The Four Hundred Years of Silence

From Daniel's Vision to the Fall of the Temple: A Torah-Observant History of the Second Temple Period

How to Read This Study

Most believers know the Old Testament, and most believers know the New Testament. What almost nobody knows is the road between them. A reader closes Malachi and opens Matthew, and in the space of one blank page four centuries have gone by. In that gap the Persian Empire fell, Alexander conquered the world, the Greek kings tore Judea in half between them, a Syrian tyrant sacrificed a pig on the altar of God, a family of country priests took up arms and won, a Jewish kingdom rose and rotted, Rome marched in, an Edomite named Herod rebuilt the Temple, and the parties we meet in the Gospels came into being.

Turn the page and suddenly there are Pharisees. There are Sadducees. There is a Sanhedrin, a synagogue in every town, scribes, a high priest appointed by a pagan governor, Roman soldiers in the Antonia fortress, and a fierce national expectation of a coming Anointed One. None of that existed when Malachi laid down his pen. All of it exists on page one of Matthew. This study fills in what happened in between.

Three things should be said before we begin.

First, this is history, not Scripture. The books, papyri, inscriptions, and historians surveyed here are useful. They are not inspired. We hold that the whole counsel of God is contained in the Scriptures alone, and that everything else is weighed by that standard (2 Timothy 3:16 to 17; Isaiah 8:20). We will read the Apocrypha the way we would read any careful ancient historian, with respect and with discernment, and we will say plainly where a source is reliable and where it is legend.

Second, prophecy can be fulfilled more than once. This study reads the four kingdoms of Daniel as real empires that really rose and really fell, and it reads the little horn of Daniel 8 as a man who really lived and really defiled the sanctuary. That is not a denial of a future fulfillment.

Scripture repeatedly gives a near fulfillment that becomes a pattern for a greater one. The Lord Himself points back to Daniel's abomination of desolation and puts it in the future tense (Matthew 24:15), long after Antiochus was dead and buried. A prophecy that has been fulfilled in history is not a prophecy that has been used up.

Third, the four hundred years were not empty. They were the years in which God quietly assembled every condition the Gospel would need. A common language.

A road system. A dispersed people with synagogues in every major city of the empire. A translated Bible. A hunger for the promised King. When Paul writes that God sent forth His Son "when the fulness of the time was come" (Galatians 4:4), this is the fulness he means. The silence was not absence. It was preparation.

Part One · The Ground Rules

1. Was It Really Silent?

2. How We Weigh a Source

4. The Four Beasts of Daniel 7 V. The Ram and the Goat of Daniel 8

6. The Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9

7. The Kings of the North and the South: Daniel 10 to 12

Part Three · The Head of Gold

- 8. Babylon, from Nebuchadnezzar to Belshazzar

- 9. The Night the Kingdom Changed Hands

Part Four · The Breast and Arms of Silver

10. Cyrus and the First Return

11. The Persian Kings, One by One

12. Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Rebuilding of a People

13. The Jews of Elephantine

14. The Samaritan Break

15. The Men of the Great Assembly and Simeon the Just

16. Malachi, the Last Voice

Part Five · The Belly and Thighs of Brass

- 17. Alexander the Great

- 18. Alexander and Jerusalem: History and Legend

- 19. The Diadochi and the Four Horns

- 20. Judea Under the Ptolemies

- 21. The Septuagint

- 22. The Tobiads and the Hellenizing of the Aristocracy.

- 23. The Syrian Wars and the Turn to the North

- 24. Antiochus 3 and the Charter of Jerusalem

- 25. Rome Enters the Story: Magnesia and Apamea

- 26. Seleucus 4 and the Raider of the Treasury.

