Hanukkah may have come and gone, but since it’s still December I hope it’s not too late to share Cambridge University Library’s “fragment of the month” from the famous collection of Jewish manuscripts known as the Cairo Genizah. To understand this fragment, one must be familiar with the now-forgotten Aramaic text on which it is based, Marc Michaels writes.
Megillat Antiochus [the “Scroll of Antiochus”], as it is mostly known (though it has gone by various names) is an interesting pseudo-biblical book. Jews read Esther on Purim, Ruth on Shavuot, the Song of Songs on Passover, Ecclesiastes on Sukkot, Lamentations on Tisha B’av, and Jonah on Yom Kippur. A book for every occasion. But nothing on Hanukkah.
To fill this gap, someone living in the Land of Israel between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE wrote this Aramaic version of the Hanukkah story, modeled on the book of Esther. Yemenite and Italian communities, among many others, even included it in their Hanukkah liturgies at various points. It even appears in the 1949 Hebrew-English Birnbaum siddur. Around 1100, a scribe copied (or composed) an adaptation of the book in rhymed Aramaic verse, which was later found in the Genizah:
The poem starts like the megillah with a reference to the villain of the piece, King Antiochus IV, the Seleucid ruler, described here as king of Greece. However, it then misses out all of the establishing information about the king, his greatness, and his cities. . . . Instead, our poem leaps to a repeated refrain from the megillah and the prime cause of the difficulties chronicled: the three decrees that were imposed upon the Jews and that led to their revolt.
Those three decrees banned the observance of the Sabbath, the marking of the new moon, and circumcision.
Read more on Cambridge University Library: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit/fragment-month/fotm-2023/fragment-10