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Hannukah 2020—The Zadokite and Miracle of the Light Controversies

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Hannukah 2020—The Zadokite and Miracle of the Light Controversies Episode 89: Hannukah 2020—The Zadokite and Miracle of the Light Controversies Last year for Hannukah, we talked about the oppressive “traditions of men” vs ordinary traditions that Yeshua/Jesus spoke of in light of the Feast of Dedication mentioned in John 10. This year I am delving deep into the scholarly materials to explore the Zadokite controversy—which purports that the Hasmoneans were illegitimate priests and which has been used to discredit Hannukah. I will also go into the works of Josephus and Megillat Ta’anit to try and figure out where the legend of the “miracle of the oil” came from. Transcript Below: Hello out there! Happy Hannukah! Or is it? It seems that this time of year many people are obsessed and stressed with finding reasons why everything under the sun that is not mentioned in the Bible is pagan or illegitimate (check out the podcast I did with Ryan White on the subject this week) and last year we talked about whether we could celebrate Hannukah because it isn’t in Leviticus 23 and the difference between traditions on one hand and the rebuked traditions of men, on the other hand. AKA which traditions honor God while not supplanting His Word and which traditions are oppressive. Hannukah falls squarely into the camp of celebrations that were intended to honor God for His great act of deliverance from Seleucid oppression and which doesn’t oppress anyone. This year we are going to cover two more objections to Hannukah—namely, the legend of the miracle of the oil and the charge that the entire celebration is illegitimate because the Hasmoneans who led the battle against the Seleucids and in later generations took both priestly and ruling leadership over Judea, Galilee, Idumea, and Samaria didn’t descend from the line of Zadok and were therefore illegitimate priests. Where do these charges come from, are they supported by primary sources, and do they even matter when deciding whether or not one should celebrate Hannukah. I will be consulting two scholarly articles—the first is a Brill article written by Michael O Wise (https://www.unwsp.edu/bio/michael-o-wise) and you have to have some serious chops to write for Brill, let me tell you—it is called 4Q245 (aka the third scroll of the Vision of Daniel) and the High Priesthood of Judas Maccabaeus. It’s a whopping fifty pages long and if you are not familiar with Michael Wise, he is a big name in Dead Sea Scroll research and is one of the authors of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation which is my go-to reference on the subject. The second article is by Alison Schofield and James Vanderkam and is called “Were the Hasmoneans Zadokites?” from the Journal of Biblical literature aka the JBL. Both of these articles were published in 2005, so this is fairly recent research. These three are all heavy hitters in this area of research. So, let’s talk about this controversy—is it legit or is it much ado about nothing? Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. Now, of the two articles I referenced, I recommend reading the Schofield/Vanderkam article because it tackles the controversy over whether or not the Hasmoneans were Zadokites in a very objective and constructive way. First, a bit of history. Our history comes from I Maccabees, as this is our most reliable ancient source, written during the reign of John Hyrcanus, the son of Simon Thassi, the last surviving son of Matthias Hasmoneus and brother of Judas Maccabeus. This extra-biblical document covers roughly 35 years (if you don’t count the first nine verses) from the beginning of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes to the death of Simon Thassi, second High Priest of the Hasmonean line, so the earliest date would be roughly 130 BCE. II Maccabees is our second oldest surviving document, which claims to be an abridged version of a five-volume account of the Maccabean revolt from a man named Jason of Cyrene but the original document is lost so we really have no idea how faithful II Macc was to the original. It was written sometime in the first half of the first century BCE. BTW, why do I use BCE and CE? Contrary to some rumors, BCE and CE, meaning “before the common era” and “common era” are actually no less Biblical than BC and AD (and certainly no more Biblical either), which never came into any sort of real use until the time of Charlemagne. During the th6 century, church scholars wanted to calculate the precise year of the resurrection because, up to that point, there were no formal year designations. It was always something like, “In the 14th year of the reign of such and such emperor.” Well, Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor took it upon himself to calculate backward to the birth of Yeshua and he did pretty darned well but was off by about four or five years based on what we know about the death of Herod the Great and Yeshua being born sometime during the previous two years. Dionysius named his new system AD “Anno Domini” meaning the Year of our Lord, to replace AD—Anno Diocletiani which gave the number of years since the emperor Diocletian began his reign (for some reason they stopped counting with individual emperors when they got to him). It wasn’t until the 8th century that the Venerable Bede invented the BC, “Before Christ” system for counting backward from the calculated birth. In the 9th century, Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the system. It would not gain supremacy in Western Europe, however, until the 15th century. However, there are some complications because Herod The Great died in 4 BCE, and it was confusing to people who assumed that Yeshua was born in the year 1 AD or BC, while others assumed that there was a magical 0 year, which there was not—because the idea of zero would not exist in Europe until a few hundred years later. Because of this discrepancy, scholars (including Bible scholars) now use CE and BCE—not to erase Yeshua from history but to clear up the discrepancy. I mean, after all, there are no BC’s or AD’s in the Bible, right? Which, I might add, is exactly why it took so long to come into popular usage. They are all manmade designations of time and not Biblical. As our understanding of history evolves, so must our designations. Dionysius made a worthy effort but we have way more documentary evidence now than he did. Sometimes, things that seem ancient and untouchable and Biblical are, in fact, not. Now II Macc has a lot of sketchy material in it. Some stuff flat out doesn’t line up with the more reliable I Macc, and a lot of it is legendary. However, when we look at the purpose of II Macc, the reasons become clear—it was a propaganda letter written by Judean loyalists to the Hasmoneans, or at least Hannukah lovers, to the Jews of Alexandra during the years where pretty much everyone hated the later generations of Hasmonean priest-kings, who were a piece of work, lemme tell ya. II Macc is a Hannukah apologetic and thus is loaded with heart-wrenching stories of martyrdom and dazzling accounts of signs in the sky and divine retribution against Antiochus Epiphanes. Some of it sounds like it was inspired by Samuel’s accounts of David and other parts by Daniel. But as this was not scripture but instead a plea for the Egyptian Jews to keep Hannukah, we shouldn’t be shocked to see such creative embellishments. Strabo, a Roman historian, would date to after II Macc and he was a serious historian used as source material for Josephus, who wrote at the cusp of the first and second centuries CE. In between those, we have the Gospel of John, chapter 10, which directly mentions Hannukah aka the Feast of Dedication. So, these are our sources. From the Hebrew scriptures, we know that after the exile, Yeshua (Aramaic form of Yehoshua/Joshua) son of Yehotsedaq, served as the first High Priest of the Second Temple period during the times of Haggai, Zerubbabel, and Zechariah. He was of the line of Zadok, whose family was given the High Priesthood after Abiathar supported Adonijah as David’s heir in an attempted coup instead of David’s choice in Solomon. Zadok was given the high priesthood and was the first high priest to preside over the first Temple in Jerusalem. His descendant, High Priest Yeshua, presided over the Second Temple, as did his descendants over the next 350 years until one really bad seed entered the picture during the Seleucid drama of the Second century BCE.
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