No. 11.
MY DEAR CHILDREN―In my last letter, we left Alexander with Asia Minor in his power after the battle of the Granicus. I shall in this letter give you a very short account of his conquests and death. But before doing so, I wish you to admire the ways of God in the universal spread of the Greek language, which the sway of Alexander brought about. It was in this language that God intended to communicate the knowledge of His Son, through the writings of the New Testament, and so He disseminated it, by the conquests of Alexander, over the face of the earth. Fifty years later (about B.C. 277), the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, and the Hebrew having fallen into disuse, this version was common in the time of our Saviour and of the Apostle Paul, and is often quoted by them. When you find, in reading treatises upon the Scripture, such a sentence as “the version of the LXX has such a reading,” you should know that it means this Greek translation of the Old Testament, which being supposed to be the work of some seventy learned men, these Roman equivalent numerals are used for the version.
Now there could not have been a more suitable language in which to express the simple, yet very deep and refined truths of the New Testament. It has a beautiful and delicate system of moods, voices, and tenses, capable of expressing the most minute shades of thought. The German is the only modern language which resembles it in its power of combining several ideas or uses of things in one word. In English, mostly, when we wish to give the meaning of a science in one word, we do it by combining two Greek words into an English one, as Geography, which means a description of the earth. Besides the elaborate system of verbs, it abounds in prepositions and particles, which give to its sentences great points and accuracy of meaning. We may humbly suppose, that one reason of the Greek poets and historians being preserved to us is, that, whilst the beauty of their style, and the range of their thoughts make it worth the while of the learned of this world to study them, when God may please to touch their hearts by His truth, they may bring their stores of Greek learning to elucidate and explain the Greek Testament. You must not mistake me, as if I wanted you to suppose that we cannot understand the truths of Scripture without knowing Greek; blessed be God, we have an excellent translation—a reflection of the original quite good enough to instruct us in the deepest truths: what I am rather aiming at, is to show that if we had one twice as good, it could not take the place of the original in the hands of a scholar capable of appreciating the delicate precision of the Greek language.
We may now return to Alexander. Let us not forget that his kingdom is figured under a he goat from the west (Daniel 8), a leopard (chapters 7), and the belly and thighs of brass of the great statue (chapters 2); and so these Greeks in history are called the brazen-coated Greeks. From the time of the battle of the Granicus, until Alexander’s death, was hardly twelve years. Having conquered the whole of Asia Minor, he had to prepare for a battle with Darius himself. This took place near the river Issue, in Cilicia, at the eastern extremity of Asia Minor, near the sea (B.C. 333). He obtained a memorable victory over Darius, who fled, leaving his wife, mother, and daughters in the conqueror’s hands. After this (B.C. 332), Alexander marched into Syria, and the Tyrians refusing him admittance into Tyre, he laid siege to it, and after seven months took it (Sept. B.C. 332). It had previously stood a siege by Nebuchadnezzar of thirteen year, and its possession confirmed him in the rule of the sea, as Tyre was the great maritime power, and the richest city in the east. The taking of it finished his third campaign in Asia. It was about this time that his visit to Jerusalem, as mentioned in my last letter, took place. All Syria was now under his hand, and his next progress was into Egypt, which fell an easy prey to him, as the Egyptians had never willingly suffered the Persian yoke, although they had succumbed to it for nearly two hundred years. His capabilities as a statesman were here shown in the founding of Alexandria, a city which must always be the emporium of the trade, and the highway of communication between Europe and India. Returning to Tyre, he undertook his fourth campaign, which included the great battle of Arbela, where the Persian power was finally ruined. He crossed the Euphrates, and subsequently the Tigris, in search of Darius, who had marched from Babylon, and the two armies met near Arbela, in Assyria, on one of the last days of September B.C. 331; the Persian troops numbering one million of infantry, and thirty thousand cavalry, against forty thousand infantry, and seven thousand cavalry on the part of Alexander. The victory was decisive, and it is said that more than three hundred thousand Persians perished. It is remarkable, as showing the accuracy of the word of God, that these three battles of the Granicus, Issus, and Arbela, were each fought so near a river, that the Greeks had to cross one immediately previous, and Scripture says, “the ram (the emblem of Persia) was standing by the side of the river.” Alexander was only 25 years of age when the battle was fought. He advanced immediately to Babylon, where he was received with open arms. The city was fast sinking in wealth and importance, and the Euphrates was beginning by the bursting of its banks to convert the surrounding country into a marsh. His first care was to provide for the re-building of the temple of Belus, and he restored their revenues to the priests of the idol. No doubt it was his purpose eventually to make it the seat of empire, and to restore it to its ancient magnificence; but the sentence of God had gone forth, that Babylon should be “an astonishment and an hissing without an inhabitant:” and who was this or that monarch to counteract Him?
