Bridging the Testaments: The History and Theology of God’s People in the Second Temple Period

By George Athas

An accessible introduction to the historical and theological developments between the Old and New Testament.

Bridging the end of the Old Testament period and the beginning of the New Testament period, this book surveys the history and theological developments of four significant eras in Israel's post-exilic history: the Persian Era (539-331 BC), the Hellenistic Era (332-167 BC), the Hasmonean Era (167-63 BC), and the Roman Era (63-4 BC). In doing so, it does away with the notion that there were four hundred years of prophetic silence before Jesus.

Bridging the Testaments outlines the political and social developments of these four periods, with particular focus on their impact upon Judeans and Samarians. Using a wide range of biblical and extra-biblical sources, George Athas reconstructs what can be known about the history of Judah and Samaria in these eras, providing the framework for understanding the history of God's covenant people, and the theological developments that occurred at the end of the Old Testament period, leading into the New Testament. In doing so, Athas shows that the notion of a supposed period of four hundred years of prophetic silence is not supported by the biblical or historical evidence. Finally, an epilogue sketches the historical and theological situation prevailing at the death of Herod in 4 BC, providing important context for the New Testament writings.

In this way, the book bridges the Old and New Testaments by providing a historical and theological understanding of the five centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus, tracking a biblical theology through them, and abolishing the notion of a four-century prophetic silence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780310520955

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume had its inception in the Zechariah class I have taught at Moore Theological College since 2007. The research for those classes revealed to me just how unknown the postexilic period was for so many and how few resources there were for students covering the whole period. While there were a host of specialized studies on certain aspects of the history or theology of this period, there was no adequate one-stop shop that I could recommend to students. And so the idea for this work was born. I wrote this book primarily for those students, but I am also deeply indebted to them for engaging with the ideas and helping to shape the current work. Learning in community is a great privilege.

I am also grateful to several people for their support and assistance in helping this volume come to fruition. The staff of the Donald Robinson Library at Moore Theological College are a stellar bunch of people who continue to make the library one of the best resources for biblical studies in the world. Particular thanks go to the research support officer, Rod Benson. I am grateful also to those who read parts of this work, provided valuable feedback on it, acted as a sounding board, or provided encouragement: Douglas Fyfe, Jordan Peterson, Lee Won Il, Jason Matthews, Ross Ciano, Peter Kerr, Marshall Ballantine-Jones, Jordan Pickering, Sigrid Holscher, Kamina Wüst, Gary Rendsburg, Mark Leuchter, John Dickson, Margaret Mowczko, Debra Snoddy, and Constantine Campbell. A special mention must, of course, go to Katya Covrett of Zondervan Academic, who believed in this project and exercised a heroic amount of patience and good humor as it grew far bigger than either of us imagined. Her guidance helped tame the beast and clarify the Nectanebos. Thanks also to Nancy Erickson for her precision as a copy editor and expertise as a scholar. Finally, I must thank my wife, Koula, my daughters, Hosanna and Josephine, and my wider family in Australia and Greece for their unstinting support, especially through some most trying times.

Δόξα τῷ θεῷ.

ABBREVIATIONS

TECHNICAL

DEUTEROCANONICAL WORKS AND SEPTUAGINT

OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA

DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND RELATED TEXTS

MISHNAH, TALMUD, AND RELATED LITERATURE

CLASSICAL SOURCES

Appian

Arrian

Caesar

Cicero

Curtius

Dio Cassius

Diodorus Siculus

Herodotus

Josephus

Justin

Justin Martyr

Livy

Memnon

Orosius

Ovid

Pausanias

Philo

Pliny the Elder

Plutarch

Polybius

Suetonius

Thucydides

Xenophon

SECONDARY LITERATURE

TABLE 1: BRIEF TIMELINE OF EVENTS (597–4 BC)

All dates are BC.

TABLE 2: THE HIGH PRIESTS OF JERUSALEM

All dates are BC.

The dates in office, lifespan, and ages of the high priests are given where they can be reasonably estimated. High priests are shown only up to the turn of the era (1 BC).

TABLE 3: RULERS OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE

All dates are BC.

* Reign Disputed

TABLE 4: ATTESTED GOVERNORS OF PERSIAN YEHUD (JUDAH)

All dates are BC.

TABLE 5: ATTESTED GOVERNORS OF PERSIAN SAMARIA

All dates are BC. Following each name in parentheses are approximate dates for the person’s lifetime and approximate age while in office.

*It is possible that Hananiah was preceded by Shelemiah ben-Sanballat I, in which case Hananiah should be relabelled as ben-Shelemiah.

TABLE 6: JERUSALEM UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE DIADOCHI

All dates are BC.

TABLE 7: RULERS OF THE PTOLEMAIC KINGDOM (EGYPT)

All dates are BC.

TABLE 8: RULERS OF THE SELEUCID KINGDOM (SYRIA)

All dates are BC.

*Claimed rule, but reality of reign is questionable.