- 27. The Books Written in These Years

Part Six · The Little Horn

- 28. Antiochus 4 Epiphanes

- 29. Jason, Menelaus, and the Sale of the Priesthood

- 30. The Abomination That Maketh Desolate

- 31. The Martyrs

- 32. Mattathias and the Revolt

- 33. Judas Maccabeus and the Cleansing of the Temple

- 34. Jonathan, Simon, and Independence

Part Seven · The Rise of the Sects

- 35. Where the Sadducees Came From

- 36. Where the Pharisees Came From

- 37. The Essenes and the Scrolls of the Dead Sea

- 38. The Zugot, the Sanhedrin, and the Synagogue

- 39. Zealots, Herodians, Boethusians, Samaritans

- 40. The Tradition of the Elders

Part Eight · The Calendar Wars

- 41. Why the Calendar Was Never a Small Thing

- 42. How the Hebrew Calendar Actually Worked

43. The Fracture Within: The 364 Day Calendar

44. The Roman Calendar and How It Was Built

45. Two Calendars, Two Worldviews

46. What Happened Afterward

Part Nine · The Hasmonean Kingdom

47. John Hyrcanus I

48. Aristobulus I and Alexander Jannaeus

49. Salome Alexandra and the Pharisee Ascendancy

50. Civil War, Antipater, and the Coming of Rome

Part Ten · The Legs of Iron

51. Rome and the Fourth Kingdom

52. Herod the Great

53. The Temple Herod Built

54. The Roman Emperors of the New Testament World

55. Governors, High Priests, and the House of Annas

56. Gamaliel and the Young Man from Tarsus

57. The Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple

Part Eleven · Bringing It Together

58. Daniel 11 Line by Line

59. The Four Kingdoms Chart

60. The Seventy Weeks: Setting the Dates

61. On Multiple Fulfillments

62. The Silence Broken

Part Twelve · The Library.

63. Annotated Source List

64. Master Timeline

Part One · The Ground Rules

1. Was It Really Silent?

The phrase "four hundred years of silence" is not a biblical phrase. It is a description invented later to say something true in a rough way: that from Malachi to John the Baptist, no prophet stood in Israel with a word that the people received as the word of the Lord.

But the people of that period said the same thing about themselves, and they said it with grief. When the

Maccabean fighters tore down the defiled altar stones, they had no prophet to tell them what to do with the rubble.

1 Maccabees 4:44 to 46

And they took counsel what to do with the altar of burnt offerings, which was profaned; and they thought it best to pull it down, lest it should be a reproach to them, because the heathen had defiled it: wherefore they pulled it down, and laid up the stones in the mountain of the temple in a convenient place, until there should come a prophet to shew what should be done with them.

The same admission appears again when Simon is made leader and high priest. The appointment is made permanent, but with a clause attached:

1 Maccabees 14:41

Also that the Jews and priests were well pleased that Simon should be their governor and high priest for ever, until there should arise a faithful prophet.

And once more, in a line that is one of the saddest in the book:

1 Maccabees 9:27

So was there a great affliction in Israel, the like whereof was not since the time that a prophet was not seen among them.

The Psalms give the same complaint in nearly the same words, and whether the psalm looks back to Babylon or forward to Antiochus, the experience is identical:

Psalm 74:9

We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is there among us any that knoweth how long.

Amos had warned that such a famine would come, and that it would be worse than hunger for bread:

Amos 8:11 to 12

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.

So the silence is real. But three qualifications matter, and they matter a great deal.

The silence was a silence of new revelation, not of God. The written word was in their hands, and in these very centuries it was copied, collected, translated, guarded, and in some quarters memorized wholesale. God was working through Cyrus, through Alexander, through Antiochus, through Pompey, and through Herod, exactly as He had worked through Nebuchadnezzar. The absence of a prophet is not the absence of providence.

The silence had already been explained in advance. Daniel had been given, in detail, the shape of the entire period before it began. Everything that would happen from the Persian court to the desecration of the sanctuary was written down in the sixth century before it took place. When the Jews of the Maccabean generation opened Daniel 8 and Daniel 11, they were not reading obscure poetry. They were reading the morning newspaper.

