In 334 B.C., sixty-three years after the reforms of Ezra at Jerusalem, Alexander the Great led his army of Macedonians and Greeks into Asia. In 333 he routed Darius III, the last of the Persian kings, at Issus in Cilicia. In 332, after a siege of seven months, he took Tyre, sold 30,000 of its people as slaves, served Gaza the same way, occupied Egypt and laid the foundations of Alexandria. In 331 he shattered the last Persian army at Gaugamela in Assyria and entered Babylon, Susa and Persepolis. Thence he pushed on into central Asia and India, and at his death in 323 had founded a greater empire than any conqueror before him.

It was not only in extent that the conquests of Alexander outdid those of Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian kings. Here for the first time in history we see a conscious theory of imperialism in practice. A social order is usually taken for granted until it enters a period of crisis. Then it becomes a subject of questioning and criticism; and then the ruling class begin to explain it and defend it. So it was with the Greeks.

After their victories over Persia in the fifth century B.C. the Greeks developed rapidly from a predominantly free towards a predominantly slave economy. The number of slaves was increased by successful war; and slave labour displaced free labour. In the long run this led to a corresponding displacement of the self-governing city-state by military monarchies, first Macedonian, finally Roman, which were better able than the city-state to hold down the mass of slaves and impoverished freemen. But this political development was held up in Greece by geographical factors. Greek cities were situated not, like those of Egypt and Babylonia, in a great river basin, but in mountain valleys or on arms of the sea which hindered the emergence of a unified government. The result was a respite of 150 years, from the Persian defeats at Salamis and Plataea to the time of Alexander, during which art, science and democracy, rooted in a tradition of free craftsmanship, had time to flower before they slowly withered in the atmosphere of a great slave-empire. Slavery in particular came in for criticism. For Greek slavery was not confined to "barbarians" and poor people whose lot prosperous citizens could take for granted and ignore. In the constant wars between cities any citizen might be taken prisoner and sold into slavery in another city. Such contradictions between ideals and realities forced the defenders of the social order to think out justifications which could be somehow squared with facts. In the fourth century B.C. we find Plato, while accepting slavery, recommending that Greeks shall no longer enslave one another, but only "barbarians". We find Isocrates urging the Greek cities to join forces, loot the Persian Empire and so solve their social problem -- though he is class-conscious enough to recognize as equals those "barbarians" of the ruling class who are Greek in education and culture. We find, finally, Aristotle arguing that there are "slaves by nature" whom it is just to reduce to bondage, and identifying these with the Asiatics, who "are always conquered and the slaves of others."¹

The conquests of Alexander therefore were more than a mere predatory adventure. They were the execution of a planned social policy. He and his successors did not indeed cease to enslave Greeks, but they opened immense new supplies in Asia. They dotted their dominions with new cities (the many Alexandrias, Seleucias, Antiochs, etc.) in which Greek settlers, enriched by the plunder of the East, formed the citizen body and lived on the labour of the Oriental masses.

Jerusalem had not resisted Alexander and was left alone for the moment. The story told by Josephus four centuries later, according to which Alexander personally visited Jerusalem and paid homage to its high priest, is unsupported by any other writer and on the face of it is an invention of Jewish priests for their own glory. At the time Alexander was too busy besieging Tyre and Gaza and securing Egypt to bother about Jerusalem. But after his death Palestine became a bone of contention between rival Macedonian generals who fought for the succession to his empire and, in the words of a Jewish historian, "multiplied evils in the earth".² Between 320 and 301 Palestine changed masters no less than seven times, finally falling to Ptolemy, who had made himself king of Egypt. Large numbers of Jews were deported to Alexandria, where they were eventually allotted a separate quarter and granted a measure of self-government. For, however roughly they treated the Jews at times, the Ptolemies, like the Persian kings before them, had an interest in conciliating at least the ruling class of this frontier-community.