TABLE 9: THE ZADOKITES AND TOBIADS

TABLE 10: THE HASMONEAN DYNASTY

TABLE 11: SABBATICAL YEARS

Sabbatical years are attested from 163/2 BC onwards. It is unknown whether the system was in use before this, but it is likely. On the assumption that it was in use, the Sabbatical Years are listed from the beginning of Seleucid rule over Judea (198 BC), which coincides with a Sabbatical Year. All dates are BC.

INTRODUCTION

ESTRANGED TESTAMENTS

Perceiving the Problem

When I ask people about what happened in the five centuries before Jesus, I tend to encounter three types of answers. The first is the classic Protestant answer. It states that there was a Maccabean Revolt but that most of this period was essentially one of silence in which prophecy ceased. Respondents usually refer to these centuries as the intertestamental period in which some Jewish literature was written, but none of it was inspired Scripture. It was, rather, apocryphal literature of dubious theological quality, though few can explain why. The second answer is what I call the series trailer response, which gives short scene grabs from the period. Respondents mention that the Israelites returned to the land from exile in Babylon, they rebuilt the temple, Nehemiah built a wall (though why is not altogether clear), then along came the Romans, Herod, and John the Baptist. The third answer is what I term the black hole response. It sees these centuries as a complete unknown and of little interest because no biblical literature was written in the period, making it largely unimportant.

All these responses are disheartening and impoverish biblical studies and theology by estranging the Old and New Testaments from each other. All too often there is an implicit assumption that the Old Testament is simply a literary preface to the New Testament; that its essential purpose was to provide a set of predictions that Jesus would fulfil to prove that he was the messiah; or that it was a bag of allegories supplying some moral parallels to the New Testament. This, however, misunderstands the nature of prophecy and undermines the conviction borne out in the pages of both Testaments: that God developed an ongoing, dynamic relationship with his covenant people Israel and that this relationship was not put on hold for several centuries during the postexilic era (or Second Temple period). To underscore the problem, while I was writing this book and discussing it with various people, they would often mistakenly refer to it as Between the Testaments rather than Bridging the Testaments.

At the heart of the Christian faith lies a conviction about the person and work of Jesus, buttressed by the scriptural authority of the Old and New Testaments. Jesus is understood to have been Israel’s messiah who fulfilled the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) by bringing to completion God’s revelation and plan of salvation, which had already begun with Israel. This message is encapsulated in the New Testament. Yet the three types of responses above all unwittingly detach the two Testaments from each other. By interposing a so-called intertestamental period with centuries of apparent prophetic silence or deepest darkest ignorance, the two Testaments are prized apart and separated by a historical and theological chasm. This disconnection results in a subconscious reconfiguring of the significance of both Testaments and how they relate. Lip service is, of course, still paid to the notion that the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New, but what this means is redefined, and theological inconsistencies enter the fray. People will claim that during the postexilic era God was still in covenant relationship with his people and still at work in history to bring about the fulfilment of his purposes, and yet they will damagingly and illogically also maintain that there was a hiatus for most of this period in which God practically fell off the airwaves or went on leave for a few centuries.

Further historical and theological dissonance results. For example, the kingdom of Israel is identified as an ethnic-based, territorial state in the Old Testament, but somehow this is set aside for an ethereal kingdom of God that is spiritual and entirely lacking in ethnic, territorial, or political dimensions. Similarly, the Davidic king of the Old Testament is someone who wields civic and military power, yet Jesus is held up as a purely spiritual messiah who is uninterested in civic and military power. We read the New Testament and shake our heads disapprovingly at those who wanted a political messiah to rescue them from the Romans but will heartily read the Psalms that plead for God to remember his promises to deliver his people from foreign oppression. We encounter the pivotal importance of the land of Israel under the terms of the national covenant but do not understand how Jesus himself relates to the land. We read the canonical books that decry the flaws and failings of the establishment and yet argue that the establishment preserved these very books as Scripture. We state that God’s word was authoritative and binding from the moment of delivery while also arguing that there had to be considerable time before books could achieve canonical status, and at the same time we claim that God’s word often related only to people and events centuries after their delivery. We assume prophecy had ceased centuries before Jesus and yet find that Simeon and Anna were prophets when Jesus was born.

Then there are the large trajectory questions that few of us pose, or if we do, do not know how to answer. For instance, how is it that the Davidic dynasty rules Israel and Judah and its scion, Zerubbabel, leads the community after the exile, but by the first century the Davidic descendants are just tradesmen in a tiny Galilean village? How does Israel go from being ruled by Davidic kings to being dominated by priests? How do we go from Judean exiles returning to Jerusalem to having Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a Sanhedrin? Why is it that the temple is so important to the pioneers who returned to Jerusalem from exile, and yet Jesus wants to tear the temple down? Why is it so crucial that Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem? Is Jesus’s pedigree as a son of David an optional extra, and if not, why not? How did the canon actually develop, and how does it relate to the historical progress of God’s covenant people? Is the redaction of Scripture a suspect notion, or was it an attendant feature of God’s ongoing dealings with his people? If the Torah demands the unity of all Israel and the prophets desire the restoration of all Israel, why is Nehemiah so determined to exclude the Samarians, and why are we generally uninterested in them, apart from one good one, one leper, and one questionable woman at a well? Why is the national covenant adamant that Israel keeps away from the nations, and yet the New Testament wholeheartedly embraces the inclusion of gentiles as gentiles within the people of God? Why is the Old Testament so focused on life in the land in the here and now, and yet the New Testament is so big on an eschatological day of judgment and resurrection?

