Topic 15 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon - known to history as Alexander the Great - was born in 356 BCE and died in Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of 32. In the thirteen years of his active military career he conquered an empire stretching from Greece through Egypt, Persia, Central Asia, and into the Punjab of modern Pakistan. No military achievement in the ancient world matched it for speed and scope, and its cultural consequences outlasted his empire by centuries. The world the New Testament was written in was, in significant ways, the world Alexander made.
Alexander's military genius is well documented and not in dispute. What made his conquests different from those of earlier empires was his cultural vision. He actively promoted the fusion of Greek and Persian culture - adopting Persian court customs, encouraging his soldiers to marry Persian women, and founding Greek-style cities (many called Alexandria) across the empire as centers of Greek culture. His successors continued this policy, and the result was the Hellenistic world: a vast cultural zone in which Greek language, Greek philosophy, Greek art, and Greek institutional forms were the common currency of educated life across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.
Alexander's death without a clear successor produced one of the ancient world's most consequential succession crises. His generals - the Diadochi, or "successors" - spent the next two decades fighting each other for pieces of the empire. By around 301 BCE the empire had effectively stabilized into several major kingdoms: the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, the Seleucid kingdom in Syria and the East, and the Antigonid kingdom in Macedonia and Greece. Judea found itself caught between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, passed back and forth between them until the Seleucid crisis of the 2nd century BCE that produced the Maccabean revolt.
For Bible readers, Alexander's significance is primarily linguistic and cultural. The spread of Koine Greek as the common language of the eastern Mediterranean is the direct result of his conquests - and it is the reason every book of the New Testament was written in Greek. The translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint), which made the Bible accessible to diaspora Jews and later to Gentile converts, was also a consequence of the Greek cultural world Alexander created. In a very real sense, the accessibility of the biblical message across cultures owes something to a Macedonian military genius who died at 32 and probably never heard the name of the God of Israel.