It is true that the hopes of the complete restoration of their former might and independence cherished at the time of the return from captivity had not been fulfilled. The splendid promises of the prophets withdrew from the mean and narrow sphere of the present into an ideal and remote future. If any expectations of political power still existed, they had to be abandoned perforce. The pressure of the times taught and compelled the people to turn their eyes to internal and spiritual conditions, by no means to the detriment of the community. The period of the Babylonian exile, comparatively short though it was, had wrought a complete change in the religious views of the nation. The leaning towards heathen cults, which had been so strongly manifest in earlier times, had completely disappeared; the prophets and psalms of this date employ no weapon but ridicule against idolatry. The sufferings they had endured, the infliction of the long-threatened chastisement, had brought about a purification of religious feeling. The adherents of heathen cults had withdrawn from the Jewish society in time of oppression, and the result had been a tightening of the bond that held them together, and a stern abhorrence of intermixture with foreigners, born of a keen instinct of self-preservation and strengthened by the memory of old and mournful experience. Contact with the Magian religion, which predominated in the Persian Empire and permitted no image-worship, may have done something towards this end; at least an acquaintance with eastern Asiatic conceptions is evident in the writings of the prophets of the exile (Ezekiel and Zechariah). The belief in the personal existence of angels, and of evil spirits likewise, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead in the enlightened aspect of the immortality of the soul, a greater accuracy of chronological statement, etc., are intellectual acquirements which the Jews brought with them from exile and developed further under the same influences.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[332-312 B.C.]
In the year 334 Alexander of Macedon entered upon that campaign of conquest against Persia which speedily brought about the fall of the great empire. After the battle of Issus (November 333) Syria and Phœnicia were subjugated, Tyre alone offered a stubborn resistance, and was not taken until August 332, after a seven months’ siege. It is said that at the beginning of the siege Alexander called upon the high priest of Jerusalem to rebel against Darius. But, unlike the Samaritans, who promptly brought an auxiliary army to Alexander’s assistance, the Jews refused to renounce the allegiance they owed to the king of Persia. In order to punish this disobedience, Alexander marched upon Jerusalem after the fall of Tyre, which was soon followed by that of Gaza. The high priest came to meet him at the head of the assembled priesthood, marching in solemn procession in their sacred vestments. At this spectacle Alexander dismounted and bowed reverently before the venerable high priest, because—as he declared to the astonished Parmenio—just such an august figure had once appeared to him in a dream. He made a peaceful entry into Jerusalem, caused sacrifices to be offered for him in the temple, and permitted the Jews to live according to their laws, granting them, among other privileges, exemption from taxation during the Sabbath year. Many Jews thereupon determined to enter his army.
The authenticity of this story of Alexander’s march to Jerusalem, which is told by Josephus and the Talmud but by no Greek historian, has been impugned with good reason.[5] The high priest in question is called Jadus (Jaddua) by Josephus, and Simon the Just by the Talmud. Later amplifications of these stories declare that, as a token of gratitude for Alexander’s favour, the high priest promised him that all sons born to high priests that year should be called Alexander. Although certain books of the Bible are later than the dissolution of the Persian Empire, Alexander’s name is not mentioned in any; he is only referred to under various figures in the dreams and visions of the book of Daniel. Thus the great figure which Nebuchadrezzar beholds in a dream, the iron thighs (Daniel ii. 32-40), the fourth terrible beast in Daniel’s dream (vii. 7, 19), the goat coming from the west in the following vision (viii. 5 seq.), and, lastly, the great king (xi. 3), stand for the Macedonian kingdom or Alexander the Great.
The dissolution of the Persian Empire at first brought about no substantial change in the political and religious condition of the Jews, and the influences bred of the diffusion of Greek civilisation in Anterior Asia were not felt by them till much later. But, generally speaking, the state of the Jewish commonwealth during this period and down to the wars of the Maccabees is wrapped in a certain amount of obscurity, since the lack of Biblical records throws us back almost entirely on the narrative of Josephus, who himself drew from somewhat turbid sources and did not sift his material with sufficient care. After the rapid decline of the Macedonian kingdom and during the conflict of Alexander’s generals among themselves, Palestine, together with Phœnicia and Cœle-Syria, became the apple of discord between the rulers of the Syrian and Egyptian kingdoms. Ptolemy I (Lagi or Soter reigned until 283) seized Jerusalem in the year 320 by a sudden attack on the Sabbath (on which day no resistance was offered) and carried away a large number of Jews to Egypt, where some of them were sold as slaves and some enrolled in the royal army. Ptolemy, however, did not gain permanent possession of the country until the battle of Gaza, in 312, after which he again marched into Jerusalem, but acted with great clemency, so much so that many Jews of consequence migrated with him to Egypt, one of them being a learned man of the name of Ezekias (Hizkiah). The high priests at the time were Onias I, in 330, and his son Simon I, in 310.
UNDER THE SELEUCIDS
[312-204 B.C.]
With the battle of Gaza in 312 is associated, among the Jews as among other oriental nations, the “era of the Seleucids” (also called Minjan Shtarot—æra contractuum—and, probably, “[the years] of the rule of the Hellenes”) which remained in use during the Middle Ages and even later. When afterwards the era of the creation of the world also came into use among the Jews, most Jewish chronologists, in order to reduce the two to a common standard, assumed that the era of the Seleucids had begun in the year 3448 after the creation of the world, and one thousand after the coming forth out of Egypt. They accordingly reduced any given date of the Seleucid era to the corresponding date after the creation of the world by adding 3447 to it, and to the corresponding date of the Christian era (with precision only for the first nine months of the year, as the Seleucid year begins in autumn) by deducting the Seleucid date from 312 to find the year B.C., or deducting 312 from it to find the year A.D. Asarja de’ Rossi, in the twenty-third chapter of Meor Enajim, enlarges upon the error of Jewish chronologists, who identify the beginning of the Seleucid era with the beginning of Greek dominion in Asia.
For more than a century Judea remained under the rule of the Greek kings of Egypt, and on the whole enjoyed, with slight interruptions, a period of happy tranquillity and benevolent treatment. The relation of the kings of Egypt to the country cannot have been widely different from that of the kings of Persia, the commonwealth was represented abroad by the high priest, whose first business it was to see to the levying of the taxes. After Simon I, mentioned above, the office was held by his brother Eleazar (his son Onias being too young), who was succeeded by his uncle Manasseh (276), and then by Onias II (250).