Soldier, Priest, and God

by F S Naiden

  A victorious Alexander returned to Tyre to find the siege faltering. Tyrian fire ships had destroyed some of the siege towers, and many Macedonians had to leap into the water. Rather than kill them, the Tyrians crushed their hands with sticks and stones. Wind and storm waters had dislodged the material on the top of the mole. Now it was out of sight.

  Alexander ordered it rebuilt, broader and bigger than before, using tree branches as a skeleton for the earth and rubble. Teams of Tyrian divers swam underwater and pulled away the branches. The mole submerged again. Diades’s towers would never reach their destination.

  The siege had now lasted weeks. The king of Tyre had returned, with some ships but no food or money. Becoming desperate, Tyrians hunted down birds and turned wine into vinegar. Some sold their own children into slavery, then sold themselves. After a citizen said he dreamed that the healing god Eshmun had left the city, the people chained the god’s statue to the altar beside it. They would have killed the hapless citizen, but he fled to the temple of Melkart and supplicated. The city magistrates shamed the populace into leaving him be.57

  Then the ships from Arwad, Sidon, and Cyprus appeared. These reinforcements served as cruisers to repel enemy vessels and battleships bringing artillery to bear against targets on the island. With Alexander serving as one of the admirals, the fleet drove the Tyrians from the waters around the island and surrounded the city’s damaged ramparts. The attackers also improved their tactics, partly by imitating the Tyrians. They put catapults aboard ships, and to increase the firepower of these vessels they lashed the prows together and built decks linking one ship to another. The fleet put catapults to a half dozen uses—blind fire against civilians in the city, sniping against enemies on the battlements, interdictory fire against Tyrian catapults, barrages to knock down the walls, covering fire if Alexander’s troops disembarked, supporting fire once they entered combat. The Tyrians responded with hot sand that scalded the attackers, and they flung scythes and hooks at the invaders.58

  The engineers also reconfigured ships to carry more marines, especially Coenus’s regiment. To make it easier for men to land, they added drawbridges, another invention by Diades. When Coenus and his men disembarked to attack the city, they would not have to step into deep, turbulent water. A bridge would lower them to some spot where projectiles had demolished the wall.59

  Aristander had assured the king that the city would fall on the last day in the month. When it did not, Alexander made the month a day longer. The next day the wind changed, letting ships draw closer. The bridges swung down, and the shield bearers disembarked and broke into the city. An axe blow to the head killed the lead officer almost immediately, but Alexander led the troops onward. He took the royal palace, then led his men to the shrine of Agenor, the reputed ancestor of the Thebans of Greece. He cut down all who resisted him. Coenus’s men broke into the rest of the city, and so did Phoenicians and Cypriots. Some Phoenicians showed mercy to the enemy, but the Macedonians did not. They slew some 8,000 Tyrians, and then calmed down enough to spare 30,000 to sell into slavery. Some of these had fled to shrines. Fifteen thousand later fled to Sidon with the help of the Phoenicians.60

  The king and the Carthaginian ambassadors had fled to the shrine of Melkart. There they supplicated, and Alexander spared them. Then he directed Diades and the engineers to wheel a catapult into the shrine. At the altar of Melkart, he prayed to the being he knew as Heracles, and asked this club-wielding hero to accept a more efficient weapon presented by a descendant. An accompanying offering went well, showing that Heracles welcomed the novel gift. After this cross-cultural flourish, Alexander buried his 400 dead in the Macedonian way. He held athletic games in their honor and gave an ample donative to his men.61

  The siege had lasted six months. Alexander assigned administrative duties to a garrison commander, then left the city to march south, toward Egypt.

  Disastrous for Tyre—which never fully recovered—the siege raised Alexander’s confidence. Never had he made such good use of allies or learned so much from enemies. He got the local god wrong, but got tactics and equipment right, and so he concluded that he had the god right, too. Centuries later, thanks to sand deposits, the abandoned mole became the peninsula that Alexander had envisioned.

