Such was Judean life under the Persians for around two hundred years, until the conquests of Alexander of Macedon from 334 to 323. Alexander defeated Darius III at the Battle of Issus on November the 5th in 333, effectively reclaiming Asia Minor from Persian control; he then swept south through the Levantine coast, facing opposition exclusively at Gaza and then turning down into Egypt where he was crowned Pharaoh and declared son of Amon (and therefore Zeus, in Greek thought). Josephus records an almost certainly fictional meeting between Alexander and the high priest Jaddua in Jerusalem during this campaign, in which Alexander supposedly prostrated towards the high priest after having seen him in a dream (Ant. 11.8.4-5). Certainly, Alexander would have taken Jerusalem, and perhaps would have met with someone, and that someone would likely have been the high priest, but this account seems to be Josephus’s attempt to boost Jerusalem’s importance during Alexander’s campaign when in fact it would have been a distant provincial holding of the Persians that he is unlikely to have had as much interest in. (Gaza, by contrast, was a fortified city necessary to holding the region and the all-important land bridge of Syria-Palestine that connected Asia Minor to Egypt.) He then defeated Darius again at Gaugamela in 331, about 450 kilometers south of the place where Cyrus had defeated the Babylonians in 539. By the time of Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, where there were surely Judeans present, he had conquered all the holdings of the Achaemenids and attempted a brief experiment in running the empire with Greek replacements in the satrapies, assuming the mantle of a Near Eastern sacral king. He had no unassailable plan for his succession, and so nearly thirty years of war ensued between his Diadochoi, the “successors” among his family members, generals, and soldiers, who each carved kingdoms for themselves of greater and lesser size from his empire. The Seleucids took their empire in Asia Minor and throughout Central Asia and the Bactrian region to which Alexander’s furthest reach had extended, the Ptolemies the title and holdings of the pharoahs of Egypt.
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