In the 170s BCE the high priesthood at Jerusalem, an office held for life by inheritance, began to be bought. Jason obtained it from Antiochus IV and set about turning Jerusalem into a Greek city with a gymnasium below the Temple; Menelaus outbid him and took it in turn. In 167, after a failed Egyptian campaign and an insurrection in the city, the king forbade the sabbath, circumcision and the Temple offerings, and an altar to Olympian Zeus was set up in the sanctuary, the abomination of desolation of the book of Daniel.
Resistance began with a rural priestly family, Mattathias and his sons, and passed to Judas Maccabeus, who took Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple in 164 BCE, the eight day festival kept since as Hanukkah. Antiochus died the same year; the fighting continued for two decades until the Hasmoneans achieved effective independence, and the dynasty they founded held both crown and high priesthood.
The persecution left more than a festival. First and Second Maccabees are the first Jewish texts to make martyrdom a theme in its own right, and Daniel, written in these years, contains the clearest statement of bodily resurrection in the Hebrew Bible, a doctrine that would divide Pharisees from Sadducees and pass into Christianity and Islam. That a Hellenistic king should have attacked a cult at all remains the puzzle of the episode, and the answers historians give to it differ sharply.