h synagogues.

It was under the reign of Antiochus IV., called Epiphanes, when Judaea
was tributary to Syria, that those calamities and miseries befell the
Jews which rendered it necessary for a deliverer to arise. Though
enlightened and a lover of art, this monarch was one of the most cruel,
rapacious, and tyrannical princes that have achieved an infamous
immortality. He began his reign with usurpation and treachery. Being
unsuccessful in his Egyptian campaigns, he vented his wrath upon the
Jews, as if he were mad. Onias III. was the high-priest at the time.
Antiochus dispossessed him of his great office and gave it to his
brother Jason, a Hellenized Jew, who erected in Jerusalem a gymnasium
after the Greek style. But the king, a zealot in paganism, bitterly and
scornfully detested the Jewish religion, and resolved to root it out.
His general, Apollonius, had orders to massacre the people in the
observance of their rites, to abolish the Temple service and the
Sabbath, to destroy the sacred books, and introduce idol worship. The
altar on Mount Moriah was especially desecrated, and afterward dedicated
to Jupiter. A herd of swine were driven into the Temple, and there
sacrificed. This outrage was to the Jews "the abomination of
desolation," which could never be forgotten or forgiven. The nation
rallied and defied the power of a king who could thus wantonly trample
on what was most sacred and venerable.

Two hundred years earlier, resistance would have been hopeless; but in
the mean time the population had quietly increased, and in the practice
of those virtues and labors which agricultural life called out, the
people had been strengthened and prepared to rally and defend their
lives and liberties. They were still unwarlike, without organization or
military habits; but they were brave, hardy, and patriotic. Compared,
however, with the forces which could be arrayed against them by the
Syrian monarch, who was supreme in western Asia, they were numerically
insignificant; and they were also despised and undervalued. They seemed
to be as sheep among wolves,--easy to be intimidated and even
exterminated.

The outrage in the Temple was the consummation of a series of
humiliations and crimes; for in addition to the desecration of the
Jewish religion, Antiochus had taken Jerusalem with a great army, had
entered into the Temple, where the national treasures were deposited
(for it was the custom even among Greeks and Romans to dep