The noun ‘hammer’ is found only a few times in Scripture. The first time is when Ya’el, the wife of Heber, uses a hammer to pound a tent stake into the head of Sisra piercing his skull and crushing his temple (Judges 4:21). With this act, she sets Israel free from God’s judgment for worshiping idols. The second time it is used when Solomon built the Temple. That stones were prepared at the quarry so that no ‘hammer’ could be heard while it was being built (1 Kings 6:7).
Category: Feast of Dedication – Hanukkah
Helper – Hebrew: Shammes
By the time of the Feast of Dedication, the Jewish people had been exiled to Babylon and Assyria and could very easily have incorporated ‘foreign’ words into their vocabulary just as we have with the days of the week: Thursday for Thor, Wednesday for Odin, even Saturday for Saturn. Perhaps even to worship the God of Israel in their exile, they used the term shamash in order to remain alive.
Bubbe’s Hanukkah Poem
In the Jerusalem Temple the killing of pigs
Left an ugly mess that was very, very big
The Levite priests went to work that day
To clean the whole place until they could say
The Holy Temple was ready to worship Yahweh.
Hanukkah: The Truth in the Tradition
In John chapter 10, it is winter and the Feast of Dedication or Hanukkah has arrived. Yeshua is walking around in Solomon’s Porch, the covered area on the far eastern side of the Temple. It connected with the Court of the Gentiles where God-fears could come to the Temple and worship the God of Isra’el. It was in this area of the Temple that Yeshua’s Jewish brothers and sisters surrounded him and demanded that he reveal his identity.