In addition, there are countless other detail questions. What was Ezra doing with the Law—wasn’t it there already? Why did Nehemiah build a wall? Why are there so many laborious genealogies in 1 Chronicles? Why did the Jews never get a Davidic king in the postexilic era, and did it matter anyway? Why do the Samarians go from being polytheistic in the early fifth century BC to devotees of Torah alone by the end of that same century? Why did Jews and Samaritans have such antipathy towards each other? Where does the notion of resurrection come from? What exactly is apocalyptic literature, and how does it work? Who were the Maccabees, and did they do the right thing in rebelling? How did the Greeks affect the Jews? How did the Jews come to be ruled by the Romans? What are the Dead Sea Scrolls all about? Why did no one have any qualms about pronouncing the name of Yahweh at an early stage of history, but by the time of the New Testament it had essentially become taboo? How did the Jewish community in Alexandria begin and develop, such that it was necessary to produce a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures? How did the Jewish diaspora develop, and what are we to make of it if the traditional covenantal land was so important? What are the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books, how are they important, and why also are they theologically suspect? Why did Herod rebuild the temple? Who were the Herodians?

Finally, there are numerous erroneous or misguided notions about this period. For example, it is usually stated that thousands of Judeans left exile in Babylonia and returned to Judah in the second year of Cyrus (538 BC), when in fact just a few hundred Judeans accompanied Zerubbabel to Jerusalem some years after Cyrus died (ca. 525 BC). Ezra is often touted as establishing the Torah within Judah alone, when he was in fact trying to unite all Yahwists under a single cultural standard. The marriage reforms of both Ezra and Nehemiah are usually seen as protecting Judah from their Samarian neighbors to the north when they were actually about protecting the primacy of Jerusalem and the integrity of all Israel when a rival temple had been built at Mount Gerizim. Malachi is usually placed within this same context (mid-fifth century BC), when he was in fact dealing with an attempt to unite Israel a century later. Hellenism is frequently equated with Greek ideals and Greek influence imposed from above. More accurately, Hellenism was about the organic combination of Greek and Eastern cultures, producing a new hybrid culture that Judaism welcomed. The critical question was what proportion of Greek and Eastern culture could coinhere within Judaism. It is commonly held that the Maccabean Revolt, which broke out in 167 BC, was mainly directed against outside Greek influence and Seleucid rule, when it was actually more an internal Jewish conflict about controlling the complexion of Hellenistic Judaism, with political ramifications for the relationship between the Jews and the Seleucid authorities. It is also erroneously stated that the Jews gained independence under the Maccabees in 164 BC, when in fact their victory in 164 BC was just a temporary foot in the political door. Jewish independence was not achieved until 142 BC. The Romans tend to be seen in monochrome fashion as brutal oppressors of the Jews, but they were initially friends and allies of the Jews. Lastly, it is often touted that the Sadducees only believed in the Law and not the Prophets. In fact, they held both in esteem but believed in the primacy of the written Law, especially in opposition to Pharisaic notions of an Oral Law.

The New Testament View

Many of these dissonant situations and questions arise from the fact that we have unwittingly estranged the New Testament from the Old Testament by inserting a so-called intertestamental period between them, which we mistakenly fill with blaring prophetic silence. This damages the historical and theological trajectories that lead from the Old Testament to the New Testament and undermines our approach to them both. What’s more, it’s plainly unbiblical.

Jesus did not believe that God had stopped sending prophets or interacting with his covenant people for several centuries. On the contrary, Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus state that all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John [the Baptist] (Matt 11:13). The fact that the prophets are placed ahead of the Law and John is counted as one of them means that Jesus was not referring to the books of the canon but rather to the historical phenomenon of prophets. He saw a crescendo of sorts with the advent of John the Baptist (Matt 11:12) but never suggested that there was a cessation or pause of prophets before him (cf. Matt 10:41).