From Babylon, Alexander marched into Persia proper, through Susiana, and received the submission of Susa, one of the Persian capitals. The unused treasures of the empire had been accumulating there for years, and accordingly Alexander found 50,000 talents of silver in the citadel. It was here that Daniel “at Shushan in the palace” saw the vision described in chapter 8. Alexander now proceeded to the proper capital of Persia, viz., Persepolis, which he burned, and thus ended his fourth campaign. He next visited Ecbatana, the Median capital, and hearing that Darius had left it but a few days before with a small body of troops, he pursued him, and finally overtook him; but only to find his dead body, for the satraps by whom he was accompanied had mutinied, and wounded him, leaving him by the wayside; and when Alexander came up he was just dead. This assassination took place in July B.C. 330, and from thence we must date the fall of the empire.
I shall not attempt to follow any further the career of the conqueror, which is traced in every book of ancient history, but shall give you only in his own words the extent of his conquests, when his soldiers refused to proceed beyond the region of the present Punjaub. “Macedonians and allies” (said Alexander) “seeing that you do not follow me into danger with your usual alacrity, I have summoned you to this assembly, that either I may persuade you to go further, or you persuade me to turn back. If you have reason to complain of our former labors, or of me your leader, I have no more to say; but if by these labors we have acquired Ionia, the Hellespont, with Phrygia, Cappadocia, Papblagonia, Lydia, Caria, Lycia, Pamphlylia, Phœnicia, Egypt, Cyrenaica, part of Arabia, Cœlo, Syria, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Susiana, Persia, Media, and all the provinces governed by the Medea and Persians, and others never subject to them: if we have subdued the regions beyond the Caspian gates and Mount Caucasus, Hyrcania, Bactria, and the countries between Caucasus, the river Tanais, and the Hyrcanian sea: if we have driven the Scythians back into their deserts, and the Indus, the Hydaspes, the Acesines flow within our empire, why do you hesitate to pass the Hyphasis also, and add the nations beyond it to the Macedonian conquests?” But it was not to be so. The soldiers refused to follow him. At the age of 30. he had to turn back to the Hydaspes, where he built a fleet, and with a division of his army marching on either bank, fell down the Indus, and after unheard of difficulties and dangers, through hitherto untravelled routes, arrived both fleet and army safe in Persia, and eventually at the age of 32 returned to Babylon, where he died of fever at the age of 33. He was full of plans at the time for rebuilding and embellishing Babylon, and for the subjugation of Arabia, both contrary to the purposes of God. (Genesis 16:12, 25:18.) So he was taken away.
I shall now touch upon the character of Alexander’s government, for the purpose of showing that “the belly and thighs of brass,” by which it is symbolized in the statue, were inferior both to the gold of Nebuchadnezzar’s empire and to the silver of the Medo-Persian. We are to consider Alexander the Great as a kind of Confederate Chief―indeed, as such the States of Greece elected him for the invasion of Asia. He was a general in the midst of his fellows; and it was the marked superiority of his personal character, rather than any national predilections in favor of monarchy, or any hallowed prejudices attached to royalty, which gave him such immense power. Off the field of battle his generals were his boon companions. In short, his was a kind of military monarchy. The very reverse was the case with Persia. Everything in her history spews us that, irrespective of the character of the monarch, there was a reverential awe attached to his person, and he was surrounded with a state, which all belonged to this sacredness. It is true that at last it fell by the weight of the accumulated vices of the court; upon the other hand, Alexander’s monarchy fell to pieces at his death. It is evident that when he reached the climax of his power, he was desirous of amalgamating the two nations; for except in his ignorance of the mind of God, Alexander ever showed himself an excellent administrator, and a good judge of the motives which influence men. He early perceived that a handful of rude Macedonians could never govern his immense empire of Asia, so he encouraged intermarriages, and himself showed the example. He organized, too, a Persian army on Greek tactics, and bred up Persian youths in the arts and languages of Greece. He surrounded himself with the state of a Persian king, and adopted the loose dress of these monarchs, so as to appear to his subjects to be the genuine successor of Darius; but he never could persuade the Macedonians to yield to him those acts of prostration, which the potentates of Asia exacted from their subjects, and which were freely yielded to him by the Persians, and even the discussions on it were the fruitful causes of bitterness and alienation on the part of the Greeks. As a man he was capable of the strongest attachments, and his personal qualities were such as to endear him to all those by whom he was surrounded. His great faults were the almost unlimited habit of drinking, which was the cause indeed of his death, and in his later years, when prosperity had spoiled him, giving away to suspicion and immoderate anger. Arrian, his historian, sums up his character in the following words (I quote them as remarkably corroborative of Scripture): “There did not, as I believe, in that age exist the nation, the city, nor the individual, whom the name of Alexander had not reached. My own opinion, therefore, I will profess, that not without especial purpose of the Deity such a man was given to the world, to whom none has ever vet been equal.”―Your affectionate Father.