Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

THRACE

(Gk. Thrakē)

The mountainous northernmost region of Greece, lying between the Danube River on the north and the Strymon River and Illyria on the west, and N of Macedonia. Thracians were considered primitive (dyeing their hair and tattooing their skin) and warlike (often hiring out as mercenaries; 2 Macc. 12:35), living by plunder rather than by agriculture, but skilled at making tools and weapons. In Greek poetry Thrace symbolizes isolation, desolation, and inhospitable frigidity. Urbanization of their villages came only with the conquest of Thrace by the Romans. Claudius made it a province in 46 c.e., dividing it in two, with the region N of Mt. Haemus becoming Moesia and that to the south becoming Thrace proper. The Thracians influenced Greek religion greatly, particularly in the worship of the god of war Ares and the god of wine Dionysus (whose wild, orgiastic nighttime worship was outlawed by the Roman Senate in 186 b.c.e.).

Bibliography. J. J. Wilkes, “Thrace,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1996), 1514-15.

Richard A. Spencer

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

THRACE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)