The writer to the Hebrews affirms the same thing in the opening of his treatise: In various times and in various ways of the past, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets, but on the last of these days he spoke to us by the Son (Heb 1:1–2a). Here the writer looks back on God’s dealings with his covenant people. He implies that the revelation that came through Jesus (the Son) was part and parcel of God’s previous dealings, even as Jesus was the ultimate revelation of that long history. There is a sense of variety and antiquity to the prophetic activity but never a sense of hiatus, for the writer maintains that it was on the last of these days that God spoke through Christ. In other words, the writer can identify the endpoint of these prophetic dealings, but he never suggests that there was a pause prior to it. In the rest of his treatise, he will go on to liken Israel’s entire historical journey with God to the journey of the Israelites through the desert under the prophetic leadership of Moses (Heb 3:1–4:11). He sees Jesus as the ultimate destination—the promised land of revelation—but he does not argue for any hiatus along the way. On the contrary, he urges his Jewish readers not to fall short of this ultimate rest in Christ, as the Israelites whose bodies fell in the desert. For him, apostolic faith was of a piece with Israelite-Jewish faith and its logical endpoint.¹

The New Testament, therefore, implies God’s ongoing work with and within his covenant people Israel throughout all five centuries before Jesus. This must lead us to a historical and theological reevaluation of these centuries. As we do, we will find confirmation of the New Testament’s claims. Prophets were indeed active throughout this time, both biblical and nonbiblical literature was being written, and significant theological developments were occurring that would have a crucial influence upon the people and events of the first century. Indeed, if we do not comprehend the colossal contribution of these centuries to the trajectory of history and theology, we risk undervaluing or even misunderstanding the New Testament and its momentous revelation. If we are to build our theology on rock, rather than sand, we must take stock of the five centuries leading up to Jesus.

The Suppression of Prophecy

Where, then, does this notion that prophecy ceased centuries before Jesus come from? The seed of the idea goes back to the second century BC, but it did not fully germinate until centuries later. The author of 1 Maccabees believed that true prophets had not appeared among the people since well before the death of Judas Maccabeus in 160 BC (1 Macc 9:27). He was referring to prophetic figures, not just prophetic writings. Even then, he viewed this as simply an absence of prophets rather than a cessation of prophecy as a phenomenon. When the Jewish nation gained independence in 142 BC, the constitutional document defining the powers of the Hasmoneans invested them with power until a reliable prophet should arise (1 Macc 14:41; cf. 4:46). The author of 1 Maccabees who preserves this decree was also decidedly pro-Hasmonean and therefore censorious of anything that might be critical of them. Yet he could not omit this particular detail. While the Hasmoneans were content to believe that prophecy had ceased, since it was politically expedient for them that no prophet arise to gainsay their power, other quarters of Judaism still fully believed that prophecy was ongoing and that the Hasmoneans could not be the ultimate form of restoration for the Jewish nation. It served those in power, however, to suppress the spirit of prophecy. In the first instance, this took the form of producing authoritative literature to justify that power (even if we today might question that literature). After this, John Hyrcanus I claimed to have the gift of prophecy (J.W. 1.68–69). Through these means, the Hasmoneans and their supporters expropriated the prophetic impulse and made it a tool of the Hasmonean establishment. But thereafter, this prophetic impulse was suppressed so as to give the impression that the final prophetic word had been spoken and that prophecy had ceased altogether. The implication was that the Hasmoneans and their supporters had become the ultimate fulfilment of God’s purposes for his covenant people—ideas that, as we will see, most other Jews simply did not believe.

This suppression of prophecy was eventually taken up by other groups who came to be part of the Jewish establishment and is alluded to in the New Testament. When Jesus talks about John the Baptist, he states that violent people have tried to lay hold of the kingdom of heaven, by which he means that those in power had tried to suppress the kingdom (Matt 11:12–13). Luke has Stephen, the first Christian martyr, express a similar sentiment when he aims a stinging charge at the Jewish Sanhedrin:

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit. You are just like your ancestors. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They also killed the ones who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become—you who received the Law through the agency of angels and yet have not kept it. (Acts 7:51–53)

In the first century, the Sanhedrin was dominated by Sadducees, who had been historically aligned with the Hasmoneans and held the key positions of power, and Pharisees, who had been given civic power in the first century BC. In accusing them of resisting the Holy Spirit, as their forebears had done, Stephen does not imply that they failed to find personal salvation in Jesus. Rather, he accuses them of suppressing prophecy, with the execution of Jesus being the epitome of this. He goes on to accuse the Sanhedrin of not even being faithful to the Torah, which they prized so highly and which the Pharisees claimed was given via angels. The insinuation is that the Holy Spirit, which had inspired the Torah, was the very same spirit who had been prophetically active down to the time of Jesus but whom the Jewish leaders were now railing against. One wonders what words Stephen would have for modern readers who perpetuate the notion of prophetic silence.

There was a widespread belief in Judaism that God had not fallen silent or stopped guiding his covenant people, even if members of the establishment believed (or needed to believe) that he had. Many Jews, including the early Christians, expected prophetic figures to arise who would proclaim the word of God, interpret the times, and perform significant signs. And indeed, they did. In Wisdom of Solomon (first century BC), wisdom is said to raise prophets in every generation (Wis 7:27). We do not know the names of all the prophetic figures who arose during these centuries, but that is only to be expected. After all, we do not know the names of the Chronicler, the compiler of the Book of the Twelve Prophets, or the composer of the Song of the Songs. Furthermore, we know of prophetic figures in biblical literature without having any literature from their hand, such as Ahijah of Shiloh, Jehu ben-Hanani, Elijah, Elisha, and Uriah ben-Shemaiah. By a similar token, we have no writings from Judas the Essene (Ant. 13.311–13; J.W. 1.78–80), who prophesied the death of Antigonus in 104 BC (see 3.7.8 below); or from Onias the Circle-Drawer, an Elijah-like prophet from Galilee, who prayed for rain to break a drought in 65 BC but who was murdered the following year for failing to take sides in a Hasmonean civil war (see 3.7.17 below). Indeed, if prophecy was suppressed it is unsurprising that we do not know the names of more prophetic figures, let alone if their prophecies were ever recorded.