  The people of Tyre, and those of the other Phoenician cities, soon accommodated themselves to the Macedonian invaders. For merchants, Alexander and his Macedonians were ideal customers—hungry, thirsty, rich, and eager to sell their numerous captives into slavery—and the Phoenicians were willing to go anywhere. From Tyre onward, they dominated the business of serving Alexander and his men. They became the expedition’s sutlers—its profitable, private commissariat. Parmenio and Hephaestion would now have the help of the world’s most energetic traders.

  darius had gone on to Babylon. During the siege he wrote Alexander again, asking for the return of the captive queen and princesses. As before, he offered a marriage alliance, but this time he added more silver. He also promised to yield all Anatolia and Syria. Darius left the status of Egypt unclear. The Persians maintained a garrison in Gaza, on the only road into Egypt. If Darius evacuated Syria, he could no longer help the Gaza garrison, and so he could scarcely defend Egypt. Without mentioning this province, he seemed to be conceding it.62

  This time Alexander did not, or could not, keep news of the offer from the companions, and the council gathered to debate it. No one favored the marriage proposal. It legitimized Alexander, but it also turned him into a subordinate. Thanks to Parmenio’s capture of Damascus, the Macedonians did not need the money. (Nor did they need Syria and Anatolia, which they had already conquered).63

  The questionable feature was Egypt. Alexander thought of it as the greatest of godly prizes. Some Greeks who fought the Macedonians at Issus were heading there in hopes of finding employment and plunder. Other Greek mercenaries might join them. If they sided with native Egyptian rebels, a new Egyptian monarchy might emerge. Then Sparta and Athens, always eager to oppose Macedon, would send men and ships to Egypt.64

  As council custom dictated, Parmenio, the senior general, spoke first, and said they should accept Darius’s offer. This offer would let them grab Egypt and erect a Mediterranean empire. Alexander disagreed: he wanted more than what Darius offered. Some of the generals wished to reject the offer, too, but they were less ambitious. They said going to Egypt would not accomplish the goal of conquering the Persians. It would be another detour, like Alexander’s visit to Troy. Other generals favored rejecting the offer for a related reason. Couriers had brought news of increasing Greek resistance to Antipater, Alexander’s viceroy in Macedon. Persians in Anatolia were helping the Greeks, as they had been for several years, and were resisting Antigonus, Alexander’s other lieutenant. The Macedonians should move to obliterate these Persian forces, the generals argued, not make peace with Darius.

  In effect, some companions wanted to go home. Alexander wanted to satisfy his curiosity and ambition. They thought of the expedition as just that, an expedition. He thought of it as a personal holy war. He again prevailed: the army would make Egypt its next target.65

  This had not been the first difference of opinion between Alexander and Parmenio, and between the king’s closest supporters, many of them his friends, and the old general’s supporters, many of them veteran commanders. Some differences were tactical. Alexander wished to fight at the Granicus immediately, and Parmenio preferred to wait; Parmenio, not Alexander, picked the Pinarus River as the spot to fight Darius. The latest difference of opinion was strategic. Alexander wanted to expand quickly, Parmenio perhaps eventually.

  Every one of these disputes involved religion. Parmenio was all for Zeus, and for the companions. He wanted to limit casualties and fight close to home. Alexander was all for Zeus, Athena, Heracles, and now Baal, Nergal, and Melkart, and next Amon and Marduk. He wanted to sanctify casualties and fight beyond the Mediterranean basin.

  Aside from these military disputes, Alexander and the companions drift
ed apart for another reason: the challenges of administering the empire. Alexander thought Anatolia, Egypt, and eventually Babylon could form a whole under his rule. Perhaps he could add Iran and places farther east. Parmenio and the others had no ecumenical ambition. For them, the lands along the Mediterranean would suffice. They obeyed the topographical dictates of the great flood that shaped the Near East thousands of years before. Alexander disobeyed.

  for parmenio and for the other companions, new conquests meant not new gods but new satrapies and other posts. So far, seven companions were serving as satraps. Antigonus, the most important of them, was fighting the Persians in central Anatolia. Three served elsewhere in Anatolia. Two more held Cilicia and Syria, the old posts of the Persian Mazdai. The remaining companion, who was serving in Thrace, on the western side of the Bosporus, had lost control of much of this satrapy to Thracian chieftains.66

  If enough of these men failed, the empire would fall apart, almost in the footsteps of Alexander’s army. Yet Alexander could do little to help them. Army life provided no time or place to train satraps. The school for pages taught only some warfare, and perhaps a little diplomacy, but not the administration of Persian satrapies. Competent in warfare, whether on land or sea, a satrap might prove incompetent in dealing with his subjects. He might not know their gods, languages, or customs.

