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Malachi _ the 400 Years of Silence – How the Old Testament Ends · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: The wind that came off the Judean hills in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of the 5th century before Christ carried dust through
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  Speaker 1: a city that had never quite become what it was
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  Speaker 1: promised to be. Jerusalem stood again, but it stood small.
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  Speaker 1: The wall that Nehemiah's crews had thrown up ran its
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  Speaker 1: uneven line around a population that historians estimate in the
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  Speaker 1: low thousands, a provincial town in a forgotten corner, of
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  Speaker 1: an empire so vast that the men who ruled it in,
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  Speaker 1: Susa and Persepolis, would have struggled to find this place
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  Speaker 1: on the tribute rolls. On a rise near the center of,
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  Speaker 1: the town sat the temple. It was the second one.
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  Speaker 1: The first, Solomon's, had been a thing of cedar and gold,
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  Speaker 1: and staggering expense, and it had burned to the ground
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  Speaker 1: in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar's army broke the city open.
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  Speaker 1: This replacement, finished around 516, was by every honest account
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  Speaker 1: a lesser building. The old men who had been children
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  Speaker 1: in Babylon, who had heard their grandfathers describe the first temple,
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  Speaker 1: looked at the second, and did not always manage to
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  Speaker 1: hide their disappointment. That disappointment is the ground on which
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  Speaker 1: the last book of the Old Testament is written. To
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  Speaker 1: understand the prophet we call Malachi, you have to stand
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  Speaker 1: where his audience stood, in a settlement that had waited
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  Speaker 1: two generations for glory and received instead a modest sanctuary,
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  Speaker 1: a Persian governor, and a tax bill. The people who
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  Speaker 1: returned from exile had come home carrying the words of
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  Speaker 1: earlier prophets. And those words had promised something enormous. The
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  Speaker 1: nations would stream to Zion The desert would bloom. A
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  Speaker 1: son of David would reign. Instead, there were bad harvests
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  Speaker 1: into marriage with the surrounding peoples, a priesthood cutting corners,
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  Speaker 1: and the slow grinding sense that heaven had gone quiet.
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  Speaker 1: The book opens with the barest possible heading. In Malachi 1,
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  Speaker 1: verse 1, the text announces itself. A prophecy. the word
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  Speaker 1: of the Lord to Israel through Malachi. That is the
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  Speaker 1: whole introduction, no date, no king, no genealogy, of the
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  Speaker 1: kind that opens Isaiah or Jeremiah, just a word delivered
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  Speaker 1: and a name that may not even be a name.
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  Speaker 1: The name is the first puzzle and it is worth
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  Speaker 1: sitting with because it tells you something about the book's character.
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  Speaker 1: Malachi in Hebrew means my messenger. It appears nowhere else
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  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew Bible as a personal name, and the
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  Speaker 1: same word turns up a few chapters later in the
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  Speaker 1: third chapter describing the messenger God will send. This has
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  Speaker 1: led many interpreters, ancient and modern, to wonder whether Malachi
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  Speaker 1: is a title rather than a birth name, a way
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  Speaker 1: of saying that the words come from God's messenger without
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  Speaker 1: telling us who the man was. The ancient Greek translation
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  Speaker 1: known as the Septuagint rendered the opening not as a
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  Speaker 1: proper name at all, but as, by the hand of
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  Speaker 1: his messenger. Other early readers, including some in the rabbinic tradition,
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  Speaker 1: went further and speculated that the prophet was really Ezra
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  Speaker 1: the scribe, writing under a title. There is no way
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  Speaker 1: to settle the question, and the book does not seem
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  Speaker 1: to care whether we settle it. The messenger recedes so
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  Speaker 1: that the message can stand in front. Whoever he was,
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  Speaker 1: he spoke into a specific and recoverable moment, and the
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  Speaker 1: internal evidence pins that moment down with unusual precision. The
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  Speaker 1: clues are scattered through the text, and they all point
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  Speaker 1: the same direction. The temple is standing and functioning, so
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  Speaker 1: this is after 516. sacrifices are being offered, which means
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  Speaker 1: the altar is in daily use. There is a governor,
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  Speaker 1: referred to with the Persian loanword Pecha, the same title
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  Speaker 1: used for Nehemiah, which places the book squarely inside the
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  Speaker 1: Persian administration of the province, the empire called Yehud. The
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  Speaker 1: abuses Malachi attacks, neglected tithes, mixed marriages, a careless priesthood,
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  Speaker 1: cheating in worship, are precisely the abuses that Ezra and
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  Speaker 1: Nehemiah confront in their own memoirs. Most scholars, therefore, date
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  Speaker 1: the book to some time around 460 to 430 before Christ,
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  Speaker 1: either just before Nehemiah's reforms or in the same generation.
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  Speaker 1: Malachi is very likely a contemporary of Nehemiah, addressing the
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  Speaker 1: same tired community from the prophetic side while Nehemiah addressed
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  Speaker 1: it from the governor's residence. That makes this book the
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  Speaker 1: final prophetic voice of the Old Testament, not only in
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  Speaker 1: the order of the Christian canon, but very nearly in
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  Speaker 1: the order of history. After Malachi, the voice that had
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  Speaker 1: spoken through Moses and Samuel and Elijah and Isaiah for
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  Speaker 1: the better part of a thousand years falls silent. To
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  Speaker 1: feel the weight of that silence, you have to feel
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  Speaker 1: first the weight of the letdown that produced it. And
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  Speaker 1: here the Bible itself gives us the emotional register. A
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  Speaker 1: generation earlier, when the foundations of the second temple were
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  Speaker 1: being laid, the prophet Haggai had put the disappointment into
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  Speaker 1: words that Malachi's audience would still have carried. In Haggai 2,
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  Speaker 1: verse 3, the prophet asks, Who of you is left
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  Speaker 1: who saw this house in its former glory? How does
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  Speaker 1: it look to you now? Does it not seem to
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  Speaker 1: you like nothing? That question hangs over the whole world
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  Speaker 1: of Malachi. The people are living inside an answer that
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  Speaker 1: feels like nothing. The archaeology of Persian period Yehud tends
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  Speaker 1: to confirm the modesty of the setting rather than contradict it.
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  Speaker 1: Excavations across the province show a thinly settled, agriculturally stressed territory,
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  Speaker 1: its towns small, its material culture unglamorous, a backwater loyal
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  Speaker 1: enough to escape imperial attention. This was not the restored
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  Speaker 1: kingdom of prophecy. It was a subject province paying its dues.
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  Speaker 1: We are not left entirely to imagination when we try
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  Speaker 1: to picture the texture of Jewish life under Persia, because
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  Speaker 1: a remarkable cache of documents survives from the same century,
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  Speaker 1: though from far away. On the island of Elephantine in
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  Speaker 1: the Nile, at the empire's southern edge, a community of
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  Speaker 1: Jewish soldiers in Persian service left behind a trove of
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  Speaker 1: papyri written in Aramaic. Those documents record their lawsuits and loans,
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  Speaker 1: their marriage contracts and divorces, even letters requesting permission to
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  Speaker 1: rebuild their own temple. They show us ordinary Jews of
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  Speaker 1: Malachi's era negotiating property, quarreling over dowries, and worshipping in
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  Speaker 1: ways that would have troubled the Reformers back in Jerusalem.
