![]() This is vital for understanding the Jewish dispersion for the rights of citizenship (or near-citizenship, called polituemata), allowed Jews to remain outside of Judaea and still thrive. Your legal status in the country you’re living in would be “foreigner” or “sojourner.” The Greeks, however, would allow foreigners to become citizens in the polis it became possible all throughout the Middle East for Hebrews and others to become citizens of states other than Judah. If you were born in Israel, and you moved to Tyre, or Babylon, or Egypt, you were always an Israelite. In the ancient world, it was not possible to become a citizen of a state if you weren’t born in that state. The Greeks brought with them a brand-new concept: the “polis,” or “city-state.” Among the revolutionary ideas of the polis was the idea of naturalization. For the dispersion of the Jews had begun during the Exile, and large, powerful groups of Jews lived all throughout the Persian empire and later the Hellenistic kingdoms (“Hellenistic” = “Greek”). When the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, desecrated the Temple in 168 BCE, he touched off a Jewish revolt under the Maccabees for a brief time, Judah became an independent state again.ĭuring this period, Jewish history takes place in several areas: in Judah, in Mesopotamia and other parts of the Middle East, and Egypt. In general, though, the Greeks left the Jews alone adopting Cyrus’s policy, they allowed the Jews to run their own country, declared that the law of Judah was the Torah, and attempted to preserve Jewish religion. In a society rigidly opposed to the exposure of the body, the Greek practice of wrestling in the nude and deliberately dressing light must have been appalling! In a religion that specifically singles out homosexuality as a crime against Yahweh, the Greek attitude and even preference for homosexuality must have been incomprehensible. In a state founded on maintaining the purity of the Hebrew religion, the gods of the Greeks seemed wildly offensive. They were more foreign than any group they had ever seen. Like all others in the region, the Jews bitterly resented the Greeks. ![]() Between 319 and 302 BCE, Jerusalem changed hands seven times. ![]() Once more, Judah would be conquered first by one, and then by the other, as it shifted from being a Seleucid vassal state to a Ptolemaic vassal state. After two centuries of peace under the Persians, the Hebrew state found itself once more caught in the middle of power struggles between two great empires: the Seleucid state with its capital in Syria to the north and the Ptolemaic state, with its capital in Egypt to the south. One general, Antigonus and then later Ptolemy, inherited Egypt another, Seleucus, inherited the Middle East and Mesopotamia. This great Greek empire would last no longer than Alexander’s brief life after his death, altercations between his generals led to the division of his empire among three generals. For most of the world belonged to Persia in a blink of an eye, it now fell to the Greeks. Alexander the Great had conquered Persia and had, in doing so, conquered most of the world. After two centuries of serving as a vassal state to Persia, Judah suddenly found itself the vassal state of Macedonia, a Greek state. How odd and unmeasurably strange it must have been, then, when after an infinite multitude of generations and millennia of separation, the descendants of Yavan moved among the descendants of Shem! Their sons and grandsons all knew one another, spoke the same language, ate the same mails, worshipped the same god. At some point, in the dim recesses of time, after the world had been destroyed by flood, the nations of the earth were all contained in the three sons of Noah. Imagine, if you will, the Hebrew vision of history. The sons of Shem, brother to Yaphet, are the Semitic (named after Shem) nations, including the Hebrews. Two other Greek nations appear in the table: Rhodes (Rodanim) and Cyprus (Kittim and Elishah). ![]() Yavan is parallel with the Greek word, “Ionia,” the Greek region of Asia Minor “Yaphet” is parallel with the Greek word, “Iapetus,” who is the mythological father of Prometheus in Greek legend. In the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.1-32, which lists the descendants of Noah and the nations they founded, the Greeks appear under the name “Yavan,” who is a son of Yaphet. Ancient Jewish History: Table of Contents| Jewish Temples| The Maccabees
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