Latest / truthunedited / WHY DID GOD NOT SPEAK FOR 400 YEARS_ – THE INTERTESTAMENTAL PERIOD

Transcript

WHY DID GOD NOT SPEAK FOR 400 YEARS_ – THE INTERTESTAMENTAL PERIOD · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In this video, we are going to walk through one
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: of the most overlooked and most important periods in all
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: of Biblical history, the Intertestamental period. We will meet the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: empires that shaped the Jewish world, the movements that divided it,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: and the slow sovereign preparation that was quietly turning history
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: into a stage. And we will answer the question that
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: four centuries of waiting had made unavoidable. Why did God
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: go silent? And what finally broke that silence. The story
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: begins with the last prophet who ever spoke in the
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Old Testament. His name was Malachi, and the final words
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: he delivered were a promise that would take four hundred
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: years to keep. Somewhere round four hundred and thirty BC,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: a man whose very name means my messenger delivered what
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: would become the final words of the Hebrew prophets. His
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: name was Malachi, and almost nothing is known about him personally,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: no father's name, no hometown, no biographical detail that history
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: chose to preserve. What remained was only the message. He
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: lived in a difficult moment for the Jewish people. The
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: great Persian King Cyrus had already allowed the exiles to
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: return from Babylon decades before the temple had been rebuilt.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: The walls of Jerusalem were standing again. By every outward appearance,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: the restoration was underway, and yet something was deeply wrong.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: The priests were offering blemished animals on the altar, choosing
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: the sick and the lame as sacrifices while keeping the
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: best for themselves. Men were divorcing their wives without cause,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Tithes were being withheld, and perhaps most telling of all,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the people were starting to ask a dangerous question, what
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: is the point of serving God if the wicked seem
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: to prosper just as much as the righteous. Malachi stepped
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: into that disillusionment and did not soften it. He named
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: it for what it was. The Book of Malachi is
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: structured as a series of disputes, God making a statement,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: the people questioning it, and God responding with force. It
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: reads less like a sermon and more like a confrontation.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: At one point, God says through the prophet that the
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: people have wearied him with their words. They respond by asking,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: how have we wearied you? The answer by calling evil good,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: by assuming that God delights in injustice, just as they
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: had learned to. But the book is not all accusation.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: Running beneath the warnings is something else, a promise that
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: refuses to disappear. In chapter three, the prophet speaks of
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: a coming messenger who would prepare the way before the Lord,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: and of the Lord himself suddenly coming to his temple.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: It was a vision of purification and judgment, yes, but
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: also of presents. Returning God, though he seemed distant in
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that moment, was announcing that he had not abandoned his people.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: The call to return to the Law of Moses, given
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: at Horeb, appears near the end, almost as a summary
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: of everything Israel had forgotten and everything they would need
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: to hold on to in the years ahead. Statutes, ordinances,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: the covenant that had defined them since the desert. Then
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: comes the final two verses of the entire Old Testament,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: and they carry a weight that is hard to overstate.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: In Malachi four five to six, God declares, see, I
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the hearts of the parents to their children, and the
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: hearts of the children to their parents. Elijah was not
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: just any prophet in the Jewish memory. He was the
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: one who had called fire down from heaven, who had
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: confronted kings who had been taken up in a whirlwind
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: without dying. In Jewish tradition, his return was bound up
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: with the coming of the Messiah. To promise Elijah's return
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: was to promise that the great day of redemption was
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: at some point coming. For the people who first heard
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: those words, it was both comfort and tension, comfort because
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: it meant God had not forgotten them, tension because they
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: did not know how long the wait would be. As
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: it turned out, it would be four hundred years. When
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Malachi finished speaking, something ended, not the faith, not the people,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: not the Covenant, but the voice, the long line of
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: men who had stood up across Israel's history and said, thus,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: says the Lord simply stopped. No one came after Malachi
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: with a new word, no vision was recorded. The heavens,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: in a very real sense, went quiet. Later Jewish writings
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: acknowledged this plainly. The rabbis spoke of the Holy Spirit
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: departing from Israel with the last of the prophets. First Maccabees,
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: written during the turbulent centuries that followed, records communities in
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: crisis making decisions and then waiting in the words of
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: the text itself until a faithful prophet should arise. The
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: absence was felt. It was not just theological silence. It
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: was a silence people lived inside of generation after generation.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: What made this period so remarkable is precisely that contrast,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Israel had never known a stretch like it. From Moses
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: to Malachi, roughly a thousand years of prophetic history had unfolded,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: sometimes a long chain of voices, sometimes only one, but
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: never nothing. Now there was nothing. The Old Testament closed,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: the page did not turn, and the world kept moving.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Now we will look at the world Israel was living
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: in when the silence began, and why those decades matter
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: more than most people realize. The story of the Intertestamental
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: period cannot be told without going back briefly to the
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: man who made the return to the land possible at all.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: In five point thirty nine BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia,
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: conquered Babylon without a battle. The city essentially opened its
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: gates to him. What followed was a political decision that
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: changed the course of Jewish heady. Cyrus issued a decree
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: allowing the exiled peoples of the Babylonian Empire, including the
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Jews to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: The decree is recorded in ezra I, and it reads
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: like something the Jews could hardly have imagined. A pagan
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: king moved by a god he did not worship, releasing
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: a captive people and funding the restoration of their sacred site.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Isaiah had actually named Cyrus by name more than a
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: century before his birth, calling him God's shepherd and his
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: anointed for the Jewish people. His rise was not a
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: political coincidence. It was the hand of God moving through
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: an unlikely instrument. The return, however, was not a triumphant
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: mass exodus. It happened in waves, and it was far
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: less glorious than the original entry into Kanae under Joshua.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: The first group came unders the Rubbable around five hundred
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: and thirty eight BC. A second wave arrived later under
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: ezra A third came with near Mayah. Many Jews, it
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: should be noted, chose not to return at all. After
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: decades in Babylon, they had built lives, established businesses, and
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: put down roots. The diaspora, the scattering of Jewish people
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: across the world outside the land, had already begun in earnest.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Those who did return found a city in ruins. Jerusalem
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: was not a sleeping giant waiting to be woken. It
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: was a wreck. The walls were broken, the temple was
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: a memory, and the surrounding peoples were hostile. The books
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: of Ezra and near Mayah record the resistance the attorneys faced.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Neighboring groups who lobbied the Persian court to have the
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: reconstruction stopped, wrote letters of accusation, and at times threatened
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: open violence. The temple was completed in five hundred and
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: sixteen BC, roughly seventy years after its destruction. The Book
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: of Ezra records that when the foundation was laid, the
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: older priests who had seen Solomon's temple wept because what
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: was rising was so much smaller, so much less magnificent,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: than what had been. Younger men who had never seen
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: the original shouted for joy. The two sounds mixed in
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the air and could not be told apart. Nehemiah's reconstruction
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: of the walls came later in the four forties BC,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: and it was completed under extraordinary pressure. Workers carried materials
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: in one hand and held weapons in the other. The
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: project that should have taken years was reportedly finished in
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: fifty two days, a speed that Neemyah credited entirely to
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: God and that left their enemies unsettled. As Neemaya's Seas
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: sixteen records, the surrounding nations recognized that the work had
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: been done with divine help. The physical rebuilding was only
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: half the problem. The community that had returned was spiritually fractured.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Ezra arrived in Jerusalem around four hundred and fifty eight
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: b C with a mandate from the Persian king art
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Exerxes to teach the law of God to the people.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: What he found there disturbed him deeply. Into marriage with
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: neighboring peoples had become widespread, even among priests and levites.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: The distinctions that were supposed to mark Israel as a
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: separate people had blurred. In one of the most emotionally
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: raw scenes in the Old Testament, Ezra tears his robe,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: pulls hair from his head and beard, and sits in
