What gives Chanukah its continuing significance is not its history but its current message. The most visible feature of the eight day holiday of lights is the daily lighting of the candelabrum or menorah. Ideally, olive oil is used, though candles, which are solidified oil, are common today. The lights of Chanukah represent not only the original menorah in the Temple that the Greeks tried to extinguish, but they also symbolize wisdom. For millennia, light has been our culture's premiere image for understanding.
Water is another universal metaphor for understanding.
We speak of someone being a fountain of wisdom, or having a thirst for knowledge. When these two paradigms of wisdom, light and water, combine, a rainbow is revealed. Soon after this, God greets them with history's first rainbow during the third month the month in which Chanukah falls Kislev. Athens changed the Godly into the human and blessing into aggression. In Hebrew, the words for a rainbow and for an archery bow are the same keshet.