Sometimes I just go out of my back porch and look at trees and birds and sunsets. And I think about that wonderful age in the history of film where you had a whole bunch of movies where some guy just wanted to be left alone and maybe farm or something and have a family and be happy. But then some jerk oppressors came along and did something horrible to his town or to his house or to his family. And then he had nothing left, so he decided to take up arms and overthrow the government and destroy the oppressor. And the soundtracks on those movies were always awesome. And the movies were always great because you knew exactly who the bad guy was because he was horrible and obviously evil. And you knew who the good guy was because the music always sounded cooler when he was on. And also he was fighting for justice and what was right and for freedom. And I'm not even joking. I really do miss those movies. They made me very happy. I went and watched the granddaddy of all of those movies the other day with my kid, Braveheart. Man, I guess you age any movie 30 years or so, and you're gonna see a little bit of campiness and some sensibilities of a bygone age. But for the most part, that held up. And let me tell you what really held up that soundtrack. My goodness, the Braveheart music. Maybe it's in my blood, but it it it stirs me deeply. Persia and Greece were beginning the process of mingling together. More on that in a moment. And the Jews were just happy to have put things back together and to have walls around their town and their temple and to have rededicated themselves to the law. The Old Testament leaves off with Nehemiah saying, Well, paraphrases mine here, I tried pretty hard. That was pretty much the best swing. God remember me. And it's sort of ambiguous, and that's the end of the Old Testament. And once again, that Old Testament wraps up in the middle of the 400s BC. Well, about a hundred years after that, stuff starts shaking in Macedonia. So if you can kind of picture Greece sticks down into the Mediterranean Sea, it sticks down further than the boot of Italy into the Mediterranean Sea. But then as you go north of that, you've kind of got that clump of countries that you can never remember how to label on a map that's on the east side of the Adriatic Sea, like straight east of Rome. That includes like Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, home of the world's greatest basketball player, Nikola Jokic. And then Macedonia is sort of the furthest south there. It sits just north historically of historic Greece. Culturally, they looked very, very similar back in the day, but there is a great and very assertive king up there who rules from 359 BC to 336 BC. And his name is Philip II. Philip II lends his name to Philippi. It's a prominent, important town in the New Testament. The book of Philippians was written to Philippi. The Apostle Paul went to Philippi. Philip II marries some kind of pre-pagan witch, sorceress lady. I don't know. There are tons of interesting rumors about her. She was particularly friendly with snakes, apparently. And they have this kid, Alexander, and Alexander turns out to be a pretty huge deal. Philip II is kind of already the inheritor of Greek culture. He isn't Greek, but he's the most powerful person in the Greek neighborhood, and he's speaking Greek, and they're building in Greek styles and saying Greek things. So I don't know. It's kind of like he took the baton. It would be like if Canada became the biggest deal of all and overshadowed the United States. It would be like, well, Canada, now it's still technically Canada, but in this imagined future, it's sort of the new America. It's the successor, it's the baton carrier of this particular culture. No offense to Canadians or Americans. I don't feel great about that analogy, but I'm going with it anyway. Alexander the Great is provided with a personal tutor named Aristotle. Aristotle's mentor was Plato, the Plato. Plato's mentor was Socrates, the Socrates. So really, Alexander the Great is the fourth in line of the intellectual family tree that goes Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great. But only one of those four conquered the entire world, and it wasn't Plato. Philip II dies unexpectedly, and Alexander, who's just a teenager, comes to power. Well, he's got it in his head that he should fulfill what might have been his dad's vision to conquer and unify everywhere that's been in any way touched by Greek culture. Remember how yesterday we were talking about how typically you think of Persia and Xerxes and Darius and all of that crowd as being one thing and the Greeks as being a different thing. But yesterday I was talking about how really they were very mingled. They traded with each other a lot more than they fought with each other. And there's a lot of overlap there. Well, Alexander the Great's like, hmm, I think I could probably conquer the whole thing and just Greekify all of it and formalize the Greekification of everything. And so he goes on this ludicrous march of conquest, starting at the age of 18 in 334 BC. He goes, and it's like, you know, I guess if you go to jail, what are you supposed to do? Go punch the biggest guy on the block, right? Well, that's what Alexander does. He invades the Achaemenid Persian Empire, ruled by Darius III. And it'd be fun to tell you all the ins and outs of how that march of conquest went. Maybe someday I'll do a whole podcast just on Alexander the Great, but we're not going to do it in this season. Suffice it to say, he won a handful of key battles that are very well documented, so we get to see the details of his battlefield genius in place. He was a guy who always fought out front while his enemies cowered from behind. Their armor was entirely ceremonial. Alexander's was entirely functional. The kid was just a legend. He was too dumb and too arrogant, too young, I don't know, to even believe he could lose. And all he did was win. And eventually he takes Darius III's family as his own. Darius III flees in shame, gets killed by his own men. Alexander is welcomed into Jerusalem as a liberator. As he goes in there, even some of the priestly class are like, look, here's some material in Daniel that we think might be about you. And if you go and read Daniel and you look at it, it's toward you know, maybe they have a point. It could be. And then Alexander goes and founds Alexandria, the really famous one in northern Egypt that's still there. And then he goes and finishes off the Persians, as I mentioned, and walks into the western Persian capital of Babylon, the ancient great city of Babylon, and he marches in as a conqueror. And you might be thinking, well, that was probably enough for him, but it wasn't. He went all the way east into modern day India and won battles clear out there. Eventually the supply lines were too thin, and he made his way back to Babylon, where finally he died as a young man at age 32. I've heard it calculated as 33 as well in 323 BC. But Alexander accomplished a lot of obvious things with that, like you know, conquering the world. I suppose that one's pretty obvious. But in addition to that, he ceded like S-E-E-D-E-D Greek culture and language everywhere. He made sure that his Greeks and Macedonians intermarried all over the world. He spread an officialized Greek language, Greek coinage. I have, not in my hand right now, but very nearby, I have a coin with Alexander's face on it that he minted, probably something he got coached to do by his tutor, Aristotle. And that coin was used to pay the army that made all of this happen. And I have one of them. And yes, if you're getting the impression that I think that's pretty cool, it's because I think that coin is pretty cool. For the purposes of our conversation, the big important thing to know is this the intellectual heritage of the Greeks, the linguistic heritage of the Greeks, the ethnic heritage of the Greeks had been spread all over the entire ancient world in just over a decade because of the decisiveness and the brilliance and the effectiveness of one 18-year-old kid who just did something absolutely crazy. I mean, in retrospect, we might look at that and be like, I've been told that was pretty cool, but that seems pretty mean to go conquer the whole world and make everybody be like you. Look, make of it what you will. I wouldn't like it if it happened to me. But in terms of things that changed Earth forever, it's hard to point to many much more decisive moments than that tenure window where Alexander just went and conquered stinking everything. Why is this important to our conversation? Well, because not everybody wants to be Greekified. And the Jews may have welcomed Alexander the Great as a hero and conqueror when he came to town initially in Jerusalem. But those who come after Alexander the Great from the Greek tradition, they're gonna be a problem for the Jewish people. The Greeks want everybody to be Greekified. The Jews don't want to be Greekified, they want to be Jewish. The Greeks want people to worship all of their gods, lots of gods. The Jews want to worship only one god. So basically, as soon as Alexander the Great is out of the picture, now we're on a collision course between the Jews and those who would come after Alexander, representing the Greek traditions. And that is where the hero rebel braveheart style story of the Jewish people rebelling against the Greeks is going to come into play, and we are going to talk about that, manana. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.