The silence ended exactly where the last prophet said it would. Malachi's closing words promise a messenger and an Elijah (Malachi 3:1; Malachi 4:5 to 6), and Luke opens his Gospel with a priest named Zacharias burning incense in the very Temple this study will trace, being told his son will go "in the spirit and power of eh-lye-us" (Luke 1:17). The silence does not simply run out. It is broken on cue.

Teacher's Note · Where the Number Comes From

There is no verse that says "four hundred years." The figure is a rounding. Malachi is usually dated to roughly 430 B.C and John the Baptist begins preaching around A.D 27 to 29, which gives about 450 to 460 years. Some count from Ezra and Nehemiah, some from the last recorded prophetic word, some from the close of the Persian period. The number is a convenient handle, not a doctrine. Do not build anything on it.

2. How We Weigh a Source

For this study to be worth teaching, a hearer has to be able to check it. So before we go anywhere, here is the grading system used throughout. Every claim in the rest of this document belongs to one of these tiers, and where a claim is weak, it will be said out loud rather than quietly dropped.

Tier One · Scripture. The sixty-six books. Final authority, no exceptions. Where Scripture speaks to a matter, the discussion is over.

Tier Two · Contemporary documentary evidence. Things written at the time by people with no stake in our argument, and buried before anyone could edit them. Clay tablets, coins, inscriptions, papyri, ostraca. This is the strongest non-biblical evidence there is, because nobody wrote a tax receipt to fool us. Examples used below: the Babylonian Chronicles, the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Behistun Inscription, the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, the Elephantine papyri, the Wadi Daliyeh papyri, the Zenon papyri, the Heliodorus stele, Hasmonean and Herodian coinage, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Tier Three · Ancient historians close to the events, using good sources. Polybius, who lived through the Roman conquest of Greece and interviewed participants. 1 Maccabees, written in Hebrew by someone with access to real documents, sober and restrained. Josephus where he is copying an official document or a good earlier historian.

Tier Four · Ancient historians at a distance, or with an agenda. Josephus where he is telling a story he heard. 2 Maccabees, which is a condensed version of a lost five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene and which openly says so (2 Maccabees 2:23), valuable but rhetorical. Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Appian, Justin's summary of Pompeius Trogus. Tacitus and Suetonius on Jewish matters, where hostility colors the reporting.

Tier Five · Later tradition and edifying legend. Rabbinic material in the Mishnah and Talmud, written down two to six centuries after the events, often preserving genuine memory but not usable as a standalone historical proof. The Letter of Aristées. 3 Maccabees. The Alexander-at-Jerusalem story in Josephus. Eusebius and Jerome where they are passing on what earlier men said. Useful. Not load-bearing.

Teacher's Note · Why the Tiers Matter for Teaching

A teacher who tells a congregation "Alexander the Great bowed before the high priest of Jerusalem" as though it were a fact of the same order as the fall of Babylon has damaged his own credibility, and worse, has taught the congregation not to check. The honest approach is to say what tier the claim sits in and let the hearer weigh it. That habit is itself a form of obedience, because Scripture commands us to prove all things (1 Thessalonians 5:21) and commends those who searched to see whether it was so (Acts 17:11).

Before we walk the history, we have to lay down the map. Daniel received four great visions, and between them they cover the entire span this study will trace. They were given in Babylon in the sixth century B.C, and everything that follows in this document is, in one way or another, commentary on them.

Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a colossal statue made of descending metals, and Daniel both recovered the dream and interpreted it.

Daniel 2:31 to 35

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

The head is identified for us by name, which anchors the whole sequence:

Daniel 2:37 to 40

Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory. And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold. And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

Notice what the text itself hands us. The head is Babylon, stated flatly. The metals decline in value as they descend but increase in hardness, which is a striking observation about the empires that follow: each is less glorious and more brutally effective than the one before. And the sequence ends not with a fifth human empire but with a stone that is not cut by human hands.

Daniel 2:44 to 45

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever. Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.

