Session 1 - Hellenistic Part I

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. We're going to now discuss the Hellenistic period. This is a time where the Greek culture has a great influence over the land of Palestine, over the land of Israel, through the conquest, or through the conquest of one general called Alexander the Great, who conquered most of the ancient world throughout Egypt and the land of Israel, the land of the Mesopotamians, and even even further east. It's just amazing. But what happened was, is with these conquests, he brought in his culture. He liked, Alexander liked to keep the culture that was best reflective of those people that he conquered. So they weren't wiped out. He liked to keep that colorful part of their culture, but also he had it with that culture of the region, his Greek culture. So the Greek language became the language of trade, the language of what was well known, okay? Also their art and their design, such as their pottery design, pottery such as terracotta. Once again, why is it so important? Because archaeologists look at terracotta to determine what time period that we're going to be in. If you want to look at one verse in the biblical narrative in the New Testament, it'd be Mark chapter 6 and verse 3, and this is where we read Jesus as being a tecton. And I want to let you privately in your own home, read that verse to yourself while I show you a piece of Hellenistic pottery. Now look how fine and nice this looks with the little rosette designs on it, and the pattern. And this is just a small crater, but the pottery is far, far more finer than just this piece right here. This is just a common piece of Hellenistic pottery, and the influence of that culture that is going to have in the land of Canaan. So this is the style of pottery that we're getting ready to see. All right, now something else, secondly, that's very important is the lamps. Remember how the lamps looked like little shells and different styles of the shells, but now it completely changes. And look at the stylized type of lamp that we have at the Hellenistic period, an oil lamp. So you put the oil in the big hole, and you have a little piece of cloth in the small hole, and you would light it as the cloth absorbs the olive oil. And we find thousands and thousands of these types of lamps, because think of that, think of an oil lamp as a light switch in a house. And you have tens, if not dozens of light switches, so there are dozens of oil lamps found in any one location of a residence. All right, so we have the type of pottery design, lamp design, in which we know it is the Hellenistic period. But also they bring in cultural, you could say, things that they would do for fun, such as dice, and they like to gamble. Or also they built mausoleums. They're the first ones to bring in mausoleums. So the wealthy had mausoleums, but later on in the Jewish culture, what they did is they thought that these mausoleums would become a place to deposit the remains, so that it had a place to wait for a time period which was known as the Resurrection.