Person · 3546–3597 AM · 215 BCE — 164 BCE
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Ἀντίοχος Δ΄ Ἐπιφανής
The Seleucid king who banned Judaism and provoked the Maccabean revolt
He took the epithet Epiphanes, "manifest", himself; his contemporaries turned it into Epimanes, "mad". His birth year is approximate; the month of his death is known—November or December 164—so he died almost immediately after the Temple was purified.
Here the academic and traditional counts diverge little: in this database the decrees stand at 3593–3596 AM.
On the timeline
Sources
Documents of the period
- 1 Maccabees 1 — the plundering of the Temple, the alien altar, the ban on Sabbath and circumcision
Scholarship
- Britannica, “Antiochus IV Epiphanes” — the reign 175–164; the epithet and its inversion
Basis: documents and evidence.