ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(al' ig zan' duhr) GREEK: ALEXANDROS
"defender of man"
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A youth not quite 20 when he came to power in his homeland of Macedonia in 336 B.C., Alexander reshaped his world before he died 13 years later. His life story is told in brief in 1 Maccabees 1:1-7. Alexander's father, King Philip II of Macedonia, trained Alexander to govern, bringing the philosopher Aristotle from Athens to tutor the prince from the age of 13 to 16. At 16 Alexander served as regent and led troops in battle. Two years later he was one of Philip's commanders in the decisive battle that gave the Macedonian ruler control of Greece. King Philip was planning to invade the vast empire of Persia, which for a century had harassed Greece and controlled the Greek cities in Asia Minor, when he was assassinated in 336.
Taking over his father's plan of conquest, Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 with some 35,000 Macedonian and Greek soldiers and defeated a Persian army at the river Granicus. He then swept through western Asia Minor to liberate the Greek cities of Pergamum, Sardis, Ephesus, and others. In battle Alexander deployed the most effective army of his day. Its power lay in the use of a concentrated cavalry charge to break enemy lines, to be followed by an almost invincible infantry phalanx, thousands of close-ordered fighting men each with a 13-foot spear that made the formation bristle like a porcupine.
In 333 Alexander met the full Persian army under King Darius III at Issus near the north-eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The defeated Persian king fled, but his family was captured. A year later Alexander took the island fortress of Tyre after a long siege and marched south through Palestine. Later legends cited by the Jewish historian Josephus tell how Alexander went up to Jerusalem and was met by the high priest Jaddua arrayed in his crown bearing the name of God. Alexander bowed before the name of God and explained that back in Macedonia he had seen a vision of the high priest who had assured him of victory.
Late in 332 Alexander occupied Egypt. There he was crowned as Pharaoh and acclaimed by an oracle as a son of the god Amon-Ra. On the Nile delta he founded the city of Alexandria - the first of many with that name - a city that was to become one of the leading intellectual and political centers of the ancient world. Moving east toward the heart of Persia in 331, he crossed the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and decisively defeated Darius at Gaugamela. The Persian king again fled but was murdered by his own cousin.
Alexander fought triumphantly across what is now Iran to the borders of India. But his eastward progress was stopped by the refusal of the army to go further, and Alexander arrived back in Persian Susa in 324. His army had gradually changed from being a Macedonian national force to a personal army owing allegiance to him alone, and the conqueror's success helped to establish the idea of ruler worship in the Mediterranean area. At his request, Greek cities voted him honors as a divinity, evidently to reinforce his political authority. Before he could enjoy his divinity, however, Alexander died of a fever at the age of 33. In the absence of any clear successor, the Middle East was thrown into 40 years of wars among Alexander's generals for control of his legacy. Without naming Alexander, a vision recorded in the book of Daniel foretells his career: "A mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. And when he has arison, his kingdom shall be broken and divided toward the four winds of heaven" (Dan. 11:3-4).
{E2 Dictionary of Biblical People}