02.27. One empire after another

One empire after another

During the period when Old Testament Israel was divided, Syria was a bitter enemy of the northern kingdom. It attacked often, seized conquered territory and treated its victims so cruelly that God’s prophets assured it of a terrible punishment.¹ The judgment fell when Assyria conquered it in 732 BC.

Syria had no independent national existence for the next four hundred years, being merely a land within the successive empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Greece. But during the Greek period it regained status when, after Alexander’s death, the empire split into a number of sectors, one of which was centred on Syria and ruled by a Greek dynasty called the Seleucids. About 300 BC, the founder of this dynasty built the city of Antioch as his administrative capital and Seleucia as its Mediterranean port. A dynasty of thirteen kings, most of them with the name Antiochus or Seleucus, reigned over Syria for more than two hundred years. The most notorious of them was Antiochus IV Epiphanes, whose hatred of Israel overflowed when he invaded Jerusalem, slaughtered the Jews, abolished their law, burnt their Scriptures, and offered unclean animals on a Greek altar in their temple. To Jews, this was the supreme atrocity, ‘the abomination of desolation’.² The Jewish resistance, led by a group known as the Maccabees, fought for more than three years till, in 165 BC, they overthrew the enemy and re-dedicated the temple.³ The Jews continued the war till they won full political independence in 143 BC. But the Jews soon became hopelessly divided, while the Seleucids to the north consistently lost more of the extensive territory they once ruled. In 64 BC the Seleucids were conquered by Rome, and Syria became a province of the emerging Roman Empire. The next year Israel lost its independence when it also fell to Rome.

1. 1 Kings 20:1; 2 Kings 6:24; 2 Kings 10:32; 2 Kings 13:22; Amos 1:3-4

2. Daniel 11:31 3. Jews celebrate the event annually in the Feast of Dedication; John 10:22 Antioch’s city wall at Seleucia, where it extended to enclose the port