On Alexander's death his empire split, and little Judea sat on the fault line between two of its fragments: the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt to the south, and the Seleucids, the Greek kings of Syria to the north (the ISBE calls the land "a sort of buffer state between Egypt under the Ptolemies on the South, and Syria, under the house of Seleucus, on the North"). For about a hundred years the two dynasties fought over it, and for most of that time the gentler Ptolemies held Judea and largely left the Jews to their own law and temple. Daniel 11 reads like a coded map of this very tug-of-war between "the king of the south" (Egypt) and "the king of the north" (Syria), their wars and marriages and broken treaties (Daniel 11:5–6). In 198 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus III ("the Great") finally won Judea for the north at the battle of Panium, near the sources of the Jordan (ISBE, "Maccabaeus; Maccabees"). The change of landlord would prove fatal a generation later.
One lasting gift came out of Ptolemaic Egypt: the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, made for the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria (tradition, preserved in the Letter of Aristeas in Charles' collection, sets it under Ptolemy II in the third century BC and has seventy-two elders do the work, hence the name, from the Latin for "seventy"). Its importance is hard to overstate: it put God's word into the common language of the whole eastern Mediterranean, and it is the very form in which the New Testament writers most often quote the Old Testament. The Greek of the synagogue was being prepared long before the apostles ever opened their mouths.