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Updated: August 18, 2024
This man said, "Since thou desirest to know the truth, if thou wilt be righteous in earnest, lay down the high priesthood, and content thyself with the civil government of the people," And when he desired to know for what cause he ought to lay down the high priesthood, the other replied, "We have heard it from old men, that thy mother had been a captive under the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes.
Then came Alexander Ptolemaus, and finally Antiochus Epiphanes, who pulled down the walls and set up an image of Jupiter in the Temple. But now, mark! sixty-three years before Christ, Jerusalem was conquered by Pompey. What happened in the same year after Christ in the Roman Empire? Pompeii, the town by Naples, named after the conqueror, was destroyed in A.D. 63 by an earthquake.
"Cleopatra, the widow of Epiphanes, while she was living and acting as guardian of her sons Philometor and Euergetes who now reign in Memphis and Alexandria held Philotas in the highest esteem and conferred on him the rank of 'relation to the king'; but she was just dead when this worthy man took my father's cause in hand, and procured his release from prison.
Ib. p. 522-3. But to a Jewish eye, or to any eye placed in the same position of view in the age of Antiochus Epiphanes, it is utterly impossible to admit that this superior strength of the Roman power to reduce and destroy, this heavier arm of subjugation, could have revealed itself so plainly, as to warrant the express deliberate description of it. 'Quære'. See Polybius. Ib.
Four years afterwards, in B. c. 164, Antiochus Epiphanes died; and the Jews of Judæa, who had been for some time struggling for liberty, then gained a short rest for their unhappy country.
He had turned his eyes to an entirely different quarter. Ptolemy Philopator of Egypt had died in 549. Philip and Antiochus, the kings of Macedonia and Asia, had combined against his successor Ptolemy Epiphanes, a child of five years old, in order completely to gratify the ancient grudge which the monarchies of the mainland entertained towards the maritime state.
Under the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about the middle of the second century B.C., their very religion seemed likely to be crushed out by merciless persecution. It was no wonder that the serious minds of the day became inclined to look upon the present as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder of what had once been an ideal world.
There seems, however, to be good reason to believe that, having exhausted his treasury by his wars and his extravagances, Epiphanes formed a general design of recruiting it by means of the plunder of his subjects. The temples of the Asiatics had hitherto been for the most part respected by their European conquerors, and large stores of the precious metals were accumulated in them.
Antiochus Epiphanes, or 'the Illustrious, is for the Jews, whom he so madly attempted to hellenize, Antiochus Epimanes, or 'the Insane. Cicero, denouncing Verres, the infamous praetor of Sicily, is too skilful a master of the passions to allow the name of the arch-criminal to escape unused.
Yet we readily understand how its religious value caused it so often to become the goal and prize of contending creeds and armies. Sometimes the motive was religious antagonism, as with Antiochus Epiphanes and Titus; sometimes it was religious devotion, as with the Maccabees and Crusaders.
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