The Gospels portray people expecting prophetic figures (Matt 10:41) and identify Zacharias (Luke 1:67), Simeon (Luke 2:25–35), Anna (Luke 2:36–38), John the Baptist (Matt 14:5; Mark 6:15; Luke 7:26; 20:6), and Jesus (Mark 8:28; Luke 7:16; 24:19; John 4:19) among them. Anna, in particular, due to her elderly age, likely had a prophetic ministry for much of the first century BC. The early church also had prophetic figures (Acts 11:27; 13:1; 15:32; 21:9–10; Rev 18:20). The inclination of the establishment to suppress prophecy is exemplified when Jesus challenged the chief priests and elders in the temple on the prophetic status of John the Baptist. The priests and elders refused to acknowledge John’s prophetic credentials, since he criticized them, and yet Jesus and the wider populace esteemed John as a prophet (Matt 21:21–27; Mark 11:27–33; Luke 20:1–8). The implication is that John was the reliable prophet who would arise to herald a new age (cf. 1 Macc 14:41). He did this by critiquing the establishment, calling for societal change, and pointing to a greater one who would come after him in fiery judgment and the prophetic Holy Spirit. But for this, John was brutally suppressed by the establishment and executed. Jesus’s exchange with the priests and elders over John’s prophetic status was no mere academic riddle but a politically charged challenge for them to recognize that he, Jesus, was the one who would come after John and fulfil prophetic expectation. But just days later, Jesus was arrested and tried by the leading priests, predominantly Sadducees who believed that prophecy had functionally ceased. They assaulted him and mocked him by goading him to prophesy (Mark 14:65; cf. Matt 26:67–68; Luke 22:63–64). The following morning, they successfully endeavored to have him crucified.

The Essenes believed in the ongoing role of prophecy. In addition to Judas the Essene, Josephus mentions the curious figure of Menahem the Essene, who predicted the rise of Herod (Ant. 15.373–78). The War Scroll, probably written in the late first century BC, says of God, By the hands of your anointed ones, seers of the appointed things, you have told us about the e[nds] of the wars of your hands (1QM 11:7–8). These anointed ones or seers were prophetic figures within the Essene community, and their prophetic role included forecasting eschatological events and interpreting the words of previous prophets, exemplified by the pesharim (interpretive commentaries) that the sect produced. While we might not view their works as authoritative, that they produced them shows again that the prophetic impulse was perceived to be active.

At the end of the first century, Josephus played a significant role in furthering the idea that prophecy ceased, though he himself never expressly stated the idea in his writings. In Against Apion he claimed that the history of the Jews written after Artaxerxes I was not of the same authority as that produced before because there had not been a precise succession of prophets (Ag. Ap. 1.41). Josephus’s wording expresses belief in a paucity of prophets rather than the cessation of prophecy altogether. His enumeration of Jewish Scriptures includes texts written after the reign of Artaxerxes I (Ag. Ap. 1.40), though he may not have known this. By his day, the hyper-literalism of the Pharisees, of whom Josephus claimed to have been a member (though his claim is dubious), had reached such a level that a hermeneutical reflex assigning authorship to early named prophets became widespread. Even late anonymous prophecy was attributed to earlier prophets on the basis of hyper-literal interpretations of scrolls.² It was the same impulse that led the Pharisees to assign the Oral Law, developed in the second century BC at the very earliest, to Moses. This reassigned late biblical literature to earlier times, thereby depopulating the later period of inspired works.

Even so, Josephus’s description of the Hasmonean ruler, John Hyrcanus I, as a paragon of prophecy proves that he did not believe prophecy had disappeared altogether (J.W. 1.68–69). He even portrayed himself as possessing a prophetic gift (J.W. 3.399–408). He also referred to written oracles predicting the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. These oracles might or might not be equated with the writings of the Essenes, but their tenor is certainly similar to them (cf. War Scroll [1QM]). He also mentions writings held in the temple pertaining to someone from Judea rising to leadership of the whole world (J.W. 6.310–15). Josephus interpreted this in a convoluted way to indicate the rise of Vespasian, but one can easily see an intersection with the son of man in Daniel 7:13–14 and the Christian belief in the cosmic supremacy of Jesus (cf. Matt 28:18; Col 1:15–20; Eph 1:10). Josephus mentioned other prophetic figures throughout his works (J.W. 2.261–262; 6.285–286; Ant. 1.240; 13.311–13; 20.97, 169), though he viewed most as necessarily false prophets because they opposed the Romans to whom he had defected. Even if we might question whether such figures were true prophets, the fact that they arose, had influence, and even wrote oracles demonstrates that there was a widespread notion that prophecy was not dead. It was the same attitude that the early church had.

