Over fifty years later, the cup-bearer of Darius’ grandson, King Artaxerxes I, was a Jew named Nehemiah. The Jerusalemites appealed to him for help: ‘The remnant are in great affliction. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down.’ Nehemiah was heartbroken: ‘I sat down and wept and mourned.’ When he was next serving at court in Susa, the Persian capital, King Artaxerxes asked, ‘Why is thy countenance sad?’ ‘Let the king live for ever,’ replied this Jewish courtier, ‘why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my father’s sepulchres, lieth waste? … If it please the king … send me unto Judah … that I may build it.’ Nehemiah was ‘sore afraid’ as he awaited the answer.
NEHEMIAH: THE DECLINE OF THE PERSIANS
The Great King appointed Nehemiah governor and granted him funds and a military escort. But the Samaritans, north of Jerusalem, were ruled by their own hereditary governor, Sanballat, who distrusted this secretive courtier from faraway Susa and the schemes of the returning Exiles. By night Nehemiah, who feared assassination, inspected Jerusalem’s broken walls and burned gates. His memoir, the only political autobiography in the Bible, tells how Sanballat ‘laughed us to scorn’ when he heard the plans to rebuild the walls until Nehemiah revealed his appointment as governor. Landowners and priests were each given sections of the wall to rebuild. When they were attacked by Sanballat’s ruffians, Nehemiah set guards ‘so the wall was finished in fifty and two days’, enclosing just the City of David and the Temple Mount, with a small fortress north of the Temple.
Now Jerusalem ‘was large and great’, Nehemiah said, but ‘the people were few therein’. Nehemiah persuaded the Jews outside the city to draw lots: one out of every ten would settle in Jerusalem. After twelve years Nehemiah travelled to Persia to report to the king, but when he returned to Jerusalem he found that Sanballat’s cronies were lucratively running the Temple while the Jews were marrying with the locals. Nehemiah expelled these interlopers, discouraged intermarriage and imposed his new pure Judaism.
As the Persian kings lost control over their provinces, the Jews developed their own semi-independent statelet of Yehud. Based around the Temple, and funded by growing numbers of pilgrims, Yehud was ruled by the Torah and governed by a dynasty of high priests supposedly descended from King David’s priest Zadok. Once again, the Temple treasury became a coveted prize. One of the high priests was murdered inside the Temple by his own avaricious brother, Jesus (the Aramaic for Joshua), a sacrilege that gave the Persian governor the pretext to march on Jerusalem and loot its gold.24
While the Persian courtiers were distracted by their own homicidal intrigues, King Philip II of Macedon trained a formidable army, conquered the Greek city-states and prepared to launch a sacred war against Persia to avenge the invasions of Darius and his son Xerxes. When Philip was assassinated, his twenty-year-old son Alexander seized the throne and launched the attack on Persia that would bring Greece to Jerusalem.
THE MACEDONIANS
336–166 BC
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Within three years of his father’s murder in 336 BC, Alexander had twice defeated the Persian king Darius III, who decided to withdraw eastwards. Alexander did not pursue him at first, but instead marched along the coast towards Egypt, and ordered Jerusalem to contribute provisions for his army. The high priest initially refused. But not for long: when Tyre resisted him, Alexander besieged the city and when it fell, he crucified all its survivors.
Alexander ‘hurried to go up to Jerusalem’, wrote the Jewish historian Josephus much later, claiming that the conqueror was welcomed at the gates by the high priest in his purple and scarlet robes and all the Jerusalemites in white. They led him into the Temple where he sacrificed to the Jewish God. This story was probably wishful thinking: it is more likely that the high priest, along with the leaders of the semi-Jewish Samaritans, paid court to Alexander on the coast at Rosh Ha Ayim and that, emulating Cyrus, he recognized their right to live by their own laws.* He then pushed on to conquer Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria before heading east, never to return.
After finishing off the Persian empire and expanding his hegemony as far as Pakistan, Alexander began his great project, the fusing of the Persians and Macedonians into a single elite to rule his world. If he did not quite succeed, he changed the world more than any other conqueror in history by spreading his version of Hellenikon – Greek culture, language, poetry, religion, sport and Homeric kingship – from the deserts of Libya to the foothills of Afghanistan. The Greek way of life became as universal as the British during the nineteenth century or the American today. From now on, even the monotheistic Jewish enemies of this philosophical and polytheistic culture could not help but see the world through the lens of Hellenism.
On 13 June 323, eight years after conquering the known world, Alexander lay in Babylon dying either of fever or of poison, aged just thirty-three. His devoted soldiers filed past his bed with tears pouring down their faces. When they asked him to whom he had left his kingdom, he replied: ‘To the strongest.’25
PTOLEMY: THE SABBATH SACKING
The tournament to find the strongest was a twenty-year war between Alexander’s generals. Jerusalem was tossed between these Macedonian warlords who ‘multiplied the evils in the earth’. In the duel between the two leading contenders, Jerusalem changed hands six times. She was ruled for fifteen years by One-Eyed Antigonos, until in 301 he was killed in battle and the victor, Ptolemy, arrived outside the walls to claim Jerusalem.
Ptolemy was Alexander’s cousin, a veteran general who had fought his way from Greece to Pakistan, where he had commanded the Macedonian fleet on the Indus. Just after Alexander’s death, he was granted Egypt. When he heard that Alexander the Great’s cortège was on its way back to Greece, he rushed up through Palestine to seize it and carried it back to rest in his capital, Alexandria. The guardian of the ultimate Greek talisman, Alexander’s body, became the keeper of his flame. Ptolemy was not just a warlord: the soldier’s strong chin and blunt nose on his coins belied his subtlety and common sense.
Now Ptolemy told the Jerusalemites that he wished to enter the city on the Sabbath to sacrifice to the Jewish God. The resting Jews believed this ruse and Ptolemy seized the city, thus revealing the fanaticism of Jewish observance. But when the sun set on the Sabbath, the Jews fought back. Ptolemy’s troops then rampaged through Jerusalem – ‘the houses rifled, the women ravished; and half the city go forth into captivity’. Ptolemy probably posted Macedonian garrisons in the Baris Fortress, built by Nehemiah just north of the Temple, and he deported thousands of Jews to Egypt. These founded the Greek-speaking Jewish community in Ptolemy’s splendid capital Alexandria. In Egypt, Ptolemy and his successors became pharaohs; in Alexandria and the Mediterranean they were Greek kings. Ptolemy Soter – the ‘Saviour’ as he was known – adopted the local gods, Isis and Osiris, and Egyptian traditions of kingship, promoting his dynasty as both Egyptian god-kings and semi-divine Greek monarchs. He and his sons conquered Cyprus, Cyrenaica and then swathes of Anatolia and the Greek Islands. He understood that not just magnificence but also culture would give him legitimacy and greatness. So he made Alexandria the world’s paramount Greek city, opulent and sophisticated, founding its Museum and the Library, recruiting Greek scholars and commissioning the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the World. His empire endured for three centuries down to the last of his family – Cleopatra.