In 168 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes captured Jerusalem, destroyed the walls, and devastated the Temple, reducing the city to a worse position than it had occupied since the time of the captivity.
Other writers again have placed the Acra on the eastern side of the hill upon which the church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands, but as this point was probably quite outside the city at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, and is at too great a distance from the Temple, it can hardly be accepted.
With Epiphanes, his son, he was the leader of a philosophic school basing its theories mainly upon Platonism, and striving to amalgamate Plato's Republic with the Christian ideal of human brotherhood.
The express declaration of these antinomian principles is said to have been given by Epiphanes.
The Pentateuch (or Hexateuch) was finally completed in its present form at some time before 400 B.C. The latest parts of the Old Testament are the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah (c. 330 B.C.), Ecclesiastes and Esther (3rd century) and Daniel, composed either in the 3rd century or according to some views as late as the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (c. 168 B.C.).