Why You Won't Find Hanukkah in the Bible

Hanukkah, also called "The Feast of Dedication" and "The Feast of the Maccabees" is the only Jewish festival that is not mentioned in the Bible. Why is this? Because the holiday of Hanukkah is too young!

Even though we have been celebrating Hanukkah for over two thousand years – since 165 B.C.E – Jewish history goes back so far in time that even something that happened two thousand years ago is still a "recent" event. Hanukkah is so new, compared to stories like the Exodus from Egypt, that the Bible had already been written by the time Judah Maccabee led the revolt against the Greeks.

The story of the Maccabees is told in the four Books of the Maccabees, which are found in a collection of writings called the Apocrypha. Also, there are passages in the Book of Daniel, in the third section of the Bible, Ketuvim (Writings), that contain a foreshadowing of the Hanukkah revolt. In this book, the prophet Daniel, who lived four hundred years before the Maccabees, has a dream that seems to predict events that are very similar to those of the Hanukkah story.