alexander the great

Alexander the Great is discussed in relation to the Bible. He is prophesied about in the book of Daniel and Zechariah. The intertestamental period, which is the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament, is discussed. Alexander the Great's life and accomplishments are explored, including his love for learning and his military genius. The prophecy in Daniel about the different governing bodies, including Alexander the Great, is mentioned. The Hellenistic time period is explained, which involved the spread of Greek language, culture, and religion. The translation of the Old Testament into Greek, known as the Septuagint, is discussed. The importance of Alexander the Great's influence in spreading a common language for the entry of Jesus into the world is highlighted. Welcome to the Biblically Wired Podcast. I'm your host. My name is Barb. And today we're going to talk about Alexander the Great. Why? When have we ever associated him with the Bible, right? Actually, he is prophesied about in the book of Daniel and the book of Zechariah. And God uses them big time, big time to prepare the world for the entrance of Jesus. This is our first teaching on the intertestamental period. Intertestamental. It's the time period between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is approximately 400 years. Remember the Israelites were in slavery 400 years. And now we have this quote unquote silent period where God is doing amazing things, but we don't know much about what went on. We have resources, Slavius Josephus, I'm going to use in this teaching. And a lot of the Apocrypha was written in this time period, the Maccabees, etc. I'm just going to focus on Alexander the Great today. And I'm going to try to really hone in on it so I don't talk too long. And we're going to talk about the Maccabees in another teaching, because that's huge, huge. Their revolt is a huge piece of the Israelite history. And the reason we have Hanukkah. But right now we are in between the end of the Old Testament, which is the time of Nehemiah and Esther. I know your last book in your Old Testament version is Malachi. But that is not the actual last book by time. The first book written in the New Testament is James. We want to say Matthew, but it isn't. It's James. And that's about 44 AD, 10 years after Jesus dies. So here we are. It's the intertestamental period. Let's get the setting here, guys. The Syrians took the northern kingdom, Babylon the southern, Babylon ruled. Forever. And the diaspora, the Jews were spread out all over Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria now, and east all the way to China. So we know the Jews are living out and about. And Babylon ruled. Now it's Persia. Persia allowed the Jews to have their own religion. So this was huge. So we still had people coming back for feasts and etc. The Jews weren't doing so bad. Okay, now, 356 years before Christ, Alexander the Great is born. So Alexander the Great at age 13 becomes a student under the great philosopher Aristotle. Alexander had a great appetite for learning. He loved science, philosophy, especially wisdom, literature, linguistics, culture, arts, you name it. Alexander liked to learn it to the point. We know he's going to form an army and take over the Persian world, the empire. But Alexander brought with him to every battle. He brought biologists, geologists, botanists for the plants, so on and so forth. He was such a lover of science and learning. So Alexander learns under Aristotle about the age of 20. He takes over the kingdom. He forms this massive military operation. He's a militaristic genius. He sends in small groups to upset and make a city unrestful while they are in a stupor. And then he plows them over with his 15th army, 15,000 soldier army. So he had this interesting way of taking over cities. He dominated the known world within 11 years, and he dies at the age of 32. So he had a short lived life. But we're going to look at the prophecy that we see about him in Daniel. In Daniel chapter 7, Daniel has a vision, and he sees the four winds of heaven making havoc on the sea and then four beasts rise up from the sea. And each of these beasts are a governing body. All right. So the first beast he sees of the four beasts coming from the sea is a lion, a lion that had the wings of an eagle. Now, this is Babylon. So Babylon's done at this point when Alexander the Great rises up. But Babylon was the king, the ruler, just like the lion is of the land and the eagle is of the sky. And then behold, a second beast comes out of the sea resembling a bear. And this is Persia. And Persia was like the bear with three ribs between its teeth. And Persia rose up and devoured Babylon. And that's according to Daniel chapter 7. And this did happen. Next, we're going to see the Greeks. After this, I kept looking. He kept looking after those two beasts came and behold, another one like a leopard, which had on its back four wings of a bird. The beast also had four heads and dominion was given to it. So that leopard with four wings and four heads, what a crazy looking animal. Dominion was given to it. This is Alexander the Great. Dominion was given to him by God to accomplish God's purposes. So Alexander the Great is going to take out Persia the bear. All right. So notice it's a leopard. Leopards are fast. Plus, he has wings. And historically, Alexander the Great was very swift. He took after area by area by area, city by city by city. He named a ton of cities after himself, Alexander, Alexandria, and one after his horse, his horse that passed away in battle. And that's in India. So Alexander then is going to be taken out and he's going to be taken out by Rome. And this is verse seven of chapter seven. After this, I kept looking in the night visions and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrifying and extremely strong. And it had large iron teeth. It devoured and crushed and trampled down the remainder with its feet. And it was different from all the beasts that were before it. And it had ten horns. And that is Rome. It goes on then in verse eight to talk about the Antichrist. So we have all these powers and dominions that Daniel's bringing about. And Alexander is that leopard. All