Judah Maccabee Rededicates the Second Temple

On the twenty fifth day of Kislev in 164 BCE, Judah Maccabee and his followers recaptured the Jerusalem Temple from Seleucid control and rededicated it to the worship of the God of Israel, three hundred and seventy four years after Judaism returned to Zion under Cyrus's decree in 538 BCE, already recorded here. Three years earlier the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes had halted the Temple's traditional sacrifices, dedicated the building to Zeus, and outlawed core Jewish practices including circumcision and dietary law, sparking the Maccabean Revolt that Judah, one of five sons of the priest Mattathias, came to lead after his father's death. Once Jerusalem was retaken, Judah's followers cleared the Temple of pagan altars and images, built a new altar in place of the desecrated one, and resumed the daily sacrifices, an eight day dedication ceremony that the books of Maccabees record as the origin of the annual festival still kept today as Hanukkah. The rededication restored Jewish worship at the Temple for more than two centuries before Hadrian suppressed Judaism and renamed Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt's defeat in 135 CE, already recorded here.