Plotting Antiochus's Persecution‪.‬

The history of religious persecution could be said to have begun in 167 B.C.E. when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV issued a series of decrees outlawing Jewish religious practice. According to 1 Maccabees, anyone found with a copy of the Torah or adhering to its laws--observing the Sabbath, for instance, or practicing circumcision--was put to death. Jews were compelled to build altars and shrines to idols and to sacrifice pigs and other unclean animals. The temple itself was desecrated by a "desolating abomination" built atop the altar of burnt offering. The alternative account in 2 Maccabees adds to the list of outrages: the temple was renamed for Olympian Zeus, and the Jews were made to walk in a procession honoring the god Dionysus. Without apparent precedent, the king decided to abolish an entire religion, suppressing its rites, flaunting its taboos, forcing the Jews to follow "customs strange to the land." Antiochus IV's persecution of Jewish religious tradition is a notorious puzzle, which the great scholar of the period Elias Bickerman once described as "the basic and sole enigma in the history of Seleucid Jerusalem." (1) Earlier foreign rulers of the Jews in Jerusalem, including Antiochus's own Seleucid forebears, were not merely tolerant of the religious traditions of their subjects; they often invested their own resources to promote those traditions. (2) According to Josephus, Antiochus III, whose defeat of the Ptolemaic kingdom at the battle of Panium in 200 B.C.E. established Seleucid control over Palestine, allowed the Jews to live in accordance with their native laws and promised to protect and subsidize the Jerusalem temple (Ant. 12.129-53). (3) 2 Maccabees suggests that such behavior was standard policy among the Seleucids, "even to the extent that King Seleucus of Asia defrayed from his own revenues all the expenses connected with the services of the sacrifices" (3:2-3). Such descriptions are consistent with Seleucid behavior as known from other sources. Thus, for example, a clay cylinder from the time of Antiochus I found in the Ezida temple complex at Borsippa presents the king as a patron of the Babylonian cult, the "caretaker of Esagila and Ezida," who undertook to rebuild these important sanctuaries. (4)