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: silence for hours, overwhelmed. Then he prays, and the prayer
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: is not angry, it is broken. He identifies himself with
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the sin of his people, rather than standing apart from it.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Nehemiah's approach to the same problem was more direct. He
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: confronted people, publicly rebuked the leaders, and in at least
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: one instance, physically grabbed men by the hair and beat
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: them for violating the Covenant. Two men, same crisis, very
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: different methods, and both of them considered essential to what
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: God was doing in that generation. Together, Ezra and Nehemiah
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: represent the last great internal reform of Israel. Before the
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: silence fell. The law was read publicly, explained section by section,
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: and the people wept as they heard it. It was
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: both a beginning and, in a sense, a farewell. The
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Persian period, on the whole, was one of the less
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: violent chapters in Israel's post Exilic experience. Persian policy generally
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: allowed conquered peoples to practice their religion, maintain local customs,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: and govern themselves in internal matters, as long as taxes
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: were paid and loyalty to the Empire was maintained. For
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: the Jews, this meant a degree of freedom that was
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: historically speaking, unusual. And yet the silence was already present.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: No prophet rose to speak life continued worship at the temple,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: the reading of the Law, the festivals, but the direct
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: living word of God through an anointed messenger had ceased.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: The faith was functioning, but something fundamental was missing, and
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: those paying attention knew it. It is worth sitting with
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: that paradox. The Jews had relative stability, a rebuilt temple,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: and the Law of Moses. By some measures, the situation
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: was better than it had been in centuries, but the
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: rabbis of a later era still looked back at this
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: period as the beginning of a kind of spiritual recession.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: External conditions had improved, the interior dimension prophecy direct divine
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: communication had gone quiet. One of the most consequential developments
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: of the Persian period happened quietly without fanfare, and its
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: origins are still debated by historians. The emergence of the synagogue.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: The temple in Jerusalem was the center of Jewish sacrificial worship,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: but it was in Babylon that the Jews had learned
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: to gather around the Word rather than around the altar.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Without a temple, without priests performing sacrifices, they had developed
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: a different kind of religious life, centered on reading, discussion, prayer,
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: and community. When they returned to the land, they brought
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: that habit with them. By the time of the Intertestamental period,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: synagogues were spreading across the Jewish world. Every town of
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: any size had won. They became the place where the
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: Torah was read weekly, where children were educated, where disputes
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: were settled, and where community identity was maintained, especially in
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: the diaspora far from Jerusalem. Ironically, the institution that Babylon's
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: destruction forced the Jews to create would outlast the Temple itself,
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: surviving its second destruction in eight seventy and carrying Jewish
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: life forward to the present day. The Persian period ends
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: around three hundred and thirty two BC, when a young
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Macedonian general swept through the region with a speed and
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: force that no one had anticipated. The relatively stable world
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Israel had inhabited for two centuries was about to be
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: shaken to its foundation. Now we turned to the man who,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: in less than a decade dismantled the world Israel had
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: known and replaced it with m something entirely different. He
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: was twenty two years old when he crossed into Asia.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: By the time he was thirty, Alexander the Great had
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: conquered an empire stretching from Greece to the borders of India,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: a territory larger than any single ruler had ever controlled
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: before him. His campaigns moved with a speed that left
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: kingdoms no time to organize resistance. Cities fell, armies dissolved.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Empires that had stood for centuries collapsed in the span
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: of a single battle. The Persian Empire, which had dominated
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: the Near East for over two hundred years, did not
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: survive him. At the Battle of Issus in three hundred
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: thirty three BC, Alexander defeated the Persian king Darius the Third,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: so decisively that Darius fled the battlefield on horseback, leaving
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: behind his mother, his wife, and his children, who were
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: captured and notably treated with courtesy by Alexander. A year later,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: at the Battle of Gugamela in three hundred thirty one BC,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Darius was defeated again, this time so thoroughly that his
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: own commanders assassinated him. Shortly after. The empire that had
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: once exiled the Jews then graciously allowed them to return
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: home simply ceased to exist. What replaced it was something new,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: and for the Jewish people, far more complicated. As Alexander
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: swept southward through the Levant in three hundred and thirty
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: two BC, most cities in his path had two options
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: surrender or be destroyed. The Phoenician city of Tire resisted
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: for seven months and was raised. Gaza resisted and was
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: taken by force. Jerusalem, by contrast, did not resist at all.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: The account preserved in the writings of the Jewisish historian Josephus,
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: written centuries later and almost certainly embellished, describes Alexander visiting
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem and being shown the prophecies of Daniel, which allegedly
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: named a Greek king who would overthrow Persia. Whether that
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: meeting happened as described is debated. What is not debated
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: is the outcome. Jerusalem was spared, Jewish religious practice was
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: left intact, and the Jews were given favorable terms within
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the new order, including exemption from tribute during sabbatical years
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: for ordinary Jews in Judea. The transition from Persian to
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Greek rule may have felt at first like little more
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: than a change of distant masters. Taxes still had to
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: be paid, the temple still stood, the High Priest still
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: governed internal affairs. But underneath that surface continuity, a far
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: deeper shift was already beginning. Alexander's treatment of Jerusalem was
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: consistent with a broader pattern in his conquests. Unlike rulers
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: before him, he did not simply impose his culture by force.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: He was more subtle than that, and in some ways
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: more dangerous. He allowed local religions and customs to continue.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: He appointed local administrators where it suited him. He even
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: adopted elements of Persian court ceremony after conquering Persia, which
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: scandalized some of his Macedonian generals. His method was not
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: a rasure, but absorption. He did not need to destroy
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: what he conquered. He needed it to become Greek, and
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: he had a tool for that transformation, far more powerful
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: than any army. The city. Wherever Alexander went he founded cities,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: dozens of them, many named Alexandria after himself, were built
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: on the Greek model, with gymnasiums, theaters, marketplaces, and temples
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: to Greek gods. They became centers of Greek language, Greek philosophy,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and Greek commerce. People who wanted to participate in the
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: new economy, advance in the new administration, or simply be
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: taken seriously in the new world had to engage with
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Greek culture on its own terms. The Jews were no exception,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: and that tension between remaining distinctly Jewish and functioning inside
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: a Greek world ay would define the next two centuries
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: of their history. In June of three hundred twenty three BC,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Alexander died in Babylon. He was thirty two years old.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: The cause of his death has been debated ever since, fever, typhoid,
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: excessive drinking, or possibly poisoning. What is certain is that
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: he died without a clear successor, and the empire he
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: had built in a single decade fractured almost immediately. His generals,
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: known as the Diodoshi, meaning successors, spent the next forty
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: years fighting each other for pieces of the inheritance. The
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: result was a collection of rival kingdoms, each ruled by
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: a Greek dynasty, each trying to maintain Alexander's cultural project
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: while competing militarily with the others. For the Jewish people,
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the most immediately relevant outcome was a territorial division between
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: two of these successor kingdoms, the Ptolemies, who controlled Egypt
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: and initially held Judea, and the Seleucids, who controlled Syria
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: and the eastern territories. The land of Israel sat almost
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: exactly on the border between them. That geography was not
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: a minor detail. It would become the defining misfortune of
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the next century and a half. The Greek language, its
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: Greek philosophy, Greek athletics, Greek architecture, and Greek ways of
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: understanding the world an All of this is what historians
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: mean when they speak of Hellenism. And it did not
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: arrive in Judea with swords drawn. It arrived with trade routes,
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: with schools, with the simple prestige of being the dominant
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: culture of the known world. Greek became the language of
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: commerce across the entire Eastern Mediterranean. A Jewish merchant who
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: wanted to do business outside his own village needed Greek.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: A Jewish young man who wanted a career in administration
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: needed Greek. Even within Judea, the upper classes began adopting
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Greek names, Greek dress, and Greek customs, not necessarily out
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: of contempt for their heritage, but out of the practical
