Peoples & nations
Greeks
Greece is the empire that arrived between the Testaments and changed everything. It gave Israel its worst persecution before Rome, and it gave the church its Bible: the Old Testament in Greek translation and the New Testament in Greek from the start.
On this page
At a glance
Ancestry and origins
Javan is a son of Japheth, and his own sons — Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim — are the coastlands and islands of the Mediterranean (Genesis 10:2-5). Javan is simply the Hebrew for Ionia, and the word is translated “Greece” wherever it appears in the prophets (Daniel 8:21; Zechariah 9:13).
For most of the Old Testament they are a distant trading people on the edge of the world, known mainly for buying slaves: Ezekiel lists “Javan, Tubal, and Meshech” among Tyre’s trading partners, dealing “in the persons of men” (Ezekiel 27:13), and Joel accuses Tyre and Sidon of selling “the people of Judah and Jerusalem... to the Greeks” (Joel 3:6).
Where they lived
Before Alexander, the Aegean and its colonies. After him, everywhere. His generals divided the empire — the Ptolemies ruling Egypt and the Seleucids ruling Syria and Mesopotamia — and Judea sat on the border between them, changing hands repeatedly. Greek cities were planted across the region, including the Decapolis east of Galilee, which is why the New Testament world speaks Greek from Jerusalem to Rome.
Timeline with Israel
c. 800 BC — The slave trade
Tyre and Sidon sell Judeans to the Greeks (Joel 3:6; Ezekiel 27:13).
c. 550 BC — Foreseen
Daniel sees a male goat from the west with a conspicuous horn, moving so fast it does not touch the ground, that shatters the ram of Media and Persia; the horn breaks at its height and four rise in its place (Daniel 8:5-8, 21-22).
c. 520 BC — Zechariah’s oracle
“I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece” (Zechariah 9:13).
331 BC — Alexander
Persia falls at Gaugamela; Judea passes to Greek rule.
323 BC — The four horns
Alexander dies at thirty-two and his empire is divided among his generals, precisely the pattern Daniel described.
c. 250 BC — The Septuagint
The Hebrew Scriptures are translated into Greek in Alexandria, putting the Old Testament into the world’s common language for the first time.
175-164 BC — Antiochus IV Epiphanes
The Seleucid king outlaws the Sabbath, circumcision, and the Scriptures, plunders the temple, and sets up an altar to Zeus with swine sacrificed on it — “the abomination that makes desolate” (Daniel 11:31; 8:9-14).
167-160 BC — The Maccabean revolt
Judas Maccabeus and his brothers drive out the Seleucids and cleanse the temple; the rededication becomes the feast of Hanukkah, which John calls “the Feast of Dedication” and places Jesus in the temple for (John 10:22-23).
63 BC — Rome takes over
Pompey enters Jerusalem, ending Greek political rule while leaving Greek culture in place.
c. AD 30 — “Sir, we wish to see Jesus”
Greeks who had come up to worship at the Passover ask Philip for an introduction, and Jesus answers, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:20-23).
c. AD 34 — The Hellenists
Greek-speaking widows are neglected in the daily distribution, and the church appoints seven men, all with Greek names, to serve (Acts 6:1-6).
c. AD 50 — Paul at Athens
Standing on the Areopagus, he quotes their own poets and preaches “the unknown god” and the resurrection (Acts 17:16-34).
c. AD 50-57 — Churches in Greece
Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth, with letters to most of them that became Scripture (Acts 16-18).
Working with Israel
Greece’s gift to Israel and to the church was language. The Septuagint made the Scriptures readable across the Mediterranean and supplied the vocabulary — christos, evangelion, ekklesia, diatheke — that the apostles later used; most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow it. Koine Greek was precise, widely written, and understood from Spain to Syria, and the New Testament was written in it. The gospel travelled on Greek roads of thought as surely as it later travelled on Roman roads of stone.
Individual Greeks are welcomed throughout. Timothy, son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother, became Paul’s closest coworker (Acts 16:1-3). Titus, a Greek, was deliberately not circumcised, as a test case for Gentile freedom (Galatians 2:3). The Greeks at the Passover who wanted to see Jesus prompted His declaration that His hour had come — the moment the mission turns outward.
Standing against Israel
Antiochus IV is the Old Testament’s nearest thing to a preview of antichrist. He took the title Epiphanes — “God manifest” — banned the practice of Judaism on pain of death, burned copies of the law, executed mothers who circumcised their sons, and turned the temple into a shrine of Olympian Zeus. Daniel 8 and 11 describe him in detail, and Jesus reaches back to that language when He warns of “the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel” still to come (Matthew 24:15).
The subtler pressure was cultural. Hellenization offered the Jewish upper classes gymnasiums, Greek names, and imperial careers in exchange for quietly setting the law aside — and many took the offer. The Maccabean crisis was as much a civil war over assimilation as a war against a foreign king, and the parties Jesus met — Pharisees, Sadducees, and the rest — took shape in its aftermath.
How their story ends
Rome absorbed the Greek kingdoms politically, but Greek remained the language of the eastern empire and of the church for centuries. In Scripture “Greek” becomes shorthand for the whole Gentile world: “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16), “There is neither Jew nor Greek... for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
Christ connection
Paul says the timing was deliberate: “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son” (Galatians 4:4). Part of that fullness was Greek — one language spanning the known world, a philosophical vocabulary ready to carry doctrine, and a hunger for wisdom that the apostles met head on. Paul answered it without flattering it: “Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified... to Greeks folly, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:22-24). The empire that had tried to erase Israel’s Scriptures ended up providing the words in which the gospel was written down.
Key passages
- Genesis 10:2-5 — Javan, son of Japheth, and the coastland peoples.
- Joel 3:6; Ezekiel 27:13 — Judeans sold to the Greeks.
- Daniel 8:5-8, 20-22 — The goat from the west, the great horn broken, the four that follow.
- Daniel 11:31 — The abomination that makes desolate.
- Zechariah 9:13 — “Your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece.”
- John 12:20-23 — “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”
- Acts 17:16-34 — Paul on the Areopagus.
- Galatians 3:28; Romans 1:16 — Neither Jew nor Greek.