This year the Jewish Holy day of Hanukkah overlaps the Christian Holy day of Christmas

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JD: During this Hanukkah season there at the White House they had a Hanukkah party. Hanukkah and Christmas are close together on our calendar each year. Actually Hanukkah beginning on December 22^nd going through December 30^th, 8 days of Hanukkah and overlapping with Christmas time. We’ll have more on that in this program Prophecy Today when we come closer to that day. But many listeners David may not understand the background for this Jewish Feast. Can you give us a bit more information?

DJ: Well Hanukkah is a winter time Jewish festival that sometimes is called the Feast of Lights because each night there’s a menorah lighting in the home. Now this feast isn’t found in the log Moses but it does come in events found in I and II Maccabees of the Old Testament Apocrypha. Those books were included by the Jews of Alexandria but not the Jews of Israel.

The Hebrew word Hanukkah means dedication and this is the name of the feast because it celebrates the rededication of the second Jewish Temple after it was desecrated by the Greeks around 167 BC. And leading up to this desecration of the Temple a sever persecution of the Jews by the Syrian Greeks was led by Antiochus the Great and then his son who grew a part of the Greek empire after the death of Alexander the Great. Now his son took the title which means to reveal or make manifest. What this meant was that Antiochus IV saw himself as a manifestation of God.

So in order to establish his dominance over the Jews and over their God he set up an altered tazeus in the temple and sacrificed the pig on the alter and thus defiled the Temple. And this led to an uprising by a small group of freedom fighters led by Judas Maccabaeus who were actually able to defeat the Greek forces against all odds. And as part of the rededication of the Temple they had to relight the menorah. But there was only enough pure oil for one day instead of the eight that they needed to prepare new oil. So according to tradition the miracle of Hanukkah is that this small amount of oil did not run out.

JD: David James with details on how the Jewish Holy day Hanukkah overlaps the Christian Holy day of Christmas and the celebration of the birth of the Messiah Jesus Christ.

We report this information because it is setting the stage for Bible prophecy to be fulfilled.

The Jewish calendar dictates the actual days in the month of Hanukkah. This year both of these holidays come together. Daniel’s prophecy, Daniel 11:29-35 this prophecy foretells 300 years before the event. It speaks of an Antichrist figure and an abomination of desolation. Both of these events happening during the seven year Tribulation period after the Rapture and before the Lord’s return to earth.