When did Alexander the Great conquer Judea?

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Accepted Answer

In 332 BC. After defeating Darius III at Issus in November 333, Alexander marched down the coast of Syria and Phoenicia, took Tyre after a siege of seven months and Gaza after two more, and went on into Egypt; Judea, in the hills between the two, passed to him with the rest of the Persian province without any battle that the sources record. The map stands at Tyre in 332 BC. Tyre lies about 166 km north of Jerusalem in a straight line and Gaza about 79 km to the south-west. The Greek and Roman historians of Alexander, Arrian, Diodorus and Curtius, do not mention the Jews at all. Josephus tells that while Tyre was besieged Alexander demanded help from the high priest Jaddua, who refused for his oath to Darius, and that after Gaza the king came up to Jerusalem, where Jaddua met him in his vestments, Alexander bowed before the Name on the priest's mitre and was shown the book of Daniel foretelling that a Greek would destroy the Persian empire. Most historians take the story for a legend of a later age; what is secure is that Samaria revolted against Alexander's governor Andromachus in 331 and was punished, as Curtius records, and the papyri of fugitives found in a cave of Wadi ed-Daliyeh in 1962 fit that account, while Judea stayed quiet and kept its laws. Daniel's visions were read of these years: the he goat that “came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground” and broke the two horns of the ram, “the kings of Media and Persia”; the angel explains that “the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king”, and that when the great horn is broken four rise in its place, as Alexander's empire was divided among his generals after his death at Babylon in 323 BC. Many commentators also read Zechariah's oracle against Tyre, of which he says, “he will smite her power in the sea”, and against Gaza, where “the king shall perish”, as a picture of the march of 332, though others date the chapter earlier. Judea then belonged to the Ptolemies of Egypt from 301 BC and passed to the Seleucids after the battle of Panium in 200 BC.