In the second century, the Christian apologist Justin Martyr expressed the view that prophecy continued right up until Jesus’s resurrection, whence the gift was taken from the Jews and bestowed upon Christians (Trypho 87). Despite his supersessionist tendency and somewhat anti-Semitic tone, Justin’s view that prophecy never ceased before Christ reflects the view of the New Testament writers. His rhetoric implies that his interlocutor, Trypho the Jew, conceded that prophecy had ceased among the Jews and used that as the basis for denying the possibility of Jesus being a prophet or that there were prophets in the early church. What we cannot tell from Justin’s rhetoric is when exactly Trypho dated the cessation of prophecy within Judaism.

It is not until the compilation of rabbinic literature that we find express claims of prophecy ceasing. The Talmud proclaims the end of prophecy with Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, with a divine voice as a mere echo being given on the rarest occasion thereafter. Only Hillel the Elder, whose life overlapped with that of Jesus, was deemed worthy of being called a prophet after this time, and yet rabbinic literature states that Hillel was not actually a prophet because his generation was deemed unworthy (b. Sotah 48b; b. Sanh. 11a; b. Yoma 9b)—an unusual notion, since prophets were traditionally seen as calling unworthy people to repentance. There is here a subtle change in which prophecy had shifted from being divine comment upon human affairs (past, present, or future) and the shaping of the human response to mere prediction bestowed upon worthy adherents (cf. Greek notions associated with oracles, such as that at Delphi). When read alongside the New Testament and the rhetoric of Justin Martyr, the implication is that rabbinic Judaism argued for the cessation of prophecy with Malachi in order to validate their hyper-literal hermeneutic, uphold claims of the antiquity of their Oral Law, redefine prophecy as prediction, and deny Christian claims that Jesus was a prophetic figure who called the Jewish nation to repentance. It also denied the phenomenon of prophets in the early church, that the destruction of the temple had verified Jesus’s message, and that the documents that eventually made up the New Testament were divinely inspired.³

The notion of a four-hundred-year silence before John the Baptist, therefore, has little scriptural or historical warrant. It certainly does not accord with the undeniable production of canonical scriptural texts after the fifth century BC, not to mention the proliferation of works that did not make it into the canon or the rise of prophetic figures within Judaism throughout these centuries. The notion even appears to post-date Justin Martyr in the mid-second century. Indeed, this curious supposition sits somewhere between Josephus’s view that prophetic authority ebbed after Artaxerxes I and the later rabbis’ claim that it ceased altogether with Malachi. The rabbinic claim arose partly as a refutation of the early Christian claim that revelation had not ceased but had continued and reached its culmination in Jesus and the first generation of the church. In this case, the persistent Christian claim of a four-hundred-year prophetic silence is ironically predicated on an anti-Christian polemic and might have proliferated through the church’s preservation of Josephus’s works beyond the second century.⁴

Dealing with the Problem

Part of the reason for a Christian readiness to accept the notion of a prophetic cessation before Jesus stems, counterintuitively, from the Christian dependence upon Scripture. Being removed from the people and events mentioned in biblical literature, Christians rely upon the inspired Scriptures to convey those persons and events to them and to understand the revelation of God contained in them. Christ himself was the completion of that revelation, and the Bible is the ultimate authority within the Christian church. The sufficiency of Scripture for knowledge of God and salvation is based on its supreme authority as God-breathed (cf. 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:21), and nothing else comes close to it. But the canon is a literary collection. It is a witness to history, but it is not the history itself, let alone the totality of history. Yet Christians tend to impose the shape of the canon, with its discrete canonical sections, onto history, thus creating a discrete Old Testament period and a discrete New Testament period, with a gap between them filled with the mortar of a so-called intertestamental period. The very terminology we use shows this. But the canon and history do not share the exact same shape, even though they are related. This fact is shown in the New Testament itself, in Paul’s claim that God sent his Son, born under the law, to redeem those under the law (Gal 4:4). To put it starkly, the Gospels describe persons and events who are still technically in the Old Testament period.

This, along with the fact that so much literature was written within Second Temple Judaism and yet so little of it became canonical, sparks a tendency to not require engagement with any of the non-canonical literature or the contexts in which they arose. These fall into the void of the so-called intertestamental period. The damage done to understanding the grand work of God in history is akin to ripping out four hundred pages of a novel just before the climactic resolution of the story. Engagement with the history of this period and its literature does not compromise the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. On the contrary, it enhances it. Prophecy in itself is a theological interpretation of history,⁵ which involves both divine comment on human affairs (past, present, or future) and the human response to the divine comment. After all, prophecy is not mere pronouncement but is given to elicit a response from those to whom it is aimed. If we eschew understanding the human affairs addressed by the prophetic voice, we risk misunderstanding the voice itself.

