94 A History of Judaism
that this despoliation of the Temple was guided by Menelaus, ‘who had
become a traitor both to the laws and to his country’, but Menelaus was
not accused of connivance in the far worse persecution which was to
come. When Antiochus invaded Egypt again in 168 bce, he was con-
fronted by the Roman senator Popillius Laenas, who transmitted to him
the demands of the senate that he must withdraw from Egypt if he
wished to avoid being at war with Rome. In a purported prophecy com-
posed shortly after these events and incorporated in the biblical book of
Daniel, the author appears to trace a direct connection between the
humbling of Antiochus in Egypt and the abolition of the Temple wor-
ship and its replacement by a pagan cult:
At the time appointed he shall return and come into the south, but this
time it shall not be as it was before. For ships of Kittim [Rome] shall come
against him, and he shall lose heart and withdraw. He shall be enraged and
take action against the holy covenant. He shall turn back and pay heed to
those who forsake the holy covenant. Forces sent by him shall occupy and
profane the Temple and fortress. They shall abolish the regular burnt-
offering and set up the abomination that makes desolate.Behind the actions described by the author with such outrage lay the
need of Antiochus for further income from the Jerusalem Temple now
that Roman intervention had deprived him of the Egyptian booty with
which he would in normal times have expected to be able to reward his
successful troops.^4
According to the First Book of Maccabees, Antiochus had addressed
his whole kingdom, declaring ‘that all should be one people, and that
they should give up their particular customs’, and the appeal was largely
successful: ‘All the gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many
even from Israel gladly adopted his religion: they sacrificed to idols and
profaned the Sabbath.’ How many Jews in fact supported the abolition
of their religion has been much debated. Josephus recorded that the
Samaritans made a request to Antiochus to have their temple dedicated
to Zeus, but the books of Maccabees give the impression, despite their
hostility to the Hellenizers, that the attack on the Jewish cult was pri-
marily an external initiative of the Seleucid state. Antiochus was an
eccentric ruler who had just suffered an appalling loss of face, and he
may well have had little interest in the ambitions of the Hellenizing Jew-
ish priests. The priests in turn were unlikely to support a policy which
abolished the Temple cult that they had intrigued to control.^5
At any rate, the assault on Jewish worship and customs was carried