Time Between The Testaments eBook: Connecting Malachi to Matthew

By Mark E Braun

What happened during the Intertestamental Period?Most English translations of the Bible have a couple of blank pages between the Old and New Testaments. Maybe they even have a copy of the Apocrypha. In reality, the time between the last book of the Old Testament— Malachi— and the first book in the New Testament— Matthew— was not a brief pause. It actually spanned many, many years.So what happened?That' s what Time Between the Testaments is all about. In this book, you' ll read about a series of important changes in Jewish life and philosophy, including the emergence of religious groups that would challenge Jesus' message of salvation.As you read this book, you' ll gain new knowledge of the world in which your Savior taught, suffered, died, and rose again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northwestern Publishing House
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780810027572

Book preview

What does your Bible contain between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New? Nothing? A page or two of blank lines in which to record the names of your parents, grandparents, siblings, children, and grandchildren, along with the dates of their births, baptisms, and marriages?

If you own the Concordia Self-Study Bible or The Lutheran Study Bible, you will find brief introductory articles summarizing what happened between the Testaments.

The following time line presents in some detail the events between the Testaments. Keep in mind that we may not always know the exact year when an event took place, so the reference to a year may be different in one place than another. At the close of the Old Testament, only a remnant from the tribe of Judah remained in Palestine, which had been reduced to an insignificant province of the vast Persian Empire. Two of the last historical books of the Old Testament—Ezra and Nehemiah—together with the final three prophetic books—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—provide us with some information about the Jews’ return to the land and their efforts to reestablish their lives. Initial enthusiasm to rebuild their city and temple was dampened by opposition from neighboring peoples. These resettlers fell into some of the same sins their ancestors had committed, sins which had led to the captivity in the first place. Some Judean returnees intermarried with the local people and endangered the transmission of their faith, but other Jews pledged instead to meet together to encourage one another to keep the law of God (Malachi 3:16).

Between the Testaments: From Malachi to Christ

More than 1500 years earlier, the Lord had made three promises to Abram: (1) I will make you into a great nation; (2) I will give your desendants this land; and (3) All nations will be blessed through you (Genesis 12:2,3,7). Martin Luther once remarked that the progress and good fortune of God’s entire people rested on these promises. In fact, Whatever will be achieved in the church until the end of the world and whatever has been achieved in it until now, has been achieved and will be achieved by virtue of this promise, which endures and is in force to this day (Luther’s Works, AE 2:265).

But as the Old Testament drew to a close, the future looked grim for these three promises. The once-great nation under King David and King Solomon was reduced to a few thousand people. Ten of Israel’s twelve tribes had been exiled from the land where they were intermixed with other conquered peoples and eventually lost their identity. The boundaries of the Promised Land—once stretching from the Mediterranean Sea on the west to beyond the Jordan River in the east, south to the Gulf of Aqaba and north to the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—were now reduced to those of a puny province, perhaps only 20 miles long and wide around Jerusalem.

How could this diminished people ever become a blessing to the many other nations of the world? The Old Testament ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

Under the Persians

The Persian Empire continued its rule over Judea beyond the end of the Old Testament and remained the dominant political force in the ancient Near East for another 75 years. Nonbiblical history records the battles of some of Persia’s greatest rulers: for example, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, Artaxerxes II, and so on. Little is known about the life of the people of Judah during this time. Egypt rebelled against Persian rule during the fourth century B.C., leading to a series of military clashes between Persian and Egyptian armies. Meanwhile, to the west, city-states in Greece were growing in power.

Jews formed other communities outside Palestine, one of which was situated on the island of Elephantine in the Nile River, near present-day Aswan. This group violated the Law of Moses by constructing its own temple. About 410 B.C., an angry Egyptian mob, worshipers of the god Khnum, destroyed this temple, and the Elephantine Jews appealed for help to the high priest of Jerusalem and the governors of Jerusalem and Samaria. The group at Elephantine worshiped Yahu, perhaps an alternate name for Yahweh, but their letters indicate that they also worshiped other local gods.

Under the Greeks

Great change came to everyone living in this region with the arrival of Alexander the Great and his Greek army. In about 331 B.C., Alexander came to Palestine. Most cities in Syria and Palestine had already submitted to Alexander, but Tyre and Gaza along the Mediterranean coast tried to resist the Greek conqueror. Alexander surrounded Tyre and captured it after a seven-month siege; he then moved south along the coast, took control of Gaza, and marched on Egypt. From there, he turned toward Jerusalem.

