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A King Titled God Manifest Dies the Year His Own Suppression Was Undone

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A King Titled God Manifest Dies the Year His Own Suppression Was Undone

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Antiochus IV took for himself the title Epiphanes, meaning God Manifest, a documented royal style distinct from an inherited title carrying no personal religious claim of its own. That self declared title stood over a reign in which he outlawed the observance of another people's religion and installed a foreign cult inside their own Temple, a documented contrast distinct from a ruler who claimed no divine standing while pursuing the same suppression.

He died in 164 BCE while on campaign in the east, a documented death away from Jerusalem distinct from a death that occurred at the scene of his own religious policy. That was the same year the Maccabean Revolt his suppression had provoked recaptured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple, a documented coincidence of dates distinct from a defeat he lived to witness in person or one that came only long after his death.

That the wars his suppression touched off are recorded across three separate surviving texts, 1 and 2 Maccabees as their central subject and 4 Maccabees drawing on the same events for its own purposes, a documented breadth of textual record distinct from a single account preserved in isolation, marks Antiochus IV's reign as a documented case where a king who styled himself God Manifest is remembered chiefly through the literature his own suppression of another religion produced against him.

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Article On

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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