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  Speaker 1: The Elephantine papyri do not describe Judah directly, but they
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  Speaker 1: open a window onto the wider world, Malachi's. Listeners inhabited
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  Speaker 1: a world of imperial paperwork and compromised faith, and the
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  Speaker 1: daily business of survival failed. from any promised glory. It
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  Speaker 1: is against exactly this backdrop of loans and marriages and
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  Speaker 1: quiet religious drift that the prophet's specific accusations, when they come,
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  Speaker 1: land with their force. And they are about to come,
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  Speaker 1: because the striking thing about this final book is that
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  Speaker 1: it does not open with comfort. A community this bruised,
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  Speaker 1: this let down, might have expected a prophet to arrive
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  Speaker 1: with consolation, to tell them that the glory was only
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  Speaker 1: delayed that the son of David was on his way.
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  Speaker 1: Malachi does the opposite. He arrives as a prosecutor. The
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  Speaker 1: book is built as a series of arguments, disputes staged
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  Speaker 1: like a courtroom drama, in which God makes a claim,
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  Speaker 1: the people object, and God answers the objection with evidence.
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  Speaker 1: There are six of these disputes running through, the four
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  Speaker 1: short chapters, and together they form the last sustained speech
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  Speaker 1: God gives before four centuries of quiet. The very first
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  Speaker 1: of them cut straight to the wound underneath all the others.
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  Speaker 1: The suspicion the people had, been nursing in the dark
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  Speaker 1: and had never quite dared to say aloud, that God
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  Speaker 1: did not love them any more. that the exile had
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  Speaker 1: been a divorce, that the modest temple and the poor
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  Speaker 1: harvests and the imperial taxes were the evidence of a
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  Speaker 1: heaven that had turned its face away. God begins there.
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  Speaker 1: at the rawest nerve, with a claim of love that
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  Speaker 1: the people are ready to throw back in his face.
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  Speaker 1: The first argument opens with the shortest and heaviest sentence
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  Speaker 1: in the book. Before any charge is laid, before the
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  Speaker 1: priests are named or the the Sacrifices inspected, God states
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  Speaker 1: the premise on which everything else will rest. In Malachi 1,
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  Speaker 1: verse 2, the exchange begins. I have loved you, says
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  Speaker 1: the Lord, but you ask, how have you loved us?
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  Speaker 1: There is the whole crisis in a single line. God
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  Speaker 1: asserts love. The people answer with a question mark. It
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  Speaker 1: is not open rebellion. Nobody in this community is bowing
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  Speaker 1: to foreign gods in the streets or tearing down the altar.
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  Speaker 1: The disease is subtler and more corrosive than idolatry. It
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  Speaker 1: is disbelief in the affection of God, a low, chronic
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  Speaker 1: doubt that had settled into the bones of a people
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  Speaker 1: who looked at their circumstances and could not reconcile them
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  Speaker 1: with the idea that they were loved. The genius and
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  Speaker 1: the difficulty of Malachi is that the whole book is
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  Speaker 1: structured around answering exactly this kind of muttered objection. God
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  Speaker 1: does not scold the question. He takes it seriously enough
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  Speaker 1: to argue. The argument he makes is one that has
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  Speaker 1: troubled readers for two and a half, thousand years. To
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  Speaker 1: prove his love for Israel, God points not to Israel,
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  Speaker 1: but to Israel's brother, The passage continues in verses 2
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  Speaker 1: and 3. Was not Esau Jacob's brother? declares the Lord.
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  Speaker 1: Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated,
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  Speaker 1: and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland
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  Speaker 1: and left his inheritance to the desert jackals. The language
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  Speaker 1: is stark, and it is important to read it the
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  Speaker 1: way it's first. Hearers would have, not as a statement
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  Speaker 1: about the eternal fate of two individuals, but as a
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  Speaker 1: statement about two nations and two histories. Jacob and Esau
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  Speaker 1: were the twin sons of Isaac, and from them descended
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  Speaker 1: two peoples, Israel from Jacob and Edom from Esau. In
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew idiom of covenant, to love is to choose
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  Speaker 1: and bind oneself to, and to hate is to reject
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  Speaker 1: or pass over God's point is national and historical. He
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  Speaker 1: had bound himself to the line of Jacob and had
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  Speaker 1: not bound himself to the line of Esau. And the
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  Speaker 1: proof of the difference was written across the map his
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  Speaker 1: listeners could see. That map is where the archaeology sharpens
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  Speaker 1: the text. Edom had been a real kingdom, settled in
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  Speaker 1: the rugged highlands southeast of the Dead Sea its people-traders
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  Speaker 1: and copper-miners and rivals of Judah for centuries. When the
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  Speaker 1: Babylonians swept through the region in the 6th century, Edom
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  Speaker 1: suffered as Judah suffered, and in the generations that followed,
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  Speaker 1: something happened to it that did not happen to Judah.
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  Speaker 1: It did not come back. Over the Persian and early
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  Speaker 1: Hellenistic periods, the Edomite homeland was... steadily overrun by Arab
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  Speaker 1: peoples pressing in from the desert. Above all the Nabateans,
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  Speaker 1: the caravan traders who would eventually carve the city of
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  Speaker 1: Petra out of the rose-colored cliffs of what had been Edom.
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  Speaker 1: The Edomites who remained were pushed west into the southern
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  Speaker 1: hill country of Judah, into a territory that came to
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  Speaker 1: be called Idumea. By Malachi's day, the trend was already visible.
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  Speaker 1: And this is precisely what the prophet points to. Jacob's
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  Speaker 1: people had been carried off and brought home. Esau's people
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  Speaker 1: had been scattered and never restored. Look at the two histories,
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  Speaker 1: God says, and tell me they are the same. The
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  Speaker 1: desert jackals in the Edomite ruins were the evidence. Having
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  Speaker 1: established the premise, the prosecutor turns to the defendants. And
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  Speaker 1: now the tone changes from tender argument to open indictment.
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  Speaker 1: If God is a father and a master, then his
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  Speaker 1: household owes him something and it is not paying. In
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  Speaker 1: verse 6 the charge is filed. A son honors his
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  Speaker 1: father and a slave his master. If I am a father,
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  Speaker 1: where is the honor due me? If I am a master,
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  Speaker 1: where is the respect due me? says the Lord Almighty.
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  Speaker 1: The accusation lands squarely on the priesthood, the men whose
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  Speaker 1: entire vocation was the honoring of God, and the specific
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  Speaker 1: evidence is drawn from the altar itself. The sacrificial system
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  Speaker 1: of Israel ran on a simple principle written into the
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  Speaker 1: law of Moses. What you give to God must be
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  Speaker 1: without defect, the best of the flock and not the worst.
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  Speaker 1: The book of Leviticus, in its 22nd chapter, had spelled
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  Speaker 1: it out in detail, forbidding the offering of any animal
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  Speaker 1: that was blind or injured or diseased because a blemished
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  Speaker 1: gift insults the one who receives it. The priests of
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  Speaker 1: Malachi's day had learned to look the other way. God's
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  Speaker 1: rebuke on this point carries a flash of something close
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  Speaker 1: to sarcasm, and it is one of the most vivid
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  Speaker 1: moments in the book In verse 8 he says, When
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  Speaker 1: you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong?
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  Speaker 1: When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong?
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  Speaker 1: Try offering them to your governor. Would he be pleased
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  Speaker 1: with you? Would he accept you? The thrust is impossible
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  Speaker 1: to miss. These same priests would never dream of bringing
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  Speaker 1: a sick, useless animal to the Persian governor as a
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  Speaker 1: tax payment or a gift, because they knew he would
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  Speaker 1: be insulted and they feared his displeasure. Yet they brought
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  Speaker 1: exactly such animals to the altar of God, because they
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  Speaker 1: no longer feared his. The contempt was measurable. It could
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  Speaker 1: be seen in the quality of the livestock led up
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  Speaker 1: the temple steps. Behind the ritual language lies an economic
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  Speaker 1: reality any farmer understood. A healthy animal had market value.
