How were the Jews troubled by the wars of the Hellenistic age?

Answer 1

The Hellenistic period was post-Alexander when his successors (his top generals) who, in the late 4th C BCE carved up his empire and struggled against each other to expand their cut of the cake - the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Syria, and various dynasties in Macedonia and Asia Minor.

Judea was both one of the areas in dispute and the route through which contending armies tramped. It alternated between Egyptian and Syrian overlordship. The Maccabaean revolt in the mid-2nd C BCE was against Syrian control as the Syrian kingdom became weak.

King Antiochus IV decided that all the trouble in the south of his kingdom arose from the troublesomeness of Judaism, and tried to stamp it out. Traditional Jews had been increasingly upset at the continuing hellenisation of the upper and merchant classes in Judea, and with this last straw started a revolt which eventually established Jewish kings, the last of whom was Herod.

However the Hellenistic kings were progressively brought under Roman control by Pompey's subjection of the east, and finally Octavian Augustus' final establisment of a pax romanus in the area after Antony and Cleopatra's demise in 31 BCE.