The so-called Maccabean War, named after the “Maccabee” Jewish rebels fighting pro-Greek compatriots and Seleucid Greeks, looms large in Hebrew imagination and history: the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the revolt to this day — in particular, the restoration of worship at Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 164 BC, after all Greek statues were removed from the site.

The Jewish Bible directly blamed Antiochus IV’s pilfering of the Temple at Jerusalem for his later death that same year. However, for the Seleucid king neither Judaea nor the war against Jewish rebels were very important matters, since he left the region in control of his lieutenants and took his army off to fight more important battles: when he died, he was in the middle of a successful Armenian campaign against his Parthian enemies.

Indeed, on this subject Flavius Josephus, a Hellenized Jew, later had an interesting argument with the Greek historian Polybius, whom he greatly admired: for the Greek Polybius, Antiochus IV's sudden death was caused by the fact that he had “wanted” to rob the treasures of the non-Jewish temple of Nanaia in Persia; Josephus on the other hand held that divine vengeance had struck him down, not because he had wanted to despoil a temple, and failed, but because he had in fact succeeded in ransacking the temple of the Jews.