Simple answer? It's about this arsehole:
His name was Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and if you know your Greek you'll have spotted the problem already. If not, sit tight, we'll be getting to that. But first you've gotta know how we got to him.
Daniel's Third Beast
We've already seen the lion with the wings of an eagle was actually a cherub, a common symbol of ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms including the Neo-Babylonians; we've also seen the great bear with three bones in its mouth, symbolising the Persians and their three principle conquests; now we can consider Daniel's third beast:
After that, I looked, and there before me was another beast, one that looked like a leopard. And on its back it had four wings like those of a bird. This beast had four heads, and it was given authority to rule. (Dan. 7:6)
As we know, after the Persian conquest of pretty much the entire known world, the former kingdom of Israel settled down under their new overlords and purred smug kittens for the next 200 years, picking up lots of Persian Zoroastrianism and incorporating it into Judaism. But then a minor tribal king named Alexander III – soon better known as Alexander the Great – put a serious ruffle in their fur by gathering up everything his father had put together and embarking on the mother of all road trips, as seen in Oliver Stone's 2004 flick ΛLΣXΛNDΣR (which actually spells "LLSXLNDSR" but we'll ignore that).
Why represent the Greeks with a leopard? Because the job was done fast. I actually spent a couple of hours once with Wikipedia open in one tab and Google Maps in the other, finding out what all the old locations are called today and following the route with the trip planner (not a bad hobby for a history geek). The exact hows and whys of Alexander's campaign aren't important to this blog however: suffice to say he took his army for a long walk, fought three major battles at the Granicus (334), Issus (333) and Gaugamela (331), and won all three, defeating the Persians in record time. From crossing the Hellespont in 334 until his death 323 was just eleven years. We couldn't conquer Iraq in eleven years; Alexander conquered Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey. He did to the Archaemenid Persians what a strangler fig does to a tree: killed it dead and took its place.
So why four heads? Because when Alexander suddenly died, aged just 32, it caught off-guard everyone who'd assumed he had a few decades left in him, and kicking off the bloody rugby scrum history calls the wars of the diodochi, or Successors.
A Game of Diadems: the Wars of the Successors
The Greek sign of kingship was not a crown or throne, but a ribbon tied around the head known as a diadem. With the death of Alexander, it was suddenly the must-have fashion accessory in Babylon and all the best people were wearing it. A succession crisis is of course nothing unusual, but this one was made worse by the Macedonian army not having the long, stratified chain of command we associate with armies today. Instead they had a pool of officers called hetairoi, who were given command of this or that unit or combination of units on an ad-hoc basis. This flexibility had served them well in the war against Darius, but with their king dead and no recognisable heir (Roxana was still pregnant with Alexander's only child, which they didn't know would be a boy), none of them could pull rank on the others. When Alexander breathed his last it took them about eight seconds to realise each of them was now king of whatever he could take and hold. Civil war was inevitable.
For the next twenty-odd years the political scene was vibrant and exciting (as in, betrayal was common and a lot of people died), but by 306 they'd more or less sorted Alexander's conquests into four(ish) Successor Kingdoms: Lysimachus, one of Alexander's bodyguards, got Thrace; Cassander, a ravening wolfshead late to the party, got Macedonia and Greece; Antigonus, the governor of Phrygia, got Asia Minor and Syria; Ptolemy, another ex-bodyguard, got Egypt; and most important to our purposes, the former infantry general Seleucus got Babylonia.
Lump Greece, Macedonia and Thrace together, and you end up with four kingdoms that used to be Alexander's – the four heads of the leopard. This natural division of power might've been enough to keep the peace had the diodochi been less ambitious, but of course they couldn't leave each other alone. Seleucus was as guilty of this as anyone else, extending his (already enormous) landholdings as far as India, where he fought Chandragupta Maurya to a draw and walked away with 500 Indian war elephants as part of the peace deal. These were the ones with which he won the Battle of Ipsus, the culmination of all the political dickery since Alexander's death: seeing Antigonus growing too strong, Lysimachus, Cassander and Seleucus joined forces Voltron-style to stop him. Since it featured former brothers-in-arms hacking each other to death, Ipsus would've been a rather depressing affair if both sides hadn't been using war elephants, Seleucus matching 400 Indian elephants against 75 smaller and less-trained versions captured by Ptolemy in Ethiopia (they weren't "African elephants" as we call them today, since they were smaller than the Indian variety; likely they were a now-extinct sub-species native to the Red Sea area). Animal rights activists will disagree, but as a war nerd I find that kind of awesome; if you've gotta have an awful blood-draining feud, at least have it with war elephants.
