeus, the Book of Maccabees and the English victory over the Scots?
very simple.
Judas Maccabaeus and the Hasmoneans were seen as an inspiration for standing in front of a foreign conqueror.
The Hasmoneans, few against many, rebelled, fought, defeated and were defeated, but managed to gain autonomy and then an independent kingdom, and their rule lasted 103 years.
The Hasmoneans made alliances with the Roman Republic and Sparta.
Araus I, king of Sparta in 265-309 BC, wrote in a letter to the high priest Choni his first: "It is written about the Spartans and the Jews, who are brothers from the seed of Abraham." By and large, the Hasmoneans are rightly an eternal inspiration to peoples and nations.
The Book of Maccabees I, also called the Book of Hasmoneans I, is one of the external books of the Bible. Its 16 chapters describe the Hasmonean revolt in the Seleucid kingdom and the initial establishment of the Hasmonean kingdom. The book is an invaluable historical source. We have no history without him. Maccabees A. was written in Hebrew near the Hasmonean revolt by an author who not only knew the events and their occurrence well, but also apparently took part in the battles.
The Hebrew source of the book was lost, and the common explanation is that the book was destroyed by the Romans following the revolts of the Jews in the first and second centuries AD (the Great Revolt, the Diaspora Revolt and the Bar Kochba Revolt). The Romans feared the inspiration of the Maccabi story of Jewish rebellion. Fortunately, the book survived because it was included in the manuscripts of the Septuagint translation into Greek from the Hebrew source. Not merely survived but became part of the ecclesiastical canon, and was included among the Christian scriptures as one of the apocryphal books of the Bible (the "Old Testament" in Christian terminology).
Strange, no? The Maccabees were Jews,
priests from Modi'in who to this day we celebrate their victory and the cleansing of the Temple for eight days. Why did the Christians sanctify the Book of Maccabees while we Jews rejected it? Let us return for a moment to the Bible, which was signed in about 100 AD. That is, at the time of the Bible's formation, the Book of Maccabees was in our possession. Chanukah and Purim are the two holidays created by Sages. The Book of Esther entered the biblical canon, Maccabees did not.
For the first Christians (and persecuted), the books of the Maccabees had a place of honor. Books that present a masterpiece of heroism and loyalty to religion to the utmost frustration, the "martyrdom", the sanctification of the faith. In their eyes, had it not been for the Hasmoneans, the Jews would have been assimilated into the Gentiles, and as a result, Christianity would never have come into being. This is exactly the same inspiration for Handel. The Maccabees fought for their faith and saved history from itself. As far as Christians are concerned, without the Maccabees there is no Jesus.
Compared to the admiring Christian attitude, Sages' treatment of the Hasmoneans is more complex.
Is it intentional?
Is it due to hostility?
History is ironic in its volatile way.
The Hasmoneans who fought the Greeks over the years became the leaders of the Sadducee faction against the Pharisees, the first sages.
It always happens.
The barefoot and idealistic rebel becomes a rich tyrant.
When Jean-Baptiste Brandt participated in the French Revolution he tattooed on his arm the phrase "MORT AUX ROIS", "Death to all kings".
A tattoo that caused him some embarrassment later in his life when he anointed himself to Carl the Fourteenth, King of Sweden.
Another view, which I tend to agree with, is that the book did not enter the Bible for fear of sages for dangerous inspiration in the period after the Great Revolt and the huge blood price that followed. Sages sought to cool the national fervor, not to increase it.
The Book of Maccabees I is almost a negative of the Book of Esther. If the Megillah and Purim are a kind of confirmation of life in exile, including the use of a concubine in the harem that changes history in the Pascal style ("If Cleopatra's nose was shorter, the face of history would change") - then Maccabees 1 is the Declaration of Independence.
There is another connection between Hanukkah and Purim that
reinforces this propaganda. As we know, on the 3rd of Adar we mark the day of Esther's fast, which precedes Purim. : The original 13 Adar was actually a happy day mentioned in the scroll "Ta'anit" today when fasting is forbidden. The original thirteenth was the day of Niknor, the day of the great victory of Yehuda the Maccabee over the Greek general Niknor in the "New" battle ("Edessa") in 161 BC, the seventh battle in the Hasmonean Revolt. 3,000 Maccabees defeated 9,000 Greeks.
"The Jews took the spoil and the plunder and cut off the head of Nicanor and his right hand, which bowed proudly; they brought the head and the hand to Jerusalem and the thornbush. The Book of Maccabees 1 tells us.
Purim ran over Hanukkah.
The holiday of exile pushed the Hasmonean Independence Day.
The fast of exile concealed a happy day for the mighty victory of a rebellious and proud people over the Hellenistic Empire.
It is time to return the Book of Maccabees to the Jews.
The fact that most graduates of the education system have not even heard of it is a disgrace.
"And Shimon answered and said unto him, We have not taken a foreign land, nor any foreign property of our own; , Tu)
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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