Encouraged by these,Antiochus held athletic games in Jerusalem and sent some money to certain sacrificial festivals which were being held in honour of the Greek gods.This greatly offended his religious subjects,but they had just been caught in a scandal of their own and until that should have been straightened out,nothing could be done.
It happened that two rival candidates were both trying to become High Priest.
One of them,by the name of Menelaus,had offered the King several hundred thousand dollars if he were appointed.It seemed a great deal of money to his neighbours,and truth to tell,it was much more than the poor man could ever hope to pay.
To get hold of the initial instalment,he was obliged to steal the Temple funds.When this was discovered,there was a great outcry against Menelaus,and suddenly every one was in favour of Jason,his opponent,who was not a whit better.
A quarrel followed,which the King of Egypt used as an opportunity to raid the city of Jerusalem,and plunder the Temple (in which by this time very little of any value had been left).
Antiochus appealed to his friends in Rome for help.
But one difficulty leading to another,he decided to visit the capital himself and plead his own cause before the senate.
The great Republic,however,had no interest in the private quarrels of its allies.Provided the tribes of western Asia did not upset the peace of the Empire or interfere with the safety of the great international roads,they could do whatever they wanted.A war in the Orient would probably have interfered with Asiatic commerce.Antiochus and Egypt therefore were both warned to behave,but nothing was done beyond this.
The turbulent young man,once the Egyptians were gone,was free to devote all his time and all his attention to the noble task of eradicating what he was pleased to call his subjects'superstitions.
He certainly worked with a will.
He gave curt orders that the old Jewish ceremonial must come to an end.The Sabbath was no longer to be observed and sacrifices to Jehovah must be discontinued as belonging to an old and happily forgotten period of barbarism.
Those books of the Law which could be gathered by his henchmen were burned and the possession of such a book by a private citizen was identical with a selfimposed sentence of death.
The people of Jerusalem,living in an imaginary world of rules and regulations and prophetic visions,were rudely awakened to these brutal and unwelcome facts.They closed the gates of the city and tried to resist the royal commands.But the Syrian general attacked the temple on the Sabbath day.Again the Jews refused to fight and Jerusalem was at the mercy of Antiochus.
Those inhabitants who could be profitably sold as slaves were spared.The others were killed.No mercy was shown to the Temple.
In the month of December of the year 168before the birth of Christ,a new altar was erected upon the site of the altar of burnt-offering which had been pulled down.
When it was ready,it was dedicated to the worship of Zeus,with a liberal offering of dead pigs.
As the pig was the most offensive animal to the Jew (the touch,yes,the sight of which made him feel uncomfortable and unclean),the insult was without parallel in the history of the world.
The Jews submitted because they had to.A strong garrison,comfortably housed in a newly built fortress,watched over the survivors with relentless eagerness.And woe to the man or the woman who tried to substitute the flesh of an ox for that of a pig which now had to be placed upon the desecrated shrines of their unfortunate city.
Of course,this silly tyranny brought its own punishment,as Antiochus was to experience ere long.
Some six miles away from Jerusalem,well towards the north in the little border village of Modin,lived an old priest called Mattathias together with his five stalwart sons.
In the course of the new dispensation,the messengers of Antiochus came to Modin and demanded that the inhabitants should worship Zeus according to the latest regulation.The people came together in the market-place.They did not quite know what to do.Antiochus was near and Jehovah was far away.
Soon a poor,frightened peasant was found willing to perform the prescribed ritual.
This was too much for Mattathias.He took his sword and he cut down the poor rustic and with a second blow he killed the official who had dared to suggest such a terrible act of sacrilege to the faithful children of Jehovah.
Thereafter,of course,there was only one thing which Mattathias and his sons could do.
They fled.
They crossed the mountains and escaped into the valley of the river Jordan.
All through the land the people heard the good news.The power of the King had been openly challenged.
Jehovah had found his champion.
And those who still believed in the future of their own race escaped in the dark of night and hastened to the Jordan to join the rebels.
Antiochus at first hoped to quell this riot by resorting to his former strategy.
Once more his troops were told to attack the Jews on the Sabbath day.
But Mattathias was a practical man.He preferred to live by the letter of the law rather than die by it.
He ordered his men to fight and the Syrian army was repulsed.
Mattathias was too old for the hardships of campaigning.He died,but his sons,John,Simon,Judas,Eleazar and Jonathan,succeeded him as leaders of the Jewish patriots and the war continued.
Of these sons,Judas,the third,gained the greatest fame.He was for ever in the thick of the fighting and the people called him Judas Maccabee,or Judas the Hammer,on account of his bold courage.He wisely avoided an open encounter with the well drilled troops of his enemies and inaugurated that strategy of guerilla warfare which twenty centuries later was used so successfully by General Washington.
He never allowed the Syrians a moment of rest.