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  Speaker 1: and a blind or lame one did not. So the
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  Speaker 1: worshippers and the priests who indulged them were quietly keeping thee,
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  Speaker 1: good stock for themselves, and passing the culls to God.
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  Speaker 1: The prophets discussed reaches a pitch that would have been
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  Speaker 1: shocking to hear inside the temple precincts. In verse 10,
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  Speaker 1: God says something no priest would ever have, said, Oh,
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  Speaker 1: that one of you would shut the temple doors. so
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  Speaker 1: that you would not light useless fires on my altar.
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  Speaker 1: I am not pleased with you. Better no worship at all,
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  Speaker 1: God declares, than this worship, this going through thee, motions
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  Speaker 1: with rejected animals and bored hearts. And then, in a
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  Speaker 1: line that lifts suddenly out of the grubby, present and
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  Speaker 1: points far beyond it, verse 11 opens a horizon the
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  Speaker 1: small province could barely imagine. My name will be great
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  Speaker 1: among the nations, from where the sun rises to where
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  Speaker 1: it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will
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  Speaker 1: be brought to me, because my name will be great
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  Speaker 1: among the nations, says the Lord Almighty. Here, in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of a rebuke about diseased sheep, is a promise
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  Speaker 1: that God's honor will one day fill the whole earth,
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  Speaker 1: from east to west, in every place. The contrast is
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  Speaker 1: deliberate and crushing. The people God had chosen were dishonoring
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  Speaker 1: him at his own altar, while a day was coming
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  Speaker 1: when strangers across the world would honor him better than
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  Speaker 1: his own priests did now. The section ends in verse
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  Speaker 1: 14 with a curse laid on deliberate fraud. Cursed is
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  Speaker 1: the cheat who has an acceptable male in his flock
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  Speaker 1: and vows to give it, but then sacrifices a blemished
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  Speaker 1: animal to the Lord. From the defective offerings, God turns
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  Speaker 1: directly to the men who accepted them, and the second
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  Speaker 1: chapter opens with the priesthood squarely in the dock. The
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  Speaker 1: threat is severe and pointed at the very thing a
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  Speaker 1: priest existed to pronounce. In the second verse of chapter 2,
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  Speaker 1: God warns that if they will not listen and honor
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  Speaker 1: his name, I will send a curse on you and
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  Speaker 1: I will curse your blessings. The men whose office was
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  Speaker 1: to bless the people would find their blessings turned to
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  Speaker 1: curses at the root. What makes the indictment sting is
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  Speaker 1: the memory of what the priesthood was supposed to be,
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  Speaker 1: and Malachi does not let that memory fade. In verse
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  Speaker 1: 7 he says, the ideal in words that define the
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  Speaker 1: whole vocation. For the lips of a priest ought to
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  Speaker 1: preserve knowledge, and from his mouth men should seek instruction,
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  Speaker 1: because he is the messenger of the Lord Almighty. The
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  Speaker 1: priest was meant to be a living channel between heaven
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  Speaker 1: and the people, a keeper of the law, a teacher
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  Speaker 1: whose mouth could be trusted. That word messenger is the
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  Speaker 1: same word that gives the book its name, and its
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  Speaker 1: appearance here is no accident. The priests were supposed to
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  Speaker 1: be God's messengers, and they had failed at the one
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  Speaker 1: thing the title required. Instead, verses 8 and 9 deliver
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  Speaker 1: the verdict. they had turned from the way, caused many
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  Speaker 1: to stumble by their teaching, and violated the covenant with Levi.
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  Speaker 1: And so God had made them despised and humiliated before
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  Speaker 1: all the people, because they showed partiality in matters of
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  Speaker 1: the law. Having tried the priests at the altar, the
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  Speaker 1: prophet widens the frame to take in the whole community,
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  Speaker 1: and he does it by appealing to something that should
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  Speaker 1: have bound them together, and instead had come apart. In
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  Speaker 1: Malachi 2 verse 10, the argument turns, Do we not
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  Speaker 1: all have one Father? Did not one God create us?
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  Speaker 1: Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by
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  Speaker 1: being unfaithful to one another? The logic moves from the
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  Speaker 1: vertical to the horizontal in a single breath. Because they
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  Speaker 1: share one Father and one Maker, The people of Judah
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  Speaker 1: are brothers, and treachery against a brother is treachery against
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  Speaker 1: the covenant itself. The word that keeps recurring in this
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  Speaker 1: section is faithlessness. The Hebrew idea of acting treacherously, dealing
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  Speaker 1: falsely with someone who had a right to trust you.
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  Speaker 1: It is the language of a broken marriage, and Malachi
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  Speaker 1: uses it in two directions at once. because the community's
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  Speaker 1: unfaithfulness to God and its unfaithfulness within its own homes
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  Speaker 1: had become the same disease wearing two faces. The first
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  Speaker 1: face is intermarriage, and to understand why the prophet treats
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  Speaker 1: it as a crisis rather than a private matter, you
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  Speaker 1: have to remember how fragile this community actually was. A
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  Speaker 1: few thousand people clustered in a small province, surrounded by
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  Speaker 1: larger populations who worshipped other gods, had come home from
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  Speaker 1: exile precisely because they had held on to a distinct
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  Speaker 1: identity through two generations in Babylon. That identity was now
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  Speaker 1: dissolving at the edges through marriage. In verse 11 the
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  Speaker 1: charge is blunt. Judah has been unfaithful. A detestable thing
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  Speaker 1: has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. Judah has
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  Speaker 1: desecrated the sanctuary the Lord loves by marrying women who
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  Speaker 1: worship a foreign god. The concern here is not ethnic
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  Speaker 1: in the modern sense. It is religious survival. The men
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  Speaker 1: of Judah were marrying into families that served other deities,
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  Speaker 1: and everyone understood how households actually worked in the ancient world.
