The Greeks and their language

3.2. The Greeks and their language
3.2.1. Alexander the Great
In 480 BC, the Hellenes, as the Greeks called themselves, defeated Xerxes I (Ahasveros) king of the Medes and Persians at Salamis. Because the Medes and Persians had prepared very well for this war (see Esther 1:3-4), they lost all hope of ever beating the Greeks again. This victory gave the Greeks the confident belief that they would become the next world empire.
The person who would become the most important leader of the Greek empire was Alexander the Great, son of Philip II, the King of Macedonia. He played a crucial role when Macedonia conquered the Greeks in 336 BC. Alexander received his education from one of the best philosophers of his time, Aristotle, who tutored him from the age of 13 to 16 in rhetoric, literature, science, medicine, and philosophy. Alexander succeeded his father to the throne of the empire in 334 BC, at the age of 20. His first goal was to liberate the Greeks, who were still under the yoke of the Persians, even though they had defeated them at Salamis in 480 BC. After conquering all of Asia Minor in 334 BC, Alexander defeated the Persians at Issus in 333 BC. The following year he marched to Egypt. Egypt accepted him as their liberator and as a Pharaoh. Alexander’s goal was to establish a world unified by the influence of Greek culture, a Hellenistic world. His reign is compared in the apocalyptic vision of Daniel 8 to a goat that was ‘coming from the west over the surface of all the whole earth’ (v. 5).
We do not know exactly when and how, but Palestine also came under Alexander's control. When Alexander died at the age of 32, his four generals divided his empire among themselves. One of these generals, Ptolemy, took control of Egypt and made the new city of Alexandria his capital. More Jews from Palestine were added by him to the Jewish population in Alexandria. The Jewish population of Egypt at this time was sufficient for Alexandria to become an important centre of Hellenistic Judaism. These Jews came under the influence of the Greek culture and language. Godly Jews, however, did not live by the morals of the Greeks. They kept the Law of God. Since most of them could no longer read the Hebrew language, the need for the Old Testament in the Greek language became evident. A translation of the Old Testament Pentateuch was prepared. This translation, which consisted of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, is known as the Septuagint (the Greek word for seventy) because of a tradition that said that seventy (actually seventy-two) elders translated the work in seventy-two days. It is said, that at a later period elders translated all the books of the Old Testament. The title Septuagint, abbreviated as LXX, was then applied to the whole Bible. The New Testament was heavily influenced by this translation.
The Hellenistic period was not only a matter of the Greek language. It was also an issue of living and thinking like a Greek. In the second book of the Maccabees, we find an illustration of this influence on the Jewish people around 170 BC.
When the king gave his assent, Jason, as soon as he had seized power, imposed the Greek way of life on his fellow-countrymen… He went so far as to found a gymnasium… and to fit out the noblest of his young men in the broad-brimmed felt hat… Jason set no bounds to his impiety; indeed the hellenising process reached such a pitch that the priests ceased to show any interest in serving the altar; but, scorning the Temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they would hurry, on the stroke of the gong, to take part in the distribution, forbidden by the Law, of the oil on the exercise ground; setting no store by the honours of their fatherland, they esteemed hellenic glories best of all (2 Maccabees 4:10-15).
The gymnasium for example was an event where men were competing naked. The word ‘gymnasium’ is derived from the Greek word gymnos, which means ‘naked’. Some Jewish men ‘undid’ their circumcision so that it would not show when they were competing. This issue may also raise questions for our day. How far can we go as Christians in adopting the trends of our world today?
In the New Testament, an incident indicated that the differences between the Hebraic and the Hellenistic Jews were still in existence. In Acts 6:1 we read the following.
Now in those days, when the disciples were growing in number, a complaint arose on the part of the Greek-speaking Jews against the native Hebraic Jews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.
Who were the Greek-speaking Jews? The KJV translates the word as ‘Grecians’. The Strong’s number for the word is ‘G1675’ and the Greek word is Hellēnistēs. These Jews grew up in the Hellenistic world and spoke Greek. We do not know how much of the Hellenistic culture they adopted. It is clear, however, that the Hellenistic Jews considered themselves as a separate group, different from the ‘Hebraic Jews’. They spoke about ‘their widows’.
3.2.2. Koine or Hellenistic Greek
What are the characteristics of the Hellenistic language? Even though Alexander did not live long, he made a lasting impact on the world. He gathered an army that consisted of people from many parts of his empire. These people used Greek to communicate with each other. The cities that he conquered also took Greek as their language of communication. These developments led to a significant change in the Greek language. The so-called Classical Greek, in which the great Greek literature was written, became Koine Greek, common Greek. It was the lingua franca, the common communication language between the people of the Greek empire. The Greek culture and language conquered the world, and the world conquered the Classical Greek language. Greek became the language of the world. This period of the Greek language is known as the Koine Greek or Hellenistic period (330 BC-AD 330).
3.2.3. History of the Greek language
3.2.3.1. Classical Greek
During the so-called Classical Greek period, the Greeks divided human beings into two categories. The people who speak, live and think like a Greek, and those who do not, the barbaroi. The barbaroi, in the mind of the Greeks, were foreigners who did not speak Greek, and did not live or think like Greeks. Thayer’s definition for the word includes the following:
Used by the Greeks of any foreigner ignorant of the Greek language, whether mental or moral, with the added notion after the Persian war, of rudeness and brutality.
In Acts 28:2 we have an incident in which, according to the text, barbaroi showed kindness to Paul and others. This is not what Greeks normally expected from barbaroi. They would have expected ‘rudeness and brutality’. The message from this text in Acts 28 is clear: do not generalise when making statements about people whom you do not know. The NT uses the word in a general sense of foreigners.
The Greeks produced a number of literary works in the various Greek dialects, such as Doric, Aeolic, and Ionic. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, the history of Herodotus and the medical works of Hippocrates were all written in the Ionic dialect.
From the Ionic dialect the Attic developed. Attic was the language in which Plato wrote his philosophical treatises, Aristophanes his tragedies, Thucydides and Xenophon their histories.
The Classical Greek language differs from the Hellenistic language. In the past, New Testament scholars studied Classical Greek and interpreted the Bible based on that form of the Greek language. This is still evident in the great works of the 19th century. Gradually scholars started to challenge the differences between Classical Greek and the Greek of the New Testament. Some scholars referred to the Greek of the New Testament as Holy Ghost Greek. The discovery of thousands of papyri documents in Koine Greek changed that view forever. The Greek of the New Testament was neither Classical nor Holy Ghost Greek. It was the common Greek of that time. This discovery changed the study of NT Greek in the 20th century and afterwards.
3.2.3.2. Byzantine and Modern Greek
From the time of Constantine in AD 330 until the fall of Byzantium to the Turks in AD 1453, the Greek language was known as ‘Byzantine Greek’. It was a continuation of the Koine Greek. Out of this language Modern Greek developed, which is spoken today by millions of people in Greece and Cyprus.