Today’s word of the day is temerity, which means rash boldness or recklessness. According to etymonline.com, the word entered the language in the late fourteenth century “from Latin temeritatem (nominative temeritas) ‘blind chance, accident; rashness, indiscretion, foolhardiness,’ from temere ‘by chance, at random; indiscreetly, rashly, recklessly;’ probably, etymologically, ‘blindly,’ from PIE root *temsro- ‘dark’ (adj.).”

If you’re new to this blog, PIE stands for Proto-IndoEuropean. IndoEuropean is the language family that includes English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, all the Romance languages, and all the Germanic languages, as well as many more. “Proto” is a Greek word-forming element that means “first,” as in prototypical (the original or model upon which something is based), or protagonist (the first actor in a Greek play, or primary actor). But when it is used with a language, it also carries the sense of extinct in that there are no written documents from that language. We know something about PIE not because there are ancient texts written in PIE but through tracing back sound changes from the various daughter languages. If you will look in the first paragraph again, you will notice that the PIE root temsro has an asterisk before it. In linguistics, the asterisk before a word “usually means that a certain root or word has been reconstructed: based on phonological rules, we think it must have been somewhat like this—but we cannot be sure, as it is always possible that some unique irregularity would result in a different form, and we have no written sources that contain this form” (https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/338/meaning-of-star-asterisk-in-linguistics).

According to On This Date, November 21 is the date when Judas Maccabeus led his insurgency back into Jerusalem, where the Jews ritually cleansed the Temple and began to worship in the Temple once again.

The year was 168 BCE, and Judea was in between Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire under King Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Seleucid Empire was one of the remainders of Alexander the Great’s empire, a Greek-oriented empire that was still large, though not as large as Alexander’s. For Antiochus, Judea was just a place within his empire along the way to wars against the Egyptians. But for some reason he decided in 168 BCE to suppress the Jewish religion, trying to force the Jews to forsake their faith in the one true God and adopt Hellenistic religious practices. Jewish practices were banned, and the Second Temple became the site for a pagan-Jewish practice.

An elderly Jewish priest named Mattathias began a guerilla war against the Seleucids. In 167, his son, Judas Maccabeus, took over leadership of the revolt. Maccabeus won a series of battles against superior Seleucid armies, and in 164, he and his followers took over Jerusalem. The Seleucid king agreed to allow the Jews to worship God in their own way, but some of the followers of Judas Maccabeus wanted more than religious freedom. They wanted independence.

Judas Maccabeus died at a battle in 160 BCE. But his leadership in fighting against religious persecution is remembered in 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, books that are part of the Old Testament in some Bibles, though not all. The event is remembered every year as the festival of Hanukkah. Hanukkah comes from a Hebrew word that means “rededication” or “consecration.” The festival lasts for eight days and features the lighting of candles in the menorah. The story is, according to Wikipedia, as follows:

“According to rabbinic tradition, the victorious Maccabees could only find a small jug of oil that had remained uncontaminated by virtue of a seal, and although it only contained enough oil to sustain the Menorah for one day, it miraculously lasted for eight days, by which time further oil could be procured.”

Considering the size of the Seleucid Empire and the relative weakness of the Jews, Judas Maccabeus and his followers were very brave. Or maybe, instead of bravery, it was temerity.

The image comes from http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/neareast/ne06.html. Unfortunately, that’s all I have on that.