Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Jesus at Hanukkah: A Storm is Coming

Jesus at Hanukkah: A Storm is Coming

Last updated on: December 16, 2022 at 2:58 am by Philip Jenkins

Jesus at Hanukkah: A Storm is Coming 2022-12-16T02:58:53-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The feast of Hanukkah begins this year on the evening of Sunday, December 18. Although Christians do not celebrate the feast, anyone with Jewish friends or neighbors will know it as a lovely event, with its lights burning through the Winter darkness, and its symbolism of liberation. But although it is not Christian, Hanukkah does feature in the New Testament, in an odd and suggestive way. Bear with me as I pursue a seasonal exploration here, and focus strongly on that word “Winter,” which in the New Testament setting is far more loaded, and more actively threatening, than we might at first think. This is not just a calendar reference. It raises the point of how any English translation can possibly render all the multifaceted meanings in the original text.

Finally, this all gets back to another theme that I touched on recently at this site, namely how this midwinter season of Christmas (and Hanukkah) is associated with apocalyptic and End Times thinking.

Jesus and the Dedication

John 10.22-23 says, “Then came the Festival of Dedication [egkainia] at Jerusalem. It was Winter [χειμών, cheimón], and Jesus was in the Temple courts walking in Solomon’s Colonnade.” This then leads into a controversy between Jesus and some Jewish opponents, who are appalled by what they see as his blasphemous claims. That egkainia is what we today call Hanukkah, or Dedication, the celebration of the liberation of the Temple during the Maccabees’ revolt against the Seleucid Greeks, in 164 BC.

Model of Second Temple

That John passage demands some unpacking, and the closer we look at it, the odder it seems. It is a rare example of Jesus being recorded as celebrating a Jewish feast or holiday. Other than Passover, the other exception is Sukkot, or Tabernacles (skenopegia) in John 7.2 – and as I’ll explain, that is a crucial point. That Hanukkah is also the only event in Jesus’s life that is specifically dated to a named season of the year, namely Winter. We can make reasonable guesses about the timing of other events described in the gospels, and scholars have suggested how John in particular is alluding to the Jewish ritual calendar in organizing his work. But this particular line is specific. I have not calculated the date, but you could with reasonable probability pinpoint the actual week in 28 or 29 AD that is being referred to.

That Jesus would celebrate all Jewish feasts, including Hanukkah or Sukkot, is no surprise whatever, and as Craig Keener points out, any suggestion to the contrary wrongly diminishes and distorts his Jewishness. But the question does arise of, why mention Hanukkah? Judaism has many high and holy days, and Hanukkah was not a particularly important one. Only in modern times has it achieved its great visibility in Western countries, as a kind of counterpart to Christmas.

The timing issue is interesting in other ways. The gospels offer different messages about Jesus’s presence in Jerusalem. In the Synoptics, he is only specifically mentioned as visiting the city for his final confrontation, and death. In contrast, John suggests regular visits to Jerusalem, although partly that is because editors have sliced and diced earlier texts to rearrange materials for narrative or theological ends. For instance, Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple in John 2 must have happened at the end of his career, yet here it features near the beginning of the story. But John does have something of an advantage here: although the Synoptics don’t mention Jesus’s earlier Jerusalem visits, such must have occurred during the great pilgrim feasts.

But as I say, the Hanukkah reference stands out. Jesus is explicitly located in the city in the Winter, presumably in December, implying a visit that is clearly distinct from the Passover season visit in his last days. Also, Hanukkah was not a pilgrim feast.

Why tell us it is Winter anyway? John does not helpfully add that Tabernacles or Passover occur when they do, respectively in Fall or Spring. Nor do the evangelists ever casually throw in the kind of setting that we would expect from a modern biography, such as “Later that June, Jesus did X.” Need I add that no New Testament tradition associates Jesus’s birth with the bleak midwinter? If anything, the stories point to the Spring, when shepherds might plausibly have been found watching their flocks on Judean hills.

It is worth noting just how vanishingly rare that Winter language is in the Bible as a whole, and in the Jewish mind-set of the time. The word “winter” features rarely in the Old Testament, which is not surprising if we think of the regional climate. The Song of Solomon (2.11) has a passing reference to the time of winter [cheimón] rains having gone by, and Job (37.6) uses the same word for a stormy downpour. Otherwise, the main other Biblical references are just a standard combination of “summer and winter.” Even in the two Books of Maccabees, which record the original Dedication of the Temple, they just date the event and its commemoration to “the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month, which is the month of Chislev,” with no seasonal reference. Hence, that word cheimón barely appears in the Greek Septuagint translation. I will explain why it is such a loaded term.

Hanukkah and Tabernacles

What is happening with this Hanukkah/Winter story? I would suggest three things.