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  Speaker 1: The religion of the home was largely the mother's to shape,
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  Speaker 1: and children raised by a mother who worshipped a foreign
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  Speaker 1: god would drift toward that god. Within a generation or two,
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  Speaker 1: the distinct faith of Israel, carried home at such cost,
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  Speaker 1: could simply be married out of existence. This is not
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  Speaker 1: an isolated complaint, and its historical anchor is firm, because
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  Speaker 1: the same crisis is documented in detail by two men
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  Speaker 1: who lived in the same generation as Malachi and left
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  Speaker 1: behind their own accounts. Ezra the scribe, arriving in Jerusalem
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  Speaker 1: with a commission from the Persian court, was reportedly appalled
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: to discover how widespread the intermarriage had become. And the
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: ninth and tenth chapters of the book that bears, his
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: name describe his public grief and the drastic painful reforms
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: that followed. Nehemiah, the governor, confronts the same problem near
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: the end of his memoir, in the 13th chapter, where
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: he describes finding children who could no longer even speak
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: the language of Judah, because their mothers came from Ashdod
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: and Ammon and Moab. Malachi stands beside these two figures
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: as the prophetic voice denouncing exactly what the scribe and
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: the governor were legislating against. Three witnesses. One crisis. The
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: convergence is part of what lets historians date the book
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: so confidently to the middle of the 5th century, and
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: it shows the prophet was not attacking a hypothetical sin,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: but a live emergency in the streets around him. Woven
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: into the same passage is the second face of the treachery,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: and it is here that Malachi's words have echoed, longest
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: and cut deepest. The men who were marrying foreign wives were,
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: in many cases, divorcing the wives they already had to
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: do it. The prophet turns to defend those discarded women
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: with a tenderness rare in prophetic literature. In verse 14,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: he answers the objection of men who could not understand
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: why their worship was being rejected. You ask, why? It
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: is because the Lord is the witness between you and
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: the wife of your youth. You have been unfaithful to her,
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: though she is your partner. the wife of your marriage covenant.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: The phrase, the wife of your youth, carries the whole
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: weight of a shared life. A woman married in the
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: years of poverty, and beginnings now set aside when a
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: more advantageous match appeared. God, Malachi insists, had stood as
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: a witness at that marriage, which makes the betrayal not
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: merely a domestic failure, but a violation. of a covenant
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: to which heaven was a party. The prophet presses the
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: point to its climax with a warning repeated, like a refrain.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: In verse 15 he urges, So be on your guard,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: and do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: And then in verse 16 comes the line that has
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: anchored discussions of marriage and divorce ever since. The man
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: who hates and divorces his wife, says the Lord, the
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: God of Israel. does violence to the one he should protect,
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: says the Lord Almighty. So be on your guard and
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: do not be unfaithful. The Hebrew of this verse is
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: famously difficult, and different translations have rendered it in different
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: ways over the centuries. But the moral center holds steady
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: across all of them. Divorce in this context is described
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: as an act of violence, a covering of one's garment
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: with wrong, a betrayal of someone the man was bound
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: to shelter. It is worth noting how radical this defense
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: of vulnerable women was in its own world. In the
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: legal culture of the ancient Near East, a wife discarded
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: by her husband had few protections and an uncertain future,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: often thrown back on relatives or reduced to destitution. The
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: Aramaic marriage and divorce contracts from the Jewish community at
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: Elephantine spell out, in dry legal language, exactly how a
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: marriage could be dissolved and what a woman was or
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: was not owed when it ended, showing us the very
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: machinery of the transactions Malachi condemns. The chapter closes by
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: circling back to the theme that opened the book, the
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: suspicion festering. underneath all the specific sins, and Malachi captures
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: it in a phrase that has become one of the
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: most quietly devastating lines in the Old Testament. The people
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: had grown cynical, and their cynicism had begun to slander
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: God directly. In verse 17, the prophet says, You have
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: wearied the Lord with your words. How have we wearied Him?
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: you ask. by saying, All who do evil are good
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: with them, or where is the God of justice? That
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: last question is the sound of a faith curdling into despair.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Look around, the people were saying. The wicked prosper, the
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: unfaithful get their advantageous marriages and their good harvests. The
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: line between good and evil seems to make no difference
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: to how life turns out, so either God cannot tell
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: the difference, or he does not care. Where is the
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: God of justice? It is the oldest complaint in the
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: religious life, and Malachi's audience had made it into a shrug,
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: a way of excusing their own compromise by accusing heaven
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: of indifference. The answer to that lazy, corrosive question arrives
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: with a jolt. The people had asked whether God of
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: justice was, and the third chapter opens with God telling them,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: in effect, to be careful what they wished for. In
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: Malachi 3 verse 1, the reply comes, I will send
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: my messenger who will prepare the way before me. Then
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: The messenger of the covenant whom you desire will come,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: says the Lord Almighty. The word suddenly is the hinge
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: of the whole verse. This is not a distant, comfortable
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: promise of eventual reckoning. It is a warning that the
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: god they had grown careless about was going to arrive
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: at his own temple without warning, walking into the very
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: sanctuary where they had been offering their blind animals and
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: going through their empty motions. And before him would come
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: a herald, a messenger sent to prepare the road, the
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: way a servant runs ahead of a king to make
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: the path straight, that figure the forerunner. would become one
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: of the most important sentences in the Old Testament for
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: the way. The New Testament would later read it, but
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: in its own moment, it functioned as a threat as
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: much as a hope. The master was coming home unannounced
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: to inspect the house. The people had assumed that the
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: day of the Lord, when it finally came, would be
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: a day of vindication for them and judgment for their enemies.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: Malachi shatters that assumption. The judgment, he warns, would begin
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: at home, and it would begin with the very people
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: asking for it. In verse 2, the prophet turns the
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: longed-for day into something terrifying. But who can endure the
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: For he will be like a refiner's fire or a
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: launderer's soap. Both images are images of violent cleaning. The
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: launderer's soap was a harsh alkaline, substance made from plant
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: ashes that was pounded and scrubbed into cloth to beat
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: the filth out of it. The refiner's fire was fiercer still,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: and the metaphor repays a close look, because Malachi's audience
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: understood the process in a way modern readers often do not.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: To refine silver in the ancient world, a smith used
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: a technique the archaeologists call copulation. The ore was heated
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: in a shallow porous vessel too, an extreme temperature, until
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: the metal turned molten, and the impurities, the dross, rose
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: to the surface or were absorbed away, leaving the pure
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: silver behind. It was slow, hot, exacting work. And the
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: refiner had to watch the metal constantly, because too little
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: heat left the impurities in, and too much destroyed the
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: silver itself. That is the picture God draws of what
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: His coming will do to His own priesthood. In verse 3,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: the prophet continues, He will sit as a refiner and
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites and refine
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: men who will bring offerings in righteousness. Notice that the
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: fire is aimed first not at Israel's enemies, but at
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: the sons of Levi, the same priests whose corruption filled
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: the first. Two chapters. The point of the fire is
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: not destruction, but purification. God intends to sit down at
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: the crucible like a patient smith and burn the corruption
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: out of the priesthood until what is left is pure
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: enough to serve him properly, until there are once again
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: men who bring offerings the way the offerings were meant
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: to be brought. There is mercy hidden inside the severity.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: The refiner does not throw the silver away. He reclaims it.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: But the reclaiming hurts. and the people who had been
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: demanding that God act had not reckoned on being the
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: metal in the fire. The purifying fire then broadens from
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: the priests to the whole society, and here God names
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: the sins that had made the community rot from within.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: In verse 5, he promises to draw near for judgment
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and to testify swiftly against the sorcerers and adulterers and perjurers.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: the widow and the fatherless, and who deprive the foreigner
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: among them of justice. It is a catalogue of the
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: ways the strong were preying on the weak, and it
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: lands on precisely the people the law had always commanded
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Israel to protect. The worker owed his pay, the widow
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: with no husband to defend her, the orphan with no father,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: the foreigner with no clan. A society is measured, Malachi implies,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: by how it treats the people who cannot fight back.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: And this society was failing the measurement. The god of
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: justice they had cynically summoned would indeed come, and he
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: would come as a witness against them. And yet the
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: chapter refuses to collapse into pure threat, because underneath the
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: warning runs a current of astonishing steadiness. The reason this exhausted,
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: compromised people had not simply been wiped away is that
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: God does not abandon what he has bound himself to.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: In verse 6 comes one of the great anchoring lines
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: of the book, I the Lord do not change, so you,
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Their survival was
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: not a reward, for their faithfulness, which was threadbare, but
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: a consequence of God's own constancy. He had chosen the
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: line of Jacob, and he does not change his mind.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: That unchanging character is what makes the next words an invitation,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: rather than a dismissal. In verse 7, God calls out
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: across the distance, the people had opened up. Return to me,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: and I will return to you, says the Lord Almighty.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: And true to the pattern of the whole book, the
