Story

Antiochus IV's Decree

167 BCE

Biblical Narrative

In the hundred and forty-and-fifth year of the kingdom of the Greeks — counting from the day Seleucus the son of Antiochus had taken his portion — there came up against Israel Antiochus, surnamed Epiphanes, the king of the Greeks, the son of King Antiochus. He had returned from Egypt in great rage, for the Romans had turned him back at the Day of Eleusis; and he sent his armies against Jerusalem, and entered the Sanctuary in his pride, and took the golden altar, and the candlestick of light, and all the vessels thereof, and the table of shewbread, and the curtain. And he made a great slaughter, and spoke very proudly.

Two years after, the king sent Apollonius the chief collector of tribute unto the cities of Judah, and he came to Jerusalem with a great multitude, and spake peaceable words unto the people, but in deceit. And when they believed him, he fell upon the city suddenly on the Sabbath day, and slew much people, and burned with fire the houses, and pulled down the walls thereof. And the women and the children he led away captive, and the cattle he took for a possession.

And the king wrote unto his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and that every man should leave his own laws. And the king of the Greeks set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar — an altar of Zeus Olympios upon the altar of the Lord — and on the five-and-twentieth day of the ninth month, in the month Kislev, they sacrificed swine upon it. He forbade the Sabbath, the festivals, and the covenant of circumcision; and the books of the Law which they found, they tore in pieces, and burned them with fire.

And whosoever would not consent to do according to the commandment of the king, he should die. They put to death the women that had circumcised their children, with their babes hanged about their necks. And many in Israel were strong, and resolved in their hearts that they would not eat unclean things, and they chose rather to die. And there was great wrath upon Israel.

And on the five and twentieth day of the month they did sacrifice upon the altar that was upon the altar of God. They put to death the women that had circumcised their children. And many in Israel were resolved in themselves that they would not eat any unclean thing, and chose rather to die.1 Maccabees 1:59–63

Archaeology · History · Genetics

The persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175–164 BCE) is reconstructed from four primary sources of varying tendency: 1 Maccabees (Hasmonean court history, written in Hebrew c. 100 BCE), 2 Maccabees (a Greek epitome of Jason of Cyrene's lost five-volume work), the prophecies of Daniel 7–12 (composed during the persecution itself, c. 167–164 BCE), and Polybius's lost Histories — surviving only in fragments preserved by Diodorus Siculus and Athenaeus. Cross-referenced with cuneiform astronomical diaries from Babylon, the chronology can be fixed to the month.

The classic reconstruction by Elias Bickerman (Der Gott der Makkabäer, 1937; English edition 1979) argued, against the older view that blamed Antiochus alone, that the king's decrees were prompted by a Hellenizing faction within the Jerusalem priesthood itself — the High Priests Jason and Menelaus, who had purchased their offices and sought to refound Jerusalem as a Greek polis named Antiochia. The crisis was thus an internal Jewish civil war over identity, into which Antiochus intervened on the Hellenizers' side. Later scholarship (Hengel, Gruen, Honigman) has refined Bickerman's thesis without overturning it.

The decrees themselves are unprecedented in Hellenistic religious policy. No Seleucid king had ever banned the religious observance of a subject people; even Antiochus III had explicitly confirmed the right of the Jews to live by their ancestral laws (Josephus, Antiquities XII.142–144, citing the king's own diagram). The 167 BCE proscription of Sabbath, circumcision, and Torah; the desecration of the altar with a statue of Zeus Olympios; and the forced sacrifice of swine to compel apostasy are without parallel in the Hellenistic world.

Why did Antiochus do it? Polybius hints at a fiscal crisis: the king needed Temple treasure to pay the Roman indemnity imposed at Apamea in 188 BCE. Bickerman emphasised the Hellenizers' pressure. Recent work (Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes, 2014) reframes the persecution as a tax revolt repackaged as a religious one. Whatever the cause, the cultural shock galvanised Mattathias and his sons, the Hasmoneans — and three years later, the rededication of the altar would inaugurate the festival of Hanukkah.

The Antiochene persecution was the first systematic religious persecution in recorded history; before 167 BCE no government had thought to ban a people's religion as such.Erich Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism (1998), paraphrased