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: pressure that comes with living inside an empire. The gymnasium
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: was one of the most visible flashpoints. Greek athletics culture
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: involved training and competing in the nude, which was not
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: merely uncomfortable for Jewish sensibilities. It was a direct confrontation
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: with the covenant mark of circumcision. Jewish young men who
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: wanted to participate in the social life that centered on
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: the gymnasium faced a choice that was, in the most
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: literal sense, written on their bodies. This was the world
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Malachi's silence had dropped the Jewish people into, not a
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: world of obvious persecution, not yet, but a world designed,
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: almost by its very nature, to make them forget who
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: they were. The storm was still gathering, but the wind
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: had already changed. After Alexander's empire broke apart, Judea spent
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: over a century being passed back and forth between two
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: powers that neither respected nor particularly understood it. The Ptolemies
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: of Ea Egypt controlled the region first from roughly three
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: hundred one BC to one hundred ninety eight b C.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Then the Seleucids of Syria took over, and the tone
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: changed almost immediately. Ptolemaic rule over Judea was for the
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: most part stable and relatively tolerant. The Jews were allowed
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: to govern their internal affairs under the High Priest. Taxes
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: were collected but not crushing, and Jewish communities both in
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: Judea and in Alexandria Egypt were permitted to maintain their traditions.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: The Jewish population of Alexandria actually grew substantially during this
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: period and became one of the most intellectually vibrant Jewish
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: communities in the ancient world. It was not a Golden age,
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: but it was livable. The Seleucid takeover began at the
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: Battle of Panium in one hundred ninety eight b C,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: when the Seleucid king Antiochus the Third defeated the Ptolemaic
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: forces and absorbed Judea into his empire. At first and
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Tiacus the Third maintained similar policies of tolerance e He
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: even issued a decree affirming Jewish religious rights. But his
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: defeat at the hands of Rome in one ninety BC
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: left the Seleucid kingdom financially crippled and politically weakened. The
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: tribute payments Rome demanded were enormous, and the easiest way
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: to raise money was to extract it from the provinces.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Judea was a province. The temple in Jerusalem held considerable wealth.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: The calculation was not hard to make, and Tiacus The
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: third successors were men under financial and military pressure, governing
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: a shrinking empire with an increasingly restless population. That combination desperation, ideology,
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: and power produced one of the most destructive figures in
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Jewish history. Hellenism was not simply the Greek language or
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Greek art. It was a complete worldview, a way of
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: understanding what human beings are, what the gods are, what
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: virtue means, and what the good life looks like. At
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: its center was the human being celebrated, physical, rational, autonomous.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: The gymnasium was its temple. The philosopher was its priest. Beauty, reason,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: and self mastery were its highest values. This worldview was
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: not evil in every detail. Greek philosophy produced Plato, Aristotle,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: and the Stoics. Greek literature gave the world Homer, Greek medicine,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Greek mathematics, and Greek political thought shaped Western civilization in
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: ways that are still visible today. The problem was not
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: that these things were worthless. The problem was what they displaced.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: For the Jewish faith, I identity was not found in
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: the individual, but in the covenant. Beauty was not the
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: measure of virtue. The body was not something to be
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: displayed in athletic competition, but something marked by circumcision as
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: belonging to God. Wisdom did not begin with human reason,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: but with the fear of the Lord. These were not
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: small differences. They were, in almost every meaningful way, opposite foundations.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: When a young Jewish man stepped into the gymnasium, learned
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: to speak Greek, took a Greek name, and began reading
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Greek philosophy, he was not simply acquiring useful skills. He
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: was inhabiting a different story about reality, and the more
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: naturally that story fit, the more foreign his ancestral faith
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: began to feel. One of the most significant and fascinating
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: developments of the Ptolemaic period was the translation of the
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, a project that produced what is
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: known as the Septuagint, commonly abbreviated as LEXX. According to
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: a document called the Letter of Aristeus, the Egyptian king
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Ptolemy second Philadelphus commissioned the translation in the third century BC,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: inviting seventy two Jewish scholars from Jerusalem to Alexandria to
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: carry it out. The name Septuagint, from the Latin for
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: seventy comes from this tradition. Whether the story is historically
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: accurate in its details or not, the result was real,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: a Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures that became the
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Bible of the Jewish diaspora and later of the early
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: Christian Church. The significance of this cannot be overstated. On
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: one hand, it made the scriptures accessible to millions of
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Jews who no longer read Hebrew fluently, a genuinely important
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: preservation of the faith. On the other hand, translation is
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: never neutral. Every choice of Greek word to render a
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Hebrew concept carried philosophical weight. The Hebrew word shale, for instance,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: was rendered with the Greek hades. The Hebrew ruach, meaning
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: spirit or breath or wind had to be mapped onto
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Greek categories that did not quite fit. Some scholars argue
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: that the Septuagant subtly hellenized Jewish theology simply through the
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: act of translation. What is clear is that by the
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: time of Jesus, the Septuagant was the version of scripture
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: most widely used across the Jewish world. When the New
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Testament quotes the Old Testament, it quotes the Septuagant far
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: more often than the Hebrew text. The cultural compromise that
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: produced it shaped the very words through which the Gospel
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: would later be proclaimed. Not everyone resisted Hellenism. In fact,
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: among the upper classes of Jerusalem, Greek culture became something
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: of a status symbol, and that embrace was not passive.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: The priesthood, which held both religious and political authority in Jerusalem,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: was particularly vulnerable to Hellenistic influence. The office of high
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: Priest had become deeply entangled with political power, and by
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: the Selucid period it was essentially being sold to the
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: highest bidder. A man named Jason obtained the high priesthood
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: around one hundred and seventy five BC by outbidding his
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: own brother and promising the Selucid king Antiochus that fought
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: a higher tribute. Once in office, Jason immediately set about
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: transforming Jerusalem into a Greek style city. He built a
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: gymnasium directly in the shadow of the temple and established
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Greek edges occasional institutions. Young priests left their temple duties
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: to train in Greek athletics. The site of Jewish priests
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: racing to the gymnasium before completing their sacrificial duties was
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: for many devout Jews, a sign that something had gone
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: catastrophically wrong. The men who were supposed to guard the
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Covenant were leading the charge to abandon it. Jason was
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: himself eventually out maneuvered by a man named Menelaeus, who
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: offered Antichus an even larger bribe and had no priestly
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: lineage whatsoever. He was not even from a priestly family.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: The highest religious office in Judaism was now being purchased
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: by unqualified men for political reasons. The institution was hollowing
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: out from the inside. Not everyone in Israel was drifting
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: alongside the Hellenisers. A significant movement of resistance was forming
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: people who looked at what was happening to their culture
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: and their faith and refused to accommodate it any further.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: These were the Hasidim, a Hebrew word meaning the pious
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: ones or the faithful ones. They were not a formal
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: organization with a leadership structure, but a broad current of people, scribes, priests,
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: ordinary families who were committed to strict observance of the Torah.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: In the face of cultural pressure, they refused to abandon
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: the dietary laws. They refused to violate the Sabbath. They
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: refused to give their sons Greek names or send them
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: to be educated in the gymnasium. The Hasidim are historically
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: important because they were the sea bed from which two
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: of the most significant Jewish movements of the New Testament
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: era later grew, the Pharisees and the Assnes. Their instinct
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: that faithfulness to God required separation from the surrounding culture
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: or would shape Jewish life for generations. But their resistance, however, principled,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: could not stop what was coming. The crisis they feared
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: was not merely cultural. It was about to become violently physical.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: In one hundred seventy five BC, a new Selucid king
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: took the throne. His name was Antiochus four, and he
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: gave himself a title that announced everything about his intentions, Epiphanes,
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: meaning God manifest. His critics in the Jewish community had
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: a different name for him. They called him Epimenes, the Madman.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: Antiochus was not a simple villain. He was a man
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: caught between an empire in decline and the ambition to
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: restore it to greatness. He had spent years as a
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: hostage in Rome, had watched the Roman Republic's power up close,
