I was watching the news the other morning and was impressed by a brief commercial inviting Israelis to celebrate Hanukkah in Jerusalem. Having just returned from a four-week speaking tour in the US, Chanukah came up a lot, though not in the way you might think.

Yes, of course, Channukah is at the center of Jewish and Israeli culture and celebrations this season, as we have for more than 2000 years. Many Christians asked what we are celebrating. It’s a holiday related to the military victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian-Greeks. And it’s the holiday on which we celebrate the miracle of one day’s worth of pure oil found in the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem that lasted eight days when the Temple was rededicated after being desecrated.

The military victory is all the more relevant now, two years into a horrific war thrust on us, and after the announcement of a recent discovery, providing additional archaeological and historic evidence of the Chanukah story and a fierce battle between the Maccabees and the Greeks some 2200 years ago.

The recent archaeological discovery took place just a few miles from my home in the Judean mountains, the site of one of the major battles during which Elazar, the son of Judah Maccabee, was crushed to death by an elephant on the main road between Jerusalem and Hebron.

When I look out my window, I see that road, albeit that today it’s a paved four-lane highway. Across the valley from my house is a community called Elazar, named appropriately in memory of the Jewish heroes who died here in defense of the land and our people from foreign occupiers. Still relevant today, and historic evidence that we are not the foreign occupiers in........

© Townhall