History of Ancient Israel and Judah - Hellenistic Period

Hellenistic Period

On the death of Alexander the Great (322) his generals divided the empire between them. Ptolemy I, the ruler of Egypt, seized Palestine, but his successors lost it to the Seleucids of Syria in 198. At first relations between the Seleucids and the Jews were cordial, but the attempt of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (174–163) to impose Hellenic culture sparked a national rebellion, which ended in the expulsion of the Syrians and the establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty. Some modern commentators see this period as a civil war between hellenized and orthodox Jews. The Hasmonean kingdom was a conscious attempt to revive the Judah described in the Bible: a Jewish monarchy ruled from Jerusalem and stretching over all the territories once ruled by David and Solomon. In order to carry out this project the Hasmoneans forcibly converted to Judaism the one-time Moabites, Edomites and Ammonites, as well as the lost kingdom of Israel. Some scholars argue that a "Jewish biblical canon" was fixed by the Hasmonean dynasty.

In 63 BCE the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and made the Jewish kingdom a client of Rome. In 40–39, Herod the Great was appointed King of the Jews by the Roman Senate, and in 6 CE the last ethnarch of Judea was deposed by the emperor Augustus and his territories were combined with Idumea and Samaria and annexed as Iudaea Province under direct Roman administration. The name Judea (Iudaea) was removed after the revolt of Simon Bar Kochba in 135 CE, after which the area was called Syria Palaestina, (Greek: Παλαιστίνη, Palaistinē; Latin: Palaestina.)