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The world after the exile

The Persian and Greek Empires

When the silent years began, the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon and lived under the Persian Empire, which had allowed them to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. Around 334 to 323 BC, Alexander the Great swept out of Macedonia, conquered the whole Persian Empire, and spread Greek language and culture across the known world. When he died young, his generals divided his empire, and little Judea was caught between the two greatest of their kingdoms. Through all of it the promises of Scripture held, and the prophet Daniel had even foreseen the rise of Greece.

And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king.Daniel 8:21 (KJV)

Under Persia, the world where Malachi wrote

The silent years open in the shadow of the Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great of Persia had conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and in the following year he issued the decree that allowed the exiled Jews to return to their land and rebuild the house of the LORD in Jerusalem. Under Persian rule the temple was finished, the walls of Jerusalem were raised again under Nehemiah, and Ezra the scribe taught the law to the people. It was in this settled Persian period, around 430 BC, that Malachi spoke the last recorded words of Old Testament prophecy.

Persia governed a vast realm from India to the edge of Greece, and it generally let its subject peoples keep their own religion and customs. For the Jews this meant relative peace and the freedom to reestablish their worship. The Persian period lasted about two centuries, and for much of it the small province of Judah, called Yehud, lived quietly under a governor and a high priest, rebuilding a life around the temple and the law.

This was a formative time for the faith of Israel, even without new prophets. With the exile fresh in memory, the people held all the more tightly to the law of Moses, to the Sabbath, and to the temple. Ezra had set the pattern of gathering the people to hear the Scriptures read and explained, and out of that impulse grew the habits of study and assembly that would later fill the synagogues. The Persian centuries were quiet, but they were the soil in which a Scripture-loving Judaism took firm root, the very world into which Jesus would one day be born.

Alexander the Great and the coming of Greece

The Persian age ended with startling speed. Beginning in 334 BC, a young Macedonian king named Alexander, tutored in his youth by the philosopher Aristotle, led a Greek army east and in only a few years shattered the Persian Empire. He won the decisive battles of Issus and Gaugamela, took Egypt, and pressed on as far as the borders of India. By the time of his death in Babylon in 323 BC, at the age of only thirty-two, he had conquered the largest empire the world had yet seen. Judea fell under his control along the way, as his armies passed down the coast toward Egypt.

Alexander did more than conquer. He carried Greek civilization with him and planted Greek cities across his empire, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt. He believed in blending the peoples he ruled into one Greek-speaking world. This deliberate spread of Greek language, thought, and custom is called Hellenization, and it would outlast his empire by centuries. Long after Alexander was dead, the world he opened remained a Greek-speaking world, and that fact would shape the age into which Jesus was born.

Daniel had seen it coming

The Jews did not read these upheavals as mere politics. The book of Daniel, set in the Babylonian and Persian courts, contains visions of a succession of world empires, and one of them is described with striking clarity. Daniel saw a swift he-goat from the west that crossed the whole earth without touching the ground and broke the power of a ram, and the angel told him plainly, the rough goat is the king of Grecia. The great horn between its eyes, broken at the height of its power and replaced by four, has long been understood as Alexander, who died at his zenith and whose empire was split four ways.

Christians and Jews have read such passages as evidence that the God of Israel was not surprised by the march of empires. The kingdoms of the world rose and fell inside a purpose larger than themselves. Daniel had also declared that in the days of these kings the God of heaven would set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, pointing beyond every earthly empire to the everlasting kingdom that would come in Christ.

The generals divide the spoils

Alexander left no strong heir, and his empire did not hold together. After years of war among his leading generals, the men later historians call the Successors, the empire settled into several kingdoms. Two of them mattered most for the Jews. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt from Alexandria to the south, and the Seleucids ruled Syria and the old Persian heartlands to the north and east. Judea lay on the road between them, a small and desirable land on the border of two rival Greek powers.

For about a century, from around 301 BC, the Ptolemies of Egypt controlled Judea, and these were on the whole tolerant years in which the Jews were left to their worship and their law. It was under Ptolemaic rule, in Alexandria, that the Hebrew Scriptures began to be translated into Greek. Then around 200 BC the Seleucids wrested Judea away, and the change of masters would soon bring the gravest crisis of the whole silent period, when a Seleucid king tried to stamp out the worship of the God of Israel altogether.

The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century after Christ, preserves much of what we know of these years, and he even records an old tradition that when Alexander came to Jerusalem he was shown the book of Daniel, in which a Greek king was foretold, and spared the city out of reverence. Whether or not that meeting happened as told, it captures how later Jews looked back on the age: they were sure that the God of their fathers had ruled over the rise of Greece as surely as over Babylon and Persia, and that not one of the empires that trampled through their little land moved outside his hand.

God at work behind the thrones

To the eye of faith, the point of these two centuries is not merely that empires changed hands. It is that the God who had promised a Messiah was quietly arranging the world he would come into. Persia had restored the temple and the law. Alexander had spread a single language across the nations. His Successors had drawn Judea into the wider Greek world, for good and for ill. Each step, in ways no one living through them could see, was laying groundwork for the day when the gospel of Christ would need a common tongue and open roads to run along.

The empires thought they were building their own glory. In truth they were servants of a larger story, moving the pieces into place for the coming of the King whose kingdom, as Daniel had said, would never be destroyed.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

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