Hanukkah fun fact: Hanukkah literally means, “dedication,”
celebrating the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem after a period of
oppression. When taking a college course on the ancient middle east, I
asked Dr. Drake, my secular Gentile professor, why he thought the Jews had
survived when all the other peoples the course was covering had long
vanished. To paraphrase his answer, “Simple. When other peoples
were defeated, they assumed their god was weak and their enemy’s god was
strong, so they switched gods. When the Babylonians hauled the Jews into
slavery, they decided that their God hadn’t failed or abandoned them, rather
they had failed and abandoned their God. It was a unique innovation that helped
them rededicate and reenergize themselves in exile.”
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