2.4 Jewish History - The Greeks and Hasmoneans

Hello, listeners. This is episode 2.4 of The Bible Unthumped, and we are about midway through our series on Jewish history, the history of the people who wrote the Bible. We’ve covered a fair amount of territory already, so let’s start again with a super quick re-cap.

The Hebrew tribes in Canaan organize as a confederation at the end of the Bronze Age. They become two kingdoms in the 10th century BC. The northern kingdom called Israel gets destroyed by the Assyrians in 720 BC, and they are basically never heard from again. The southern kingdom called Judah sticks around a while longer but is eventually destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. Their capital at Jerusalem is burned to the ground, including the temple of Yahweh. The Jews are exiled and scattered, but after the Persians overthrow the Babylonians, the Jews are allowed to reclaim their homeland and start to rebuild a version of their former culture but as a subject province of Persia, not as a Jewish Kingdom. And, the Persian period of Jewish history lasts until 332 BC. By this time, the vast majority of what we call the Old Testament has been written. Some of the books, including the Torah, Genesis to Deuteronomy, have been edited into a form we’d recognize today.

But, Jesus won’t show up for more than another three centuries, so we have a ways to go. Today, we are going to talk about the Greeks (and the Hasmonean kingdom) and a bit about how both Persia and Greece influenced Judaism. 

Now, in the 330s BC, human history experiences one of the most important turning points of all time. Some historians will argue that it's the most important thing that’s ever happened, in fact. 

In 336 BC, a young man named Alexander, who was a student of the famous philosopher Aristotle, comes to the throne of Macedonia in northern Greece when his father is assassinated. Alexander quickly solidified his power base in Greece before launching eastward on a conquest that would be astonishing in its speed and geographic scope. He first conquered what is now Turkey. In 332 BC, he took over Palestine where the province of Judea was located. Then he conquered Egypt and founded the city called Alexandria, named after himself. 

After Egypt, Alexander headed east, crushing the Persian Empire in every battle, taking Mesopotamia, then the Persian heartland, before conquering lands as far east as India. And, just like that, in one fell swoop, Persia was gone, and the Jews were subjects of the Greeks instead. 

But, Alexander died at the age of 33 in 323 BC, and he left no obvious heir to the throne of his vast empire. So, this is oversimplifying, but two of Alexander’s generals end up ruling the bulk of the newly Greek lands—Seleucus and Ptolemy. Seleucus founds the Seleucid Greek Empire, which includes Mesopotamia, Persia, and Alexander’s eastern lands. And, Ptolemy founds the Ptolemaic Greek Empire, which includes Egypt and Palestine including Judea. So, the Jews are now Greeks under the Ptolemaic Empire based in Egypt. 

Many Jews relocate to Alexandria, which quickly becomes one of the most important cities in the Mediterranean, home to a famous lighthouse and a famous library. In Egypt around this time, many of the Jews’ most important texts are translated from Hebrew into Greek, including the books that later become part of the Bible. Greek becomes the language of the educated classes and the everyday language for Jews living in Egypt. 

And, for the Jews back in the homeland of Judea, where Aramaic was becoming the primary everyday language, it was pretty nice being ruled by the Egyptian Greeks because they sort of let the Jews do what they wanted without too much interference for about 125 years. But, around the year 200, those eastern Seleucid Greeks took control of Judea, and King Antiochus IV stopped being so nice to the Jews. He intended to stamp out their religion, desecrated the Temple of Yahweh in 167 BC, and fought campaigns to force the Jews to be more Greeklike. Plenty of Jews were happy to adopt Greek ways, but following a complicated period of civil conflict among the Jews and rebellion against the Seleucid Greeks, the traditionalists among the Jews led by a warrior family called the Maccabees or sometimes the Hasmoneans, gained independence from the Greeks around the year 110 BC and took over a fairly large territory, which included Galilee, a land in northern Palestine where the inhabitants were forcibly converted to Judaism. Galilee becomes notable because this is where Jesus will grow up a little more than a century later. 

Though the Hasmoneans were themselves Jews, they were quite ruthless with their own people, and court intrigues and infighting and manipulation of the priesthood of Yahweh meant this was not a stable or happy time in Judea. The independent Hasmonean Kingdom lasted only about 50 years until 63 BC, which is the date at which we will pick up next week.  

_____

Let’s talk now about how the Persians and the Greeks influenced Judaism during the Second Temple period. Simplistically, first, Persian influences came from the East, and then Greek influences came from the West. Since the Jews lived sandwiched between, they could not help but absorb the culture and even aspects of the religions of the Empires that ruled them during the time we’ve been discussing. 

For today, we will take note of things that were absent from Israelite religion before the exile and the things that show up for the first time after the Persians and the Greeks have ruled Judea. This is again a subject that deserves its own arc of episodes, something I hope to do in the future, but let’s superficially note some of the new influences here. 

