By the end of the Old Testament, many Jews had settled back into Palestine, they had rebuilt the temple, and they were conducting their own religious ceremonies. Alexander the Great swept into the area in 332 B.C., leaving wherever he went an emphasis on Greek culture called Hellenism. After his death, his kingdom was divided into four kingdoms run by different families, two of which became important for their relations with the Jews. One, the Ptolemies, took over Egypt while the other, the Seleucids, ruled Syria and Mesopotamia. Both battled endlessly for dominance, and, as in the past, Palestine was caught in a tug-of-war struggle between the two powers.

Jews continued to spread throughout the known world. This Diaspora, as it is called, led to widely scattered groups of Jews settling into a life focused on the Torah and the synagogue where personal piety and a relationship with God replaced national ideals. In 285 B.C. the Old Testament was translated into Greek. The resulting work was called the Septuagint, a Latin term meaning “seventy,” a reference to the story that seventy men worked on the translation. This was an important book because it made the Scriptures available to all people of the western world; it became the Bible of the early Christian church.

The struggle for political control took a bad turn when the Seleucids defeated the Ptolemies, who had given the Jews religious freedom. Persecutions started in earnest under the leadership of Antiochus Epiphanes with the result that a Jewish guerilla group, the Maccabees, fought for freedom from 167-142 B.C. For the next eighty years, the Jews enjoyed autonomy until 63 B.C. when the Romans took possession of Palestine and put an end to Jewish nationhood until 1948.