That victory gave Seleucus control of much of Asia Minor, and also the nickname Nicator (the Victor). Greece was next on his hit list, and turning on his erstwhile allies he went on to defeat Lysimachus in the Battle of Corupedium (281), giving him control of nearly all Alexander's empire bar Egypt. But having brushed his fingertips on the throne Alexander had vacated, he was assassinated that same September, and with his death the last chance of reuniting the fractured Greek empire was lost forever. From here on it was diodochi all the way down.
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| Sigil: an eagle. Words: Incest is a Family Game |
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| Sigil: an anchor. Words: Speak Hellenic or Die |
The throne passed to their son Seleucus II Callinicus (the Gloriously Triumphant), an epithet a trifle overdone considering he inherited the Syrian clusterfuck his father and grandfather had created and did little to solve it. He lost control of Asia Minor when the Gauls invaded and forged their own kingdom of Galatia; he fought off Ptolemy III, then his own half-brother Antiochus Hierax (the Hawk), until sometime in 226 he was killed falling off his horse. He passed the diadem to his elder son Seleucus III Ceraunus (the Thunderbolt – I bet he strutted that one), who reigned only three years before he was assassinated and the diadem passed to his younger brother, Antiochus III.
Having inherited the throne in in the year 222, aged just 18, Antiochus III went down in history as Antiochus the Great more because he was vain enough to briefly call himself the Basileus Megas, or Great King, the traditional title of the lords of Babylon. He didn't move the Syrian situation along very much either, but not for lack of trying. Daniel records:
His sons will prepare for war and assemble a great army, which will sweep on like an irresistible flood and carry the battle as far as his fortress. Then the king of the South will march out in a rage and fight against the king of the North, who will raise a large army, but it will be defeated. When the army is carried off, the king of the South will be filled with pride and will slaughter many thousands, yet he will not remain triumphant... (Dan 11:10-14)In other words, the sons of Seleucus Callinicus (i.e. Seleucus Ceraunus and Antiochus the Great) will prepare for and fight the Battle of Raphia (217) near the great fortress of Gaza, and lose 10,000 soldiers in one day. Thus the Syrian situation briefly went from a stalemate to a bloody stalemate, buying House Ptolemy a respite while Antiochus the Great went off to do his conquering elsewhere. And at this he was rather successful, restoring the Seleucid kingdom almost back to the enormous boundaries it had enjoyed in Nicator's day.
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| A balanced, decently-trained military can do that for you. |
S.P.Q.R. Bitches
But if his life wasn't complicated enough, he soon had to contend with an ambitious new player with a habit of backing their words with iron, a city-state nobody had ever heard of from a salt route in the arse-end of Italy: Rome.
The Romans were on the up, already masters of northern Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Spain, and a lot of the cities Antiochus had been conquering had been shedding refugees that had fled to Rome and made all sorts of uninformed prejudicial remarks about House Seleucus. If that wasn't enough, he also had a Carthaginian refugee named Hannibal in his court egging him on. It wasn't long before Antiochus the Great was declaring himself "champion of Greek freedom against Roman domination," and invading Greece proper.
And of course, getting his arse kicked, because this was the war that gave Rome control of Greece. In the autumn of 192 the Romans sent an army under Scipio soon-to-be Asiaticus, younger brother of Africanus, who met the Seleucid army at Thermopylae and trounced them using the same goat path that had hamstrung Leonidas. Yes, that wasn't just fanfic, this was a thing that actually happened: Hannibal Barca had a hand in a military action where Alexander the Great's army fought Roman legions under the command of the little brother of Scipio Africanus – at Thermopylae. Which makes this the most awesome paragraph I have ever written.