4. The Four Beasts of Daniel 7

Roughly fifty years later, Daniel himself sees the same sequence from heaven's side. Where Nebuchadnezzar saw a magnificent statue, Daniel sees four predators coming up out of a troubled sea.

Daniel 7:2 to 8

Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another. The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it. And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it. After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.

The interpreting angel gives the key in one sentence:

Daniel 7:17

These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth.

Every detail here will matter later. The lion with eagle's wings is Babylon, and Nebuchadnezzar's humbling and restoration in Daniel 4 is exactly the plucking of wings and the giving of a man's heart. The bear raised up on one side is a two-part empire in which the second part is the stronger, and Persia dominated Media. The leopard with four heads and four wings is a kingdom of terrifying speed that divides into four, which is precisely what happened to Alexander's empire. The fourth is not compared to any animal at all, because nothing in the natural world was adequate to it.

5. The Ram and the Goat of Daniel 8

Daniel 8 is the single most important prophetic chapter for this study, because it is the only one in which the angel names the empires in advance.

Daniel 8:3 to 8

Then I lifted up mine eyes, and saw, and, behold, there stood before the river a ram which had two horns: and the two horns were high; but one was higher than the other, and the higher came up last. I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward; so that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will, and became great. And as I was considering, behold, an he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes. And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power. And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with choler against him, and smote the ram, and brake his two horns: and there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground, and stamped upon him: and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand. Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven.

Then the identification, given plainly:

Daniel 8:20 to 22

The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king. Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.

There is no room for argument here. Media and Persia are named. Greece is named. The first king of Greece who conquers Persia and then is broken at the height of his strength, leaving four kingdoms behind him, is Alexander of Macedon. This is why the pagan philosopher Porphyry, writing against the Christians in the third century A.D, insisted that Daniel must have been written after the fact.

He could not accept that the accuracy was prophetic. Jerome preserved and answered his arguments in his Commentary on Daniel, and the exchange is worth knowing about, because the enemy of the book conceded the very point believers should notice: the details match.

Then comes the horn that dominates the rest of this study.

Daniel 8:9 to 12

And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them. Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised; and prospered.

Daniel 8:13 to 14

Then I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.

And the character sketch of the man:

Daniel 8:23 to 25

And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up. And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people. And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes; but he shall be broken without hand.

Hold that description. In Part Six we will meet the man it fits.

6. The Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9

Daniel had been reading Jeremiah and counting the years of the exile (Daniel 9:2; Jeremiah 25:11 to 12). He confessed the sin of his people, and Gabriel came with an answer far larger than the question.

Daniel 9:24 to 27

Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

This prophecy sets the clock for the entire period. It begins with a decree to restore and build Jerusalem, which places its starting point somewhere in the Persian period we are about to walk through. It runs through the building of the street and the wall "in troublous times," which is Nehemiah's world exactly.

It arrives at Messiah the Prince, and it says that Messiah will be cut off. And then it says something that no Jewish reader in the Maccabean period could have applied to Antiochus, because Antiochus did not do it: the people of a coming prince will destroy the city and the sanctuary. That happened in A.D 70, and it is the terminus of this study.

The dating of this prophecy, decree by decree and year by year, is worked out in full in Part Eleven.

7. The Kings of the North and the South: Daniel 10 to 12

The last vision is the longest and the most detailed prophecy of secular history anywhere in the Bible. It opens with the curtain pulled back on the war behind the war.

Daniel 10:13

But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

Daniel 10:20 to 21

Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come. But I will shew thee that which is noted in the scripture of truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince.

The empires we are about to study had spiritual princes standing behind them. Persia had one. Greece had one. This is the same arrangement that runs from the division of the nations onward, and it means that the political history in the pages ahead is the visible surface of a conflict that was never merely political.

Then Daniel 11 begins, and it does not let up for thirty-five verses. It moves from the Persian kings, to the mighty king of Greece, to the breaking of his kingdom toward the four winds, and then into a long and precise account of two dynasties at war, called throughout the king of the north and the king of the south. Judea sits between them, and the text calls it "the glorious land" (Daniel 11:16, 41).