In this and similar ways there gradually arose in the principal cities of the Mediterranean colonies of Jews descended partly from prisoners of war, partly from settlers who migrated to better themselves. They therefore differed widely from one another in social position. Had the Jewish "dispersion" (diaspora), as it was called, consisted wholly or even mainly of fortune-seekers, they would soon have been assimilated by their Greek neighbours and lost to Judaism. Many must have been so assimilated. But most of the "dispersion" belonged to the exploited classes -- slaves, freedmen or petty traders. It was they who made history. Living in Greek cities they learnt the Greek language and used a Greek version of the Pentateuch and other Hebrew writings; and the better educated among them read Greek literature. This led to interaction between Judaism and kindred movements in the Greek-speaking world. One outcome of the revolutionary criticism of institutions in the Greek-speaking world of the fourth century B.C. was the Stoic philosophy of Zeno and Cleanthes (the one of Phoenician descent, the other a Greek of the poorer class). This, with its repudiation of temples, images and sacrifices, its affirmation of the brotherhood of man and its appeal to reason (logos -- easily identified with the "word of Jahveh" often invoked in the prophetic writings), left an unmistakeable mark on later Judaism and through it on Christianity. But it was the differences between Stoicism and the ideology of the Greek ruling class which commended it to serious Jews. With the ruling class itself they could not come to terms.

Only the more intelligent Greeks at first drew any distinction between the Jews and other conquered "barbarians" of Asia. Keen observers were struck by their monotheism and relative freedom from crude superstition. Josephus cites a dialogue written by Clearchus of Soli, a disciple of Aristotle, in which Aristotle (against all historical probability) is made to express admiration of Judaism. And we have a singular instance of an even closer approach between Greeks and Jews. At some time during the dynastic struggles following Alexander's death (probably about 302) the Spartans, who were trying to throw off the Macedonian yoke, made overtures to the Jews and even claimed kinship with them. That Sparta, a hundred years before the mistress of Greece, should have sought an alliance with the Jews shows how hard she had been hit by the disasters of the fourth century, and how good a fight the Jews must have put up against one or other of the Macedonian war-lords.

Under the early Ptolemies Greek cities were founded at Ptolemais (Acre), Philadelphia (Amman) and other places in and around Palestine. The Jews therefore had ample opportunity in their own country to study the Greek way of life -- the wealth, leisure and culture which it provided for the few, and the toil and degradation which it exacted from the many. The Jewish priests and nobles, who a few generations before had submitted reluctantly to the reforms of Nehemiah and Ezra, naturally welcomed Hellenism. But to the Jewish masses the gymnasium and the theatre were luxuries of the rich, dearly bought by the abrogation of the Pentateuchal law with its guaranteed rest-day and protection against usury and enslavement. They had a means of organization against Hellenism in their local assemblies or synagogues. These organizations were of vital importance in the history of Judaism and provided a model for the first Christian churches three centuries later. Wherever there was a Jewish community of any size, its men and women met weekly for study, exhortation and devotion. The affairs of the synagogue were managed by a committee of senior members or "elders", one of whom would naturally preside at the weekly meetings. The chairman or "ruler of the synagogue", who was not necessarily a priest and in early days might even be a woman, called on any member or visitor to read and comment on passages from the law and the prophets, to offer prayer or to address the meeting. Collections were taken for the poorer members, and instruction given to the young. The synagogue, with its popular basis and freedom of discussion, was entirely independent of the priesthood of Jerusalem and in the end survived its destruction.

The issue between the Hellenized ruling class and the Jewish masses came rapidly to a head after 198 B.C., when the Seleucid king Antiochus HI succeeded in winning Palestine from the Ptolemies. The Seleucid Empire was not a compact geographical unit like Egypt, but a gigantic, ramshackle dominion reaching from the coast of the Mediterranean to the borders of India and without ethnic, economic or strategic cohesion. Throughout its history it had to fight a losing battle against revolts in India, Parthia, Armenia and elsewhere as well as against its Macedonian rivals. They too had revolts to face -- for example the revolutionary movement in Greece itself headed by Agis and Cleomenes of Sparta in the third century B.C. These difficulties of the Macedonian monarchs led in the second century B.C. to the intervention of Rome, which in 190 decisively defeated Antiochus in Asia Minor, drove him behind the Taurus range and imposed a huge indemnity. To meet this the Seleucids put the screw on their Asiatic subjects, thus adding to the internal weakness of their empire. In 187 Antiochus was killed in an attempt to loot a temple in Persia. A little later his son, SeleucusJV, sent his chancellor, Heliodorus, to plunder the temple at Jerusalem. It was probably plundered; for the Jewish legend of Heliodorus being scourged out of the temple by angels, like the earlier legend of the destruction of the army of Sennacherib, is plain wishful thinking. Such acts alienated even the wealthy classes in the countries concerned and fanned the flame of nationalism among the masses to white heat.

