Alexander the Great in Prophecy
To understand Bible prophecy, it is vital to know what Alexander the Great accomplished during his short reign as King of Macedonia. The book of Daniel makes references to Alexander’s kingdom and how he was used by God to usher in the third world-ruling empire of Greece. It is astounding what Alexander the Great was able to accomplish in twelve years on horseback. By the time of his death, his empire stretched from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. But his successes were not from his might alone. While Alexander the Great was just a man, he was used by God to conquer the Persian empire, and his kingdom’s split is prophesied in the Bible.
At the time of his reign, Alexander the Great was often compared to a Greek god. His parents both had dreams that their son would be great. His father, Philip of Macedon, dreamt that his son would be lion-like, and his mother Olympias dreamt that a bolt of lightning struck her womb, signaling that her son would have celestial parentage. In some ways, the life of Alexander the Great has been romanticized. Art and literature have exaggerated some of the history of his life. However, Alexander was able to accomplish some astounding things during his short life.
Alexander the Great was born in Pella, Macedonia in July 356 B.C. As a son of a Macedonian king, Alexander was given the best possible education. One of his tutors was the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Because of Aristotle, Alexander read and loved the Iliad. This instilled grand ideas of heroism in his head. Like those dreams his parents had before his birth, Alexander also believed that he was destined for greatness, much like Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. But Alexander was not so much interested in books as he was in the military.
At eighteen, Alexander was given command over the Macedonian Companion Cavalry at the battle of Chaerona. This victory marked Alexander’s father Philip, the King of Macedonia, as the clear leader of Greece. He started the League of Corinth in 337 B.C., made up of all Greek city-states. It was during the first meeting of the League of Corinth that the decision was made to invade Persia. For Philip, there were a few reasons why he wanted to invade Asia.
The first reason why Philip wanted to invade Persia was to get revenge. A couple of centuries previous, the Persian king Artaxerxes had invaded Greece and pillaged Athens. Another reason Philip wanted to invade was because of the riches in Persia. Thirdly, he believed that if the Greeks were busy fighting in Asia, they would not be able to rebel against his forces in Greece. The final and most crucial reason why Philip wanted to invade Persia was to expand the Macedonian empire.
Philip of Macedon had had aspirations to conquer Asia, but this goal was never realized before his death in 336 B.C. That year, Alexander was crowned king at the age of twenty and continued his father’s exploits. It was obvious for Alexander to continue his father’s dream of conquering Persia.
In 332 B.C., Alexander laid siege to the city of Tyre, the Phoenician capital. He wanted to secure all Phoenician cities before moving on to Egypt. Alexander’s plan was to isolate the Persian fleet from the Persian army on the mainland. However, much to Alexander’s frustration, the Tyrians resisted and the siege lasted for seven months.
After the siege of Tyre, Alexander moved south to Jerusalem. According to Josephus, the Jews in Jerusalem were fearful of Alexander because they had yet to pay tribute to him. There was a high priest named Jaddua in Jerusalem who had made an oath with Darius the Third that they would never bear arms against the Persians. Alexander threated that he would make an example of the high priest and show the Jews who they should make oaths to.
According to Josephus, Jaddua had a dream from God that the city gates were opened, and the people were dressed in white to meet Alexander. In the dream, he met the priests with friendliness. Alexander said that he himself had had a dream in which Jaddua, dressed in white clothes, told Alexander that he would be victorious over the Persians. The Jews and Alexander got along well in Jerusalem, and he even offered a sacrifice to God in the temple. When the chance occurred between the Persian and Greek empires, there was no bloodshed in Jerusalem.
Jaddua showed Alexander the prophecies in Daniel that show Alexander would be victorious. And those prophecies were written two hundred years before Alexander was even alive.
In November 332 B.C., Alexander moved on to Egypt. There, he was crowned pharaoh with the double crown of Egypt. While he spent the winter there, he founded the city of Alexandria. With each city he conquered, Alexander was crucial to the spreading Hellenism, the spread of Greek ideas and culture. From his youth, Alexander admired the Greek culture. Alexander continued east, moving into Persia.
Three battles were crucial in the downfall of the Persian empire: Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela. In the spring of 334 B.C., with a skilled cavalry of six thousand men and an infantry of forty-three thousand, Alexander and his army met the Persians at the Granicus river. The Persians were greatly outnumbered. It was an easy defeat, and Alexander was generous with the Persians. He allowed the families of the dead Persian soldiers to be free from taxes and military services.
The battle of Issus was fought in November of 333 B.C. This battle marked a turning point in the Persian empire’s downfall. There, Alexander took the Persian royal family prisoner. But his strategy of generosity was extended toward them. Alexander treated the Persians favorably, so as to better legitimize his move to claim the throne. While his men wanted to pillage Persia, Alexander commanded them not to on the grounds that it now belonged to him. This suggests that he did not see himself as conquering Persia, so much as becoming its new ruler.
The battle of Gaugamela was fought in November of 331 B.C. Unlike at Granicus, Alexander’s forces were outnumbered. Darius had possibly a quarter of a million soldiers to Alexander’s forty-seven thousand. With his characteristic logic, a gap opened in the center Darius’s forces, allowing Alexander’s cavalry to charge through. Darius fled from the battle.
This was another crucial battle because it ensured Persia’s demise. One of Alexander’s main objectives in this battle was to capture Darius alive. This was part of a propaganda coup to However, after an arduous search, the goal was fruitless. Darius’s relative, Bessus, murdered Darius in the summer of 330 B.C. and took the crown.
Alexander’s generosity toward the Persians was a common theme and a calculated move. The Persians on the western coast were not ruled harshly. They were not concerned with who ruled them, because they governed themselves on a local level. They paid taxes to the Persian king, who left them to their own devices. For Alexander, it was easy to Hellenize these people. In this way, he continued across Persia, replacing the satrapies with his own generals.