After inflicting another defeat at Magnesia (190), the Romans offered harsh peace terms, requiring Antiochus's middle son to be sent to Rome as a hostage (they couldn't take the eldest son and heir, as the Romans allowed no reigning monarch to cross the sacred boundary into their city, and an heir could of course become a reigning monarch at any moment). Thus at last we meet our star, for this middle son was of course our friend, Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
At the same time, the Romans imposed a huge indemnity payment that the kingdom could ill-afford, which had severe knock-on effects and led to the first real violation of the Jews. To get this part of the story, you really need to ask your Catholic friends to borrow their Bible and read 1 and 2 Maccabees (if you don't have any Catholic friends, shame on you, you'll have to do a Google search instead). The Maccabees books weren't declared canon until 1546, i.e. in the middle of the Protestant Reformation – 2 Maccabees contains the scriptural justification for Purgatory, which Pope Paul III was keen to uphold and Martin Luther was equally keen to shuffle off (besides which he was a notorious anti-semite, so the history of those evil Christ-killing Jews probably wasn't a priority). Unfortunately, leaving Maccabees out of scripture meant these books sort of dropped off the radar entirely in Protestant languages like English, which was problematic because it left the latter half of Daniel open to schizoids like John Darby who think it's about the end of the world. But that's what happens when you read a coded message without the crib.
Anyway, the weird religious enclave formerly known as Israel had transferred from the lands of the Ptolemies to the lands of the Seleucids in 198, and the angels had held their breath. House Ptolemy had been highly tolerant of their peculiarities; House Seleucus surely would not. From the beginning, quite aware he ruled the most eastern of all the Successor Kingdoms, Seleucus Nicator had gone out of his way to make it the most zealously Hellenistic as well, working hard to sow unifying Greek culture all the way from the Levant to the Indus. Thousands of heartland Greeks had been uprooted and grafted into towns and cities across Babylonia, Greek was made the official language, and Zoroastrianism was abandoned in favour of the Olympians. The Jews gradually found themselves separating into two camps, the traditionalists with Hebrew/Aramaic names like Honi and Onias, and the Hellenisers who preferred Greek names, Honi becoming Menelaus and Yeshua, of course, becoming Jesus. The power struggle between them of course revolved around the Temple and who was currently serving as High Priest: the coffers in the Temple which contained the shekel contributions were marked with Greek letters, and the inscription forbidding strangers to advance beyond a certain point in the Temple was now in Greek, no doubt made necessary by the droves of festival-going Jews from across the known world who no longer spoke Aramaic. If the culture clash wasn't hitting home yet, Hellenism also meant eating unclean foods like goose and wild boar, and of course they were big on homosexuality, as I've outlined before:
In ancient Greece, a couple usually comprised of a conservative older man (the erastes, usually translated "lover") and a pretty younger man (the eromenos, or "beloved"), who was usually a teenager. This was intentional, as Plutarch noted: "Their lawgivers, designing to soften whilst they are young their natural fierceness... gave great encouragement to these friendships... to temper the manners and characters of the youth." ... Xenophon even wrote that many of them solemnified their relationship in a religious ceremony – virtually a marriage – which, since the cult of Herakles was especially strong in Thebes, took place at the shrine of Herakles's lover and comrade-in-arms, Iolaus.This of course did not gel with "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable," which Westboro Baptist will remind you is Leviticus 18:22. In short, the traditionalist Jews felt themselves surrounded by creeping heresy, and it would've made the whole region a ticking time bomb had Antiochus not been wise enough to let them live, in the words of the historian Josephus, "according to the law of their forefathers."
When he died in 187, however, things changed swiftly. The throne passed to his son Seleucus IV Philopator (the Father-Loving), the middle son (now heir) Antiochus IV was returned home and hostage duty was passed to the youngest son Demetrius I Soter. But the Father-Lover was anything but kind to his father's memory. With the deadline for his next indemnity payment bearing down, in 175 young Philly sent a minister named Heliodorus to seize the temple treasury in Jerusalem.
But when he arrived at the treasury with his bodyguard, then and there the Sovereign of spirits and of all authority caused so great a manifestation that all who had been so bold as to accompany him were astounded by the power of God, and became faint with terror. For there appeared to them a magnificently caparisoned horse, with a rider of frightening mien; it rushed furiously at Heliodorus and struck at him with its front hoofs. Its rider was seen to have armour and weapons of gold. Two young men also appeared to him, remarkably strong, gloriously beautiful and splendidly dressed, who stood on either side of him and flogged him continuously, inflicting many blows on him. When he suddenly fell to the ground and deep darkness came over him, his men took him up, put him on a stretcher, and carried him away — this man who had just entered the aforesaid treasury with a great retinue and all his bodyguard but was now unable to help himself. They recognized clearly the sovereign power of God. (2 Mac 3:24-28)
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| Famously painted by Raphael in The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple (1512) |
Now ruling in his own name, in 170 Antiochus IV finally got something done on the Syrian front when he launched a pre-emptive strike against the Ptolemies and made it as far as the city of Alexandria itself, something nobody had managed since, well, Alexander.
