Judea in Antiquity: 332 BCE–628 CE.

The Hellenistic Era (332–63 BC)

Philip II of Macedon — a peripheral kingdom on the Greek mainland — spent the 23 years of his reign reforming the Macedonian army and turning it into the greatest fighting force in the ancient world. Philip died in 336 BCE, leaving the state and the army to his son Alexander III.

Over the next 13 years, Alexander would conquer all of the Persian empire, including the Levant. When Alexander died in 323 BCE at the age of 32, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River and from the Egyptian deserts to the central Asian steppe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_Alexander_the_Great#/media/File:MacedonEmpire.jpg

After Alexander died, however, his empire fragmented into local kingdoms, as his generals laid claim to whatever land they could control. The two most powerful successor kingdoms in Asia were the Ptolemaic kingdom (founded by Ptolemy) in Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom (founded by Seleucus) in Persia. Those two powerful kingdoms bordered each other, of course, along the great highway that was the Levant.

The Ptolemaic kingdom initially laid claim to the Levant, but from 274 BCE to 168 BCE, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids fought no fewer than six wars for control of Syria and its surrounding areas. Ultimately, the province of Yehud ended up under the control of the Seleucids.

In 175 BCE, King Antiochus IV ascended to the Seleucid throne. Although the sources we have about this time are not particularly reliable, it appears that Antiochus engaged in systematic persecutions of the Jews, which in 167 BCE prompted a rebellion against Seleucid authority. After three years of guerrilla warfare, led by a priest named Judah “the Hammer” (Judah Maccabee) and his followers, the Jews succeeded in driving the Seleucid armies out of Jerusalem.

After throwing off the Seleucid yoke, the followers of Judah Maccabee set up the Hasmonean dynasty. This was not an instantaneous or clean break from the past — it took another two decades of conflict to gain full political autonomy from the Seleucids — but it was a critical period for the development of modern Judaism. The Hasmoneans were a theocratic monarchy, and the development of religious rituals was part of a deliberate process of nation-building — the goal being to forge a separate and unique Jewish identity. Recent scholarship suggests that recognizable Jewish ritual practices probably started to be observed during the Hasmonean period. Thus, the late second century and early first century BCE saw the completion of the transformation of Iron Age Yahwism to classical Judaism.

Jews Under Roman Rule (63 BC — 638 CE)

And still the wheel of empire kept turning.

In the mid-60s BCE, the Roman general Pompey the Great used the threat of Mediterranean piracy as a pretext for conquering all of Anatolia, Syria, and the Levant, finally wiping the Seleucid kingdom off the map. Meanwhile, in 63 BCE, a dynastic struggle for control of the Judean throne gave Pompey the pretext of capturing Jerusalem and bringing Judea under Roman “protection.”

Judea and the Hasmonean dynasty were preserved as a “client state” of Rome, first under the existing Hasmonean dynasty and then under the Herodian dynasty, before Emperor Augustus brought Judea under direct Roman rule in 6 CE.

The Jews were never particularly happy with Roman rule — particularly not the deification and idolization (literally) of the Roman emperors, which was anathema to the Jews’ religious teachings. Riots and small insurrections were commonplace, and in 66, a full-scale war broke out. Lasting seven years, the Great Jewish Revolt did not go well for the Jews. In 70 CE, Titus Flavius Vespasianus — the son of the Roman emperor of the same name (who ultimately would succeed his father as emperor) — laid siege to Jerusalem and sacked the city in July of 70 CE, razing the Second Temple to the ground.

The Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating Titus’s sack of Jerusalem

The Revolt continued for another three years, until it finally came to a bloody end with the fall of the desert fortress Masada in 73 CE.

Another revolt in 115 came to a similar end, and a final revolt under the leadership of Simon bar Kokhba in 132 CE was the final straw for the Romans. By 135 CE, when the revolt was finally put down, hundreds of thousands of Jews lay dead, observance of Jewish practices was banned, the remaining Jews were exiled, and the name of the province of Judaea was changed to Syria Palaestina, to expunge any reference to the former inhabitants of the land.

Over the next 500 years, there were periodic attempts to re-establish a Jewish presence in Palestina, all of which came to naught. For half a millennium, Palestina was just another Roman province — albeit one with particular spiritual importance to the empire, which became officially Christian in the 4th Century CE.

Politics in the Eastern Roman Empire (today usually called the “Byzantine Empire”) in late antiquity was dominated by the constant fighting between the Romans and the Persian Sasanian dynasty. The last of these conflicts — the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602–628 — was a drawn-out period of bloody war along the Byzantine-Persian border. Although Persian forces (with the support of exiled Jews) conquered Jerusalem in 613, the Byzantines reconquered it in 617, massacring the Jews who had returned to the city.

The generation-long war ultimately ended in a draw, with the status quo ante bellum being restored by 628. Both empires were left exhausted, depleted of resources and in political chaos.

Just in time for the eruption of the Muslim armies out of Arabia.