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: and had returned to Syria determined to build a unified
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Hellenized empire that could compete. Cultural and religious diversity, in
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: his view, was a weakness. Unity. Greek unity was the answer.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: The Jews, with their stubborn insistence on a single invisible
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: God and their refusal to participate in the religious life
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: of the empire, were not merely inconvenient. They were, to
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: his mind, a problem that needed to be solved. What
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: he did next would traumatize the Jewish people so deeply
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: that the memory of it is still observed every year,
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: more than two thousand years later. Now we will look
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: at the moment that broke something deep inside the Jewish world,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: and whose shadows stretched all the way to the words
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: of Jesus himself. What and Tyrchus the Force did to
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: the Jews between one hundred sixty eight and one hundred
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: and sixty seven b c. Was not a single act
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: of violence. It was a calculated, methodical attempt to erase
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: a religion. It began after a military humiliation, and Tiachus
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: had invaded Egypt and was on the verge of conquering
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: it when Roman envoys intercepted him and delivered an ultimatum
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: withdrawal from Egypt or face war with Rome. A Roman
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: senator named Caius Popilius Linas drew a circle in the
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: sand around Antiochus and told him to make his decision
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: before stepping out of it. Antiochus, who had spent years
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: in Rome and understood exactly what that threat meant, withdrew
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: He returned to Syria. Furius humiliated and in desperate need
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: of money. On his way back, he stopped in Jerusalem.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: He entered the temple, stripped it of its golden furniture,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: its lamp stands, and its sacred vessels, and left with
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: an enormous quantity of wealth. According to Firhun's Maccabees one,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: the sound of mourning across Israel was like the mourning
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: of a nation that had lost everything, because in a
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: very real sense, it had. But the looting was only
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: the beginning. Within months, Antiochus issued a series of decrees
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: that targeted Jewish identity at its most essential points. Sabbath
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: observance was outlawed, the possession of Torres scrolls was made
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: a capital offense. Circumcision was banned, and mothers who circumcised
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: their sons were executed with their dead infants hung around
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: their necks. The Jewish calendar, the dietary laws, the festivals,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: all of it was prohibited under penalty of death. These
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: were not abstract political restrictions. They were an attempt to
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: make it impossible to be Jewish. In December of one
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: in sixty seven BC, and Tiachus took the final step.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: He erected an altar to Zeus inside the Temple in Jerusalem,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: directly on top of the altar of burnt offering, and
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: sacrificed a pig on it. The desecration was complete and deliberate.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: Every element of it was chosen to be maximally offensive
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: to Jewish sensibility. A pagan god, an unclean animal, the
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: holiest space in the world. The author of First Maccabeeds
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: calls it the abomination of desolation. The phrase is not
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: merely rhetorical. In Jewish thought, the temple was the place
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: where heaven and Earth met Wus, where God's presence dwelt
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: among his people in a unique and irreplaceable way. To
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: defile it was not simply an act of political aggression.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: It was a theological assault on the very idea that
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: God was present with Israel. Pagan altars was set up
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: throughout Judea. Jewish people were rounded up and forced to
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: eat pork publicly as a demonstration of submission. Those who
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: refused were killed. The elderly scribe Eliaza, according to Sega,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Maccabee six, was offered the chance to pretend to eat pork,
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: to simply go through the motions, and refused, dying rather
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: than give even a false impression that he had abandoned
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: the law. He was not alone. The stories of these
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: martyrs circulated widely and became foundational to Jewish identity in
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: the centuries that followed. The idea that it was better
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: to die than to betray the faith, a concept scholars
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: call kiddush Hashem the sanctification of God's name, a found
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: some of its most powerful early expression in the resistance
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: to Antiochus. The Book of Daniel, written in part during
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: the Babylonian exile, contains a series of visions that Jewish
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: readers of the second century b c. Recognized with something
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: like dread and recognition. In Daniel eight, a vision describes
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: a fierce king who would abolish the daily sacrifice, desecrate
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: the sanctuary, and set up what the text calls the
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: abomination that causes desolation. In Daniel eleven, a figure is
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: described who would exalt himself above every god, show contempt
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: for the God of gods, and speak unheard of things.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: For Jews living under Antiochus, these passages were not ancient riddles.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: They were a map of what was happening around them
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: in real time, and Tiarchus the Force matched the description
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: with an accuracy that was either remarkable prophecy, or, as
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: critical scholars argue, an indication that those sections of Daniel
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: were written closer to the events themselves. The debate continues
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: among scholars to this day. What is beyond debate is
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: the effect the text had on the people who read it.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Daniel's visions did not end with the abomination. They ended
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: with judgment, with the sanctuary being restored, and with the
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: arrogant king being broken, not by human hands. For a
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: community enduring active persecution, that ending was not a theological abstraction.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: It was the reason to keep going. Centuries later, Jesus
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: would invoke the same phrase, the abomination of desolation in
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: Matthew twenty four, pointing to a future fulfillment the original
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: event under Antiochus became a template, a pattern that scripture
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: itself suggested would repeat. That is how deeply Antiochus's actions
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: cut into the religious imagination of God's people. One of
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: the most significant consequences of the Antiochini persecution was the
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: explosion of apocalyptic literature, writings that described history as a
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: cosmic conflict between good and evil, moving toward a dramatic
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: divine intervention that would set everything right. Before this period,
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: the dominant mode of Jewish religious writing was the prophetic tradition,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: God speaking through a prophet calling the people to repentance,
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: promising restoration. After Antiochus, a different voice emerged, one that
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: looked at the present world and concluded that it was
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: so thoroughly corrupted that no amount of repentance would fix it.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: What was needed was not reform but rescue, not a revival,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: but a revolution from above. Books like Vaughan d. Enoch,
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: written and compiled largely during this period, described a universe
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: populated by fallen angels whose influence had corrupted the earth,
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: and a coming judgment in which God himself would intervene
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: to overthrow the powers of evil. These texts were not
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: fringe documents. They were widely read deeply influential and quoted
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: with authority even within the New Testament itself, as the
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Letter of Jude demonstrates the apocalyptic imagination that shaped so
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: much of the New Testament. The language of kingdoms in conflict,
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: of a world under oppression awaiting liberation of a coming
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: son of man who would judge the nations grew directly
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: out of the soil that Antiochus had salted. He intended
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: to destroy Jewish faith. What he actually produced was one
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: of the most creative and enduring theological responses in human history.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: Persecution on this scale could not continue without producing a response.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: It came from an unlikely place, not from Jerusalem, not
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: from the Temple establishment, but from a small rural town
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: called Moudan, northwest of the capital. A saluted officer arrived
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: in modern with orders to enforce the new decrees. The
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: townspeople were to offer sacrifice to the Greek gods publicly.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: A local priest named Mattathias, elderly respected from the line
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: of Yurhib, was asked to be the first to comply
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: as an example to the others. His refusal was absolute.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: Before the officer could respond, another Jewish man stepped forward
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: to make the sacrifice in his place. Mattathias, in a
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: moment of fury that he himself seemed not to have planned,
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: drew his sword and killed the man where he stood.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: Then he killed the Seleucid officer. Then he pulled down
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: the altar. He fled into the hills with his five sons,
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: and with that act, unplanned, violent, theologically complicated, the revolt began.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: The silence of the heavens had not broken, no prophet
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: had appeared, no divine voice had thundered. Just an old man,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: a sword and a refusal to what his god be
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: mocked any longer. Sometimes that is enough to change history.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: Now we will follow the story of the most unlikely
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: military uprising in Jewish history and see how it gave
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: birth to one of Judaism's most celebrated festivals. When Mattathias
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: fled into the hills of Judea with his five sons,
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: he had no army, no strategy, and no realistic prospect
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: of defeating the most powerful military force in the region.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: What he had was conviction, and as it turned out,
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: that was enough to attract others. Words spread quickly the Hasidim,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: those communities of devout Jews who had been resisting Hellenism
