Alexander the Great Conquers the Near East

In the autumn of 333 BC Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, defeated the army of the Persian king Darius III at Issus in Cilicia. Darius fled, and his mother, wife and children were taken in his camp (Arrian, Anabasis 2.7–11). Persia had ruled Judah for two centuries, since Cyrus took Babylon (see Cyrus Takes Babylon).

Alexander marched down the Phoenician coast. Byblos and Sidon surrendered (Arrian, Anabasis 2.15–16). Tyre, a walled city on an island (Arrian, Anabasis 2.18), offered to obey him but would not let him enter to sacrifice to its god, whom Arrian calls the Tyrian Heracles (Arrian, Anabasis 2.15–16). Alexander built a mole from the mainland out to the island (Arrian, Anabasis 2.18). The city fell in the summer of 332 BC. Arrian counts about 8,000 Tyrians killed and some 30,000 people sold into slavery (Arrian, Anabasis 2.24). Gaza also resisted and was stormed; its men died fighting and its women and children were sold (Arrian, Anabasis 2.25–27). Josephus gives the length of the two sieges as seven months and two (Josephus, Antiquities 11.325).

The Persian governor of Egypt gave up the country without a battle. Alexander sacrificed at Memphis, sailed down the Nile, and on the coast beside Lake Mareotis marked out the walls, market and temples of a new city, Alexandria (Arrian, Anabasis 3.1).

Of Palestine Arrian says at this point that all of it except Gaza had already submitted (Arrian, Anabasis 2.25–27). Josephus, writing more than four centuries later, tells a story that Arrian does not have. During the siege of Tyre, he says, the high priest refused Alexander’s demand for troops and supplies, because he had given Darius his oath not to bear arms against him (Josephus, Antiquities 11.317–319). After Gaza, the story goes on, the king marched on Jerusalem. The high priest, whom Josephus names Jaddua, was instructed in a dream and went out to meet him with the priests in their vestments and the people in white. Alexander bowed before the divine name on the high priest’s headdress and said that he had seen such a figure in a dream in Macedonia. He sacrificed in the temple, was shown the book of Daniel, and granted the Jews the right to live by their ancestral laws and to pay no tribute in the seventh year (Josephus, Antiquities 11.325–339).

In 331 BC Alexander defeated Darius for the last time near Arbela (Arrian, Anabasis 3.15), and in 323 BC he died at Babylon (Arrian, Anabasis 7.23–26) (Arrian, Anabasis 7.28). 1 Maccabees opens with his conquests and says that his officers took crowns after him (1 Maccabees 1:1–9), and Daniel pictures a great horn broken and replaced by four (Daniel 8:5–8, 20–22). Judea fell first to the Ptolemies of Egypt (Josephus, Antiquities 12.1–9) and later to the Seleucid kings of Syria (Josephus, Antiquities 12.129–133). Greek kings ruled it for the next 190 years, until the Hasmoneans won its independence (see Judea Gains Independence under the Hasmoneans). Under them the law of Moses was translated into Greek in Egypt (see the Hebrew Scriptures Are Translated into Greek), and the adoption of Greek ways in Jerusalem itself opened the crisis under Antiochus IV (1 Maccabees 1:10–15).