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If there was enough oil for one day-why is Chanuka 8 days and not 7 days

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Kahane-Was-Right BT:

--- Quote from: edu on December 03, 2013, 02:10:09 AM ---http://www.torah.org/learning/yomtov/chanukah/5755/vol1no58.htmlI was told that Rabbi Kahane's answer is that the first day of Chanuka is also a miracle for a different reason. It is to commemorate that the Jews even had the audacity to try to make a revolution against the Greeks and their Hellenists allies, which such terrible dangers and odds against them.
Rabbi Yisrael Ariel of Machon Hamikdash has sort of a revised version of answer #1 of the Beit Yosef which minimizes the miracle by saying, they used thinner wicks and possibly some lenient halachic views - in order to get by with less oil.
I myself lean in the direction of answer 2 of the Beit Yosef.
Although at another time, bli neder, I will try to provide an answer for a halachic objection raised against answer 2 of the Beit Yosef.

--- End quote ---

There is also an answer given that Rav Hai Gaon had a different girsa of the gemara.  In his girsa, it says there wasn't enough oil even for 1 day.  So burning for even 1 day was a miracle, and thus all 8 days were a miraculous burning.  That to me is a very easy way to make sense of the gemara and perhaps his girsa was the correct one.  There are also about a hundred different drashas on this question which address it in a less than literal way.   However, a more straightforward and obvious answer to the general question of why the holiday is 8 days long is that cited by Rabbi Bar Hayim which is pretty directly stated in Macabees II (which by the way, even the secular scholars agree was written by a Pharisee adherent and not excessively long after the events took place).  This answer, alluded to by Tag, also simultaneously explains why we say full hallel on every day of hanuka too.     But the question raised here by the Beis Yosef is more dealing internally with making sense of the length of the holiday in light of what the Talmud states about it.  Rav Hai Gaon's girsa eliminates any inconsistency there about the Talmud's claims.

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