One sign of the growing nationalist movement in Palestine was the revival of prophetic writing. Its circulation had probably never entirely ceased; but under foreign rule it was naturally anonymous, and in the absence of known historical allusions the fragments are difficult to date. Under the Seleucid Empire, however, prophecy becomes transparently topical and revolutionary. Anonymous pieces appended to the book of Zechariah denounce the Seleucid rulers and Jewish high priests who traffic in office and maltreat "the poor of the flock".³ One fragment incites the Jews and Samaritans (Judah and Ephraim) to sink their quarrel and unite against the Greeks, and foretells the reign of a victorious people's king who will usher in an age of peace on earth.⁴ Such prophecies illustrate the weak state of the Seleucid Empire after its defeat by Rome, and the wild hopes raised among the oppressed Asiatics.

In 170 Antiochus IV was at war with the reigning Ptolemy. It happened that there were two rival claimants to the Jewish high priesthood. One of these had outbidden the other by bribes at court and was enjoying the sweets of office, when he was attacked by his defeated rival, who no doubt counted on help from Egypt. The people, who detested both, rose against the ruffian in office and turned a thieves' quarrel into a popular revolution. Antiochus had to return from Egypt to deal with the Jews. He stormed Jerusalem and plundered the temple to finance his Egyptian campaign. But in 168 an ultimatum from Rome obliged him to evacuate Egypt. Antiochus was now thoroughly convinced that the Jews were a "fifth column" in his empire, and took the desperate resolution to suppress Judaism. He garrisoned Jerusalem; set up an image of Zeus in the temple; prohibited circumcision, sabbath observance and the possession of copies of the Pentateuch on pain of death; and organized pagan sacrifices in place of the Jewish cult. Samaria must have been involved in the revolt; for similar action was taken there.

If it had rested with the priestly nobility, nothing more would have been heard of Judaism. It was the Jewish masses under the leadership of the Hasmoneans. a family sprung from the lower ranks of the priesthood, who resisted Antiochus. Their resistance, however heroic, would have availed little if Antiochus had had a free hand. But he had just been threatened and humiliated by Rome; and the Parthians were attacking his eastern provinces. Consequently Judas Maccabaeus was able to hold his own against the Seleucid armies, in 165 to enter Jerusalem and restore the temple cult, and in 161 to conclude an alliance with Rome. By 142 the Tews had forced the Seleucids to recognize their complete independence.

The spearhead of the Maccabean revolution was the party known as the Hasidim ("pious ones" or "saints") -- active propagandists of Judaism, live wires of the local synagogues, and the forerunners of the Pharisees of a later day. Their admirers describe them as "mighty men of Israel" who offer themselves "willingly for the law",⁵ their enemies as seditious trouble-makers. Many of the Psalms are the work of anonymous poets of the party and reflect the social and political conditions of the Maccabean era. The writers identify themselves with the poor and inveigh against the Hellenizing "workers of iniquity" who "eat up" the people and "call not upon Jahveh".⁶ Some write during actual persecution: the people are "killed all the day long" and "counted as sheep for the slaughter";⁷ the synagogues are burnt; the temple is defiled; the blood of the "saints" is shed like water, and their bodies are given to the birds and beasts.⁸ Such psalms cannot have been originally written for the formal service of the temple. They were written for secret conventicles of fugitives and outlaws without even a synagogue to gather in. Others are songs of revolution. The "saints" are fighting back. With "the high praises of God in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand", they will bind "kings with chains" and "nobles with fetters of iron",⁹ and by valour unite all Palestine in a new Israelite state.¹⁰ Others celebrate victory and the return of "Jahveh strong and mighty, Jahveh mighty in battle", to his temple.¹¹ Others look forward to the spread of Judaism among the nations. "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God."¹² In a world new-builded the old enemies of Israel -- Babylonians, Philistines, Phoenicians -- will be counted citizens of Zion.¹³

