The End of the Persian Period and the Arrival of Alexander the Great

The Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, which had dominated the Near East since the mid-sixth century BCE, created the little district of Yehud out of the northern half of the historical Kingdom of Judah. According to accounts in the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the Persian emperors permitted or even encouraged the restoration of the central Temple of the old kingdom in Jerusalem, the return of a segment of its traditional priesthood and other officials from their exile in Babylonia (Mesopotamia), and the restoration of the Law of Moses, which some Judahites, both before and after the exile (587 BCE), had regarded as authoritative. 

The regime thus nurtured by the Persians was in effect almost entirely new, the discontinuities more conspicuous than the continuities. Before 587 BCE, Israelites had worshiped their God Yahweh in a variety of temples and shrines, not just at Jerusalem, and for most of the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as reported in the books of Kings, they worshiped other gods as well, as part of a regional pantheon. But there is no evidence for the public worship in Achaemenid Yehud (after 539 BCE) of any god but Yahweh. The chief priest of the first Jerusalem Temple had been one important functionary among many, but under the Persians, he was the governor of the province, with no competition from a native king or a royal bureaucracy. The first mention of a compiled law collection, sefer torah (book of the law), which the high priest Hilkiah supposedly discovered in the Jerusalem Temple during the reign of the pre-exilic king Josiah (r. 640–609 BCE) according to 2 Kings 22, was a short scroll containing probably a part, or early version, of what we call Deuteronomy. The laws endorsed directly or indirectly by the Persians, also called sefer torah or sefer torat Moshe (Nehemiah 8:1), appear to have contained more than just that Deuteronomic material. In other words, the Torah that became the binding law code and constitution of the Jews after the exile had not previously existed. Achaemenid Yehud was a very different place from the pre-exilic kingdom of Judah. It was also much poorer and more sparsely populated. 

The Macedonian conqueror Alexander never set foot in Judea, contrary to later legends, but that tiny district did yield to him, as far as we can tell, without significant struggle. To understand fully what Judea (as it had begun to be called) was like at the moment it submitted to Alexander, we are obliged to consider demographic shifts. These shifts, which are routinely ignored, tremendously enrich and complicate our understanding of events and texts. They also provide a useful frame in which to set an entire complex of changes, both internal and external to Jewish history per se, that forms the main topic of the narrative of Jewish antiquity.