right. So Alexander goes into these areas, takes them over. And this is what he does. We see this time period is called the Hellenistic time period. Hellenism is Greek culture. Hellenism is taking on all that is Greek. And what Alexander the Great did, he had so much pride in everything about his Greek heritage. Every single place he dominated, he moved Greek people into that area. And he demanded and commanded them to be like the Greeks. Socrates said at one point, let every man who aspires to be a Greek be called a Hellene. H-E-L-L-E-N-E. All right. So we see Alexander moving in, leaving people behind to make sure that there's governing bodies behind and military posts behind to make sure these areas become Greek provinces. All right. So what did he spread in this Hellenistic movement? Okay, guys, he spread language and religion, the Greek gods, the Greek myths. He brought culture, the gymnasiums, theater, the Olympics. Do you know Olympian? Those are the names of the 12 gods together, the Olympians. And Olympus is the mountain of Zeus. So our word for the Olympics comes from this Greek culture. So how we live our life today involves much of these Hellenistic principles that were indoctrinated at this time. This got so prevalent because it had to. If the whole world becomes Greek, you need to know Greek to do business. You need their coins. You need to be able to trade and do business as a Greek. That's what Alexander the Great brought about for just 150 years. He brought about this Hellenism. So it's interesting because this shows up in the New Testament with Apostle Paul. Apostle Paul is growing up in Turkey, another area totally taken over in this Greek culture. And there are two synagogues. One is in Greek. One is in Hebrew. This is why Apostle Paul calls himself a Hebrew of Hebrews in Philippians 3. He went and was raised in the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew language. Now, the more the Jews spread out, and they did at this time, they spread all over the place, the more they lacked nationalism. They lacked nationalism. They were all Israelites. They were monotheistic. But they started to have generations of children that were raised in the Greek language. So about 250 years before Christ, when one of the Greek portions of the world, it was divided into four portions after Alexander died, this portion was run by Philadelphus. He reigned 250 years before Christ. He ordered a translation of the Old Testament in Greek. And this is called the Septuagint. And this is called the Septuagint. So what they did is they went and found 70 Jewish scholars, and they asked them to complete this translation into Greek. And this is why we see the Septuagint as LXX. That's the number 70. Their scholars argue about whether there's 72 or 70 people that were part of this translation. But either way, Greek was the translation of the Old Testament that was around for the disciples and for Jesus. Greek is still learned in the seminaries today. And we are taught how to translate Greek into English. So Greek was a big deal. Now, why is it called Koine Greek? K-O-I-N-E. Koine Greek. The reason it's called that is because it's a little bit of a mix. Pure Greek was probably found around the area of Greece. But there was four different dialects going on in the Greek language because it covered such a great area. And Koine Greek is a mix of those four languages. So another thing Alexander did is he was like a vacuum going through the area. He didn't only bring the Greek gods, but he sucked up like a vacuum any other god that was in that territory at the time. Go ahead and believe in that god. We'll just add that festival to the calendar and we will worship that god. The more gods, the better, according to Alexander. So he dies at the age of 32. As I said, he divides the kingdom. So why am I saying that he was used so greatly by God? Well, God was doing this because if Jesus is going to come into a culture, into the world, into the known world, he was going to come into a place that shared a common language. A common language. So you guys imagine there's missionaries we support today that go all over the world. They have to spend the first two years learning the language, right? Apostle Paul, Mark, Thomas, all those disciples, every disciple of Jesus Christ for a long, long time at the start of his religion, his new kingdom, understood Greek. They could go anywhere, anytime. They also could come listen to Jesus from all over the world and understand what he had to say. Jesus grew up speaking Aramaic, but Greek was used in business. Jesus also knew Greek. He would have studied the Bible in Hebrew and he knew Latin. So there was four languages that were out and about. So I want to read you the coolest thing, okay? So Zechariah 9, another huge prophecy about Alexander the Great. What happens in Zechariah 9 is Zechariah prophesies that neighboring nations that have gone against the word of the Lord are going to be not destroyed, but they're going to be taken into account that God is going to use basically Alexander the Great to wake them up, to give them some judgment. Who is he talking about in Zechariah 9? In verse 1, he talks about Hadrach with Damascus, and that's northern Aram. Verse 2 is Hamas, that's Syria. Tyre and Sudan is Lebanon. Ashkelon, which is near Jerusalem, it's in Israel, modern day Israel. Ekron, the Philistines, Ashdod, all of these are in Israel, and God is saying that I'm going to bring some judgment about in that area. But then guys, get this, Zechariah 9 verse 8, but I will camp around my house, which we know is a temple, because of an army, because of him who passes by and returns. And no oppressor will pass over them anymore, for now I have seen with my eyes. So he goes on to talk about this triumph for this daughter of Jerusalem, and then goes on to talk about how Jesus is coming. In other words, Alexander the Great, he is not going to touch Jerusalem, is what he's saying. He's going to touch all these areas around. He's going to make this a one world language that hasn't been a one world language since the time of Babel, in preparation for Jesus Christ. But he's not going to touch my temple. How does this happen? Alexander the Great wants ownership, and he