Some time in the 990s, after Byrhtnoth was slain at the Battle of Maldon and Æthelred the Unready had begun to pay the danegeld, an English monk at Cerne in Dorset put together a loose translation of the two biblical books of Maccabees. Ælfric probably had never met a Jew, but he found much with which to empathise in the story Jews celebrate each year at Hanukkah. The story is that of the Maccabean Revolt, when the Jews threw off the Seleucid yoke and redeemed their homeland, their religion, and their temple.

Among Ælfric’s challenges was to explain elephants – which appear, clad in armour, in the Seleucid cavalry – to an audience which had never seen one (medieval depictions of this episode are well worth looking at for the same reason). The elephant, he says, is a ‘massive beast, bigger than a house, all encased in bones beneath the skin, except at the navel’. That last was an important detail: the elephant’s navel at 1 Maccabees 6 is something like the thermal exhaust port on the Death Star. Unlike Luke Skywalker, Eleazar Avaran, Judah Maccabee’s brother, does not live to tell the tale: ‘he pierced it at the navel so that they both lay there’, Ælfric wrote sorrowfully, ‘each the other’s killer’.

Having recounted these events of the second century BC, Ælfric revealed his intentions for the work by launching into a discussion of the just war, for which the Maccabees could serve as exemplars. ‘Iustum bellum‘, his mind drifting to the present, ‘is just war against the fierce seamen or against other peoples who intend to destroy our land.’ One might imagine the shrieking and clashing of Viking swords off in the background.

It was not unusual for the Christian faithful to turn to the Maccabees in trying times. While they were being harried by Hungarian raids in the first half of the tenth century, the monks of St Gallen produced a Latin manuscript of the books of Maccabees, whose sumptuous illustrations evoked their own struggles. Judah Maccabee had a cult among the Crusaders, and was revered as one of the ‘Nine Worthies’, ranking alongside such heroes as Alexander the Great, King David and Charlemagne.

One of the peculiar things about the Hanukkah story is that it appears in most Christian Bibles but not in the Jewish one. The Maccabees narrative appealed to medieval churchmen partly because, as in Ælfric’s case, it offered lessons about the just war. But in its themes of martyrdom and piety, it also offered spiritual consolation. At 2 Maccabees 7, seven brothers are put to death for refusing to eat unkosher meat. This was what merited the books’ inclusion in the canon, according to St Augustine: ‘because of the savage, amazing sufferings endured by some of the martyrs who, before Christ’s coming in his human body, contended even unto death for the cause of God’s Law, and held firm under the most appalling agonies’. Other church fathers, such as St Jerome and Pope Gregory the Great, harboured some doubts, however; and the Protestant reformers, a millennium later, followed the Jewish example by relegating 1 and 2 Maccabees (along with Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch) to the Apocrypha.

As for the third and fourth books of Maccabees: alas, they never got much of a look-in. The third contains an even better story about elephants than the first; but you will find it only in Georgian Orthodox Bibles. The pharaoh Ptolemy (here, he, rather than the Seleucid Antiochus, is the villain of the piece) rounds up the Jews of Alexandria in the hippodrome, and has his elephant-keeper ply 500 of the beasts with frankincense and wine, making them mad ‘so that the Jews might meet their doom’. The prayers of the priest Eleazar, and the intercession of two angels, deliver the Jews from the feet of the drug-crazed elephants. 4 Maccabees, meanwhile, is a rather high-minded explication of 2 Maccabees, soaked in Greek philosophy; nobody regards it as canonical.

It is not hard to see why non-Protestant Christians thought 1 and 2 Maccabees bore the mark of revelation: the martyrdoms (including the elephant-slayer Eleazar’s) prefigured Christ on the Cross, and the wars gave them succour in their own battles with heathen enemies, whether Saracen, Magyar, or Dane. For Jews, however, the story posed a problem. It was difficult to celebrate the ancient recovery of a homeland when that homeland had since been lost, or the consecration of a temple that the Romans were later to destroy. Hanukkah was a celebration of Jewish cultural and national independence: it did not fit the needs and realities of a scattered people. The festival in diaspora had to be rethought and redefined. The Talmud made popular a story that does not appear in the books of Maccabees: the miracle of the oil, which Jews commemorate by lighting the Hanukkiah. There was a shift in the meaning of Hanukkah, as Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, from a celebration of ‘military power’ to one of ‘spiritual strength’.

But the more martial themes of the Maccabees story resurfaced in Jewish thought, much as they once had been put to use by Ælfric. In the First World War, the British Army’s Jewish Legion found recruits eager to emulate Maccabean valour by liberating Palestine from the Turks: ‘The Star of David, which led the armies of the Maccabees of glorious memory in glorious battles for the liberation of Israel over 2,000 years ago, is now again to lead the Jewish men to secure a free land of Israel for a free people.’ It was possible in the 20th century, without too much difficulty, to cast the Maccabees as Zionists avant la lettre. In the diaspora, the Hebrew letters on the dreidl spun on Hanukkah spell out the phrase ‘A Great Miracle Happened There.’ Now, close to half the world’s Jews know a different formula: ‘A Great Miracle Happened Here.’ The story of Hanukkah inspires in both its spiritual and worldly dimensions; it did not need to appear in the Jewish Bible in order to become the national epic of the Jewish people.