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: people answer the invitation with an evasion. But you ask,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: how are we to return? As if they did not know.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: As if the road back were a mystery. God's reply
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: is concrete and almost startlingly practical. He tells them that
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: the way back to him runs of all places through
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: their wallets. The evasion is met with a accusation that
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: must have stunned the room. In verse 8, God says,
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: But you ask, How are we robbing you in tithes
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: and offerings? The community had been withholding the tithes that
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: were supposed to support the temple and its ministers, keeping
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: for themselves what belonged to God. And Malachi names it
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: with a scandalous word. Robbery. This was not an abstract failing.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: The economy of the second temple depended on those contributions.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: The storehouses attached to the temple were meant to hold
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: the grain and produce that fed the Levites and the
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: temple staff. And Nehemiah's memoir describes the practical collapse of
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: exactly this system. The chambers standing empty, the Levites forced
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: to abandon there. and returned to their fields because the
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: people had stopped bringing what they owed. When the tithes
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: dried up, the whole apparatus of worship ground toward a halt.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: To rob the storehouse was to starve the house of God.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: Then comes the single most famous line in the book,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: and the only place in all of Scripture where God
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: explicitly invites His people to put Him to the test.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: In verse 10 the challenge is laid down. Bring the
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty,
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: and see if I will not throw open the floodgates
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: will not be room enough to store it. The image
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: is agricultural history. and generous to the point of extravagance.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: The windows of heaven flung open, the rain of blessing
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: so heavy that the barns cannot contain the harvest it produces.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: To a farming community living hand to mouth on stony
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: soil under a heavy tax burden, this was a promise
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: aimed directly at their deepest anxiety. Give first, God says,
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: and watch what I do. The return to God that
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: the people had claimed not to understand turned out to
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: begin with a wagon of grain, brought up to the
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: temple in trust, rather than kept back in fear. Before
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: the book turns its eyes to the horizon, it records
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: one last exchange, and it is the bitterest of them all.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: The people's cynicism, which had started as a muttered question
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: about God's love, had hardened into open contempt. In Malachi
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: 3 verse 13, God confronts it directly. You have spoken
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: arrogantly against me, says the Lord. Yet you ask, what
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: have we said against you? And then, in the verses
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: that follow, the prophet quotes back to them the words
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: they had been saying. and they are the words of
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: a faith gone completely cold. They had said it was
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: futile to serve God, that there was no profit in
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: keeping His requirements or walking about, like mourners in repentance
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: before Him. Worse, they had begun to envy exactly the
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: people they should have. Pityed, they called the arrogant blessed.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: They said that evildoers prosper, and that those who challenge
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: God to His face get away with it. This is
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: the end point of the road the whole book has
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: been tracing. A people who no longer believe God loves
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: them will, in the end, come to believe that serving
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: him is a waste, and that the wicked have chosen
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: the smarter path. It is despair dressed up as realism,
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: and it had spread through the community like a stain.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: But at the darkest moment of the book, something quietly turns,
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: and it turns around a small group who had not
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: given in. Not everyone had grown cynical. In verse 16,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: the camera pulls back to show them. Then those who
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: his presence concerning those who feared the Lord. and honored
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: his name. Here is one of the most tender images
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: in all the prophets. While the crowd complained that serving
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: God was pointless, a remnant of the faithful was speaking
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: to one another, encouraging each other to hold on, and
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: heaven was leaning in to listen. And God did something
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: with what he heard. He had it written down, a
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: scroll of remembrance, a book kept in the presence of
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: God recording the names of those who feared him when,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: fearing him had gone out of fashion. The ancient Persian
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: court kept exactly such books, royal chronicles in, which loyal
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: deeds were recorded so the king could reward them later,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: and the image would have been immediately legible to a
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: people living under that empire. Their faithfulness was not being
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: lost in the noise. It was being entered into the
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: permanent record of the king. That record exists for a day,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: and the day is coming. In verse 17, God speaks
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: of it. On the day when I act, says the
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: Lord Almighty, they will be my treasured possession. I will
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: spare them, just as a father has compassion, and spares
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: his son who serves him. The cynics had said there
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: was no difference between serving God and not serving him.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: God answers that a day is coming when the difference
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: will be the only thing that matters. Verse 18 drives
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: it home. On that day, the people will again see
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: who serve God and those who do not. The line
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: the people thought had been erased was going to be
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: redrawn in fire and everyone would see which side of
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: it they stood on. The final chapter opens with that, fire.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: In Malachi 4 verse 1, the day arrives in full.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: Surely the day is coming, it will burn like a furnace.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: the day that is coming will set them on fire,
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: says the Lord Almighty. Not a root or a branch
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: will be left to them. It is a harvest image
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: turned to judgment. After the grain is gathered, the dry
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: stubble left standing in the field is burned off, and
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: the arrogant who had called themselves blessed would be that
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: stubble consumed root and branch. But the same sunrise that scorches,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: the stubble warms the faithful, and the very next verse
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: turns the fire into light. In verse 2 God promises,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: But for you who revere my name, The sun of
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: righteousness will rise with healing in its rays, and you
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. The image
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: is of dawn breaking over a long night, a healing
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: warmth spreading across the horizon, and the faithful running out
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: into it like young cattle released from the stall into
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: the morning pasture. The same day is furnace and sunrise,
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: terror and healing, depending entirely on where a person stands. Then,
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: as the book prepares to close, it does two things
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: that function almost like a signature on the entire Old Testament. First,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: in verse 4, it looks backward. Remember the law of
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: at Horeb for all Israel. At the very end of
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: the prophetic era, The last prophet points back to the
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: first great mediator Moses and to the law given at Horeb,
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: which is Sinai. It is as if the whole tradition
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: from the mountain of the law to the final prophet
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: is being gathered up and handed to the people with
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: a single instruction. Hold on to what you were given. Remember,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: and then in verses 5 and 6, the book looks forward.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: And it does so with a prophecy that would hang
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: over the next four centuries like a held breath. See,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: turn the hearts of the parents to their children and
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: the hearts of the children to their parents. Or else
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: I will come and strike the land with total destruction. Elijah.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: The prophet who had confronted kings and called down fire
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: and been carried into heaven in a whirlwind of flame
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: centuries before would come again before the great and dreadful day.
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: It is the last promise the Old Testament makes, and
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: it points beyond itself. Some coming figure, an Elijah, would
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: arrive to prepare the people, to heal the fractures between generations.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: to ready the nation for God's own arrival. And with
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: that promise of a forerunner still ringing, the voice of
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: prophecy stops. This is where the timing matters, because these are,
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: quite literally, the last recorded words that God speaks to
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: Israel through a prophet for the next 400 years. After Malachi,
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: the sky goes quiet. There is a subtle problem with
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: ending a sacred book on the Word. Destruction. And the
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: way different traditions handled it tells you something about how
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: the book was read. In the Christian ordering of the
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: Old Testament, Malachi stands last. So the entire first half
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: of the Bible ends on that dark note of a
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: threatened curse, deliberately left hanging so that the promise of
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: Elijah pulls the reader forward toward what comes next. In
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew ordering of the scriptures, the Tanakh, the books
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: are arranged differently, and the collection ends not with Malachi,
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: but with Chronicles, closing on a note of return and rebuilding.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: And in the synagogue, when Malachi is read aloud, an
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: old custom has the reader go back and repeat the
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: gentler verse about Elijah turning hearts, rather than let the
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: public reading end on the word of destruction. Across all
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: these traditions, there is the same instinct at work. The
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: last word of the prophets is heavy, and it aches
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: for a resolution the book itself does not provide. That
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: resolution would not come for a very long time. The
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: Jewish writers who lived in the centuries after Malachi were
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: acutely aware that something had ended. The books of the Maccabees,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: written during the turbulent times that followed, speak plainly of
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: the absence of prophets in the land, of decisions that
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: had to be postponed until a trustworthy prophet should arise.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Of a time when prophets had ceased to appear among them,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: they knew they were living in the silence. The voice
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: that had spoken through Moses at Horeb, and through Elijah
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: on Carmel, and through Isaiah and Jeremiah, and now, last
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: of all, through the messenger called Malachi, had fallen still.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: and it left behind a single unfulfilled promise, a forerunner
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: who had not yet come and a day that had
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: not yet dawned. The phrase the 400 years of silence
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: is one of those pieces of religious shorthand that can
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: mislead as much as it illuminates. So it is worth
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: saying clearly what did and did not fall silent. What
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: ended with Malachi was the succession of canonical prophets, the
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: line of men and women through whom, the tradition held,
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: God spoke directly and authoritatively to Israel. No new book
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: would be added to the Hebrew scriptures across this span.