For the Hasidim were no narrow nationalists. Resistance to Hellenism had brought Asiatic peoples together. Persian as well as Jewish temples had been plundered. Common adversity led to a fusion of Jewish and Zoroastrian ideas which had been hardly possible when the Jews had been vassals to Persian overlords. As we have seen, the Persians, living on the edge of the desert, pictured life as a battle between the settled peasants, servants of the "wise lord", Ahura Mazda, and the savage nomads and other pests led by the evil spirit, Angro Mainyush. Since the right side often has the worst of it, the Persians consoled themselves by hoping for a not far distant catastrophe in which the power of evil would be broken and, after a last judgment of all mankind, the righteous, alive or dead, would enjoy a new life in a new world. Under the Seleucids these Persian ideas begin to colour Jewish poetry and prophecy. Here and there a psalmist (it may be only in a poetical figure) contrasts the wicked who boast of their wealth, but yet "shall carry nothing away", with the upright whom "God will redeem from the power of Sheol".¹⁴ Here and there an anonymous prophet (it may be in metaphor) predicts a resurrection in compensation for present failure.¹⁵ In one prophecy, written under Persian influence and later incorporated in the apocryphal book of Enoch, we get a fanciful picture of a regenerated world in which the righteous shall enjoy patriarchal lives and beget a thousand children before they die, while renegade Jews are tormented in Gehenna or hell. But such pious dreams were not yet orthodoxy and did not divert patriots from the struggle in hand.

The greatest literary product of the Maccabean revolt is the book of Daniel -- half novel, half prophecy -- written by an unknown pamphleteer at an early stage of the struggle. The writer is steeped in the law and the prophets of his own nation, influenced too by Persian religion, but untouched by the Hellenism of the ruling class; extremely ignorant of Babylonian, Persian and Greek history prior to Alexander, but well up in the more recent history of the Greek world. Going back four centuries to the time of the Babylonian exile, he tells fictitious stories of the persecution of the Jews by Nebuchadnezzar in order to stimulate resistance to the real persecution of Antiochus. Into the mouth of his hero, Daniel, he puts three allegorical "prophecies" of Oriental history down to his own time, leading up to a divinely predestined world revolution shortly to come. The predatory empires which successively exploit Asia are likened to a series of wild beasts of which the last is the Greek Empire -- "terrible and powerful, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it."¹⁶ This will be shortly destroyed, and the kingdom of the earth given to "one like unto a son of man;"¹⁷ that is to say, the bestial world-order of the military empires will give place to a human world-order ruled by "the saints of the Most High."¹⁸ The term "son ot man" in Semitic idiom means merely "man". It does not in Daniel denote an individual Messiah, though that idea was in the air. In the closing chapters the writer drops allegory and describes in plain language (though without mentioning names) the power-politics of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, and the attempt of Antiochus to suppress Judaism. He repeatedly alludes to the profanation of the temple, but only vaguely foretells its restoration -- a circumstance which dates the book between 168 and 165. In the end, after unexampled tribulation, the Jews will be delivered, and "many" of the dead will rise, "some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."¹⁹

The book was popular. Not only did it circulate among the revolutionary party in Palestine, but it was translated into Greek for the Jews of the "dispersion" and embellished with new stories, one of which, that of Susanna and the elders, is as good as any in the original book. But Daniel was too plainly of recent origin to be included by the Jews in the canon of the prophets. We do not hear of "Daniel the prophet" until Christian times. To us this revolutionary pamphlet is mainly valuable as evidence of the light in which the empire of Alexander and his successors, so well known to us from Greek sources, appeared to the Oriental masses who carried it on their backs.

With the triumph of the Maccabean revolution it seemed to many that the "kingdom of the son of man" was at hand. Simon, the brother of Judas Maccabaeus, was high priest of the Jews.

"The yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel. . . . And they tilled their land in peace, and the land gave her increase, and the trees of the plains their fruit. The ancient men sat in the streets, they communed all of them together of good things, and the young men put on glorious and warlike apparel. He provided victuals for the cities, and furnished them with instruments of munition. . . . He made peace in the land, and Israel rejoiced with great joy: and they sat each man under his vine and his fig tree; and there was none to make them afraid."²⁰

But Simon's son, John Hyrcanus, had to face a new Seleucid invasion and temporarily to accept defeat. He only regained his independence owing to the Roman alliance and the enemy's troubles with Parthia. At first the revolutionary party, who now begin to be called Pharisees (Perushim, "men set apart" for a special mission) nursed extravagant hopes of Hyrcanus as the destined inaugurator of the kingdom of God on earth. But soon the breach between priests and people reopened. Hyrcanus made himself independent of the people by enlisting foreign mercenaries, lined up with the priestly nobility (the Sadducees, perhaps so called from the old priestly family of Zadok) against the masses and showed more interest in extending his dominions than in creating a Utopia. The Hasmoneans had degenerated from revolutionary leaders into Oriental princelings with a veneer of Greek culture nardly disguising their old-style ruffianism.