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: in quieter ways began joining the movement. Families who had
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: watched the decrees of Antiochus destroy everything they held sacred
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: came out of their towns and villages and made their
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: way into the wilderness. What began as a fugitive band
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: became within months a functioning guerrilla force. Their early tactics
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: were shaped by necessity. They could not meet the Seleucid
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: army in open battle, the numbers were too unequal, the
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: equipment too mismatched. Instead, they moved at night, struck quickly,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: and disappeared back into the terrain they knew better than
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: their pursuerus. They tore down pagan altars, circumcised boys whose
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: parents had been too afraid to do so, and enforced
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: Torah observance in the villages they passed through. Mattathias himself
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: did not live to see the outcome. He died shortly
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: after the revolt began, leaving leadership to his son Judah.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Of all his sons, Judah was the one the movement
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: needed most. Judah's nickname tells the whole story. He was
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: called Macabaeus, most likely derived from the Aramaic word for hammer,
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: and he hammered. What Judah accomplished militarily between one hundred
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: sixty six and one hundred sixty BC belongs among the
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: most remarkable feats of ancient warfare. He defeated Seleucid armies
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: that outnumbered his forces multiple times over, using terrain, surprise,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: and speed in ways that compensated for the vast difference
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: in resources. At the Battle of beth Horn in one
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: hundred sixty six b C, he routed a Selucid force
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: under a general named Seron, who had assembled an army
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: specifically to crush the revolt. The Jewish fighters, exhausted and outnumbered,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: were told by Judah that victory did not depend on
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: the size of the army, It depended on the God
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: who had delivered at Israel before then, they attacked downhill,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: broke the formation, and drove the Seleucids back toward the coast.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: Two years later, in one from sixty four BC, Judah
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: achieved what had seemed impossible. His forces retook Jerusalem. The
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Temple mount was in Jewish hands for the first time
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: since the desecration. When they entered the sanctuary and saw
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: the state it was in the Pagan altar. The defilement
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: the extinguished Manora, the soldiers reportedly wept, then they set
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: about purifying it. The rededication of the temple took place
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: on the twenty fifth of kisslev One at sixty four BC,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: exactly three years to the day after Antiochus had desecrated it.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Whether that timing was deliberate on Judah's part or simply
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: how the calendar fell, it carried enormous symbolic weight. The
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: story of what happened during the temple rededication became one
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: of the most beloved narratives in Jewish tradition, though its
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: most famous detail does not appear in First Maccabees at all.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: It comes from the Talmud, written centuries later. According to
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: the Talmudic account, when the priests went to relight the Manura,
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: the seven branched lampstand that was supposed to burn continuously
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: in the temple, they found only a single small jar
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: of consecrated oil that had not been defiled by the Seleucids.
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: It was enough for one day. Preparing new consecrated oil
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: would take eight days. They lit the manura anyway, and
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: the oil burned for eight days. Whether the miracle happened
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: exactly as described is a question Jewish tradition itself has debated.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: What is not in question is its meaning. Even in
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: the smallest, most insufficient supply, God could sustain what human
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: hands could not. The light that had almost been extinguished
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: was burning again. The festival of Hannuka, meaning Dedication, commemorates
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: those eight days. It is not commanded in the Torah,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: which is why it is considered a minor festival informal
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: Jewish law. Yet it became one of the most widely observed,
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: carried forward by the sheer emotional power of what it represented, survival, resistance,
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: and the refusal to let the light go out. The
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: Maccabean revolt did not end with the rededication of the temple.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: The Seleucids were still in the region, still a threat,
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: and the political situation remained volatile for decades. Judah Maccabeus
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: himself died in battle in one hundred and sixty BC,
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: fighting against a Selucid force with only eight hundred men
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: at his side. His brothers continued the struggle after him. Eventually,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: under the leadership of Judah's brother Simon, full political independence
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: was achieved in one hundred and forty two BC, the
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: first time the Jewish people had genuinely governed themselves in
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: their own land since the Babylonian conquest four and a
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: half centuries earlier. Simon was recognized as both high priest
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: and political ruler, and the combination of those two offices
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: in one person became the defining structure of the new
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: dynasty the Hasmanians for a generation. The achievement was remarkable.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: A family of rural priests had led an outnumbered peasant
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: army against a Hellenistic empire, reclaimed the temple, restored Jewish
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: religious practice, and ultimately one political freedom. It was the
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: kind of story that became the foundation of national identity,
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: But power, as it so often does, began to corrode
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: the very things it was supposed to protect. The Hasmonian
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: rulers of the late second and early first centuries BC
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: bear almost no resemblance to the passionate defenders of the
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: faith who started the revolt. Within two generations of Simon,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: the dynasty had become something the Maccabees would likely have
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: found unrecognizable and deeply troubling. John Hercanus, Simon's son, expanded
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: Jewish territory aggressively and forcibly converted conquered peoples to Judaism,
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: a practice with no precedent in the tradition. His son,
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: Aristobulus I was the first Hasmanian to formally take the
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: title of king, a designation that many Jews found problematic
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: since the legitimate kings of Israel were supposed to come
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: from the tribe of Judah and the line of David
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: not from a priestly family. His successor, Alexander Jannaeus, was
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: even more extreme, combining brutal military expansion with a contempt
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: for the Pharisees, the religious scholars who had become the
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: guardians of popular piety, that led to open civil war.
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: During one particularly horrifying episode, Janeus crucified eight hundred Pharisees
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: whilst celebrating at a banquet. The Hasidim, who had supported
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the revolt in its early days, increasingly found themselves at
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: odds with the very dynasty their movement had helped bring
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: to power. The betrayal was not sudden. It accumulated decision
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: by decision, compromised by compromise. By the time Rome arrived,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: the Hasmonian dynasty was not a united people defending their freedom.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: It was a family tearing itself apart. Looking back at
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: the Maccabean period from a distance, it is possible to
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: see two things happening similar taneously, and the tension between
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: them is essential to understanding the Jewish world that Jesus entered.
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: On one hand, the revolt had proven something A faithful remnant,
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: with God's help could resist overwhelming force and win. The
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: Temple could be reclaimed, the Covenant could be upheld even
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: under the worst pressure. That memory was carried forward as
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: both inspiration and expectation, ever, the belief that God could
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: act suddenly and decisively in history on behalf of his people.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: On the other hand, the aftermath of the revolt had
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: demonstrated something equally important and far more sobering political power,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: even when one in God's name was not the same
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: as the kingdom of God. The Hasmanians had started as
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: heroes and ended as tyrants. The priests who were supposed
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: to be represent God had sold the high priesthood to
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: the highest bidder. The independence that had cost so much
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: blood had produced a ruling class that was in its
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: own way as corrupted as the Hellenisers. The revolt had
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: originally opposed. The question that lingered in the air of
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: the first century BC was one that the Maccabean story
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: had raised but not answered. If political independence under a
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: Jewish king was not the solution, then what was What
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: kind of deliverance were they actually waiting for? That question
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: would drive Jewish thought for the next hundred years, and
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: it would still be unanswered when a carpenter's son from
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: Nazareth began preaching in Galilee. Now we will meet the
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: groups that emerged from the chaos of the Intertestamental period,
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: a because without understanding them, the world of the New
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: Testament makes very very little sense. When there is no
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: profit to settle a dispute, people form schools of thought.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: When the official religious leadership loses its credibility as the
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: hasmonean high priests, so thoroughly did other voices rise to
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: fill the vacuum. And when a people spends four centuries
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: under foreign domination asking the same unanswered questions about God's
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: will and their own future, those voices inevitably diverge. The
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: great Jewish sects of the first century were not born overnight.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: They grew slowly out of the tensions the Intertestamental period
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: had produced. Each one was, in its own way, an
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: answer to the same set of problems. How should a
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: faithful Jew live under foreign rule? What did God actually require?
