1 mayo 167 año aC - **Antiochus (Seleucid) Takes Control of Jerusalem- Temple Profaned

Descripción:

To settle things down in Jerusalem, Antiochus takes control of Jerusalem and he stationed Syrian troops, that is the Greco-Syrian troops, in Jerusalem in 167. Now things are heating up. Around this time changes were made to the temple in Jerusalem. It may have been basically to accommodate the soldiers. They may have had to house soldiers from the Greco-Syrian Empire, and they may have used the temple mount apparently to house some of them. This caused changes to the temple. At this time Menelaus is in charge, and his Hellenizing party, which we could call the radical reformers, they saw--this is the beginning of the anti-Judaism laws.
About this time several laws were passed that forbade circumcision, you can't circumcise your boys anymore; you're forbidden from observing the Torah, the Jewish law; it may have been that even a pig was sacrificed on the altar in Jerusalem in the Holy of Holies, and the temple was turned into a syncretistic Jewish pagan grove. In traditional Greek religion and other religions having a grove of trees is sort of considered the sacred area. Like when you walk through a forest now and you come upon a nice open kind of grove of trees, and all of sudden you just kind of feel like some nymph or something is going to jump out at you, and God is there, so the Greeks liked these sorts of groves of trees, so this is often what they would use as a sacred area. They did this to the temple, and it was renamed as a shrine to Zeus Olympus.
Now notice what's happening, I talked about syncretism last time. If you're one of these liberal Jews, you may not really believe you're doing anything bad. You're not forsaking Judaism, you're just updating it, you're just bringing it up to the modern era. You might say, "Well what's wrong with calling it Zeus Olympus? We all know these are just different names given to the same god anyway, there's just one supreme God." So they may well have identified the Jewish god Yahweh with this god Zeus Olympus and said it's just two different names, one Greek name and one Jewish name for the same Jewish god. That may have been what they were thinking about. They could also have been thinking about the Syrian god Baal, that Baal Shamin was a Syrian god, so they're just saying we'll have an altar here, Antiochus will be happy because we're worshipping this Syrian god here, the Greeks are happy we're worshipping Zeus Olympus, and the Jews will be happy because it's identified as Yahweh.
This whole process of Hellenization, therefore, I'm interpreting this--in a lot of history books, sometimes, you'll get the idea that the Jews were all good loyal Jews just trying to keep the law, trying to keep Torah, and that Antiochus IV Epiphanes is putting all this on them and forcing Greek religion and Greek culture on them. That's not really the way it happened. I've told the story the way I--I've proceeded--if you read between the lines of some of these ancient Jewish texts, it's more like it's a debate that's going on within Judaism itself. How Greek should we be? How much do you accommodate the dominant culture? Precisely the way you get a lot of this kind of debate in the modern world, our time, of how much do you want your kids, your Jewish boys and girls to assimilate to be just as American as everybody else? How much intermarriage do you want to have or do you allow? If you're a Muslim immigrant to this country, the first generation, do you let them listen to hip hop? Do you let the women stop covering their hair? Where do you draw the line? What I'm arguing is that this is what was going on, and it was an internal Jewish conflict that was going on.
Yale New Testament Pg. 44

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