Alexander’s Conquests

Alexander III of Macedon — "Alexander the Great" — crossed the Hellespont with about 40,000 men in the spring of 334 BC. He was twenty years old, the son of Philip II, taught by Aristotle, and devout in his own pagan way. He defeated the Persian satraps at the Granicus (334), the army of Darius III at Issus (333), and finally Darius himself at Gaugamela (331). He marched south through Phoenicia, took Tyre after a famous seven-month siege (332), went down into Egypt where he founded Alexandria, then east through Babylon and Susa to burn Persepolis. By 327 he had crossed the Hindu Kush and reached the Punjab; his exhausted army refused to go further. He died in Babylon on 11 June 323 BC, aged thirty-two, leaving an empire from Greece to the Indus. The conquest is foretold in Daniel as the rough male goat from the west whose great horn is broken at the height of its power, and divided into four (Dan 8:5–8; 8:21–22); the four horns are his successor-generals Cassander, Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy. Josephus preserves a tradition (Antiquities 11.8) that Alexander spared Jerusalem when the high priest Jaddua met him in procession and showed him the prophecy of Daniel.