Pillage of the Temple by Antiochos IV upon his return from his Egyptian campaign

Antiochos IV Épiphane was returning from Egypt, where he had waged war against the Lagids, when he went up to Jerusalem and entered the sanctuary. The Seleucid king took from it the golden altar, the lampstand, the table of showbread, the vessels and the veils, as well as the reserves deposited in the Temple by private individuals — a deposit that ancient law held to be inviolable.

The plunder was not yet religious persecution: it was a fiscal raid, carried out by a sovereign whose campaigns had left him indebted and whom Rome had just humiliated. But it opened the sequence that led, two years later, to the prohibition of worship and the profanation of the sanctuary, and then to the uprising of the Maccabees.

The account comes from the first book of Maccabees, written a generation later in a Hasmonean milieu, and from the abridgment of Jason of Cyrene preserved in the second. The two sources diverge on the order of events; they agree on the despoiling of the Temple.