Alexander the Great marched through the area of Israel, which by then had come to be called Palestine, in 333 b. c. After Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, Palestine became Greek, and this began a phase known as the Hellenistic (hell-in-IS-tick), or Greek, Period. First the Ptolemies, the Egyptian inheritors of Alexander's empire, ruled Palestine, but from 198 b. c. the area came under the control of the Seleucids (suh-LOO-sidz), a Hellenistic group that had also emerged from Alexander's conquests.
Several important things happened in these centuries. No longer known by their nation but by their religion, the people of Israel were called simply Jews, and they began to spread throughout the region. This spreading of the Jews, known as the Diaspora (dee-AS-pour-uh), would continue for many centuries, as they remained a people without a homeland of their own. Some of them went to Egypt, where they made the first translations of the Old Testament from the Hebrew language into Greek.
The Seleucids tried to force the Greek religion on the Jews, and this led to a revolt by a priest named Mattatias (matt-uh-TIE-us) and his son Judas Maccabeus (mack-uh-BEE-us) in 164 b. c. They reconquered Jerusalem, an event that Jews commemorate in the festival of Hanukkah ([K]ON-oo-kuh). Under the Maccabees, whose history is recorded in the Apocryphal book by that name [see sidebar, “The Structure of the Bible”], the people of Israel enjoyed their last period of freedom for more than 2,000 years. But a later Maccabean ruler attempted to combine the functions of king and priest, an unpopular move with his Jewish subjects. This made it easy for the Romans to conquer the region in 63 b. c.
World History