After conquering the Persia empire, Alexander adopted a few Persian customs. One was the Persia style of dress for kings: a striped purple and white tunic, but he did not wear the Persian crown. His cavalry began to wear Persian cloaks, and even the horses had Persian saddles. This was an attempt by Alexander to merge the Persian and Macedonian cultures. He wanted his empire to be unified, and one way to do that was to adopt Persian customs. He also adopted the Persian custom of proskynesis, which was the custom of prostrating oneself before the Persian king.
Alexander also integrated Persian soldiers into his army. Before setting out for India, he recruited thirty thousand young Persians to be trained in his army. He called them his “Successors” because they were to succeed the old Macedonian army. Alexander made these efforts because it was important to him that his empire was united.
Alexander continued into Media, Parthia, and what we now know as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into India. In India, along the Hydaspes River, Alexander and his forces fought in one of the last major battles against king Porus and his army. Alexander wanted the territory west of the Hydapses River. They fought against four thousand cavalry, fifty thousand infantry, and two hundred war elephants.
Alexander’s forces were victorious in the battle of the Hydapses. Buoyed by thus victory, Alexander wanted to keep moving east until they could see the ocean. But they never saw it. While in India, Alexander’s men had had enough. They essentially mutinied. While Alexander wanted to conquer more land until he reached the ocean, his men were homesick and refused to go any further. This, of course, made Alexander furious.
After an arduous journey home, racked with hardships in the desert and sickness for Alexander, they arrived in Susa in 324 B.C. In Persia, Alexander used his Macedonian soldiers to build stronger ties with the Persian people. Alexander had a strong desire to homogenize his empire. In Susa, a mass wedding was held. A hundred of his most high-ranking soldiers married Persian noblewomen. Alexander himself married two Persian women. One of them was Stateira, a daughter of King Darius, and the other was Parysatis, a daughter of the previous king Ataxerxes Ochus. Most of his soldiers, however, resented these forced unions and had them annulled.
Alexander intended to make Babylon the capital of his empire. But he did not live long enough to see his dreams come to fruition. After drinking too much, he fell ill during a banquet in Babylon. Ten days later, on June 13, 333 B.C., Alexander the Great died. He was thirty-two years old.
In Daniel 11, it is prophesied that a mighty king would rise up and that his kingdom would be split into four divisions. Verses 2 through 4 say, “And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia. And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.”
These verses clearly refer to the four divisions of Alexander’s empire, given to his four generals. “Not to his posterity” means that his kingdom would not be handed down through his son. These verses also indicate that the four divisions would never be as strong as Alexander’s single empire. While Alexander had a son, Alexander IV, through his first wife Roxane, the boy was only about twelve years old when his father died and was killed by Cassander.
Daniel 7:6 says, “After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it.” The leopard represents the Greek empire. Like a leopard, Alexander moved swiftly across the east, conquering cities and the entire Persian empire with almost unfathomable quickness.
Daniel 8:3-8 is about Alexander the Great as the first king of the Greek empire. This prophecy was written 200 years before Alexander came on the scene. Verse 21 clearly states that the “notable horn” is a Grecian king. No other Grecian king accomplished what Alexander the Great was able to accomplish. In this verse, the goat represents the Greco-Macedonian empire.
When Alexander died, the great horn was broken and four horns were left in its place. The great horn, of course, is Alexander, and the four horns are his four generals. Daniel 8:8 says, “Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heave.”
“When he was strong, the great horn was broken” indicated that Alexander would be cut off during the height of his power. Indeed, in 323 B.C., when he was only 32 years old, Alexander died in Babylon. He reigned for only twelve years. He had conquered two million square miles of land—the known western world—on horseback.
Looking at his victories, they seem impossible. Alexander’s forces were outnumbered 2:1 in the battle of Issus, and yet that battle was a decisive victory. Alexander never had the upper hand as far as territory was concerned. All of the major battles that he fought were on the enemy’s home front. He did not have the advantage of knowing the terrain. God performed great miracles through Alexander. Greece was united because of him, and the Persia empire—already on unstable ground—finally collapsed. Now nothing stood in the way of Hellenism reaching western Asia.
Although Alexander had a son with his wife Roxane, the boy and his mother were killed by Cassander, who wanted the throne for himself. Without an heir of age to take over Alexander’s empire, it was split into four divisions. Ptolemy ruled Egypt, part of Syria and Judea. Seleucus ruled Syria, Babylonia and territory east to India. Lysamichus ruled Asia Minor. Cassander ruled over Greece and Macedonia.
Out of two of these generals—Seleucus and Ptolemy—came the king of the north and the king of the south. Their main struggle was over Jerusalem, and countless of conflicts were caused because of that struggle of Jerusalem.
Alexander’s legacy cannot be understated. Biblical prophecies in Daniel relate just how important Alexander is in world history. He was used by God to cut down the Medo-Persian Empire and usher in the Grecian empire, the third world-ruling empire. Alexander established cities and universities across the swath of land he conquered. Although Hellenization was not a term used during Alexander’s time, because of him, Greek ideas and culture spread swiftly across the western world. His empire stretched from the Mediterranean to India.
It is difficult to compare Alexander’s legacy to anyone else, considering he accomplished so much without the tools of modern warfare. Alexander used strategy on the battlefield to conquer his enemies, even when he was outnumbered 2:1. Obviously this was not the work of a man, but of God performing miracles and fulfilling His prophecy. The sheer magnitude of what Alexander was able to do shows that God’s hand was involved every part of the way. The prophecies in Daniel are clear and cannot be ascribed to any other Greek king. The prophecies about Alexander the Great prove that the Bible is authoritative and that God fulfills prophecy.