From the Altar at Modin to the Field Where Judas Fell

The king's officers rode into the village of Modin with a portable altar and a simple demand. Every man would come forward and sacrifice to the idols of Antiochus, and the most honored man would go first, because a village follows its elders. They set their eyes on an old priest named Mattathias, a father of five sons, and told him to burn the offering where everyone could watch.

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The Officer Fell Beside the Village Altar

Mattathias would not touch it. He had already gathered his sons and told them the plain thing, that it was better to die for the laws of their fathers than to live in shame. So he stood still. But another Jew, eager to please the crown, stepped up to the altar and reached for the knife himself.

Something in the old priest broke loose. He killed the man where he stood at the altar. He killed the king's general Apelles beside him. Then he tore the altar apart with his hands and shouted across the village, "Whoever is zealous for the laws of his fathers and the worship of God, let him follow me." He fled into the wilderness that night, his five sons around him, and thousands of Jews walked out of their homes behind him.

A Thousand Chose the Caves Over the Sword

The Seleucid generals found the rebels' one weakness fast. They waited for Shabbat, the seventh day, when a faithful Jew would not lift a weapon, and then they struck. Roughly a thousand men, women, and children hid in the caves and let themselves be slaughtered rather than break the day of rest. They suffocated in the dark and never raised a hand.

Mattathias buried them and made a ruling that outlived him. When a life hangs in the balance, he said, you fight on Shabbat. That law still stands. The old priest lasted only a year in the hills. When he felt death coming he handed the war to his sons and named the one who would lead the armies, his son Judas, the one they called the Hammer.

The Hammer Broke General After General

Judas turned out to be something the empire had not planned for. The general Apollonius marched against him with Samaritan levies and royal troops, and Judas scattered them and killed Apollonius with his own hands. He stripped the dead general's sword off the field and carried it into every battle for the rest of his life. Then came Seron. Then Lysias with sixty thousand foot soldiers and five thousand horse. Judas was outnumbered in every fight, and he won every fight, and the roads of Judea filled with the wreckage of armies sent to erase him.

The Sanctuary Rose From Weeds and Ash

Three years after Antiochus had defiled the Temple, Judas marched his men into Jerusalem and walked into the sanctuary. The gates were burned. Weeds grew in the courts where priests once ran. The lamps sat cold. His men cleared the ruin, built a new altar from unworked stone, and hammered out fresh sacred vessels to replace the ones the empire had carried off. On the twenty-fifth of Kislev they lit the rededicated Temple and feasted for eight days. The people called the festival Lights, because a freedom no one had dared hope for had come to them out of the dark. Later generations kept the eight days and called them Hanukkah.

The Whisper of the Collaborators

The war did not end. A prince named Demetrius escaped his hostage years in Rome, seized the Syrian throne, and turned at once toward Judea. Jews who wanted the old order back went to him. Their spokesman was Alcimus, a High Priest of their own blood, and he swore that Judas and his brothers were murdering everyone loyal to the crown. Demetrius sent his general Bacchides with a great army.

Bacchides tried a lie first. He offered peace to draw Judas into the open, and Judas refused it. Some Jews trusted the offer because Alcimus was one of their own, and they crossed over, and Bacchides cut sixty of them down at once. No one crossed over after that. When Alcimus could not beat Judas in the field he begged the king again, and Demetrius sent Nicanor, one of his best. Nicanor arranged his own friendly meeting that was a trap. Judas saw the ambush and slipped it, and in the battle that followed Nicanor died. They hung his head and his right hand in Jerusalem, and the day of his fall became a feast of its own.

The Field Where the Eight Hundred Stood

Then Demetrius sent Bacchides back, this time with twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse. Judas's army looked at the size of it and melted away. From thousands he was left with eight hundred men. They begged him to slip off and raise a new force another day. He would not. "If our hour has come," he told them, "let us die like men for our people, and leave no stain on our name." The fight ran from morning to sundown. Judas saw that Bacchides held the strongest wing himself and drove straight at it, breaking it and chasing it back. But the enemy's other wing swung around behind him and closed the ring. Surrounded, with no lane left, Judas fought until they cut him down. His brothers Simon and Jonathan won his body back under a truce and carried it home to Modin, and laid the Hammer in the ground beside his father, on the same soil where an old priest had once refused to bow.