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Alexander the Great Bowed to the High Priest at Jerusalem's Gate

Alexander marched toward Jerusalem with orders to destroy the Temple, then saw the High Priest coming out and remembered a face from a dream.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Army at the Gate
  2. The Face He Had Seen in a Dream
  3. What the Samaritans Had Asked For
  4. Two Accounts of One Meeting

The Army at the Gate

Alexander of Macedon had been told to destroy the Temple. The Samaritans, who had their own quarrel with Jerusalem, sent a delegation to meet him on the road and argue that the Temple was the seat of Jewish rebellion, that it would be safer for the empire to level it before it caused trouble. Alexander was persuaded. He turned toward Jerusalem with that intention.

The High Priest, Simeon the Just, heard the army approaching. He put on the eight garments of the high priesthood: the breastplate with its twelve gemstones, the ephod, the robe with its pomegranates and bells, the golden headplate engraved with the divine name. He walked out of the city gates with the priests and the elders of Jerusalem, dressed in white, bearing no weapons, to meet the Macedonian army in the road.

The Face He Had Seen in a Dream

Alexander saw the procession coming and stopped his horse. He dismounted. Then he did something no one in his army had ever seen him do. He bowed before the High Priest. His generals were astonished. Alexander was not a man who prostrated himself before anyone. One of his commanders asked him what he thought he was doing. Alexander answered: "before every battle I have fought, I have had a dream. In that dream, a man in these garments leads me to victory. This is the face I have seen in the dream before every conquest. I am not bowing to a person. I am bowing to the sign I have been given."

He entered Jerusalem peacefully. He went to the Temple. He made offerings. He met with Simeon the Just, who according to one tradition told him that the kingdom of Persia, which Alexander had not yet defeated, would fall to him as had been foretold. Alexander asked for what he could do for the people of Jerusalem in return for this prophecy. Simeon asked that the Samaritans who had encouraged the destruction of the Temple be punished for the attempt.

What the Samaritans Had Asked For

The Samaritans, who had brought Alexander to the road in the first place, were standing there when the exchange happened. When Alexander turned back to them and reminded them that they had petitioned for the destruction of the Temple, they tried to reframe the request. They had not meant the Temple in Jerusalem, they said. They had meant the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. This was not believed. The chronicle does not record what happened to them in detail, and the reversal was complete: the people who aimed to use Alexander's power to destroy the Jewish sanctuary found themselves accused by the very man they had recruited.

Two Accounts of One Meeting

The tradition carries two versions of the High Priest's name. The Talmud at Yoma 69a, which is the rabbinic account, calls him Simeon the Just, a figure celebrated in Pirkei Avot as one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly. The historian Josephus, writing in his Antiquities of the Jews in the first century CE, gives the name as Jaddua, and his account adds details the Talmud does not include. In Josephus, the High Priest has a dream of his own before Alexander arrives: God tells him to open the gates, dress the priests in white, and go out to meet the army. He obeys. The procession meets Alexander in the plain. The Macedonian king prostrates himself. His generals are shocked. He tells them about the dream.

The two accounts differ on whose dream comes first, whether the High Priest received divine instruction or whether Alexander's vision alone prompted his reverence. What they share is the image of one of the most powerful military commanders of the ancient world bowing in the dust before a Jewish priest in ceremonial garments, and the tradition's insistence that this was not a political calculation but the recognition of something the conqueror had already been shown.

AlexanderHigh PriestTempleDreamsSimeon The JustJosephusJerusalem
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis, no. 279; cf. Yoma 69aThe Exempla of the Rabbis (1924)

When Alexander of Macedon marched east, the Samaritans, called in the Talmud the Kutim, saw a political opening. They sent word to Alexander asking him to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple, they claimed, was the seat of rebellion. Better to level it before it caused him trouble.

Alexander agreed. He marched toward Jerusalem with the intention of razing the Temple to the ground.

