Catholic Commentary
Antiochus's Decrees: Desecration of the Temple and the Law
1Not long after this, the king sent out an old man of Athens to compel the Jews to depart from the laws of their fathers and not to live by the laws of God,2and also to pollute the sanctuary in Jerusalem and to call it by the name of Olympian Zeus, and to call the sanctuary in Gerizim by the name of Zeus the Protector of foreigners, even as the people who lived in that place did.
2 Maccabees 6:1–2 describes King Antiochus IV sending an Athenian official to force Jews to abandon their ancestral laws and God's Torah, and to desecrate the Jerusalem Temple and Samaritan sanctuary by renaming them after Zeus. This passage records the systematic suppression of Jewish religious identity through combined legal coercion and cultic profanation.
Antiochus didn't just attack Jewish worship—he attacked the Jews' memory of who God is by renaming His Temple after a pagan god, the first blow in a strategy that always begins by severing a people from their founding law.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
At the typological level, this desecration prefigures what Jesus calls the "abomination of desolation" (Mt 24:15, citing Dn 9:27; 11:31; 12:11), pointing forward to both the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and, in Catholic eschatological reading, to the final apostasy of the last days. The "renaming" of the sacred — the attempt to redefine the identity of God's dwelling by the authority of a human power — is the archetypal form of sacrilege. In the moral-spiritual sense, these verses illuminate the mechanism of every apostasy: first the Law is attacked (the Word of God silenced), and then the sanctuary is renamed (worship is redirected). The sequence is always the same.
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses along several interconnected lines.
The Inviolability of Divine Law. The Catechism teaches that the moral law has God as its author and is expressed most perfectly in the Ten Commandments (CCC §§1950–1960). Antiochus's decree attacks this very principle: that there exists a law above royal decree, a law the state cannot legitimately abolish. The martyrs of Maccabees become proto-witnesses to what Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae articulates — that conscience is bound to seek and adhere to divine truth, and that no human authority may command what God forbids (DH §2–3).
Sacrilege and the Sanctity of Sacred Space. The renaming of the Temple is what the Catechism defines as sacrilege: "profaning or treating unworthily the sacraments and other liturgical actions, as well as persons, things, or places consecrated to God" (CCC §2120). St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the Maccabees (Homily on the Maccabees, PG 50), identifies the desecration of the Temple as the paradigmatic act that makes subsequent martyrdom both necessary and holy: one cannot acquiesce to the profane renaming of what God has claimed.
Typology of the Antichrist. Following Hippolytus (On the Antichrist, ch. 54) and St. Jerome's commentary on Daniel, Catholic tradition has consistently read Antiochus IV as a figura of the eschatological Antichrist — a power that "exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship" (2 Thes 2:4). The Catechism itself, citing this Pauline text, treats the "abomination of desolation" as a recurring and finally consummated pattern (CCC §675).
Renaming as Spiritual Warfare. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth (Vol. 1), reflects on the temptation of redefining God according to human ideological categories. Antiochus's decree is the political enactment of that temptation: to take the living God and rename him in the image of human power.
Contemporary Catholics encounter the logic of Antiochus not in edicts demanding Temple sacrifice to Zeus, but in the subtler cultural pressure to "rename" the sacred — to redefine marriage, the human person, the liturgy, or the moral law according to categories imported from ideological systems that do not acknowledge divine authority. The pattern of these verses is precise and recognizable: first, detach a community from its founding law ("depart from the laws of their fathers"), then rename its sacred space and practices according to the dominant culture's preferred vocabulary.
The practical application is this: Catholics are called to examine where they have permitted the "renaming" of sacred realities in their own lives — whether through the casual adoption of language, categories, or assumptions that subtly replace a scriptural and doctrinal understanding with a secular one. Just as the Maccabean faithful are distinguished by their refusal to cooperate with the renaming, the contemporary Catholic's first act of resistance is attentiveness to language itself — insisting on calling things by their right names, as defined by Revelation and Tradition, even under social pressure. This is not rigidity; it is the fidelity that makes martyrdom, when it comes, intelligible.
Commentary
2 Maccabees 6:1 — The Emissary and the Erasure of Law
The phrase "not long after this" ties these decrees directly to the preceding narrative of Antiochus's plunder of the Temple (2 Macc 5:15–21), making clear that desecration of space and suppression of law belong to a single imperial strategy. The "old man of Athens" (Greek: Athēnaion tina geron) is a figure of particular significance. The text does not name him — a subtle narrative choice that denies him the honor of historical memory — but identifies him by city and age. Athens was the philosophical and cultural capital of the Greek world, so sending an Athenian communicates that the weapon deployed against Judaism is not merely military but intellectual and civilizational: Hellenism itself, embodied in its premier city, is marshaled to displace Torah. The word rendered "compel" (anagkazein) is forceful — this is not persuasion but coercion, a mandate backed by royal power.
The aim is described in careful parallel: to "depart from the laws of their fathers" (a phrase invoking ancestral, ethnic, and customary identity) and to "not live by the laws of God" (a phrase invoking divine authority and revelation). The two formulations are not redundant. The first targets the Jews' social and communal identity; the second targets their theological obedience. Antiochus attacks both simultaneously because he understands — perhaps better than some of his victims — that for Israel, the ancestral is inseparable from the divine. The Torah is not merely custom; it is covenant. To strip one is to destroy the other.
2 Maccabees 6:2 — The Renaming of the Sanctuary
The second verse moves from the suppression of law to the corruption of worship. Two sanctuaries are mentioned: the Temple in Jerusalem (the legitimate, divinely chosen dwelling of the Name) and the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim (the rival Samaritan holy site, itself a source of ongoing tension with Jerusalem since the return from exile). Both are to be "polluted" — the Greek bebēlōsai, to profane, to drag from the sacred into the common — and renamed.
The renaming is theologically violent in a precise way. To rename a holy place is to make a claim about its true owner. The Jerusalem Temple, built for the Name of the LORD (cf. 1 Kgs 8:29), is to be claimed for Zeus Olympios, the chief deity of the Greek pantheon. The Gerizim sanctuary is reassigned to Zeus Xenios, the god of hospitality toward foreigners — a bitter irony, since the Samaritans who worshipped there were themselves regarded by Jews as foreigners who had corrupted the true religion. The note that this renaming was done "even as the people who lived in that place did" suggests the Samaritan community had either voluntarily or under pressure accommodated to the Hellenistic cult, making them a foil for the faithful Jews who will resist.