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: No voice would stand in the gate of Jerusalem and say,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: Thus says the Lord, with the recognized authority of an
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: Isaiah or a Jeremiah, That is the silence. It is
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: a silence of revelation, not a silence of history. And
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: the distinction matters enormously, because the four centuries that followed,
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: Malachi were among the loudest and most violent and most
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: transformative in the entire experience of the Jewish people. Empires
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: rose and fell over their heads. Their temple was defiled
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: and reclaimed. Their language shifted. Their literature exploded, and the
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: religious parties that would populate the Gospels were all born
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: in this period. God may have stopped sending prophets, but
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: the world did not stop turning. And by the time
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: the silence broke, the Jewish world had been remade almost
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: beyond recognition. The silence began quietly, under the same Persian
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: rule that had framed Malachi's whole message. For roughly the
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: first century of the 80s period, from the late 5th
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: century into the 4th, Judea remained a small temple state
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: within the Persian Empire, governed by its high priests under
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: the oversight of imperial officials, paying its tribute, keeping its law,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: drawing little attention. These were years that left few records
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: precisely because they were stables. the province of Yehud minted
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: its own small coins, maintained its temple, and lived the
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: unremarkable life of a loyal imperial backwater. The great drama
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: of the age was happening elsewhere, in the long, grinding
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: rivalry between Persia and the Greek city-states across the Aegean,
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: a rivalry that had produced the famous wars a Greek
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: would remember at Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis. And that
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: was slowly, decade by decade, shifting the balance of the
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: world westward. Judea sat on the sidelines of that struggle,
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: unaware that its outcome would reshape everything. The change, when
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: it came, came with the speed of a cavalry, charge
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: and the force of an earthquake. In the year 336 BCE,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: A twenty-year-old inherited the throne of Macedon, a rough kingdom
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: on the northern edge of the Greek world, and within
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: a decade he had done something no one had imagined possible. Alexander,
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: whom later ages would call the Great, led his armies
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: east against the Persian Empire and did not stop until
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: he had conquered the whole of it, from the Aegean
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: to the borders of India. In 333, he shattered the
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: main Persian army at Issus, in what is now southern Turkey,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: and then he turned down the coast of the Mediterranean,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: taking the great cities of the Levant one after another.
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: In 332, his march brought him through the land of
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: Judea itself, on his way to the conquest of Egypt.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: In the span of a very few years, The empire
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: that had ruled the Jews since the days of Cyrus
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: simply ceased to exist. And a Greek-speaking Macedonian became master
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: of their world. There is a famous story about Alexander
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: and Jerusalem, preserved by the Jewish historian Josephus in the
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: eleventh book of his great work on Jewish antiquities, written
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: more than three centuries later. According to Josephus, as Alexander
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: approached Jerusalem the high, priest went out to meet him
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: in his priestly robes, and Alexander, rather than sacking the city,
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: bowed before the priest and treated the temple with honor,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: explaining that he had seen this very figure in a
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: dream that had promised him victory over Persia. Josephus even
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: claims that Alexander was shown the book of Daniel and
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: recognized in its prophecies a prediction of his own conquests.
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Historians treat the tale with heavy skepticism. It has the
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: shape of a legend crafted to give the Jews a
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: dignified place in the story of the world conqueror, and
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: no Greek source records it. But whether or not Alexander
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: ever stood before the temple, the underlying reality the story
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: dramatizes is entirely true. Judea passed into Greek hands without
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: being destroyed, and the encounter between the faith of Israel
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: and the culture of Greece had begun. That encounter is
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: the deep event of the whole period, far more important
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: than any battle, and it has a name, Hellenism. Alexander
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: did not merely conquer territory. He carried with him and
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: deliberately planted an entire civilization. Wherever his armies went, Greek
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: cities were founded or refounded. Greek became the language of
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: administration and commerce. Greek gymnasiums and theaters and marketplaces appeared.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: And with them came a whole way of seeing the world. confident, cosmopolitan, humanistic,
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: and utterly foreign to the covenant faith of Judea. The
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: Greek language became the common tongue of the Eastern Mediterranean,
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: the way English functions across much of the world today,
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: so that a Jew in Alexandria or Antioch might live
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: his whole life speaking and thinking in Greek. This was
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: the cultural earthquake Malachi's Descendants had to survive, and it
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: posed a question sharper than any the Persians had ever posed.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: Persia had demanded tribute and loyalty. Greece demanded something more
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: intimate and more dangerous. It invited the Jews to become
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: like everyone else, to translate their strange, exclusive, unfashionable faith
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: into the reasonable idiom of the wider world. And in
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: doing so, perhaps... to dissolve it. The pull of that
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: invitation can be measured in a single enormous fact. It
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: was in this period that a large and permanent Jewish
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: community grew up in Egypt, centered on the new city
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: that bore the conqueror's own name. Alexander had founded Alexandria
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: on the Egyptian coast in 331, and it swiftly became
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. a
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: center of trade and learning with its famous library, and
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: home to a Jewish population that would eventually number in
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: the hundreds of thousands. These were Jews who lived their
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: entire lives in Greek. Within a few generations, many of
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: them could no longer read the Hebrew scriptures of their ancestors,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: and this simple linguistic fact would soon force one of
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: the most consequential religious projects in history. the translation of
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible into Greek. For now, it is enough
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: to see that the Jewish world was no longer confined
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: to the hills of Judea. It had spread across the Mediterranean,
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: and it was learning to think in the language of Athens.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: There is one more thread worth drawing out of this period,
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: because it shaped how the Jews themselves understood what was
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: happening to them. The Greek conquest did not catch the
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: biblical tradition entirely unprepared. The Book of Daniel, set in
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: the earlier days of the Babylonian and Persian courts, contains
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: visions of successive world empires rising and falling, and among
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: them a vision in its eighth chapter of a swift
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: and powerful goat from the west that charges across the
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: earth without touching the ground and shatters a great ram.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: only for its own single great horn to be broken
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: at the height of its power and replaced by four
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: lesser horns. Readers in the Hellenistic age saw in that
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: vision an unmistakable portrait of their own moment, the goat
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: from the West as the Greek kingdom, its great horn
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: as Alexander himself, and the four horns that replaced it
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: as what happened next. because the truly fateful thing about Alexander,
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: for the Jews, was not his conquest but his death.
