Living Words

About the King’s Business Daniel 8:1-27 by William Klock The books of 1 and 2 Maccabees in the Apocrypha detail the persecution of the Jews in the mid-160s BC, during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  2 Maccabees 6, for example, tells how “the king sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake the laws of their ancestors and no longer to live by the laws of God; also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and to call it the temple of Olympian Zeus” (6:1-2).  The gentiles used the temple of God for their orgies and drunken banquets.  Antiochus desecrated the alter with the sacrifice of a pig.  On holidays the king’s men would round up Jews and force them to participate in his parades and sacrifices.  Those who refused to participate or who were caught living by torah were killed.  Two women, for example, were caught having circumcised their baby boys.  Their babies were tied around their necks as the women were paraded through the streets to the wall of the city and then thrown down it to their deat