  Unlike the companions, Alexander knew how to handle the religious and cultural aspect of power. He had been a priest-king for years, and had watched his father serve as one. He even had his older, simpleminded half-brother, Arrhidaeus, accompany him on the expedition to help him perform ceremonies. He always had help. What help would a companion have, especially among Semites?

  As the army marched south on the coastal road, two Semitic communities, Samaria and Yehud, surrendered to the invaders, and Alexander presented the challenge of dealing with them to a middling companion, Andromachus. Alexander might have reserved this task for himself, or for Parmenio. Instead Alexander and Parmenio went on, without pausing, toward Egypt, and Andromachus turned inland in order to serve as companion in chief for what is now the land of Israel.

  Samaria and Yehud worshipped Yahweh, not a polytheistic set of gods such as Baal and Melkart. The bigger community, Samaria, centered on a temple at Mount Gerizim, and smaller Yehud centered on an unfinished temple in Jerusalem. Both communities spoke Aramaic and read a scripture written in an early form of Hebrew. It consisted of the five books of Moses. Other religious writings had not yet become canonical. Both communities were poor. They minted few coins.

  Accompanied by a small number of troops, Andromachus came first to Samaria. He summoned the local ruler, called a pihatum, who had served the Persian satrap in Damascus. Defying the Persians, this official had brought troops to Tyre to fight alongside Alexander.67 Andromachus told him to keep his post and be attentive to the wishes of Damascus now that a Macedonian ruled there.

  Andromachus visited the shrine at Mount Gerizim, which for the Samaritans was the navel of the world, like Delphi among the Greeks. The small temple was ashlar masonry, not smooth stone, with Phoenician serpent motifs on the columns. A small cairn in the middle contained the remains of the usual animal offerings, cattle, sheep, and goats, but no pigs and many pigeons and doves. The nearby town had never fully recovered from an Assyrian attack centuries before. It served as the depository for the taxes Andromachus had come to take charge of—some due to the pihatum, some to the satrap, some to the king, and some to the shrine. The high priest of the shrine was the most important Samaritan. The pihatum was a foreigner, such as a Babylonian.68

  Andromachus now traveled south some fifty miles to his other responsibility, Yehud. In Jerusalem, the only town, some thousands lived within the ruins of the walls of the city of David. The city’s temple, which was rising atop the older temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, was far from finished. Cyrus the Great, who had authorized the Jews to build it, had left the costs to them, and they were even poorer than the Samaritans. Yehud was more arid than Samaria. The 600-yard water tunnel built by King Hezekiah snaked back and forth amid geological faults in the rocky earth below Jerusalem. Had Alexander’s geometrically minded engineers come to inspect this well-known piece of engineering, they would have left disappointed.69

  The hands claiming a share of the meager local revenue were many. As in Samaria, the high priest took his share, and the pihatum took his. The Persians had spent some of their share on a common official perquisite, specially enriched black soil for the garden next to their palace. This originally Elamite refinement let the Persians cultivate exotic fruits and flowers.70

  And this local money, what was it? The legends bore the names of long-vanished kings of Israel and Judah, as well as those of local Aramaic administrators. Sometimes the Persian king appeared in a traditional pose, kneeling and shooting an arrow. Even Zeus appeared, but not for any religious purpose. The coins were as confused as the taxes. Yet the local god, Yahweh, let his people worship no other beings.71

  To the Macedonian mind, that explained the backwardness of Samaria and Yehud. Since there was only one god, there were fewer shrines; the divine received less attention and so gave fewer blessings. Since Yahweh was not like Hermes, god of commerce, the people were poor, and since Yahweh was not like Athena, goddess of crafts, the imagery on the coins was unsystematic and there was little art. Although Yahweh did not go so far as to deny that Hermes and Athena existed, he insisted on his monopoly over Samaria and Yehud. He was not the only henotheistic god in the region. In the desert, the tribes of Moabites worshipped only Chemosh. Perhaps Yahweh was more demanding. Everything that belonged to him was consecrated and made irrevocably his. The whole people of Yehud belonged to him.

