Comments on: Hanukkah history

By: William

William — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:01:17 +0000

The term that I always remember being used was “Assyrian-Greek” – and, as the Seleucids controlled Assyria – and, perhaps, made their capital there – hence the name, and then I’m guessing that some less-informed folk dropped the first ‘a’ and ‘s’ from “Assyrian”…

By: David

David — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:40:54 +0000

The folks who were implementing the hellenizing reforms that the Maccabees were so upset about were not actually the Selucids, but were other Jews: the Maccabean war was a civil war, and Antiochus IV only got involved after the second year of that war. I wrote about my annoyance with the term "syrian greek" a few years ago.

By: Yehuda

Yehuda — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:27:39 +0000

I don’t know you, but am a reader of your blog through our mutual friend Zev. I could not resist pointing out, though, that there were certainly Syrians at the time of the Hanukkah story, though certainly Antiochus was not one of them. The earliest reference I can think of to Syrians off the top of my head is in Herodotus, who wrote around the 5th century BCE. Herodotus’ Syria was significantly bigger than modern Syria and appears to have included what is today Israel and Cyprus. The fact that ancient Syria included what is today modern Israel played a large political part in the plans for a merger between Syria and Egypt in the 1950s.