A CENTURY LATER A YOUNG MACEDONIAN CHIEFTAIN,TRAINED IN THE BEST GREEK SCHOOLS,DECIDED THAT HE MUST BRING THE BLESSINGS OF HIS ADOPTED CIVILISATION TO ALL MANKIND,AND CONQUERED ASIA.THE COUNTRY OF THE JEWS WAS OVERRUN BY THE ARMIES OF ALEXANDER AND WAS TURNED INTO A MACEDONLAN PROVINCE.AFTER HIS DEATH,ONE OF HIS GENERALS BY THE NAME OF PTOLEMY MADE HIMSELF KING OF EGYPT AND THE PROVINCE OF PALESTINE WAS ADDED TO HIS POSSESSIONS
During their long residence in Persia,the Jews had made the acquaintance of a new religious system.The Persians were the disciples of a great religious teacher whose name was Zarathustra,or Zoroaster.
Zarathustra regarded all life as a constant struggle between Good and Evil.The lord of wisdom,called Ormuzd,was forever at war with Ahriman,the lord of ignorance and evil.
This was a new idea to most of the Jews.
Thus far they had recognised one single master of all things,who was called Jehovah.When things had gone wrong,when they had been defeated in battle or suffered from sickness,they had invariably attributed such disaster to the lack of devotion of their own people.The idea that sin was the result of the direct interference of a malevolent spirit had never occurred to them.Even the serpent in Paradise in their eyes had been less wicked than Adam and Eve,who wilfully had disobeyed the holy commands.
Under the influence of the doctrines of Zarathustra,the Jews now began to believe in the existence of a spirit who tried to undo all the good accomplished by Jehovah.
They called him Jehovah's adversary,or Satan.
They feared him and they hated him and in the year 231,they were sure that he had come to earth.
A young pagan prince by the name of Alexander destroyed the remnants of the Persian armies in the plains of Nineveh.Darius,the last of the Persian kings,lay murdered by the side of one of his own royal highways.
The mighty empire which had been such a good friend to the Jewish exiles was a thing of the past.Alexander and his Greeks were triumphant.It was a terrible time.
The end of the world seemed to have come.
Only the world never quite ends.There always is a “next Chapter”and this now opened for the Jews under very strange aspects.
Alexander of Macedonia was really not a Greek.The true Greeks regarded him as a Macedonian,as a “foreigner.”But he himself,convinced of his love for Greek life and civilisation,refused to share this point of view.
As a very young man he made himself the avowed champion of the Greek cause.Thereafter it was his ambition to carry the ideas of Solon and Pericles to the four corners of the world,that all men might be benefited by their noble appeal to human intelligence.
Alexander began his career in 336.
Thirteen years later his dead body lay in the palace which once had been the home of Nebuchadnezzar,and which now was to have been the centre of a new world empire.
In the meantime,the Macedonians had conquered all the land from the river Nile to the river Indus,and they had carried the rudiments of Greek civilisation to all the nations of western Asia and Egypt.
When the armies of the great conqueror began to overrun the plains of Syria,the Jews were faced with a difficult problem.
How should they behave towards this new master?Only a few years before (in 345)they had dared to revolt against certain atrocities inflicted upon them by Artaxerxes,one of the later Syrian kings.
For a short while,aided by the Egyptian king,Nectabenus,and an auxiliary corps of Greeks,they had been able to maintain themselves.This easy victory had emboldened the Phoenicians to follow their example and begin a revolution of their own.As a result,the city of Sidon had been burned to the ground.
Shortly afterwards,Jerusalem had shared a similar fate.Most of the houses had been destroyed.