The High Priest, Simeon the Just, the same Simeon celebrated in Pirkei Avot, heard the army approaching. He put on the eight garments of the high priesthood: the breastplate with its twelve stones, the tzitz with the Divine Name on his forehead, the blue robe, the tunic, the belt, the turban, and the priestly undergarments. He took the leading citizens of Jerusalem, and they walked out of the city at night, processing with torches toward the approaching army.

When the two companies met, something strange happened. Alexander dismounted. Alexander bowed. His own generals were stunned. A Macedonian king did not bow to anyone, least of all to a subject priest of a subject city.

Alexander explained: he had seen this man in a dream. Before every major battle of his life, this figure in white robes had appeared to him, leading him to victory. And now the figure stood before him in the flesh.

Alexander spared the Temple. He turned on the Samaritans, delivering them into the hands of the Jews, who destroyed the rival sanctuary on Mount Gerizim. The anniversary of that day was declared a festival.

Gaster's Exempla (no. 279, 1924) preserves this story because it insists that even the conqueror of the world was, without knowing it, guided by a Jerusalem dream. No emperor conquers alone.

Full source
Antiquities XI.8Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world by age thirty, but Josephus tells a story about the one city he did not need to take by force. When Alexander marched on Jerusalem after the siege of Gaza, the High Priest Jaddua was terrified. He had sworn loyalty to the Persian King Darius and refused Alexander's earlier demand for tribute and troops. Now the conqueror was coming to punish him.

Jaddua prayed. God spoke to him in a dream: open the gates, dress the priests in white, and go out to meet the Macedonian army. The next morning, the Jewish procession marched out of the city in full priestly regalia, white robes, the High Priest wearing the golden plate inscribed with God's name on his turban.

What happened next shocked everyone. Alexander, who had just sacked Tyre and Gaza, who was feared across Asia, fell on his face before the High Priest. His generals were baffled. Parmenion, his most trusted commander, asked why the conqueror of the world was bowing to a Jewish priest. Alexander's answer was extraordinary: before he had left Macedonia, he had seen this exact figure in a dream, wearing these exact garments, who promised him that God would grant him dominion over Persia. When he saw Jaddua, he recognized the man from his vision.

Alexander entered Jerusalem peacefully. He went up to the Temple and offered sacrifice to God according to the High Priest's instructions. They showed him the book of Daniel, which prophesied that a Greek king would destroy the Persian Empire (Daniel 8:21). Alexander was delighted and believed the prophecy referred to him. He told the Jews to ask for whatever they wanted. They asked for one thing: the right to keep their ancestral laws and an exemption from tribute every seventh year, since the Torah forbids farming during the shemittah (שמיטה), the sabbatical year. Alexander granted it all.

Full source
Exempla of the Rabbis, No. 279Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924)

Behind this dense column of references stands one of the most celebrated encounters in the Jewish memory of the Second Temple: the meeting of Simeon the Just, the High Priest, with Alexander of Macedon. The principal account sits in the Talmud at Yoma 69a, with the date fixed in Megillat Taanit on the twenty-first of Kislev as a day on which fasting was forbidden, and parallels run through Genesis Rabbah and Josephus (Antiquities XI). The story tells that the Samaritans, called here the Cuthites, sought permission from Alexander to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem as he advanced. Hearing of the danger, Simeon the Just clothed himself in the priestly garments and went out by night with the elders of Israel, torches in their hands, to meet the conqueror. When Alexander saw the High Priest he descended from his chariot and bowed before him. His astonished officers asked how a king who conquers nations could prostrate himself before this Jew. Alexander answered that the very face of this man, radiant in the white linen of the priesthood, had gone before him into every battle and given him victory. He then granted Simeon's request, refused the Samaritans, and the threatened Temple was spared. The tale dramatizes a recurring claim of the rabbis, that the dignity of the priesthood and the merit of the Temple service command respect even from the mightiest gentile ruler, and that deliverance comes when the leaders of Israel go out to meet danger rather than wait for it. Gaster gathers here both the Jewish witnesses and the Hellenistic versions in Pseudo-Callisthenes to map the legend's spread.

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