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: What would deliverance look like when it finally came. The
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: answers they gave could not have been more different. The
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: Pharisees are the group most familiar to readers of the
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: New Testament and also the most consistently misunderstood. Centuries of
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: reading the Gospels through a particular lens have turned the
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: word pharisee into a synonym for hypocrisy, but that reading
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: flattens a movement that was, in its origins genuinely serious.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: They emerged from the tradition of the Hasidim, those faithful
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: Jews who had resisted Hellenism before and during the Maccabean Revolt.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: Their central conviction was that the Torah could be lived
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: out fully in every area of ordinary life, not just
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: in the temple. A farmer, a tradesman, a housewife, anyone
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: anywhere could be just as holy as a priest at
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: the altar, provided they observed the law correctly. To make
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: that possible, they developed what they called the Oral Law,
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: vast body of interpretation that surrounded the written Torah like
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: a fence. If the Torah said to keep the Sabbath holy,
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: the oral law specified in precise detail what actions were
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: and were not permitted on that day. The goal was
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: to make obedience to God practical, portable, and comprehensive. The
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: problem which Jesus identified with surgical precision was that the
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: fence could become the point. Rules designed to protect the
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: law could be used to evade its demands. Yet, the
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: Pharisees were also the group most responsible for Judaism's survival
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: after the Temple's destruction in eighty seventy, when the sacrificial
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: system was gone, it was the Pharisaic tradition, torah, study, prayer,
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: and synagogue life that kept the faith alive. Their legacy
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: is complicated, and it deserves to be held that way.
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: The Sadducees were in almost every way the mirror image
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: of the Pharisee. Where the Pharisees were populist, the Sadducees
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: were aristocratic, where the Pharisees multiplied interpretation. The Sadducees accepted
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: only the Five Books of Moses as authoritative scripture, and
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: where the Pharisees believed passionately in the resurrection of the dead.
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: The Sadducees rejected it entirely, as a later invention not
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: found in the Mosaic text. They represented the priestly aristocracy
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: of Jerusalem. The families who controlled the temple, managed its
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: finances and maintained political relationships with whatever foreign power was
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: currently in charged under Roman rule. They were indispensable because
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Rome governed Judea partly through the High Priest, and the
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: high Priest was almost always a Sadducee. Their rejection of
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: the resurrection was not a minor theological quirk. It reflected
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: a fundamentally different understanding of what faithfulness to God meant.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: For the Sadducees, the Covenant was about this world, about prosperity, honor,
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: and political influence. When the Temple fell in eight seventy,
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: the movement effectively ceased to exist. Without the temple, the
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: priesthood had no function. Without the priesthood, the Sadducees had
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: no platform, They left no successors, and almost no writings.
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: Convinced that the Temple in Jerusalem had been irreversibly corrupted,
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: Thecenes withdrew from society altogether and formed communities in the
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: desert where they believed they could practice the true Torah
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: in purity, far from the contamination of the mainstream. The
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: most famous of these communities was at Cumran, near the
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea. The people who lived there were intensely disciplined
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: communal property, strict purity regulations, daily immersions who shared meals
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: eaten in sacred silence. They also wrote prolifically commentaries on scripture,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: rule books, hymns, apocalyptic visions, and copies of nearly every
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: book of the Hebrew Bible. In nineteen forty seven, a
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Bedouin shepherd discovered jars containing some of these texts in
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: a cave above the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea Scrolls,
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: as they became known, were one of the most significant
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: archaeological finds of the twentieth century, hey providing Biblical manuscripts
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: a thousand years older than any previously known copies and
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: confirming the remarkable accuracy with which the text had been
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: transmitted across the centuries. The scenes intended to preserve the
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: true faith in isolation. What they actually preserved was evidence
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: for the whole world. The Zealots held a conviction that
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: waiting was not enough that God helped those who picked
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: up a sword. They drew inspiration from figures like Finnihas
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: in numbers twenty five, who had acted violently on God's
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: behalf and been commended for it, and they saw in
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: that story a model for their own moment. What distinguished
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: them from other resistance movements was their willingness to target
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: not only Roman soldiers, but also fellow Jews who cooperated
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: with Rome, tax collectors, collaborators, anyone they considered a traitor
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: to the covenant. The social world of first century Galilee
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: was shaped in part by that tension. The fact that
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus called both a tax collector and a zealot into
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: his inner circle of twelve was in its day roughly
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: as provocative as it sounds. Two men who outside that
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: group would have regarded each other as enemies, sitting at
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: the same table, hearing the same teaching being sent out
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: with the same message that said something about the kind
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: of kingdom Jesus was announcing. By the first century AD,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: these groups had been arguing, competing, and occasionally killing each
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: other for generations. The Pharisees sat in the synagogues and
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: commanded popular respect the Sadducees controlled the temple, the essnes
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: had withdrawn to wait for everyone else to be destroyed.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: The Zealots were sharpening their knives, and the vast majority
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: of ordinary people, farmers, fishermen, day laborers inhabited that world
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: without fully belonging to any of them. Carrying the weight
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: of occupation, poverty, and four centuries of unanswered prayer into
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: that world, Jesus came not as a pharisee, not as
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: a sadducee, not as an aesine, and not as a zalot.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: Though every group, at various points tried to test him,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: claim him, or enlist him, he addressed each of their
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: central concerns and satisfied none of their agendas. That alone
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: should have told them something extraordinary was happening. Now we
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: will watch the final collapse of Jewish political independence and
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: meet the man whose shadow fell over the very night
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: Jesus was born. The Roman general Pompey did not come
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: to Judea looking for a conquest. He came because he
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: was invited. The Hasmonian dynasty, by the mid first century BC,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: had descended into civil war between two brothers, Hrcanus the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: Second and Aristobulus second, each claiming the throne and the
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: high priesthood. Simultaneously. Both sides sent delegations to Pompey, who
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: was reorganizing Rome's eastern provinces, offering him money and loyalty
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: in exchange for his support. Pompey backed Hyrcanus. When Aristombulus's
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: supporters barricaded themselves inside the temple, Mount, Pompey laid siege
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: to it. The siege lasted three months. What finally allowed
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: the Romans to breach the defenses was the Jewish Sabbath,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: me The defenders refused to fight on the holy day,
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: and the Romans used those regular intervals of inaction to
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: advance their siege works undisturbed. When the walls fell, the
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: slaughter was considerable, but what Pompey did afterward caused a
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: wound that went deeper than any battle. He walked into
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: the temple. He passed through the courts and the sanctuary itself,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: and entered the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber, where
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: only the High priest was permitted to enter and only
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: once a year from yum Kipur. He looked inside, then
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: walked out, and according to the sources touched nothing. The
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: temple service resumed the following day, but the violation was complete. Regardless.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: From that day forward, Judea was a client state of Rome,
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: self governing in religious matters, but ultimately subject to Roman
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: authority in everything that mattered. The decades that followed were
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: among the most chaotic in Judean history. The Hasmanian family
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: continued to tear itself apart in succession conflicts that Rome
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: exploited and occasionally suppressed by force. Real power gradually shifted
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: toward an Idumean adviser named Antipater Hey, a man of
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: considerable political skill and very little interest in Jewish religious concerns.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: When Antipater was poisoned in forty three BC, his son
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: Herod stepped into his place. Meanwhile, the broader Roman world
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: was convulsing. Julius Caesar was assassinated in forty four BC,
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: the empire split between Antony and Octavian. A Parthian invasion
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: in forty b C briefly drove Herod out of Judea entirely.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: He fled to Rome, made his case to the Senate,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: and was declared King of Judea by Roman decree. Sur
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: a king without a kingdom, who would have to go
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: back and take it by force. By thirty seven BC,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: after three years of brutal campaigning, he had retaken Jerusalem.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: The last Hasmanian ruler was captured, sent to mark Antony,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: and executed. The dynasty that had begun with Mattathias's righteous
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: fury in the hills of modern ended with a beheading
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: ordered by a Roman general at the request of an
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: Idomian opportunist. Few figures in this entire period are as
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: difficult to assess as herod. He was simultaneously one of
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: the most capable rulers Judea ever had and one of
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: the most brutal, a master builder whose projects still inspire
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: awe and a paranoia tyrant who murdered members of his
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: own family. His legitimacy problem was enormous and never fully resolved.