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: He died in Babylon in 323 before Christ, still only
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: in his early thirties, with no capable heir, and the
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: empire he had welded together in a decade came apart
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: almost at once. His generals, the men history calls the successors,
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: fell to fighting over the carcass of his empire. And
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: after 40 years of war, the pieces settled into a
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: handful of rival Greek kingdoms, each ruled by a dynasty,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: descended from one of those generals. Two of those kingdoms
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: mattered above all others for the Jews because Judea lay
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: directly between them, on the fault line where they ground
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: against each other. To the south in Egypt ruled the
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: house of Ptolemy. To the north in Syria and the
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: vast eastern lands, ruled the house of Seleucus. For the
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: next century and a half, the small province of Judea
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: would be caught in the middle, passed back and forth
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: between these two Greek powers like a contested borderland, and
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: the pressure of that position would eventually produce the greatest
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: crisis of the entire silent age. For about a century
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: after Alexander's death, Judea belonged to the southern kingdom, the
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: Ptolemies of Egypt, and these were on the whole tolerable years.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: The Ptolemies ruled from Alexandria with a light hand over Judean,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: religious life, content to collect taxes through the high priest
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: and leave the temple alone. It was under Ptolemaic rule
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: and largely for the sake of that vast Greek-speaking Jewish
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: community in Alexandria. that the single most important literary project
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: of the whole silent age was carried out, the translation
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. This translation is known
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: as the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy, because
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: of a legend about its origins preserved in an ancient
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: document called the Letter of Aristeas. According to that letter,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: the Egyptian king Ptolemy II said, wanting a copy of
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: the Jewish law for his great library, sent to Jerusalem
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: for scholars and 72 elders, six from each of the
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: twelve tribes, came to Egypt and produced the translation. The
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: details of the legend are almost certainly embroidered, but the
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: core is history. Beginning in the third century before Christ,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: the Torah and then the rest of the Hebrew scriptures
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: were rendered into Greek. and the effects were incalculable. For
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: the first time, the scriptures of Israel could be read
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: by anyone in the ancient world who read Greek, which
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: meant nearly everyone educated. The Septuagint would become the Bible
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: of the early diaspora, and, later, the version most often
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: quoted by the writers of the New Testament. The tolerable
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: century ended when Judea changed hands. Around the year 200
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: before Christ, after a long series of wars between the
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: two Greek dynasties, the northern kingdom finally wrested control of
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: the province away from Egypt. Judea now belonged to the Seleucids,
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: the house that ruled from Syria over the sprawling eastern
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: remains of Alexander's empire, and the change of masters would
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: prove catastrophic. For a generation, it made little difference. But
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: in 175 before Christ, a new king came to the
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: Seleucid throne, and his reign became the great trauma around,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: which the entire silent age turns. His name was Antiochus IV,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: and he took for himself the title, Epiphanes, meaning God Manifest,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: a claim to divinity that captures the whole character of
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: the man. Contemporaries who despised him twisted the title into Epimenes,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: the madman. Antiochus came to power over a eugeiae, kingdom
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: under severe financial and military pressure, squeezed by the rising
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: power of Rome to the west, and he conceived an
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: ambition to weld his diverse territories together through a shared
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Greek culture. In most of his realm, this program of
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: Hellenization met little resistance. In Jerusalem, it collided with the One,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: people in the ancient world who could not simply absorb
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: another god into their pantheon, because they held that there
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: was only One. The crisis did not begin entirely as
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: foreign persecution. It began partly as a civil war within
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: Judaism itself. Between Jews who embraced Greek culture and wanted,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem remade as a Greek city and and Jews who
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: regarded that as the death of the covenant. Hellenizing priests
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: bought the high priesthood from Antiochus with bribes, built a
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: Greek gymnasium in the shadow of the temple where young
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: men exercised naked in the Greek fashion, and set about
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: dismantling the ancestral law from the inside. When rival factions
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: among these priests fell to fighting, and a rumor spread
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: that Antiochus had died on campaign in Egypt, Jerusalem erupted,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: and the king returned in fury to punish what he
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: took for rebellion. What followed was the first systematic attempt
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: in history to destroy the Jewish religion outright. In 167
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: before Christ, Antiochus issued decrees that made the practice of
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: Judaism a capital crime. Sabbath observance was banned. Circumcision was
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: forbidden on pain of death. Copies of the Torah were burned,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: and mothers who circumcised their sons were executed with their
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: infants hung around their necks. Then he struck at the
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: heart of everything. He entered the temple in Jerusalem, plundered
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: its treasures, halted the daily sacrifices. and in December of
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: 167 he rededicated the temple of the God of Israel
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: to the Greek, God Zeus, erecting an altar to Zeus
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: upon the sacred altar, and according to the ancient accounts,
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: sacrificing swine upon it. This desecration is the event that
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: the book of Daniel, in its visions, calls the abomination
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: that causes desolation, And readers of Daniel in this period
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: saw its eleventh chapter, with its extraordinarily detailed account of
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: wars between a king of the north and a king
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: of the south, as a prophetic map of exactly the
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: Seleucid and Ptolemaic struggle that had brought them to this catastrophe.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: The holy place had been made an altar to a
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: foreign god, and the faith of Israel stood on the
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: edge of extinction. It did not go over the edge
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: because of a family. In the village of Modane, northwest
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: of Jerusalem, an aging priest named Mattathias refused the king's
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: officers when they came to enforce pagan sacrifice, killed the
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: first Jew who stepped forward to comply along with the
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: royal official, and fled to the hills with his sons
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: to raise a revolt. When Mattathias died, leadership passed to
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: his son Judas, who bore the nickname Maccabeus, probably meaning
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: the hammer, and it is from him that the whole
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: struggle takes its name, the Maccabean Revolt. What Judas and
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: his brothers accomplished over the next several years was, by
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: any military standard, remarkable. Leading a guerrilla army of farmers
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: and villagers against the professional, forces of a Greek empire,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: exploiting the mountainous terrain, and the divided attention of a
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: Seleucid state. Distracted by threats elsewhere, they won a series
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: of improbable victories. And in December of 164 before Christ,
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: three years to the season after the desecration, Judas retook
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: the temple, tore down the defiled altar, built a new one,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: and rededicated the sanctuary to the God of Israel. That
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: rededication is the origin of the festival the Jews still
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: keep as Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, a celebration of
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: light returning to a temple that had been given over
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: to darkness. The revolt's success opened a new and complicated chapter,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: because the family that had saved the faith went on
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: to rule, the descendants of Mattathias, known as as the
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: Hasmonean dynasty, gradually won not just religious freedom, but full
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: political independence, as the Seleucid Empire crumbled around them. For
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: the first time since the Babylonians had ended the kingdom, Meux-Evieux, Judah,
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: more than four centuries earlier, the Jews governed themselves, an
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: independent Jewish state ruled by the Hasmoneans, who combined in
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: their own persons the offices of high priest and, eventually, king.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: Yet the independence came trailing its own ironies. Within a
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: few generations, the Hasmoneans, who had risen up against Greek culture,
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: had themselves become a worldly dynasty adopting Greek customs and
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: Greek names, expanding their borders by conquest and forcing conversions
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: on the peoples they subdued and tearing themselves apart in
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: dynastic feuds. The house that had cleansed the temple came
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: to be seen by many, devout Jews, as one more
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: compromised power. It is out of exactly these pressures that,
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: the trauma of persecution and the disappointments of Hasmonean rule,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: that the religious landscape of the Gospels took shape. The
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: parties whose names fill the New Testament were all products
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: of this age. The Pharisees emerged as a movement devoted
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: to applying the whole law of Moses to everyday life,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: developing the traditions that would later feed Rabbinic Judaism. The Sadducees,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: drawn from the priestly and aristocratic families tied to the temple,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: held to the written law alone and made their peace
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: with the ruling powers. And a third movement, convinced that
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: both the priesthood and the nation had been hopelessly corrupted,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: withdrew from Jerusalem altogether. Many scholars connect this impulse with
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: the community that settled at Qumran by the Dead Sea.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: the community that produced or preserved the library we now
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: call the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves above
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: the shoreline in the 20th century. Those scrolls, copied and
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: composed during these very centuries, include the oldest surviving manuscripts
