Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast. Episode 107, Jews and Judaism from Alexander the Great to Antiochus III.

In our last episode, we discussed some of the literature of the Jews that was produced during the Hellenistic age. Now that we have enough context to use them as sources of information,

we can transition to looking at the history of the Jews at large, from the arrival of Alexander the Great

to the earliest years of Seleucid rule.

This will not only cover the dealings of Jerusalem, but also the consequences of the arrival

of Hellenism, and how both Jewish life and Judaism as a whole responded

to these developments. Before we continue, it is important to get a sense of geography,

as recent political disputes regarding naming conventions require that it be addressed.

The coastline of the eastern Mediterranean has been a key area of focus as we have marched through to the 2nd century BC,

but the regions we will be focusing on for the next several episodes are contained mostly within the modern states of Israel and Palestine,

along with parts of Lebanon and Jordan.

Both Israel and Palestine are designations that were used in antiquity, though some clarification

is needed about their application.

Israel, the name of the ancient kingdom of the early Iron Age from the time of Saul until

the conquest of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 8th century, is not employed at all by the

Greco-Roman authors. Most of the Jewish writers during the Greco-Roman period, like Chesafus, considered it to be rather

anachronistic, but applied it in ideological sense rather than a strict geographic terminology.

Writing in the 5th century, Herodotus describes the lands of Syria and the coastline as Palestine,

a likely derivation from the name of the ancient Philistines who occupied the lands to the immediate

west of Jerusalem. He seems to be encompassing not just key settlements like Gaza, but also

the territory stretching from Egypt up to the borders of Phoenicia.

This term carries forward to the time of Aristotle and later Hellenistic writers like Agatharquides of Naitus.

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