He will be succeeded by a contemptible person who has not been given the honour of royalty. He will invade the kingdom when its people feel secure, and he will seize it through intrigue. Then an overwhelming army will be swept away before him; both it and a prince of the covenant will be destroyed. After coming to an agreement with him, he will act deceitfully, and with only a few people he will rise to power. When the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and achieve what neither his fathers nor his forefathers did. He will distribute plunder, loot and wealth among his followers. (Dan 11:21-24)The "prince of the covenant" was probably High Priest Onias III, who was murdered that year (others translate it "confederate prince" and see it as a reference to Ptolemy VI Philometor, but I disagree because he wasn't destroyed; he outlived Antiochus by a considerable margin). knowing Rome would step in if the status quo was disturbed, Ptolemy VI was allowed to keep the throne as a Seleucid puppet – an arrangement which lasted only until the Seleucid army pulled up stakes, because as soon as they were gone the Egyptians turned around and hailed the younger brother Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (Gross Belly, so named after his morbid obesity) their pharaoh instead. The brothers Ptolemy decided to rule jointly rather than start a civil war, an example the rest of the successor kingdoms really could've learned from.
In 168 Antiochus launched a second invasion of Egypt, aiming to finish the business once and for all, and this time the Romans acted. "At the appointed time he will invade the South again," Daniel says, "but this time the outcome will be different from what it was before. Ships of Kittim will oppose him, and he will lose heart." It's referring to one of the most famous diplomatic incidents of all time: Rome elected to send Gaius Popillius Laenas, a single proconsul (i.e. one of last year's consuls, the office you occupy when you're fresh out of office) escorted only by lictors, the civil servants carrying fasces (bundles of sticks) that were the physical representation of power in Rome. As he came down the Canopic branch of the Nile, Antiochus found his path blocked by Laenas and his retinue – no army within five hundred Roman miles, remember – who sweetly told him to turn his army around and go back to Antioch, or consider himself in a state of war with the Roman Republic. This act always seemed to bluff eastern kings, who didn't know what to make of it. Antiochus asked for time to discuss it with his war council; Laenas stepped forward and drew a line in the sand all the way around Antiochus, and said: "Before you cross this circle, I want you to give me a reply for the Roman Senate" – the implication being that Rome would declare war if the king stepped out of the circle without committing to leave Egypt immediately. Weighing his options, Antiochus slunk away with his tail between his legs.
The Abomination of Desolation
The term “abomination” (Hebrew toevah or siqqus) appears more than a hundred times in the Old Testament and refers to a great sin, one usually punishable by death. In Daniel the phrase is ha-siqqus misomem (שִׁקּוּץ מְשׁמֵם), literally, "one who makes desolate." Siqqus is always connected with idolatry, and paired with misomem seems to indicate that something has been destroyed, made worthless, the ultimate desecration. That's a big clue as to what was about to happen.
While he'd been in Egypt, the rumour had got out that Antiochus had been killed, and the Jews took the opportunity to have a bit of a rebellion. Their leader was the deposed High Priest Jason, who had his own reasons:
[The Jews] were divided into two parties, the orthodox Hasideans (Pious Ones) and a reform party that favoured Hellenism. For financial reasons Antiochus supported the reform party and, in return for a considerable sum, permitted the high priest, Jason, to build a gymnasium in Jerusalem and to introduce the Greek mode of educating young people. In 172, for an even bigger tribute, he appointed Menelaus in place of Jason. In 169, however, while Antiochus was campaigning in Egypt, Jason conquered Jerusalem – with the exception of the citadel – and murdered many adherents of his rival Menelaus. (“Antiochus IV Epiphanes,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003 Deluxe Edition, Britannica Corp, 2003, referenced on ChristianCourier.com)Jason's 1,000-man rebellion attracted swift vengeance:
When these happenings were reported to the king, he thought that Judea was in revolt. Raging like a wild animal, he set out from Egypt and took Jerusalem by storm. He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery. (2 Mac 5:11-14)The numbers might be inflated, but the plot is accurate: the traditionalist faction's consciousness of their status as a people apart made them too independent for the Seleucid kingdom. The solution? Abolish Judaism, which Antiochus made his mission from this moment on. He was well placed to do this, because like all all the Seleucids he had an epithet, Epiphanes, that couldn't have been more perfect for baiting the Jews.