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: He was an Idumeyan from a people forcibly converted to
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: Judaism only a generation before his birth. In Jewish eyes,
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: that made him at best a half jew, and the
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: fact that his throne came through Roman patronage rather than
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: Davidic lineage made it worse. He was a king who
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: could never quite be accepted as a Jewish king. His
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: response to that insecurity was to build Masada, rising from
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: a desert plateau above the Dead Sea, became a nearly
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: impregnable palace fortress. Cesarea Maritima, built virtually from nothing on
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: the Mediterranean coast, became one of the finest harbors in
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: the eastern Mediterranean. And then there was the Temple. Around
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: twenty BC, Herod announced the complete reconstruction of the Second Temple,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: on a scale that would make it one of the
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: wonders of the ancient world. The temple mount was expanded
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: by enormous retaining walls, enclosing a platform roughly the size
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: of twenty football fields. The stones used in those walls
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: were of a size that still defies easy explanation, some
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: way hundreds of tons. A portion of the western retaining
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: wall survives to this day as the Western Wall. The
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: temple itself, clad in white marble and gold, was visible
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: from miles away. Josephus wrote that travelers approaching Jerusalem saw
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: something resembling a mountain covered in snow. So brilliantly did
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: the stone and gold gleam in the sunlight. When the
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: disciples pointed out the temple buildings to Jesus in Mark thirteen.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: His response that not one stone would be left on
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: another must have seemed almost incomprehensible. The thing looked in destruction.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: Construction was still ongoing when Jesus walked its courts. It
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: continued until a d. Sixty four, just six years before
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: the Romans burned it to the ground. As Herod aged,
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: his paranoia intensified to a degree that alarmed even contemporary observers.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: He executed his own wife, Mariamne, on suspicion of conspiracy,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: then her mother, then two of his sons by Mariamne,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: then his eldest son, Antipater. Just days before his own death,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: the Emperor Augustus reportedly remarked that it was safer to
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: be Herod's pig than Herod's son. It is against this
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: backdrop that Matthew two sits when wise men arrived in
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem asking about a new born king of the Jews,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: Herod's response, first cunning inquiry, then murderous rage, is entirely
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: consistent with everything else known about his character. The massacre
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: of the infants of Bethlehem fits the profile of a
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: man who had already killed his own children to protect
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: his throne. Herod died in four BC, largely unlamented, leaving
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: behind a divided kingdom, a reshaped landscape, and a reputation
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: history has never quite known how to hold. The world
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: into which Jesus was born. Was still his world, running
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: on the institutions he had built, still flinching from the
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: cruelty he had normalized, still waiting for a king who
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: was something entirely other than what every king so far
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: had been. Now we will step inside the collective imagination
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: of the Jewish people and ask the question that four
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: hundred years of silence had made impossible to ignore. What
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: exactly were they hoping for? There is something easy to
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: read past in the gospel accounts, and almost impossib to
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: fully grasp from the outside. The sheer accumulated weight of
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: waiting for centuries is not an abstraction. It is great
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: great grandparents who never heard a prophet, and their children
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: and their children's children, all the way down to the
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, and the women drawing
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: water at the well in Samaria. Every generation had inherited
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: the same promise and the same silence. The prayers had
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: not stopped, the temple service continued. The festivals came around
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: each year. The Torah was read every Sabbath in synagogues
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: from Alexandria to Babylon. But the direct living voice of God,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: the kind that had called Moses from a burning bush,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: that had spoken to Isaiah in the year King Aziah died,
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: that had come to Jeremiah like fire shut up in
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: his bones, had not been heard in four centuries later.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: Rabbinic writings speak of the Shekinah, the divine presence having departed.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: The Holy Spirit, they said, had rested on the prophets
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: and then withdrawn. What remained was the written word, which
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: was precious, But it was not the same thing. A
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: letter from someone you love is not the same as
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: their voice. The Jews of the first century knew they
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: were living in the interval between the letter and the return,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: and the interval had lasted longer than anyone's grandfather could remember.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: The word Messiah, from the Hebrew mashiach, meaning anointed, one
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: did not refer in the Hebrew Bible exclusively to a
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: single future figure. Kings were anointed, priests were anointed. Even
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: Cyrus of Persia, as noted earlier, received the title from Isiah.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: The concept was broad, and what the Intertestaments Lint period
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: produced was not one unified Messianic expectation, but a collection
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: of competing ones, each drawing on real threads of scripture.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: The most politically dominant expectation was the Royal Messiah, a
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: descendant of David, who would restore the Kingdom of Israel,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: drive out the foreign occupiers, and establish Jerusalem as the
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: seat of a renewed nation under God's direct rule. He
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: would be a warrior, a king liberator. His coming would
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: mean the end of Roman boots on Jewish soil. But
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: there were other streams. The suffering Servant passages in Isaiah,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: particularly chapters fifty two and fifty three, described a figure
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: who would bear the sins of others, be despised and rejected,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: and accomplish something decisive through suffering rather than conquest. Jewish
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: interpretation of these passages varied widely. Some applied them to
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: the nation of Israel collectively, some to a righteous individual,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: some to a future Messianic figure. What seems clear is
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: that most people did not connect the suffering Servant to
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: the royal Messiah. The idea that the triumphant king and
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: the one who died bearing the sins of others could
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: be the same person. Was not the expectation most carried
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: into the first century. Daniel seven added yet another layer,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the Son of Man, who comes with the clouds of heaven,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: approaches the ancient of days and receives dominion over an
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: everlasting kingdom. This was a cosmic, heavenly figure, not a
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: political leader, emerging from the soil of Judea. Some thinkers
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: connected him to the Davidic Messiah, others kept them entirely distinct.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: The Dead Sea scrolls revealed that the Cumruan community expected
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: not one Messiah, but two, a priestly messiah from the
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: line of Aaron and a royal messiah from the line
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: of David, working together. Some texts also anticipated a prophetic forerunner,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: echoing Malachi's promise of Elijah's return. The picture taken whole
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: is not one of a people with a clear and
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: unified expectation. It is a people with an urgent need
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: and multiple competing theories about how God would meet it man,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: each shaped by the particular sufferings and hopes of those
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: who held it, and none of them quite prepared for
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: what actually arrived. The Intertestamental period produced a body of
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: writing that most Christians have never read, but that saturated
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: the religious imagination of the Jewish world into which Jesus
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: was born. These are the apocalyptic texts, visionary literature that
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: mapped the present suffering of God's people onto a cosmic
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: canvas and promised a dramatic divine intervention at history's end.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: The Book of Ferninoch is perhaps the most significant. It
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: contains visions of fallen angels, cosmic judgment, and a heavenly
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: son of Man seated on a throne of glory, imagri
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: that feeds directly into the language Jesus used repeatedly in
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: the Gospels. The Letter of Jude quotes it explicitly, which
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: tells us it was taken seriously even within the early
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: Christian community. These books were not scripture for most Jewish communities,
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: but they were widely read and shaped the categories through
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: which people understood their world. The language of kingdoms in conflict,
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: of a creation, groaning under oppression of a coming judge
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: who would overturn the present order. All of it was
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: already in the air when Jesus began preaching. His audiences
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: recognized the vocabulary immediately embedded in Jewish daily world worship
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: was the Amidah and a sequence of blessings that formed
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: the backbone of synagogue prayer. Several of its petitions read
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: like a compressed inventory of everything the Jewish people had
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: been waiting for across the Intertestamental period, the in gathering
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: of exiles, the restoration of righteous judges, the rebuilding of Jerusalem,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: the coming of the shoot of David. Every morning, every afternoon,
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: every evening, the same requests repeated across generations. When the
