In the autumn of 332 BCE, Alexander of Macedon was moving fast. He had broken the Persian fleet's supply lines by taking the coast, crushed Tyre after a seven-month siege, and left Gaza smouldering behind him. Egypt lay ahead. Between Gaza and the Nile delta stood Judea - not an obstacle, not a prize, but a land that would need deciding about. Alexander decided about it quickly, and the decision echoed for centuries.
The story that came down through Jewish memory, recorded by the first-century historian Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, is vivid and deliberate. The high priest Jaddua, warned in a dream, went out in his priestly vestments to meet the conqueror on the road. Alexander, seeing him, dismounted and prostrated himself. His general Parmenion asked, astonished, why the king of Macedon was bowing to a Jewish priest. Alexander's answer was that he was not bowing to the man but to the God the man served - whose appearance had come to him in a dream at Dion, telling him his conquest of Persia was assured. He then entered Jerusalem in peace, offered sacrifice in the Temple, and granted the Jews the right to live by their ancestral laws and to be exempt from tribute every seventh year - the sabbatical year. The visit was brief. Alexander moved on to Egypt, where the priests of Amun would hail him as a god. He had other appointments to keep.
The record
The Macedonian conquest of the Levant in 332 BCE is well attested in Greek and Latin sources including Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri (Book II, chapters 25-27), written in the second century CE but drawing on the court historian Ptolemy and the near-contemporary Aristobulus. Arrian records Alexander's siege of Gaza and his subsequent march to Egypt without a stop at Jerusalem - the city simply does not appear in the Greek military record for this campaign. Josephus's account of the Jerusalem encounter appears in Antiquities of the Jews XI.8.4-6 (written c. 93-94 CE), drawing on sources now lost. Historians debate whether the meeting with Jaddua is legendary elaboration or a compressed account of a real encounter; the broad political fact - that Judea passed to Macedonian control in 332 BCE without recorded resistance or siege - is not disputed. (Josephus, Antiquities XI.317-345; Arrian, Anabasis II.26.)
What matters most about Alexander's passage is not whether he bowed or whether he dreamed. What matters is what it inaugurated. For the better part of two centuries after 332 BCE, the Jews lived under Hellenistic rulers - first the Ptolemies of Egypt, then the Seleucids of Syria. Greek became the prestige language of the eastern Mediterranean. Jewish communities in Alexandria grew until they were among the largest in the diaspora. The Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek - the translation we call the Septuagint - so that Jews who no longer read Hebrew could hear their own law. Greek names appeared alongside Hebrew ones in Jewish families across the land. The encounter between the Jewish world and the Greek one was not a collision. It was, for a long generation, something more complicated and more interesting: an argument about what could be kept and what had to be renegotiated, conducted inside every family and every community that Alexander's passing had touched.
The record
The translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek - the Septuagint - is dated by the Letter of Aristeas (c. 150-100 BCE) to the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BCE), roughly two generations after Alexander. The letter describes seventy-two Jewish elders brought to Alexandria at the king's request to produce a translation of the Torah for the royal library. While the Letter of Aristeas is itself a literary composition rather than a documentary record, the existence of a Greek Torah by the third century BCE is confirmed by its use in the New Testament, in Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE - 50 CE), and by the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include fragments of Greek texts alongside Hebrew. The Septuagint remains in liturgical use in Eastern Orthodox Christianity today. (Philo, De vita Mosis II.25-44; Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed., Fortress Press, 2012.)
The Seleucid chapter that followed would be harder - Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Maccabees, the rededication of the Temple that Hanukkah remembers. But that story begins with Alexander's passing through. He did not try to abolish Jewish practice. He confirmed it. The precedent he set - that a foreign empire could rule Judea while leaving Jewish law intact - became the template that Jews would invoke, argue for, and sometimes fight to restore for the next four centuries, through Seleucid and then Roman dominion. A conqueror who shows up and moves on can leave behind more than one who stays and imposes. Alexander's brevity was, in its way, a gift.
The painting in the Prado shows Jaddua with a scroll open to a prophecy - the tradition that it was a passage from Daniel, foretelling a Greek king who would overthrow Persia. Whether or not the scroll was opened that day, the scene captures something true: a people who had learned to read the movements of empires and to find in their own texts a frame for surviving them. Alexander passed through. The text remained.