Unfortunately, biblical scholars rarely venture outside the pages of canonical literature in their endeavor to understand it and the world in which it arose. There is a pragmatic consideration here: it is very difficult to master the many disparate fields it takes to come to grips with this literature and its contexts, and so biblical scholars tend to specialize. However, an unwanted fruit of this tendency is that the canonical literature gets treated as though it were hermetically sealed from the rest of the reality in which it arose. If Christians believe that God did indeed interact with real people in real times in real places, just as the writer to the Hebrews believed, then it must serve Christians well to investigate those people, times, and places.

There is, therefore, benefit in a large-scale analysis that integrates an understanding of how the biblical literature of the Second Temple period arose, what it meant in its original context, what the covenant people of God experienced in this period, and how the Old Testament leads into the New. It is a daunting task that involves the close reading of biblical and nonbiblical literature; interpretation and evaluation of sources written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin; consideration of political, cultural, religious, economic, and social history across five centuries; appraisal of archaeological excavations and artefacts they unearth; sensitivity to theological and philosophical developments among Jews, Samaritans, Persians, Greeks, and Romans; and doing all this with an eye on discerning the trajectories between the old covenant and the new. Daunting though it may be, it can be done. Indeed, if there is no such thing as an intertestamental period, then it is vital that we bridge the Testaments so that we may recover the trajectories that join them and see with greater clarity just what it means to claim that, when the fulness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law—that is, the old covenant—to redeem those under the Law, so that they might receive the adoption as sons (cf. Gal 4:4).

Furthermore, we will understand better the nature of the new revelation that occurs in Jesus and the New Testament. We will understand the idea that God progressively revealed himself and his purposes to his people through the ages and that the pages of Scripture are a very complex witness to this. It is sometimes difficult for us as modern readers to discern the development of theological ideas within biblical texts. The tendency of many modern readers is to see such ideas as perennially present throughout biblical revelation. For example, the concept of a coming kingdom of God or a day of eschatological judgment are read back into the Old Testament and assumed to have always been there rather than formulated in response to the historical circumstances that God’s covenant people experienced. For some modern readers, there is an inherent bias against the idea of late theological developments, as though such an idea implies the deficiency of the texts and necessitates their rejection, or alternatively that it implies earlier revelation was incorrect. Such responses fail to understand the implications of God pursuing a relationship with his covenant people. Relationships are by nature dynamic, not static. We should, therefore, expect theological development to have occurred, but it is important to understand the contexts in which it occurred so that it might be understood correctly.

Unfortunately, the assumption that prophecy fell silent in the fifth century BC is often accompanied by a further assumption that the biblical documents were essentially systematic theological formulations. Neither assumption has any foundation. Jews throughout these centuries believed that God was still speaking to them because his relationship with them had not stagnated into a static form. Rather, there was more yet to come, so God continued to relate to his people dynamically; his story was not yet finished. Consequently, theological development should be expected in this framework, viewing the Old Testament books as unfolding revelations whose story was still unfinished. Earlier revelation was true but incomplete; partial but not deficient or incorrect.

Furthermore, while the biblical documents are theological in nature and systematic theologians rightly develop theological systems from them, this does not mean the biblical documents were themselves systematic theologies. This would be like mistaking a cluster of grapes for a bottle of wine. Rather, the biblical documents were the products of contextually bound people who were just as much products of their environment as we are of ours today. This does not preclude such concepts as divine inspiration but rather implies that God worked through complex historical circumstances to relate to his people in their circumstances. To put it another way, the biblical documents have an original context, so they should be read in light of that context. If we fail to see the progression of theological development through these eras, we fail to understand the significance of the biblical documents themselves, which were written to shape responses to historical and cultural challenges. That is, we will not do justice to the prophetic and revelatory nature of biblical literature or to our understanding of what it meant to be God’s covenant people in the ancient world. Such a failure inevitably impoverishes theological endeavor by decontextualizing it—consigning it to a cell that imprisons theology by isolating it from the real world. Since biblical literature was written precisely to say something meaningful about the real world, the irony is indeed tragic.

BRIDGING THE TESTAMENTS

Questions and Aims

Before we begin the detailed work of bridging the Testaments, it is worth giving a quick overview of the journey we will take. In general, I follow a chronological model that asks two broad questions:

1. What happened historically to the covenant people of God between their return from exile in the late sixth century BC and the death of Herod in 4 BC?

2. What theological developments arose out of this history?

Underlying these two broad questions are a series of supporting sub-questions. For example, in asking what happened historically to God’s people, we must inevitably ask how they were affected by the larger political currents of their day. As we will see, telling the story of Israel in these five centuries necessarily involves dipping into the stories of Persia, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. If we do not make these connections, we hermetically seal the experience of Israel off from the real world. Similarly, in asking what theological developments arose, we are also asking how Jews interacted with the culture and thought of their neighbors. As we will see, this means considering the political, social, and philosophical milieu of various people. When we begin our story, the Jews are a people facing Mesopotamia, while speaking and writing in Hebrew and Aramaic. At the end of the story, they are a people facing Rome, while reading Hebrew and speaking Aramaic and Greek.

