Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem. He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views—that is to say, that religion made very little difference and had very little part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world.
I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin, they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek.
Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very near neighbour of Greece herself. There must have been much coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the world, as you may read it described—which means making the thought of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for Greece—went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.
The possession of Palestine, inevitably, because of its position, had been very much disputed between Seleucus and Ptolemy after Alexander's death, but the dispute was decided by the battle of Ipsus, which seems to have cleared the air all round. Palestine then became subject to Egypt and so remained under successive Ptolemies for more than a hundred years.
Alexandria
The Jews in Judæa, with that love of their own customs which has always been remarkably strong in their nation, held out against the introduction of Greek thought and language, and so on, longer than any of their neighbours, but many Jews, as we have seen, had settled in Alexandria. The first three, at least, of the Ptolemies, who successively reigned in Egypt, showed favour to them; they had synagogues in other cities of Egypt besides Alexandria, and those Jews of Egypt, besides those who were in Babylonia and other parts of Asia, had the habit of coming up to Jerusalem, where was the Temple, to attend their great religious ceremonies. And these Jews brought to Jerusalem the Greek language and thought, so that the Greek influence penetrated there too at last.
Alexandria became a great city for men of letters, learned men and writers, as well a great city of trade and a great seaport. The largest library of the ancient world was collected—and later was destroyed by fire—in that city. And there, probably before 250 B.C., the books of the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew, were translated into Greek. Possibly not all were translated at that time, but it seems at least certain that the first five books, called the Pentateuch, were done into Greek about that date. Wherever they went the Jews never lost sight of their sacred books. The records of their history and their religious institutions were always with them.
Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the government of Egypt was less strongly maintained, the power of Egypt waned, and in 198 B.C. the Egyptians were thoroughly defeated by the Syrians on the banks of the Jordan, and Judæa and Jerusalem came under the rule of the Syrian king. He did not interfere with their religion or their customs, and for a while the change of rulers appears to have made very little difference to them.
Such, then, is the outline which I would have you carry in your minds of the position of those peoples of the story on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in Egypt southward, and in Thrace, Macedon, and Greece. And now I would ask you to come back again to look at the western side of the picture, for the time has fully come when we should bring more prominently into it a figure which will grow larger and larger until it grows to such a size as to fill in the whole frame, and more than the frame—the figure of world-conquering Rome.