out of the legal deeds" [Original Aramaic: ] [Excursus: The date transcribed in Megillat Taanit is explained in Babylonian Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 18b), and represents the date in which the Sages of Israel reversed an earlier decree made by the Hasmoneans. During Macedonian hegemony over Israel, the wicked kingdom had prohibited Jews from mentioning the Name of God in their written transactions or by word of mouth. When the Hasmoneans eventually overcame their enemies, they decreed that all of Israel should thenceforth transcribe the Name of God in their legal documents; for example: "In the year such-and-such of Johanan, the High Priest of the Most-High God." However, when the Sages had fully come to understand this ruling's implication, they reasoned among themselves that if we permit common people to inscribe the Name of God in their ordinary bills of sale and promissory notes, once the debt had been paid-off and the bill of sale no longer applicable, the commoners would tear-up the bill and discard it by casting it into the dunghill, thereby showing utmost disrespect unto God's Name. For this reason they reversed the earlier decree, but not without declaring a day of merriment on the day's anniversary.] "On the twenty-second day thereof (i.e. the lunar month of Shevat) there was cancelled the work that had been decreed by the enemy to be brought against the Temple Sanctuary, [a day on which] it is prohibited to mourn" [Original Aramaic: ] [Excursus: The event here is alluded to in Tosefta Sotah 13:6, the Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 33a), and fully expanded and explained by Josephus (Antiquities 18, entire 8th chapter) and by Philo (de Leg. 249). The event revolves around Caius Caligula who revered himself as a god and who had decreed that a statue of his own likeness be dedicated and set up in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. To affect his plan, he ordered Petronius the Roman governor of Syria to carry the image to Jerusalem, and to erect it there, but if the Jews would not admit of such an image, to presently make war with them. This act, being known, caused a great consternation among the Jews, so that when Petronius had arrived in Ptolemais to spend the winter with his troops before proceeding on to Jerusalem at the Caesar's bidding, he was met there by members of the Jewish nation who went out to placate him