wants to take on everything. Well, there's that Slavius Josephus I told you about, and he writes in his Antiquities of the Jew, his history that he wrote, because the Romans asked him to, about 100 years after Christ. Slavius Josephus was raised in a Jewish home. He was taught all the Jewish history. He was very, very smart. He was a very dedicated Jew. He even fought for Jew against the Romans. But when the Romans won, he switched sides. So he was a little bit of a traitor. Well, Josephus wrote a ton, and he writes all the way back from the Garden of Eden. There's something we have to always remember. Oral tradition was huge in this time. By this, I mean storytelling. Storytelling. There is an art of storytelling. It's the same thing Jesus uses later that was huge in this time period. Why? There was no printing press, right? So Josephus knew all this stuff from Adam till the time where he lived that he wrote about in the Antiquities of the Jews. So he writes of this time period where Alexander the Great is on a roll, and Alexander the Great is coming south towards Jerusalem. And he is battling, and he sends a messenger ahead, and they go to Judea, and they ask for supplies. And the high priest, Jaddus, J-A-D-D-U-S, says no. You see, Alexander the Great had not totally conquered the Persians. He's on his way. He's got a lot of their territory, but he hasn't hit the downtown, if you know what I mean. So Jaddus, the high priest, is like, hey, we're very loyal to Persia. Remember, Persia was really good to the Jews. So he's like, no, I'm not going to send you any supplies. Well, then all the Jewish people were literally knees a-knocking, can barely sleep, full of anxiety, like what are we going to do now? Because we know this is not going to go well. So Jaddus has a dream. He's pretty nervous, too. But he feels like he's supposed to be loyal to Persia. He feels like he's supposed to be loyal to Persia. So God gives him a dream. And in the dream, he tells them, do not worry about Alexander the Great. I am going to protect you and protect Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, what I want you to do is get all dressed up, open your gates, and go meet him when he's on the way. And do not have any fear or dread. So this is what they do. Jaddus gives the orders. All the priests put on their ceremonial robes. The people of Jerusalem gather around. They open the gates and they go marching right towards Alexander the Great. And when they meet him as he is coming to Jerusalem with his humongous army, he gives them homage. He salutes them and gives them homage. Why? According to Flavius Josephus, Alexander the Great had a dream that Jaddus, the high priest, he saw him personally, was going to meet him. And in his dream, he heard that he was going to have divine permission. And not just permission, divine power or authority. And he will end up taking Persia. So Alexander the Great follows the priest back into Jerusalem, into the temple, and he even sacrifices there in Jerusalem with the priest. Okay. This is just fascinating. So fascinating. So what happens then is they show him these areas of the Old Testament where they feel he is being prophesied about and he agrees. So we know the end of the story. Alexander the Great does take over Persia and he rules until he's 32. He then divides his kingdom into four big portions. And going forward, the Septuagint is written. So in my next teaching, what I'm going to talk about is the way the Israelites changed in that 400 years, how the Pharisees, Sadducees, Sanhedrin, scribes, etc. came about and the Zealots. So I'm very, very excited about the next teaching. I just wanted to review for all of us that God is on his throne and he is moving and grooving, right? But when I think of Alexander the Great, another thing occurs to me. And that is we are still inundated with Greek culture, Greek mythology. As a matter of fact, as I'm doing my research, I love to listen to podcasts of all sorts. And I found this podcast and the title was Intro to Hellenism. It was called the Intro to Hellenism. And these two women went on to describe how they worship Greek gods and they were giving an introduction to what that's like. And it was so fascinating because they were talking about if you worship this God, this is how you're saved. And if you worship that God, this is how you're saved. And they even said, if you're going to bring a offering to a God, a mythical God, let's say you crocheted something for months, that God might not like it or appreciate it. And that's OK. It's all about respecting these mythological gods. That's what they said. They kept calling them myths, but they also said they pray to them, they sacrifice to them, they live as they're supposed to live, and they're giving this introduction into Greek gods. What I found fascinating was they said that they were from Catholicism and they weren't buying the stories of Jesus Christ. But they felt like a jump into the Greek mythology was nothing when you're coming from Catholicism because they were used to praying to saints. So they felt like it was a polytheistic religion. I was so stunned. I couldn't believe that. I was just stunned. Anyways, that's another subject. But it made me really want to do this teaching. And it made me realize, like, sometimes I'm like, why am I doing all this? This takes me so much time and effort. And I wonder, am I having any type of impact? Is God using this? Is he even calling me to this? But then I hear that podcast and I'm like, oh, whoa. Oh, whoa. We've got to be out there telling the truth in any avenue, in any platform that we can. I just pray that this gets spread about and that God brings people who have ears to hear and eyes to see and are seeking the real wisdom and Jesus, that he's drawing them near. So let's all pray for that and pray for Christian ministries around the globe and around the world. There's no better time than now to send people to these kind of platforms. They're not opening their Bibles, but they might throw their AirPods in and listen to this. So thank you so much for listening. I can't wait till the next teaching. I'm super excited about it. And for now, I hope that you have a blessed day and you keep your chin up in Jesus' name.