Daniel 11:2 to 4

And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia. And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.

We will return to Daniel 11 at the end of this study and lay it out verse by verse against what actually happened. For now, take it as the outline we are about to fill in.

Teacher's Note · What "Historicist" Means and Does Not Mean

Reading these chapters against real history is sometimes labeled the historicist approach, and it has a long pedigree in the church. It is often set against the futurist approach, which places the fulfillments ahead of us, and the preterist approach, which places them all in the past. This study does not adopt any of those labels as a system. It simply observes what the text says and what history did, and holds firmly that a fulfilled prophecy remains a live pattern. Antiochus really did take away the daily sacrifice and set up an abomination in the sanctuary, and the Lord Jesus, speaking long afterward, still told His disciples to watch for the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet (Matthew 24:15). Both are true. The one does not cancel the other.

Part Three · The Head of Gold

8. Babylon, from Nebuchadnezzar to Belshazzar

The head of gold lasted a single long lifetime and then collapsed with astonishing speed. Its whole imperial career runs from 605 B.C to 539 B.C, which is sixty-six years.

Nabopolassar (626 to 605 B.C) founded the dynasty by breaking Assyria. The fall of Nineveh in 612 B.C, which Nahum had prophesied, is recorded in a cuneiform tablet known as the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle, one of the series of Babylonian Chronicles now in the British Museum. This is Tier Two evidence, written by Babylonian scribes with no interest in confirming Hebrew prophets.

Nebuchadnezzar 2 (605 to 562 B.C) is the head of gold by name (Daniel 2:38). He beat Egypt at Carchemish in 605 B.C, and the Babylonian Chronicle records that campaign along with his march through Hatti-land, which is where he first took Judean captives including Daniel himself (Daniel 1:1 to 6). The Chronicle also records, in one of the most striking confirmations in all of archaeology, the capture of Jerusalem in the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar, on the second day of the month Adar, and the appointment of a king of his own choosing, which lines up with the deportation of Jehoiachin and the installation of Zedeiah (2 Kings 24:10 to 17). Ration tablets excavated at Babylon list oil issued to "Yaukin, king of the land of Yahud" and his sons, which is Jehoiachin, alive in Babylon and drawing a royal allowance, exactly as 2 Kings 25:27 to 30 describes.

The final destruction of the Temple came in 586 B.C (2 Kings 25:8 to 10; Jeremiah 52:12 to 14).

Amel-Marduk, the Evil-merodach of Scripture (562 to 560 B.C), released Jehoiachin from prison (2 Kings 25:27 to 30; Jeremiah 52:31 to 34). He was murdered by his brother-in-law.

Neriglissar (560 to 556 B.C) is very probably the Nergal-sharezer who appears among the Babylonian officers at the fall of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 39:3, 13).

Labashi-Marduk (556 B.C) reigned a matter of months and was killed by conspirators.

Nabonidus (556 to 539 B.C) was the last king of Babylon, and he was strange. He promoted the moon god Sin above Marduk, offending the Babylonian priesthood, and then he left the capital altogether and spent roughly ten years at the oasis of Tema in Arabia. All of this is documented in Tier Two material: the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Harran stelae erected by his mother Adad-guppi, and a hostile Babylonian propaganda text usually called the Verse Account of Nabonidus.

Belshazzar is the son of Nabonidus who governed Babylon while his father was away. For centuries critics used Belshazzar as a club against the book of Daniel, because no Greek historian mentioned him and Nabonidus was known as the last king. Then the cuneiform record was recovered, and Belshazzar turned out to be exactly what Daniel says he was: a co-regent in Babylon. This also explains a detail that used to look like an error. When Belshazzar offers a reward, he offers to make Daniel "the third ruler in the kingdom" (Daniel 5:7, 16, 29), not the second.

