The Hellenistic Kingdoms: Ptolemies and Seleucids Divide the Near East

The event

Alexander's sudden death without an adult heir plunged his enormous empire into decades of warfare among his former generals, known to historians as the Diadochi, or 'Successors.' By the decisive Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, the fighting had largely settled into a lasting arrangement: Ptolemy and his descendants ruled Egypt — and, initially, Judea — from Alexandria, while Seleucus and his descendants ruled a vast realm stretching from Syria eastward, governed from their new capital at Antioch.

For the next century and a half, tiny Judea sat squarely on the border between these two rival Hellenistic superpowers — ruled first by the Ptolemies (301–198 BC) and then by the Seleucids — in exactly the drawn-out struggle between 'the king of the South' and 'the king of the North' that the prophet Daniel had laid out in extraordinary, almost history-like detail generations before it happened (Daniel 11:2-20). Under Ptolemaic rule, the large Jewish community centered in Alexandria produced the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that would shape the entire intertestamental period and the world of the New Testament.

This uneasy balance of power held for generations, until a Seleucid king with far less restraint than his predecessors — Antiochus IV Epiphanes — took the throne. His brutal campaign to stamp out Jewish worship in Jerusalem would soon ignite the Maccabean revolt, carrying God's covenant people into the final turbulent chapter of history before the coming of Christ.

Dating

301 BC (the Battle of Ipsus) is the commonly used marker for the settlement among Alexander's successors, though minor territorial adjustments between the rival dynasties continued for some years afterward.