OGIONIK wrote:so persian wiped them out, and assyria wiped out israel correct? before persia got to assyria obviously..
No, not exactly. The Assyrians under Tiglath Pileser at the end of the 8th century BCE carried the Jews off to the Babylonian Captivity. But the Chaldeans drove them out, although they did not attempt to overrun the Assyrians. The Persians simply put everybody under tribute. The Assyrians got a deservedly bad reputation in the early days of their ascendancy for just slaughtering everyone in sight. Eventually it dawned on them that dead slaves aren't very productive. The Akkadians brought to them a cultural sophistication which they had lacked, and the Later or Neo-Assyrian Empire was a product of their having learned the lessons of their defeat by the Akkadians. People rarely ran around just wiping other people out, because there was no profit in it, and war ain't cheap. The key word is hegemony. You leave the old boys in place, with instruction to forward the tax money to you, and don't screw up because this army gets really nasty if they don't get paid on time. As for the Jews, they were allowed to go home by the Persians, and after Alexander overran the middle east, and then pretty promptly died, the region was divvied up by various Greek and Macedonian generals. One of these was Seleucus, who established the Seleucid Empire (rather a feeble empire, but the competition was thin, and it was based on the Greco-Macedonian conquests of Alexander). There were constant revolts with generals setting up on their own here and there, which is about how the Greeks had behaved before Alexander's pappy, Philip, had conquered them. The Big Dog of the Seleucids (don't remember the joker's name) is claimed to have prohibited the Jews from practicing their religion, so this one dude lead a revolt. His son, Judas Maccabeus lead a long but succesful revolt against the Seleucids, which the Jews usually claimed was a defeat of the Persian Empire, because it made them sound like really bad dudes. The joy of the Jews was short lived. In about a century's time, Pompey the Great showed up, overran the feeble remnants of the Seleucids, and marched into Jerusalem, and walked right into the Temple to show the Jews who was Boss.
The Jews could never really get down with it, though. Too bad for them, the Romans made all those old big dogs look like puppies.