The era's first force is Alexander the Great. In a single decade (334–323 BC) the young Macedonian shattered the Persian Empire that the late Old Testament had known (Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther) and carried Greek language and culture from Greece to India. The book of Daniel had pictured exactly such a conqueror under the image of a he-goat rushing from the west "and touched not the ground," whose "great horn" is "the first king" of Greece, broken at the height of his power (Daniel 8:5–8, 21; compare the "mighty king" of Daniel 11:3). Alexander died young in 323 BC, and, as Daniel's image of the broken horn replaced "by four" foreshadows (Daniel 8:8, 22), his generals carved the empire among themselves.
What Alexander left behind mattered more than his conquests: Hellenism, the seductive package of Greek language, athletics, philosophy, and city life. Charles' edition of 1 Maccabees opens its story right here, with "the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the division of his kingdom" (Charles APOT, 1 Maccabees, Oesterley's introduction). For the next three centuries the deepest struggle in Jewish life was not merely against foreign armies but against the pull of Greek culture, whether a faithful Jew could, or should, become a Greek. That tension is the slow fuse that the Maccabean crisis would finally ignite.