The Persian religion was highly dualistic. If there was a good God, there was also an evil god. If there were lesser deities that served the good God, then there were corresponding lesser deities that were evil. If there were heavens where the divine lived, then there was an opposite realm that housed evil. This dualistic idea serves as the backdrop for Satan, for angels and demons, and for heaven and hell in the conceptions of the afterlife. Persians also believed in a judgment at death and a messiah who would participate in the renewal of the world at a final judgment. If you go looking in Israelite religion for an afterlife, angels and demons, Satan, or a messiah in the early texts of the Old Testament, you won’t find them. They entered Jewish religious thought through Persia. 

The Greek philosophies that spread through Alexander and his successors from the west into the Middle East and beyond brought with them a certain sense of human equality and a universalism that conflicted with and triumphed over the idea of national gods who were appeased through sacrifices at temples. This relates to the swing toward true monotheism—that some one god must be universally, as it were, applicable. Not our god versus your god, but the god. No longer, for example, Yahweh, god of Israel, vs. Dagon, god of the Philistines. But, just God. Skipping ahead a bit, to illustrate, Yahweh doesn’t appear in the New Testament as the name of God. Rather, the Greek words theos or kyrios are used, generic words for God and lord, respectively. 

Religion became much more concerned with ethics and with the nature of the divine and its relationship to the physical and human world. Greek thought brought nuanced views of Hades, the place of the afterlife. And, in both Persia and Greece, as well as in Egypt, there was a view that great humans could also be gods. That divinity and humanity could mingle and be united. Specifically, this was true of the emperors and pharaohs who were worshiped as divinities and sons of gods or who, after death, were elevated to live in heaven among the stars as immortals. This human-divine mixture was an idea that did not exist in the former Israelite religion. 

The idea of breath or spirit became conflated with the Greek idea of the soul, that persistent and ethereal aspect of the human. Even such major ideas as sin and absolution take leaps forward under the Greeks. 

As I say, all of this deserves more discussion in future episodes, but know that the Israelite religion as we read about it from the early days of the Hebrew tribes and Israelite monarchies has changed by the time we get to Judaism leading up to the time of Jesus. And, be aware of how momentous the coming of Alexander the Great really was to world history. He mingles the east and the west. Civilization gets magnified, setting the stage for globalism and humanism, and Greek philosophy underpins the way the western world uses its collective brain. The political and cultural conditions are provided for religions with origins in the east to move westward toward the centers of power, for example Judaism and eventually Christianity spread westward from Palestine to Athens and Rome. There is before Alexander, and there is after Alexander, and to this day, we live under the influence of his conquest.

_____

Finally for today, let’s mention the last of the Old Testament books that get written during the Greek Period of Jewish history. As we discussed last week, 36 of the 39 books of the Old Testament had been written during the Israelite monarchical period, the exile, and the Persian period. After the time of Alexander the Great, we get the final three: Song of Solomon, Esther, and Daniel. 

All three of these were written quite late in the Old Testament period but have settings in much earlier times. For example, Song of Solomon, which is a book of erotic poetry, is ascribed to Solomon the 10th century BC king of Israel, but follows a pattern from much later Greek and Mesopotamian literature. Similarly, Daniel includes stories about a hero-figure set at the time of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century, but the language and subject matter reflect the 2nd century BC. And, Esther is a story about a Jewish woman in the court of the Persian Emperor set in the 5th century BC, but probably written in the 3rd century BC.

And, when we add these three books, we have the complete Old Testament writings. Though, it is important to note that these books had not been grouped into any definitive collection until later. The last Old Testament book written was Daniel, completed about 165 BC, and it was about 350 years after that, well after the time of Jesus, even, that the books were formed into a Hebrew Bible.  

In the next episode, we will pick up our Jewish history with the end of the Hasmonean Jewish Kingdom in 63 BC, and the beginning of Roman domination, and we’ll talk about the various types of Jews that lived at the time of Jesus and that figured into his life and ministry. 

Let me take a moment to remind you that if you want to reach out to the podcast, particularly with any questions you might have, you can email us. And I want to mention, since I haven’t for a while, that there is a website that accompanies the podcast at thebibleunthumped.com. This website is, in a word, very basic, but I hope to make it more useful in the future. I will hope to post resources related to each episode for more information and to highlight source material. But, the truth is that up to this point in the podcast, I’ve merely been sharing information at a sort of encyclopedia-level rather than anything creditable to particular scholars or representing active debate. Everything I’ve mentioned so far is easily googled.  

Thank you for listening. I hope you are enjoying The Bible Unthumped and that you will share it with your friends, especially if you know folks who are recovering Bible Thumpers or who need a space to explore their questions about the Bible. 

I’ll see you next time. Less thumping. More understanding.