Under Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 B.C.), the son of Hyrcanus, matters came to a head. Military reverses led to a popular revolt and to six years of civil war, at the end of which Alexander, "the slayer of the pious," crucified eight hundred Pharisees and slew their wives and children before their eyes! Eight thousand others fled to Egypt. After Alexander's death his widow, Salome Alexandra, ended the policy of repression, and the Pharisees managed to bring to justice at least some of the highly placed oppressors and to effect some reforms in criminal procedure and in the position of women. But on her death in 69 her younger son, Aristobulus, seized the high priesthood from his elder brother, Hyrcanus, and annulled the reforms.

This wretched sequel to what had seemed a successful popular revolution left a deep mark on contemporary Jewish literature. The ideology of revolt became more and more visionary. During the Maccabean revolution the author of Daniel had pictured the new age as the kingdom of the "son of man" or, as we should say, the kingdom of man. In the book of Enoch, compiled from various sources either under Alexander Jannaeus or under his son Aristobulus, the Son of Man has become a mythical individual -- a supernatural being appointed by God from the beginning to judge the world in the last days and to create a new heaven and a new earth. The Son of Man is also called the Elect or the Anointed (in Hebrew Messiah, in Greek Christ). The kings and the mighty of the earth who oppress God's children will be tortured in Gehenna; ordinary sinners will be annihilated; and the persecuted saints will rise from the dead and live happily ever after. Such literature is poetical and does not necessarily exclude active revolutionary struggle, but it opens the door to the ivory tower of the escapist.

A small minority of the revolutionary party, disappointed with the results of the Maccabean revolt, tried to set up a Utopian community of their own. These were the Essenes (probably the same word as Hasidim) of whom we read in Philo, Pliny and Josephus. They practised strict community of goods, condemned slavery as a violation of the brotherhood of man and lived mostly in small self-governing societies of workers and peasants. To the ordinary Pharisee the Essene seemed a "fool who destroyed the world". Much of what we read of the Essenes reminds us curiously of primitive Christianity. Some of the sect renounced marriage; others allowed it for the propagation of the race. Travelling Essenes carried no provisions, but relied on the hospitality of local brotherhoods. They took no oaths, except one which all took on admission and which bound them to piety towards God, justice and truth towards men, hatred of the wicked, assistance to the righteous and preservation of the secrets of the sect. They rejected animal sacrifice and explained allegorically the enactments which enjoined it; otherwise they strictly observed the Jewish law. Persian influence shows itself in their practice of prayers before dawn, "as if beseeching the sun to rise",²² and in their doctrine of eternal reward and punishment. Although Philo and Josephus assert the loyalty of the Essenes to the temporal government, this is probably exaggerated. They never numbered more than four thousand; yet, as we shall see, it appears from recently discovered Essene documents that Aristobulus found the sect dangerous enough to be worth persecuting, and that he tortured and executed a leader whom they called "the master of justice and the elect of God". Josephus records their part in the later revolutionary war against Rome and their bravery under torture when taken by the enemy.

Thus the hope of successful revolution slowly flickered before final extinction. Jewish patriots fought on, and were to fight on for nearly two centuries more. But the prospect was getting desperate, and became more so with Roman intervention.

1 Aristotle, Politics, VII, 7.

2 I Maccabees i, 9.

3 Zechariah xi, 4-17.

4 ix-x.

5 11 Maccabees ii, 42.

6 Psalms xiv, 4.

7 xliv, 22.

8 lxxiv, lxxix.

9 cxlbc, 6-9.

10 be, 6-12.

11 xxiv, 7-10.

12 lxviii, 31.

13 lxxxvii.

14 xlix.

15 Isaiah xxvi, 19.

16 Daniel vii, 7.

17 13.

18 27.

19 xii, 2.

20 Maccabees xiii, 41; xiv, 8-12.

21 viii, 16.

22 Josephus, Jewish War, II, 8, 5.