"Epiphanes" means god made manifest.
In the diodochi world virtually every statue proclaimed someone "Saviour of Mankind and God Made Manifest" – to the eastern mind, standard laudatory stuff. But when "god manifest" came to the land of YHWH, shit had to get real. That same year, 167, Antiochus banned circumcision, started gathering and burning copies of the Torah, and built the Akra, a fort in the middle of Jerusalem to keep the city under heel (hence, "he will worship a god of fortresses" in Dan 11:38). But the main event came when he deliberately profaned the Second Temple, placing an idol of Zeus on the altar of burnt offerings and ordering the sacrifice of a pig* – an unclean animal – to rededicate the Temple to Zeus.
To reiterate: He put this...
...and this...
...in this.
Can we even begin to imagine how this went down? This was the famous Abomination of Desolation, the ha-siqqus misomem, the ultimate sacrilege; this was the "time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations." Antiochus IV Epiphanes, stand revealed and take a bow: the King Who Exalts Himself, he of Many Blasphemous Names, the Little Horn (*giggle* "I do miss the old names...").
The traditionalist Jews would not – could not – take this insult lying down. Opposition rallied around an elderly villager from a priestly family named Mattathias, and his five sons: Judas called Maccabeus, Jonathan, Simon, John and Eleazar. Mattathias destroyed the Greek altar that had been set up in his home village of Modein, and killed Antiochus's representative – kicking off the Maccabean Revolt, a war that was to last the next 24 years.
We don't need to know the outcome of the revolt, however, to comprehend the book of Daniel. We don't need to know that the traditionalists ultimately won, gaining an independence for Israel that lasted until the Romans came in 63, although it was a Pyrrhic victory that failed to excise Hellenism from the Holy Land and set the stage for King Herod – we don't need to know all that, because the authors of Daniel didn't seem to know that. After tracking accurately from Nebuchadnezzar right down the centuries, the "prophecies" of Daniel abruptly stop right here during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes; it seems to know nothing of the reconstruction of the Temple, or of the tyrant's death in 164. Daniel was written (or collated – we'll get to that another time) with the message "Hang in there, God has it all under control," while the tyrant was still in power, still applying the jackboot, with no victory or hope of victory anywhere in sight. It's like Anne Frank writing, "stay strong, this evil will not last," from within the barbed wire of Auschwitz. It's a book from Saturday, not Sunday, and it faces the despair full on and never flinches.
As someone who knows a bit about despair, I find that heroic.
So if the Daniel is ultimately about Antiochus, why does it waste our time talking about Nebuchadnezzar? Because tyrants don't take criticism well; it's one of the things that makes them tyrants. If you want to talk some smack about a mad dictator, it's safer to do so in code.
The authors of Daniel – it's a compilation of varying voices, stories and languages – couldn't safely talk directly about their oppression under Antiochus Epiphanes, so instead they wrote about Nebuchadnezzar. And lest their readers miss the point, they added that whole latter half with its dreams and visions reminding us that empires come and empires go and that this latest oppressor and conqueror too will fall, just like Nebuchadnezzar did.This is probably still going on today, literally this very day; I can imagine an isolated Jewish family somewhere in Syria, huddling desperately while ISIS thugs are kicking in doors all over town, one of the parents abruptly saying, "Have I ever told you how savta got away from Hitler...?"
You're familiar with this approach if you've ever watched the television show M*A*S*H. That classic sit-com was set during the Korean War, but it wasn't really about Korea – it was about Vietnam. Vietnam was still too current, too raw and too polarizing to address directly when M*A*S*H was originally written and broadcast. The Korean War on the show provided a kind of surrogate or parallel that allowed us to talk about and deal with something we couldn't otherwise have discussed. – Fred Clark, TF: Must be the clouds in my eyes, Patheos.com
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| Not all oppressors are mighty |
But Daniel doesn't quite end there. Looking to the future, the authors of Daniel saw another beast, another empire to come. It turned out they weren't much mistaken.
* Intriguingly, it seems a swine was the appropriate offering to Zeus Epoptes, i.e. Zeus the Watcher or Zeus the Overseer, just the deity you'd want on side if you were trying to get a rebellious province back in line. More poignantly, it was also made as a burnt offering – in Greek, a holókaustos. The cult of Zeus Epoptes was located back in Attica, however, so it might not have made the trip to the lands of the Seleucids. And in any case I cannot credit that Antiochus didn't know exactly what he was doing.
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