Reinhard Kratz over at TheTorah breaks down the Jewish accounts of Antiochus IV in Jerusalem. Kratz holds that the Greek king of Syro-Palaestina did less than the Jews claim he did.
Kratz inherits David Ganz that Daniel 11 came first. Kratz diverges from Ganz on it being true prophecy; Daniel 11 fails accuracy after the initial "persecution". Also - argues Kratz - it "predicts" that the Greek king didn't order the wrongs done to Jerusalem. 1-2 Maccabees and Josephus, and Jewish lore generally, are in agreement that the king was a blasphemer himself.
Kratz sides with Daniel 11 that the king wasn't a "blasphemous tyrant". That much is a trope. It was already a trope: applied to - for example - Nabunaid of Tayman. In reality the local priests would sometimes halt the sacrifices in protest. If the priests' party won, as shah Cyrus won, they would restore the sacrifices and blame the old king.
All Antiochus did was quash a rebellion, sort-of. His troops, however, weren't even Greeks; mostly they were Syrians. These guys had to be kept on a leash or they'd take out their frustrations on historic enemies. This is the Near East we're talking about. Antiochus seems not to have kept his leash tight enough. So Daniel 11 doesn't even blame the king, it blames "they" - all the hosts with him - for disrupting the rituals.
One wonders - well, I wonder - if really what we're talking about here is the calendar. The Seleucid calendar was lunar with scheduled intercalated months (so was the Roman calendar back then). The Ptolemies, who'd had the place before the Antiochii, were Egyptian so solar. The Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls are full of invective about the calendar.
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