  Yahweh’s enemies also belonged to him. On his say-so, they might be irrevocably destroyed. Yahweh might even command that they be burned alive. Foreign armies might be punished in this way, as would violators of Yahweh’s shrine, and committers of incest and fornication with women in the high priest’s family. Samaria and Yehud, which quarreled about other religious matters, thought alike about the consecration of goods and men to Yahweh.72

  Greeks and Macedonians did not have any such ideas. They could melt down sacred objects in an emergency and replace them later. A slave might be dedicated to a god, to serve in a shrine, but a whole community could not be. Gods did not consecrate human beings to destruction. The wrath of the Olympians was unceremonious—a lightning bolt, a plague, or a flood. Worshippers did not burn criminals alive.73

  Although the Samaritans had aided Alexander, Andromachus squeezed them harder than he did the people of Yehud, who were to be spared taxation one year in every seven. While the army was in Egypt, the Samaritans rebelled. The troops who had aided Alexander turned on Andromachus and his garrison. They killed the Macedonian soldiers, drove them off, or sold them into slavery. They presented Andromachus to Yahweh, who consecrated him to destruction. The Samaritans burned him alive. Perhaps Andromachus had moved some valuable (or even trivial) items from the shrine at Mount Gerizim and melted them down, as no doubt happened at Solli, when the inhabitants had to give Alexander 200 talents. Perhaps he had seized temple livestock for the Macedonian offerings. Perhaps he had fornicated with the priest’s wife or daughters.74

  Only later, on his way back from Egypt, did Alexander send Perdiccas to suppress the rebellion. Perdiccas’s regiment assaulted Mount Gerizim and the settlement around the Persian fort. The Samaritans fought back, but Macedonian proficiency was too much for them. Although the settlement had resisted the Assyrians for three years, it fell to the Macedonians in a matter of weeks. Some of the defenders withdrew and escaped to caves in the desert. They had supplies and records with them, even registries of slaves. They may have expected to live in hiding. Perdiccas discovered, attacked, and slaughtered them. He then established a Macedonian colony in Samaria, peopling it with ex-soldiers and fugitives from Tyre. He and his regiment rejoined the army, and another minor companion replaced Andromachus.75
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  The Macedonians adjusted to the Semitic brand of polytheism that they encountered in Syria and Palestine. They expected the Semites to adjust in return. Some, like the people of Sidon, adjusted readily. Others, like the people of Tyre, adjusted reluctantly. When the Macedonians encountered henotheism, they did not realize that they needed to adjust in another way. For their part, the Samaritans refused to adjust to the invaders. A slaughter ensued. Alexander and his men had made their first religious mistake, but it was a small one, and they did not suffer from it. Only the Samaritans did. The community never recovered, and so Yahweh worship became largely and permanently Jewish.

  perdiccas did not attack the people of Yehud. They peaceably paid their taxes, and the Macedonians took some land from Samaria and gave it to them. A few of them enlisted as mercenaries in the invading army.76

  As for Alexander, he never visited Yehud. According to the Hebrew Romance, however, the conqueror not only visited this small country but invaded it:

  Alexander turned toward Jerusalem, for he had heard of the might of the Jews, and thought that if he did not conquer them, his glory would amount to little. He and his men arrived at Dan, in the north of Israel, and he sent messengers to Jerusalem, saying, “Send me your taxes and send me all the treasures of the house of Yahweh as tribute.” When the people heard this, they were afraid, and clothed themselves with sackcloth, fasted, and prayed. The high priest wrote to Alexander and offered to send him a dinar of gold for every house in the city, but asked him to spare the treasures their ancestors had dedicated to God. When Alexander read the letter, he became angry, and swore by his idol that he would not leave the land of the Jews until he had made Jerusalem and the temple a heap of ruins.