In 164 BCE, Judah Maccabee led a Jewish revolt to a decisive victory against the forces of the Seleucid Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had several years earlier moved to suppress Jewish religious practice in Judea, banning circumcision, Sabbath observance and possession of Torah scrolls, and had desecrated the Second Temple in Jerusalem by erecting an altar to Zeus within it and, according to Jewish tradition, ordering the sacrifice of pigs on the temple altar, an animal considered ritually impure in Jewish law.
Upon recapturing the temple, Judah and his followers cleansed and rededicated it, removing the pagan altar, building a new one, and restoring the temple's ritual functions, an event the books of First and Second Maccabees describe in considerable narrative detail as the culmination of the revolt's religious purpose, distinct from its military and political dimensions, which continued for some years afterward under Judah's successors.
The rededication took place on the twenty fifth day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, and the books of Maccabees describe the following celebration as lasting eight days, deliberately modeled on the Festival of Sukkot, which the Jewish community had been unable to properly observe during the period of Seleucid religious suppression.