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 Against this backdrop, according to Erich Gruen, Antiochus IV's attempt to abolish Jewish tradition "stands out starkly and glaringly in contrast."5 Sixty-five years after Bickerman tried to explain the persecution, it continues to defy explanation, becoming only more puzzling as more is learned about how Seleucid rulers normally related to the religions of their subjects. There has been no shortage of attempts to explain it.6 One theory imputes the persecution to mental illness.7 In another, the king is motivated by a love of Greek culture, forcing it on the Jews because of their stubborn adherence to their native traditions.8 In still others, the king's behavior is reactively pragmatic, a response to a budgetary shortfall or a Jewish revolt.9 According to Bickerman, the impetus came not from Antiochus but from Jewish reformers who urged the king to persecute their traditionalist rivals.10 Not one of these reconstructions escapes being selective in what it stresses as salient facts, and they all must inevitably rely on speculation to fill in yawning gaps in the documentation.11 This is true even of the most recent efforts to explain the persecution-that of Gruen, for example.12 What allows for, and indeed motivates, so many different explanations for the persecution is the slim and biased testimony of our sources-Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Josephus's narratives. What we know of these works shows that, with the exception of the brief and coded references to the persecution in the book of Daniel, all of the descriptions were written long after the events, and all, including the material in Daniel, were shaped by the rhetorical objectives of their respective authors.13 To choose between them, declaring this one trustworthy and that one irrelevant, is a necessarily arbitrary exercise, since each is suspect for one reason or another and there is practically no extratextual evidence against which to measure them. …