One is that, in its liturgy and symbolism, Hanukkah had a major overlap with Tabernacles, and so that discussion should be seen as part of the larger Tabernacles debate in John’s previous chapters. The eight days of Hanukkah echo and reproduce the eight days of Sukkot. Luc Devillers is a leading expert on this Tabernacles theme in John, and as he remarks (in a review), “the liturgy of the Dedication was duplicated in that of Tabernacles (see 2 Maccabees 10:6), so that the new feast was sometimes called “The feast of the Tabernacles of the month of Chislev” (2 Maccabees 1:9).” If you will pardon the phrase, it is Tabernacles Part Deux.

According to John, Jesus is in Jerusalem for Tabernacles in October (John 7) and again for Hanukkah in December (John 10), but those references are not given for biographical precision. What matters centrally for John’s argument is to fit Jesus into the Jewish liturgical year, and especially to those festivals pointing to the identity and renewal of the Jewish people. When John says that Jesus was in Jerusalem in feasts falling in October or December, he may or may not have been correct historically and biographically, but that is subordinate to his main purpose, and even irrelevant.

One other obvious point about the explosive political context. Hanukkah is about the destruction and rededication of the Temple after a period of pagan overlordship. Now there was a potentially very subversive subtext for Jesus’s time, an incendiary precedent for a time of Roman occupation. In various ways, all the evangelists were deeply interested in the Temple, and Jesus’s relationship to it. At his eventual trial, claims that he had spoken of destroying the Temple proved lethal. Eitan Bar also makes an excellent point about the Hanukkah passage in John. As he asks, if people at this particular Hanukkah season were necessarily thinking of the Maccabean insurrection, how did that condition their expectations about Jesus as a possible leader of political revolt? Might he himself be seen as a neo-Maccabee, so to speak?

Why Winter?

Also critical is the reference to Winter, cheimón, which has meanings quite apart from anything to do with feasts or holy days. That word signified the season that we know, but it also carried other implications, of tempest, storm, and general turbulence. In Matthew 16, Jesus says “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast’.” That “stormy” phrase there is literally “there will be a storm [cheimón].” In Acts 27, the storm [cheimonós] continued raging.

By way of numbers, the word cheimón features six times in the New Testament, including the present Hanukkah one. Of the remainder, English versions normally render the word as “storm” twice (Matthew 16 and Acts 27). Two other references occur in parallel passages in Matthew and Mark, where Jesus prophesies the horrible times awaiting Jerusalem, and warns his followers that when they are forced to flee, they should pray that their flight does not take place in the Winter, cheimonós. That again points to the word’s threatening connotations. Otherwise, only the use in 2 Timothy 4.21 is purely seasonal.

Cheimón may mean Winter, but never in the pleasant sense of a Winter Wonderland. It’s not so much Jack Frost nipping at your nose, as the Angel of Death tapping on your shoulder.

So no, I don’t just think Winter is mentioned because it is when Hanukkah happens year by year. Rather, there are truly threatening implications here for the narrative as it develops. After the Hanukkah scene, we move into the raising of Lazarus, and the sequence of plots that culminate with Jesus’s death. It is almost as if John says “Jesus went to Jerusalem. The storm clouds were gathering.”

John 13 offers an analogy. At the Last Supper, “As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night [en de nux, ἦν δὲ νύξ].” “Night” there is not just a chronological reference, it is an ominous symbol for a state of darkness and malevolence.

I also offer a couple of modern popular culture parallels. The 1984 film of The Terminator ends with Sarah Connor grimly agreeing to the warning that “They say there’s a storm coming,” which, as she alone knows, portends a killer robot apocalypse. Or to get the sense of what John implies by his use of cheimón, I’ll adapt another phrase that has been popular in recent years: Winter is coming.

There are a couple of fine personified Classical depictions of Cheimon, Winter, from mosaics here and here. I won’t reproduce them because I don’t know the copyright status, but you can link to them.

SOURCES

Eitan Bar, “Hanukkah,” in Craig A. Evans and David Mishkin eds., A Handbook on the Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (Hendrickson, 2019), 92-95. This short piece is very good on applying the specific content of Hanukkah and its Maccabean origins to the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd.

Michael A. Daise, Feasts in John: Jewish Festivals and Jesus’s “Hour” in the Fourth Gospel (Mohr Siebeck, 2007)

Luc Devillers, La Fête de l’Envoyé (Paris: Gabalda, 2002)

Jamie Morton, The Role of the Physical Environment in Ancient Greek Seafaring (Brill 2001) and especially the chapter on “Sailing Seasons, Winter Sailing, And Night Sailing,” 255-265

Bruce G. Schuchard, “Temple, Festivals, and Scripture in the Gospel of John,” in Judith M. Lieu and Martinus C. de Boer, eds., The Oxford Handbook Of Johannine Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018), 381-395

Gerry Wheaton, The Role of Jewish Feasts in John’s Gospel (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Elon Gilad did a nice history of the Hebrew background at “Word of the Day Stav: How the Ancient Word for Winter Turned Into Fall,” in Haaretz, November 7, 2013

I am expanding this column from one I did at this site some years back.

Previous Post

December 14, 2022

2022: My Year of Reading Promiscuously

Next Post

December 16, 2022 Learning to Walk in the Dark

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who said, "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

John the Baptist Peter Paul Jesus