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The Christian theologian Ambrose of Milan quotes 2 Maccabees’ story of priests hiding altar fire during the exile, later recovered under Nehemiah and linked to Hanukkah. Ambrose treats 2 Maccabees as an authentic authority for history and theology.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Maccabees 1:19
Deuterocanon
17 Blessed be our God in all things, who handed over those who had committed impiety. 18 Since we are now about to celebrate the purification of the temple in the month Chislev, on the twenty-fifth day, we thought it necessary to notify you, so that you may also keep a feast of tabernacles, and remember the fire which was given when Nehemiah offered sacrifices, after he had built both the temple and the altar. 19 For indeed when our fathers were about to be led into the land of Persia, the godly priests of that time took some of the fire of the altar, and hid it secretly in the hollow of a well that was without water, where they made sure that the place was unknown to anyone.
Date: 100–90 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Early Christian
99 For when our fathers were carried away into Persia, certain priests, who then were in the service of Almighty God, secretly buried in the valley the fire taken from the altar of the Lord. There was there an open pit, with no water in it, and not accessible for the wants of the people, in a spot unknown and free from intruders. There they sealed the hidden fire with the sacred mark and in secret. They were not anxious to bury gold or to hide up silver to preserve it for their children, but in their own great peril, thinking of all that was virtuous, they thought the sacred fire ought to be preserved so that impure men might not defile it, nor the blood of the slain extinguish it, nor the heaps of miserable ruins cover it.
Date: 390–395 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Not all the works that were excluded from the canon were deemed heretical. Some were merely 'of the second rank' or 'among the apocrypha' (works that were 'to be hidden away' because they were not to be read, at least not in the liturgy). For most church fathers, 'the apocrypha' was not a fixed selection but a fluid category for books of dubious status. In modern parlance, the phrase 'the Apocrypha' (or 'the Apocrypha of the Old Testament') is often used to designate those Jewish books (Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, etc.) that are included in the Greek or Latin Old Testament of the church but are absent from the Hebrew Tanak of the Jews ..."
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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