The Abomination of Desolation: When the Temple Became Something Else

Antiochus IV Epiphanes was not the first ruler to persecute Jews, but he may have been the first to try to eliminate Jewish identity rather than Jewish power. His decree, as I Maccabees describes it, was comprehensive: the king commanded the whole kingdom to be one people and abandon their own laws.

The Temple was his first target. The daily sacrifices were stopped. The Sabbath and the festivals were made illegal. Circumcision was outlawed — mothers who circumcised their sons were killed, with their infants hung around their necks. The scrolls of the Torah were torn up and burned. Anyone who possessed one was put to death. On the fifteenth of Kislev, 167 BCE, what I Maccabees calls the desolating sacrilege — the abomination of desolation — was erected on the altar of burnt offering. Swine were sacrificed on the altar. The sacred precincts were given over to cult prostitution.

The phrase abomination of desolation — shiqqutz meshomem in Hebrew — is borrowed from Daniel, and it became one of the most durable and charged phrases in biblical eschatology: Jesus uses it in Matthew 24 as a sign of the end; Revelation echoes it; medieval and modern readers have found it useful for every subsequent desecration.

What Antiochus did not anticipate was the response. Some Jews conformed. Others fled into the wilderness to die rather than violate the Torah. And Mattathias the priest, in the village of Modin, refused — and killed both the royal official and a Jew who was about to comply. He and his sons, the Maccabees, fled to the hills and began a guerrilla war that would, by 164 BCE, result in the recapture and rededication of the Temple. The rededication is what Hanukkah celebrates.

The attempt to destroy a religious identity by outlawing its practices created not the death of Judaism but one of the most durable examples in human history of faith surviving and outlasting power.