Antiochus's Decrees and the Maccabean Revolt for the Temple

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

In 167 BCE the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes banned central Jewish religious practices, circumcision, Sabbath observance and Torah reading among them, and rededicated the Second Temple's altar to a syncretic cult identified with Zeus Olympios. The priest Mattathias of Modein refused to comply and led an uprising against both the Seleucid crown and the Hellenizing faction of Jerusalem's own Jewish population that had supported the reforms, and after his death leadership passed to his son Judas Maccabeus, who led a guerrilla and later open campaign against Seleucid forces across Judea.

Judas recaptured Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple's altar in 164 BCE, restoring traditional Jewish worship there, an event later commemorated as Hanukkah. Fighting continued for years afterward under his brothers Jonathan and Simon after Judas died in battle at Elasa in 160 BCE, and Simon secured a formal grant of Jewish political independence from the Seleucid crown in 141 BCE, founding the Hasmonean dynasty that governed an independent Judea until the Roman general Pompey's intervention in 63 BCE ended its full sovereignty.