Structure and Style

The book is divided chronologically into four main parts:

1. The Persian Era (539–331 BC)

2. The Hellenistic Era (331–167 BC)

3. The Hasmonean Era (167–63 BC)

4. The Roman Era (63–4 BC)

In some cases, the transition between these four eras is gradual, making the ordering of material somewhat difficult. For example, the Hasmoneans gained independence in 142 BC, but their roots go back to the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BC, when the Jews were under Seleucid Rule. Because the Hasmoneans were so important for Jewish history, I have opted to begin the Hasmonean era from 167 BC, even though technically this was still part of Seleucid Rule in the Hellenistic era. One could also argue that the whole Hasmonean era was just a part of the Hellenistic era. But I have chosen these four broad political horizons for their use in conveying the major political influences upon God’s covenant people. Each part is related to the others, and there are several subsections within each part.

Occasionally, one might think that I have brought too much detail to bear on these questions. To some extent, I sympathize with such a response. I think of my students who ask me every year for that one go-to reference that gives a quick snapshot of the entire period. But my aim here is to give an integrative account of these centuries that provides some depth of analysis as well as breadth of coverage. The quick snapshot approach too often fails to make the necessary connections I wish to illuminate here. I have my students predominantly in mind, who have always been grateful that I have taken the time to initiate them into the depth and breadth of the period.

Furthermore, I want to capture something of the thrill of this period. These centuries are laden with fascinating twists and turns, close calls, and a cast of enthralling characters, in addition to the theological value that we derive from studying them. To that end, I have often translated names and nicknames rather than simply transliterating them into English. This conveys something of the real flesh and blood people who feature in this history. I also opt for designations that are more familiar to readers. Thus, I tend to follow Latinized names, as opposed to Hellenized names (e.g., Alexander rather than Alexandros). I also tend to give full names at the outset of sections, and whenever I deem them appropriate to remind people or to distinguish them from others (e.g., frequently Onias III, and not just Onias).

There is some debate as to whether one should refer to Judeans or Jews and Samarians or Samaritans. I have opted to use Judeans and Samarians for the Persian era, but Jews and Samaritans thereafter. The reason for this is that, during the Persian era, the Judeans and Samarians had many dealings with each other in a way that evokes the older traditions of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Jews and Samaritans, on the other hand, tends to evoke the situation of conflict between the two communities, which resulted in a permanent estrangement from the very end of the Persian era onwards. These are also the terms more recognizable to readers of the Greek New Testament, and therefore I employ them from the ascendancy of the Greek kingdoms onwards. The terms Jews and Jewish, therefore, appear in material relating to the Hellenistic era onwards. I identify the Andromachus Affair (331 BC), which brought the governing Sanballat dynasty of Samaria to an end, as the tipping point for moving from Samarians to Samaritans.

Since my aim is to bridge the Testaments, I will often trace a trajectory directly from the topic under discussion to the New Testament. I hope that these trajectories will help to reinforce the idea that when we understand the historical and theological developments of these centuries, we enhance our understanding and appreciation of the New Testament.

Finally, all translations of ancient texts, including biblical texts, are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

THE GRAND SWEEP

The five centuries between the return of Judean exiles to Jerusalem (520s BC) and the death of Herod (4 BC) witnessed a series of tectonic historical shifts and momentous theological developments within the covenant nation of Israel. At the beginning of this period, the political, cultural, and economic pole of the Near East was situated in Mesopotamia. Over these centuries, however, this pole moved west to the Mediterranean, and on the eve of the birth of Jesus was firmly located in Rome. Theologically, this period began with the hope of restoring a nascent Davidic kingdom under Zerubbabel, but as the centuries went by this hope became more remote, posing a series of major theological challenges. On the eve of Jesus’s birth, Israel was split broadly into the Jewish and Samaritan communities, dispersed across the Roman Empire, and fragmented into competing factions and beliefs in Judea. There was no united front but rather a people being pulled forcefully towards opposite extremes.

At the heart of the Jewish nation lay the institution of the temple. As the Sprig (Zech 3:8; 6:12), Zerubbabel had initiated its construction in Jerusalem in 520 BC as the first step towards restoring the lost Davidic kingdom—a state that would aspire to incorporate both Judah and the remnants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This Davidic, pan-Israelite agenda was the expression of hopes arising from the classic notions of a national covenant, as inculcated by the canon of the Torah, and a Davidic covenant, as inculcated by the canon of the Prophets (and later by the works of the Writings, also). As a permanent cultic center, the Jerusalem temple tied both these covenants together as a place of worship (cf. the tabernacle in the Torah) and a symbol of the permanent covenant between Yahweh and David.

Yet, throughout the Persian and early Hellenistic eras, the Jerusalem temple struggled as an institution. The authority