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That's kind of conversation between your soul.

That's conversation.

Between your soul and the night. next conversation Hello, and welcome.

And of course,

and of course,

Khag Sama'emya, to my fellow Jewish listeners. This will be released on Saturday the day before

Hanukkah starts. And we thought that it would be interesting to do a deep dive onto the

actual history of the Maccabees, the story around which the modern holiday of Hanukkah is actually organized

and was the inspiration for the story. And for that reason, we've brought on Joseph Scales,

an independent scholar of ancient Judaism and Jewish antiquity that we're very, very proud to have

here. And as always, I'm Danny Bessner and here with Derek Davison.

So, Joe, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for inviting me.

Derek, I know you had a first question, so why don't you just get us started?

I wanted to start us off, and this is going to be a really general question.

So, Joseph, please kind of distill it down as you think would be

necessary to tell this story. But one of the things that, as somebody who comes to this entirely

from just kind of reading the Hebrew scriptures and you get to Maccabees. And one of the things that stands out to me

is the question of the institutions of the state. And the Maccabees represent a change from a

...