A Lot Can Happen in 400 Years!
A look at some important events that took place between the Old and New Testaments
In most of our printed Bibles, Malachi (the last book of the Old Testament) and Matthew (the first book of the New Testament) lie adjacent to each other. Often all it takes is a flip of the page to leave the world of the Old Testament and enter the world of the New.
This simplicity can create the mistaken impression that Matthew’s Gospel follows immediately on the heels of Malachi’s prophecies. But these two books—and, thus, these two eras of human history—are separated by no fewer than four centuries. Bible scholars refer to these centuries as the “intertestamental period” (because they occurred between the two testaments) or the “400 silent years” (because prophetic revelation from God apparently ceased during that time).
God may have been silent, but human history marched on. People lived and died. Civilizations rose and fell. And significant, transformative developments occurred. I believe it’s helpful for Christians to understand these developments. Doing so enables us to read the New Testament in a more historically informed way, as several of the intertestamental events played a key role in shaping the sociocultural setting into which Jesus of Nazareth was born.
Hellenization
Alexander the Great was a remarkable world figure. It’s said that in a mere 13 years, he conquered the known world. Of course, plenty of inhabited regions existed that Alexander did not conquer. Nevertheless, his empire at its height was staggeringly massive: It spanned more than 2 million square miles across three continents, stretching from Greece in the west to the Indus Valley (modern-day Pakistan) in the east. And Alexander accomplished this amazing conquest in about the same time it takes us to train up a child from kindergarten through high school.
But Alexander’s ambitions were more than territorial. He didn’t merely want to conquer the world; he wanted to transform it. He believed in the abiding superiority of all things Greek. Whatever the sphere of human experience—religion, culture, philosophy, law, architecture, aesthetics, or language—Alexander believed being Greek was the best you could be.
So, as he conquered areas, he imposed on them Greek thinking, culture, and lifestyles. This project, known as Hellenization, was “Greekifying” the world. It was Hellenization that changed the lingua franca (common language) of the Eurasian world from Aramaic to Greek. Hellenization is why the time of Jesus and the apostles is called the Graeco-Roman Period. It is why, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into the Greek Septuagint, the primary Bible version the apostles and early church used. Hellenization also is why many of the names in the New Testament (Andrew, Philip, Peter, Paul, Luke, and Timothy) are Greek.
Truly, Alexander’s project of Hellenization left its mark not only on world history, but also on virtually everything we read in the New Testament.
The Rise of the Sects
Many of the important sects and factions we read about in the New Testament originated during the intertestamental period, before the New Testament was written.
The Pharisees and Sadducees. When these Jewish religious factions weren’t conspiring against their common enemy, Jesus, they usually were at each other’s throats. The Pharisees were the religious conservatives of their day. Because they accepted all the canonical books of the Jewish Scriptures as authoritative, they believed in miracles, angels, God’s sovereignty, and a future physical resurrection.
By contrast, the Sadducees, the religious liberals, rejected all these convictions and accepted as authoritative only the first five books (the Torah) of Scripture. The Pharisees traced their existence back to Ezra and the scribal school he purportedly founded. The Sadducees seem to have sprung from a secularizing impetus that emerged among the more pro-Hellenistic segments of Israelite society during the intertestamental period.
The Samaritans. The Bible does not say from where the Samaritans originated (2 Kings 17:24 may shed light on the subject). Historically, there have been several theories. The Jewish people in Jesus’ day believed the Samaritans descended from Gentiles whom the Assyrians imported into northern Israel after they conquered the northern kingdom in 722 BC (Josephus, Antiquities, 9.288).
Since the days of the early church fathers, most Christians have believed the Samaritans were the product of Gentile-Jewish intermarriage that began during that same period, making the Samaritans partly Jewish and partly Gentile. The Samaritans themselves always insisted they were racially unmixed, the direct descendants of the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. Regardless of which explanation is correct, a sharp division between the Jews and Samaritans emerged during the intertestamental period.
Like the Sadducees, the Samaritans accepted only the Torah, but they maintained their own slightly altered version of it. In the Samaritan Torah, Mount Gerizim was specified as the place of acceptable worship to God. So, in the 5th century BC, the Samaritans built a temple on that mountain. The Jewish people regarded this temple as an abomination and offense to God; so, in 110 BC, a Jewish army marched on Mount Gerizim and destroyed the structure.
This event was one of many that revealed the deep antipathy between the Jews and Samaritans. By Jesus’ time, the division was so pronounced that most observant Jews refused to set foot in Samaria. (This fact directly informs the significance of Jesus’ radically countercultural actions in John 4, when He purposely traveled through Samaria to give the Samaritans a chance to believe in Him for salvation.)
Other groups. The Zealots were a fiercely nationalistic Jewish group committed to opposing and perhaps even violently overthrowing the Roman government’s control over Israel. Jesus’ disciple Simon was a Zealot. The Herodians supported King Herod and his dynasty—a family that controversially exercised ruling power over Israel in the 1st century, even though its members were ethnically Idumeans, not Jews. The Essenes were monastic desert-dwellers with strong Messianic expectations and an ultraconservative understanding of their Jewish religion.
All these groups helped to shape the political and religious fabric of the society into which Jesus of Nazareth stepped when God became a Man. In many ways, 1st-century Israel was a powder keg ready to blow. Religious and political division ran rampant. This background information helps us understand why different factions of Israelite society reacted the way they did to Jesus and His message.
The Pax Romana
Although Israel was riven by many religious and political fault lines, the Eurasian world was experiencing relative peace and safety due to the Pax Romana (literally, “Roman Peace”), the state of prevailing stability and tranquility that Rome imposed on the world from 27 BC to around AD 180. With this peace came a highly sophisticated system of roads that crisscrossed the Roman Empire. These roads, combined with standardized coinage, created an almost unprecedented ability to travel safely across large distances.
In short, the Pax Romana that emerged during the 400 silent years set the stage perfectly for the explosive missionary expansion of the early church throughout the known world. In fact, it could be argued that without it, the apostles’ extensive missionary journeys would have been virtually impossible. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the apostle Paul described Jesus’ entry into the world this way: “But when the fullness of the time had come [at just the right moment in time], God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4–5).
Indeed, a lot can happen in 400 years. And a lot did happen in the 400 years between the Testaments. Through the eyes of faith, it is easy to see how God used those developments to set the stage for His Son’s entry into redemptive history and the great work of salvation He undertook so that “whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (Jn. 3:16).
