Nadene Goldfoot
Israel was a great and mighty empire under King David and his son, King Solomon. A kingdom made up of 12 tribes, the best of the northern 10 were kidnapped; taken as hostages or slaves in 721 BCE by the Assyrians, leaving the two left, Benjamin and Judah, to fend for themselves. The Israelites differed from other people in that they were monotheistic; they believed in one G-d, while the others were all polytheistic.
Benjamin and Judah joined for security, but were also forced to leave their land by the Babylonians in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE who had taken the place of the Assyrians. The siege of Jerusalem was a military campaign carried out by Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, in 597 BCE. Before, In 605 BCE, he had defeated Pharaoh Necho at the Battle of Carchemish, and subsequently invaded Judah. Unlike Israelites, the Judeans were given the green light by the next king to return to Jerusalem by 538 BCE, 59 years later. Many did not return who had not been born and raised there, but remained in Babylonia.
Those that returned to Judea were to face the Greeks 374 years later. In 164 BCE, Judah Maccabee crushed the numerically superior Greeks under Lysias at the Battle of Beth Zur and restored the temple in Jerusalem. This is celebrated each year since then with the holiday of Chanukah. Not only were the Greeks superior in numbers, but they should also have been superior in war tactics with their well developed logical minds, honed by Plato and Aristotle. 
The Seleucid Greeks has used elephants in their attack. The war elephants unnerved Judah's troops. As the Jews began to break for the rear, Maccabee's younger brother, Eleazar Horan, attempted to show his fellow men that the elephants were vulnerable. 1 Maccabees 6:43–47 tells how, charging into the mouth of the Syrian assault, he spotted a large elephant bearing the royal seal. Eleazar cast himself under the animal and thrust his sword into its soft belly.
The elephant died immediately and fell onto Eleazar, killing him. This show of bravery was not enough to rally the Jewish forces, which collapsed under the heavy pressure of the Greek phalanx. Logic should have forewarned Eleazar, but he didn't think it out. He acted out of impulse. How would the elephant act after being stabbed? Eleazar was the brother of Judah, the Maccabee. This story is not in the Tanakh but the original Hebrew is lost and the most important surviving version is the Greek translation contained in the Septuagint. (No wonder it was new to me-though in my Jewish Encyclopedia.)
The Greeks were known for their logic and their teachers. Plato 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), while also interested in ethics, studied different sciences like physics, biology, and astronomy. He is often credited with developing the study of logic, as well as the foundation for modern-day zoology.
Fragments of early proofs are preserved in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the idea of a deductive system was probably known in the Pythagorean school and the Platonic Academy. The proofs of Euclid of Alexandria are a paradigm of Greek geometry.
While the ancient Egyptians empirically discovered some truths of geometry, the great achievement of the ancient Greeks was to replace empirical methods by demonstrative proof. Both Thales and Pythagoras of the Pre-Socratic philosophers seem aware of geometry's methods. Yet, the Greeks were polytheistic. They believed in many gods. Everyone did at this time, except the Jews.
- Zeus- God of the Sky; Poseidon- God of the Sea.; Ares- God of War.; Aphrodite- Goddess of Love.; Hera- Goddess of Women.; Demeter- Goddess of Harvest.; Athena- Goddess of Strategy.
- Apollo- God of the Sun, Music and Poetry.;
- Artemis- Goddess of the Hunt; Hephaestus- God of Fire; Hermes- the Messenger God
- Dionysus- God of Wine; Persephone (aka Kore) was the Greek goddess of agriculture and vegetation, especially grain, and the wife of Hades, with whom she rules the Underworld.
- Hades, Greek Aïdes (“the Unseen”), also called Pluto or Pluton (“the Wealthy One” or “the Giver of Wealth”), in ancient Greek religion, god of the underworld. Hades was a son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, and brother of the deities Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera, and Hestia.
- Not only did they believe in multiple gods but they also used idols, and every god called for a temple to worship it in.
- Jews had left a world of polytheism when they left the city of Ur, led by Abram, born in about 1948 BCE. For the past 1,784 years, Israelites had been monotheistic, believing in one G-d, an invisible G-d.
- They had a teacher named Moses who taught them facts that he was told by the one and only G-d that only he received in his head.
- It started one day when Abram's father, Terah, an idol maker, had left Abram in charge of the idol's that were stored in a room in their home. Abram accidently knocked one over and being made of clay, it cracked into many pieces. When Terah came home and saw what had happened, he questioned Abram, who replied, Father, that one on the floor and this one had a fight, and that one knocked this one down. Abram and Terah knew that they were only clay objects without any power as Terah had made them, but people put all their faith into these objects.
All this development of the thinking process in solving problems, yet they still believed in a polytheistic religion made up of many gods who were in charge of all of nature's actions. They could not conceive of a one G-d of the universe. Furthermore, they wanted all other peoples to believe as they did.
Jews, today's Israelites, are so monotheistic that they don't even believe in drawing pictures of G-d. They don't use G-d's name in vain.
- Jupiter/ Zeus. ...Juno/ Hera. ...Neptune/ Poseidon. ...Minerva/ Athena. ...Mars/ Ares. ...
- Venus/ Aphrodite. ...Apollo / Apollo. ...Diana/ Artemis.
The Romans developed enough to take on the Greeks, and they became the rulers of the world, using their teachers and people as their slaves, and even borrowed aspects of their religion to add onto their very similar polytheistic religion. About the only thing that changed were the names of the many gods.
They had really humanized their gods, knowing that work must be delegated to those with the skills, they could not comprehend a force that could do all. Well, I could not comprehend TV when my father tried to explain it to me, in view that we would be getting one in a few years. i thought he was crazy, at the time. My brain had to grow, to develop, the dendrites had to have a workout before I could accept that we at home would have movies like we did in the movie theater. And as I have grown, I am in awe of Moses and the Israelites who accepted such a new idea and stuck with it. No one else could. Judah Maccabee saved the day. if he hadn't stopped the Syrian Greeks when he did, we might all still be worshipping Greek or Roman gods.
The amazing story of Chanukah is that when the Israelites took out the idols that were placed in their holy Temple, they cleaned it thoroughly but found only drop or two of oil in their eternal light holder, so they sent runners to fetch more. Those few drops lasted the 8 days and nights that it took the runners to return with oil. It was a miracle. So we remember with a Chanukiah, made with 9 holders to tell this story. The tall piece holds the helper candle that does the lighting. Each night we light one more; first night with 1, next night with 2, etc. It's a happy holiday and celebrated with gifts.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beth_Zechariah
https://web.archive.org/web/20070929115110/http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/collections/fortitude/whoswho.asp
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