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: Angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah in Luke Valvoan, telling him
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: that his prayer had been heard, Zechariah was at the
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: altar of incense at the hour of prayer, while the
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: people stood outside, interceding. Luke is deliberate about that detail.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: The answer to four centuries of prayer arrived not in
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: a thunderstorm or a military uprising, but in a whisper
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: to an old man at an altar on an ordinary day,
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: while the congregation prayed the prayers they had always prayed.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: By the time the silence ended, the Jewish people had
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: watched the Greeks come and nearly destroy them. They had
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: fought back and won, only to watch their own liberators
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: become tyrants. They had seen the high priesthood sold to
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: the highest bidder. They had watched Rome reduce them to
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: subjects in their own land. Every human solution had been tried, accommodation, separation, armed, revolt,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: political maneuvering, and none of it had produced the restoration
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: they were waiting for. What that history had done, slowly
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: and at great cost, was eliminate the lesser answers. It
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: had demonstrated generation by generation that no king, no army,
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: no political arrangement was going to be what Israel actually needed.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: The silence had not been empty, It had been quietly
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: clearing the ground. Now we arrive at the question. The
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: entire video has been building toward. Ooh, not just what
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: happened during those four hundred years, but what they meant
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: and what finally brought them to an end. The most
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: instinctive reading of the four hundred years is that they
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: were disciplinary that Israel had accumulated so much unfaithfulness that
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: God had withdrawn his voice until the people were ready
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: to hear it again. There is something to that reading.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: Malachi's final words are themselves a call to repentance that
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: largely went unheeded. But punishment alone does not explain what
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: the silence actually produced. Punishment's end when the offender has
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: suffered enough. What the Intertestamental period produced was not simply
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: a chastened Israel. It was a transform A universal language
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: had spread across the Mediterranean basin, a road system connected
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: distant cities, A single empire administered the known world under
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: one structure. None of that was necessary to discipline Israel
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: for its sins. Something larger was being built. The silence
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: was not merely a pause. It was the interval in
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: which the stage was being constructed for the most consequential
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: event in human history. One of the deepest themes in
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: the Biblical narrative is that God works through the ordinary
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: movements of history, through rulers who do not know him,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: through political decisions made for entirely self interested reasons, through
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: cultural shifts no one planned with theological intent. Cyrus freed
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: the Jewish exiles not because of a religious vision, but
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: because it was pragmatic imperial policy. Alexander spread the Greek
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: language because he believed it would unify his empire. Rome
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: built its road network to move legions, none of them
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: imagined they were preparing the world for anything beyond their
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: own ambitions. And yet, from the perspective of what came after,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: each development served a purpose that its authors never foresaw.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: A common language meant a message could travel without the
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: friction of translation. A road network meant travelers could cross
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: provinces in weeks. A unified empire meant that news proclaimed
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem could reach Rome and Alexandria within the lifetime
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: of those who first heard it. God was without announcing it,
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: assembling the conditions for the most important announcement ever made,
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: the Pax Romana. The Roman peace was not, of course,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: peace for everyone. It was the peace of the conquered,
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: maintained by military force. Crucifixion lined the roads. Taxation was heavy,
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: but for the movement of people, ideas, and letters. It
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: created conditions that had never existed before. Paul's missionary journeys
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: covered thousands of miles across multiple provinces in just a
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: few years, something logistically impossible in any previous century. The
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: New Testament was written in Greek and read from Britain
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: to Mesopotamia without translation. The infrastructure that made the Gospel
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: spread so rapid was assembled piece by peace during four
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: hundred years that looked from the inside like silence and suffering.
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: The world was ready in ways it did not know
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: it was ready. In the fifteenth year of the reign
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: of Tiberius Caesar, a man appeared in the wilderness of
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: Judea preaching a baptism of repentance. Luke Thie named the Emperor,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: the governor, the regional rulers. The precision is deliberate. This
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: was not a vision. It happened in real history under
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: rulers whose names appeared in imperial records. The man was
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: john son of the priest Zechariah. He wore camel's hair,
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: ate locusts, and wild honey, and lived in the desert,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: the place where in Jewish symbolic geography, God met his
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: people most directly. When he spoke, He did not cite
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: the rabbis or hedge his words with careful attribution. He
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: declared in the direct mode of the classical prophets that
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. People came from
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem and all of Judea to hear him. They came
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: not as tourists, but as people who recognized, in whatever
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: instinctive way human beings recognized such things that they were hearing,
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: something they had not heard in a very long time.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: He was, as Malachi had promised, the voice calling in
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: the wilderness. He was the last prophet of the old
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: order and the first herald of the New, standing on
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: the boundary between two ages, pointing towards someone whose sandals
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: he was unworthy to untie. The silence was over the
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: four hundred years between Malachi and John carry a weight
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: that speaks directly into the experience of anyone who has
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: ever prayed and heard nothing back, who has waited for
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: God to act and watched the years pass without the
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: answer they were looking for. What the Intertestamental period demonstrates
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: is that divine silence is not divine absence. God was
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: present in the courage of Mattathias, in the faithfulness of
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: the Hasidim, in the scrolls copied by hand, in desert caves,
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: in the synagogue communities that kept Jewish identity alive across centuries.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: He simply was not speaking in the way he had
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: spoken before. And that difference, which felt to the people
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: living through it like abandonment, was in reality the shape
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: of a plan whose scale they could not yet see.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: For believers to day in their own seasons of silence.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: The Intertestamental period offers no comfortable guarantee that the weight
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: will be short or that God will explain himself while
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: it lasts. What it offers is something more durable, four
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: hundred years of verifiable history, demonstrating that the silence is
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: never the end of the story. Open a Bible turn
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: from the last page of Malachi to the first page
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: of Matthew. The physical distance is nothing a single page.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: The historical distance is four hundred years, containing everything, this
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: video has traced the fall of Persia, the rise of Greece,
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: the Maccabean Revolt, the corruption of the Hasmanians, the arrival
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: of Rome, the desperate hopes of a people waiting for
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: a deliverer. Matthew opens with a genialogy. Then almost immediately
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: a star appears in the east, and wise men ask
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: a question in the court of a dying tyrant, where
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: is the one born King of the Jews. It is
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: the same question the entire Intertestamental period had been asking,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: in different words, through different movements and prayers and revolts.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Where is he? When is he coming? The answer was
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: lying in a feeding trough in a village so small
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: it barely appears on the maps of the period. No army,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: no trumpet, no throne, just a child and the quiet
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: of a Bethlehem knight, a silence that, unlike the four
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: hundred years before, it was full. The silence had not
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: been the absence of God. It had been the same
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: of Him getting ready. If this video was valuable to you,
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: the best thing you can do right now is share
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: it with someone who loves the Word of God. Send
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: it to a friend, a family member, someone in your church,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: anyone who would benefit from understanding the world between the Testaments.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: Every share puts this content in front of someone who
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: may never have heard it otherwise. And if you are
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: not yet subscribed to this channel, now is the time.
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: There is much more to explore, more books of the Bible,
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: more forgotten history, more of the story that most people
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: never get to hear. Subscribe and stay close because the
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: next video is already coming. God's story is still being
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: told and you are part of it.