Hellenistic Period

Hellenistic Period is the era between the conquests of Alexander the Great and the Roman absorption of the last Greek successor kingdoms, running from 334 BC to the final decades of the first century BC. Like other era labels it is a modern convenience, and its closing date in particular depends entirely on which part of the old Persian world is in view, so a general reference to the period is often more accurate than pinning it to one region.

Etymology and Biblical Usage

The word comes from the Greek hellenizein, to speak or live as a Greek, and the modern label was popularised by the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen in the 1830s. Droysen's distinction has stuck: Hellenic describes classical Greece itself, while Hellenistic describes the wider, mixed world that followed Alexander, in which Greek language and civic forms spread across Egypt and the Near East and were taken up, adapted and resisted by the peoples already there. The Hebrew canon closes before the period is far advanced, so it is named nowhere in the Old Testament, but the era is the setting the later books look toward: the visions of Daniel 8 and 11 are read as tracing the rise of Greece and the wars of Alexander's successors, and the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, was begun at Alexandria in the third century BC.

Historical Context

Alexander crossed into Asia in 334 BC and within a decade had taken the Persian empire; when he died in 323 his generals divided it. The Ptolemies took Egypt, the Seleucids the vast middle from Syria through Mesopotamia to Iran, the Antigonids Macedon, and the Attalids a kingdom around Pergamon. Judea sat on the seam: under Ptolemaic rule for most of the third century, it passed to the Seleucids after 200 BC, and the pressure to Hellenise under Antiochus IV Epiphanes produced the Maccabean crisis of 167 BC and the Hasmonean state that followed.

Distinctions & Relationships

The period opens at much the same moment everywhere and ends at quite different ones, which is the main thing to know about it. In Anatolia it is conventionally carried to 63 BC and Pompey's settlement of the east. In the Levant it is often closed at 167 BC with the Maccabean revolt, since what follows is a Jewish state rather than a Greek one. In Mesopotamia and on the Iranian plateau it ends around 141 BC, when the Parthians took Babylonia from the Seleucid kings. In Egypt the Ptolemaic Period runs latest of all, to 30 BC. The same century can therefore be Hellenistic in one place and something else next door.

Theological Significance

The period matters to Old Testament study out of proportion to its length. Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Septuagint made in this era became the form in which many later readers met the Hebrew scriptures. The confrontation between Hellenising and traditionalist parties in Judea shaped the religious landscape of the following centuries, and the apocalyptic literature that the period produced gives the vocabulary in which much of Daniel has been interpreted ever since.