Alexander marches out of Macedon, breaks the Persians, and dies young with his empire carved up among his generals. Out of that wreckage rises Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who enters Jerusalem, strips the temple of its gold, and outlaws the sacrifices, the Sabbath, and circumcision on pain of death. First Maccabees, valued and read across the whole tradition and received as Scripture by Catholics and the Orthodox while the Reformers set it apart from the canon, records here the desolating sacrilege raised upon the altar of burnt offering on the fifteenth of Chislev: the abomination of desolation that Daniel foresaw and Jesus would name again. Renegades within Israel trade the covenant for the gymnasium, and the scrolls of the law are torn and burned wherever they are found. Yet mothers go to their deaths with their circumcised infants hung at their necks, and the faithful choose to die undefiled rather than live unclean.