The Jewish historian Josephus (whose name will become familiar to us throughout this history) tells an intriguing story about Alexander’s entrance into Jerusalem. The high priest Jaddua was so frightened at Alexander’s coming that he urged people to decorate Jerusalem with wreathes and to dress in white to greet him. Jaddua himself led a procession of priests to welcome the Greek conqueror and to escort him into the city, where Jaddua showed Alexander the prediction in the book of Daniel that a Greek ruler would overtake the Persian Empire (Daniel 2:38-45; 7:15-27). Such a greeting no doubt appealed to Alexander’s ego, and, in turn, Alexander granted the Jews in Judea the right to follow their own laws and to be exempted from paying tribute to him. Alexander further invited Jews to enlist in his army and promised that they could retain their own customs (Antiquities 11:324-339).

Although many historians doubt the reliability of this story, it seems accurate that Alexander took control of Jerusalem without a fight and that he granted Judeans some religious freedoms.

Alexander himself remained on the scene only a short time, but his impact on the region and on world history was profound. Greek art and architecture, the theater, the Greek city structure, marketplaces and thoroughfares, and temples depicting the many Greek gods were imported wherever Alexander conquered. The Greeks sought not only military victory, political expansion, and economic gain but were also intent on transmitting their way of life to the non-Greek barbarians. During the century following Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., Greek cities were founded along the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, Syria, and Judea. These cities advanced Greek life through joint commercial, cultural, and athletic endeavors. Max Dimont, in his book Jews, God and History, compares the conquering Greeks to a hoop skirt into which they tried to fit their conquered peoples in the Near East (77).

This process, called Hellenization, was not a sudden imposition of Greek culture on native peoples but a centuries-long endeavor. The Greeks did not typically force their way of life on others, but it was often the native peoples themselves—particularly those of the upper classes—who sought to improve their status by learning the Greek language and adopting Greek customs. Non-Greek-speaking peoples incorporated whatever elements of the culture they considered useful to them or adapted elements to suit their purposes. Local and Greek ways of life often functioned side by side, and in time it became difficult to tell what was borrowed and what was original.

The Jews were no exception. However, Jewish insistence on the worship of only one God—only their God—together with the unique features of Jewish religious practice, put faithful Jews on more of a collision course with the Greeks than was true of most other conquered peoples. The apocryphal book of 1 Maccabees says that some Jewish men even removed the marks of circumcision from their bodies (1 Maccabees 1:15). Since Greek males tended to exercise in the nude at gymnasiums, Jewish males would thereby expose their circumcision, which Greeks thought a barbaric custom. Some Jewish men underwent a painful operation [called an epispasm] to surgically remove the signs of circumcision (The Apocrypha: The Lutheran Edition with Notes, p. 160, note).

Under the Ptolemies

Alexander, one of the world’s great military leaders, reportedly lamented before his death at age 33 that he had no more worlds to conquer. But apparently he had no plan for governing his vast conquests. For the next two decades, several of Alexander’s generals, his Diadochoi, or successors, fought to control his empire. An agreement in 301 B.C. gave Syria to his general Seleucus and granted another of his generals, Ptolemy I, rule over southern Palestine and Egypt. With that, for the next century, the Jews were under control of the Ptolemaic Empire.

In general, the Ptolemies are remembered as tolerant rulers. They seem to have followed a live-and-let-live philosophy in their rule. As long as the Jews in Palestine paid their taxes, the Ptolemies mostly left them alone, even granting them some self-government and cultural and religious freedom.

Ptolemy I (Soter) gained control of Jerusalem by deceptively entering the city on a Sabbath Day, pretending he had come to offer a sacrifice at the temple; and unsuspecting Jews refused to fight to defend themselves. Ptolemy I took many captives from Jerusalem and surrounding areas to settle in Egypt. Yet he also promised them many of the privileges that the citizens of Alexandria already enjoyed, causing other Jews to move willingly to Egypt not only in response to Ptolemy’s promises of freedom but also for Egypt’s good farming land (Antiquities 12:2-9).

During the rule of Ptolemy II (Philadelphus), a significant event occurred, as told in the tale, The Letter of Aristeas. In this tale, Demetrius of Phaleron, librarian of the great collection of volumes at Alexandria, informed the book-loving Philadelphus that the laws of the Jews deserved inclusion in the king’s rapidly growing collection, but this would necessitate translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The king eagerly approved this effort and ordered all the necessary preparations. Aristeas took the opportunity to strike a bargain with Philadelphus. In exchange for the translation, the king would release more than 100,000 Jews still enslaved by Ptolemy I.