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: of the Hebrew Bible by a margin of a thousand years.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: and they are the single greatest archaeological window we possess
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: into the Jewish world of the silence, a world seething
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: with expectation, convinced it was living in the last days,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: watching for God to act. And even as the Hasmonean
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: state quarreled with itself, a new and heavier power was
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: moving down from the West, one that would end Jewish
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: independence almost as soon as it had been won. and
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: set the final stage on which the silence would at
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: last be broken. The power moving down from the West
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: was Rome, and it arrived at a moment when the
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: Jews had made themselves vulnerable through their own divisions. By
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: the sixties before Christ, the Hasmonean dynasty had collapsed into
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: a civil war between two brothers, each claiming the throne
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: and the high, priesthood and each. Disastrously, appealing to Rome
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: to settle the dispute in his favor. The Roman general
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: Pompey was in the east at the time, reorganizing the
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: whole region into the Roman sphere, and the invitation to
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: intervene was one he was glad to accept. In 63,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: before Christ Pompey marched on Jerusalem, laid siege to the
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: Temple Mount, where one faction had barricaded itself, and after
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: three months broke in. The ancient accounts record that he
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: did something no Jew could forgive. He walked into the
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: temple and entered the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: where only the high priest was permitted to go, and
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: only once a year. He found it empty, no image,
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: no idol, just an empty room. And the emptiness, apparently,
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: puzzled the Roman mind that could not conceive of a
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: god without a statue. He took nothing and left the temple.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: Treasury untouched, but the violation of the sacred space was
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: a wound, and it announced the new reality with brutal clarity.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: The independence the Maccabees had bled for was over. Judea
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: now lay under the shadow of Rome, and it would
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: remain there for centuries. Rome preferred to rule such places
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: through local strongmen. and the strongman it eventually settled on
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: for Judea, is one of the most consequential and most
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: hated figures of the age. His name was Herod, remembered
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: by history as Herod the Great, and he was not,
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: in the eyes of many Jews, truly one of them
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: at all. He came from Idumea, the region south of Judea,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: populated by the descendants of those Edomites whose ruin Malachi
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: had once pointed to as proof of God's choosing, a
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: people forcibly converted to Judaism a couple of generations earlier
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: under Hasmonean conquest. Herod was thus in the sneering phrase
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: of his enemies, a half-Jew, an Edomite ruling over the
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: sons of Jacob, an irony that would not have been
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: lost on anyone who knew the old prophecies. Backed by
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: Roman arms, He seized the throne in the late 30s
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: before Christ and held it for more than three decades
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: through a combination of political cunning, ruthless violence, and staggering ambition.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: He murdered his own wife and several of his sons
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: on suspicion of plotting against him, and he ruled a
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: resentful population that never accepted him as legitimate. Yet this
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: same brutal, insecure, illegitimate king gave the Jewish world the
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: most magnificent temple it would ever possess. In a bid
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: to win the loyalty of his subjects and to glorify
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: his own reign, Herod undertook to rebuild the second, temple
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: on a scale that dwarfed anything since Solomon. Beginning around
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: 20 before Christ, he doubled the size of the temple platform,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: raising the vast retaining walls whose massive stones still stand in.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem today, the most famous of them being the Western
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: Wall that remains the holiest site in Judaism. He clad
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: the sanctuary in white stone and gold until, according to
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: those who saw it, it blazed in the sunlight like
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: a mountain of snow and fire. The modest temple that
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: Haggai's generation had wept over, the building that had seemed
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: like nothing compared to Solomon's, was transformed by an Edomite
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: tyrant into one. Of the wonders of the ancient world,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: the archaeology of the Temple Mount confirms the scale of
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: the undertaking. The engineering was extraordinary, and it was still
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: going on, still being finished, decades after Herod's death. This
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: was the temple that would stand at the center of
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: the gospel accounts. The temple whose courts a Galilean teacher
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: would one day walk. Beneath the surface of all this
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: imperial politics and monumental building, something had been quietly transforming
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: Jewish religious life during the long silence. And it would
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: prove more durable than any of Herod's stones. In the
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: centuries since the exile, and especially through the dispersion of
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: Jews across the Greek and Roman world, a new institution
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: had grown up alongside the temple, the synagogue. because most
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: Jews now lived far from Jerusalem and could visit the
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: temple rarely if ever. They gathered in local assemblies to
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: read the scriptures, to pray, and to be taught the law.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: Worship was becoming for the first time a matter of
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: the word as much as of sacrifice, of a community
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: gathered around a scroll rather than a priest gathered at
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: an altar. This development, born of necessity during the silent,
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: Centuries meant that when the silence finally broke, there existed
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: across the whole Mediterranean world a network of communities steeped
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: in the scriptures, literate in the law and the prophets,
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: and primed to argue about what those texts meant. The
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: stage on which the next act would play out had
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: been carefully, if unintentionally, prepared, and the audience on that
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: stage was waiting for something. The overwhelming impression left by
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: the Jewish literature of this period, from the Dead Sea
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: Scrolls to the many other writings that survive, is of
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: a people leaning forward in expectation. Four centuries of foreign domination,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: of Greek persecution, and Roman occupation and illegitimate kings had
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: sharpened a hope into a hunger. They were waiting for
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: God to act, for the promises of the prophets to
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: come due, for a deliverer, an anointed one, a messiah.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: who would set right everything that the silence had left broken.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: Different groups imagined that figure differently, some as a conquering
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: king who would drive out Rome, some as a heavenly deliverer,
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: some as a priestly redeemer, and some expected more than
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: one figure. But the expectation itself was everywhere, and woven
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: through it was the memory of the very last thing
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: a prophet had said. Before the great day of the Lord,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: Malachi had promised Elijah would come. So they watched for Elijah.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: The hope that hung over Judea was in part the
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: hope planted by the final verses of the final book.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: A forerunner who would turn the hearts of parents and
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: children and prepare the people for the coming of their God.
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: That is the exact point at which the New Testament opens.
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: and it opens by answering the question the Old Testament
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: had left hanging for 400 years. The Gospel of Luke
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: begins not with the birth of Jesus, but with the
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: birth of another child, the son of an old priest
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: named Zechariah. And when the angel announces that birth, he
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: does so in words that reach straight back across the
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: silence and pick up Malachi's unfinished, sentence. In Luke 1.17,
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: the angel says of the child who will be called John,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: And he will go on before the Lord in the
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: the parents to their children, and the disobedient to the
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: for the Lord. There it is, the forerunner in the
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: spirit and power of Elijah. turning the hearts of parents
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: and children, preparing a people for the Lord. The New
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: Testament announces itself as the resolution of the note Malachi had,
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: left ringing, the messenger who prepares the way, the Elijah
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: who comes before the day. Whatever a reader concludes about
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: the claims that follow, the literary and historical shape is unmistakable.
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: the story deliberately resumes precisely where the prophets had stopped.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: And so, the 400 years find their meaning in the
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: frame that Malachi built. The Old Testament does not end
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: with an achievement or an arrival. It ends with a
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: promise deliberately left open, a curse threatened, and a forerunner
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: announced immediately. a people told to remember the law of Moses,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: while they wait for an Elijah who has not yet come.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: Everything that filled the silence, the Greek language that would
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: carry the message, the Septuagint that made, the scriptures readable
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: to the nations, the synagogues scattered across the empire, the
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: fierce messianic hope, forged in the fire of persecution, the
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: very expectation of a coming deliverer can be read as
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: the slow preparation of the ground into which that promise
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: would finally fall. The prophet had said the Lord would
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: come suddenly to his temple, and for four centuries the
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: temple stood, rebuilt and gilded, waiting. The book that ends
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: the Old Testament is, in the end, not a conclusion
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: at all, but a threshold. a door left standing open
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: onto a silence that everyone knew could not last forever.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: Israel had been given a final word and then no
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: words at all, and it spent four hundred years learning
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: to listen for the sound of the doctor opening. When
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: at last it did, the first voice to break the
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: silence would call itself a messenger sent to prepare the way.