He could not offer second place, because second place was his own. His father held the first.

Teacher's Note · The Value of the Belshazzar Case

This is one of the clearest examples in all of biblical scholarship of the Bible being accused, tried, convicted, and then vindicated by the shovel. It is worth teaching for that reason alone. It is also worth teaching with restraint: not every difficulty has been resolved this way, and we do not need every difficulty resolved in order to trust the Word. But when a resolution comes, we should notice it.

9. The Night the Kingdom Changed Hands

Daniel 5 records the feast, the vessels of the house of God used for a drinking party, the handwriting on the wall, and the interpretation.

Daniel 5:25 to 28

And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

Daniel 5:30 to 31

In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.

The Nabonidus Chronicle records the fall from the other side. Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army at Opis, Sippar fell without a battle, and the troops of Cyrus entered Babylon without fighting. The date given is the sixteenth of Tashritu, which is October of 539 B.C. Cyrus himself entered the city some days later.

The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel inscription recovered from Babylon in 1879, presents Cyrus as the liberator who restored the gods to their cities and returned displaced peoples to their homes. It is a Persian propaganda document, and it does not mention the Jews specifically. But it establishes beyond dispute that returning captive peoples and rebuilding their sanctuaries was standing Persian policy, which is precisely the policy Ezra 1 records being applied to Judah.

Teacher's Note · Who Was Darius the Mede?

Daniel names a Darius the Mede who takes the kingdom at about sixty-two years of age (Daniel 5:31; Daniel 6:1). No cuneiform text yet recovered uses that exact name for a ruler at that moment. Several proposals exist. Some identify him with Gubaru, the general who took the city and then governed it for Cyrus. Some suggest Cyaxares 2, a Median king mentioned by Xenophon in the Cyropaedia. Some read Daniel 6:28 as a Hebrew construction meaning "in the reign of Darius, that is, the reign of Cyrus," making Darius a throne name of Cyrus himself. This is a genuine open question, and it belongs firmly in a teacher's note rather than in a sermon point. What is not open is that the kingdom fell to the Medes and Persians on the night of a feast, which is what the text asserts and what the Chronicle confirms.

Part Four · The Breast and Arms of Silver

The Persian Empire is the second metal, the bear raised up on one side, and the ram with two horns of which the higher came up last (Daniel 8:3). Media was the older power; Persia was the younger and the greater. It lasted from 539 B.C to 332 B.C, which is more than two centuries, and it is the period in which the Jewish people were reconstituted as a religious community centered on Scripture and Temple rather than as a political kingdom.

10. Cyrus and the First Return

Isaiah had named Cyrus by name roughly a century and a half before he was born:

Isaiah 44:28

That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.

Isaiah 45:1 to 4

Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: and I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.

The decree came in his first year, 538 B.C.

Ezra 1:2 to 4

Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem. And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, beside the freewill offering for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.

Shehbazzar brought back the Temple vessels and laid a foundation (Ezra 1:8, 5:14 to 16). Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, of the line of David, and Jeshua the high priest led the main return of 42,360 people (Ezra 2:64). The altar was rebuilt and the feasts resumed almost immediately (Ezra 3:1 to 6), which is worth pausing on: the very first act of the restored community was to restore the appointed times.

Opposition halted the work (Ezra 4). It resumed in 520 B.C under the preaching of Haggai and Zechariah (Ezra 5:1 to 2; Haggai 1:1; Zechariah 1:1), and the Second Temple was finished in 516 B.C, in the sixth year of Darius (Ezra 6:15). The men who remembered Solomon's house wept when they saw it (Ezra 3:12), and Haggai answered them with a promise that reaches past the whole of this study:

Haggai 2:9

The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.

That promise was fulfilled not by architecture but by a Person walking into it.

11. The Persian Kings, One by One

This is the list a teacher needs, because the Persian kings are constantly confused with one another in Bible study.

Cyrus 2 the Great (559 to 530 B.C). Conquered Media, Lydia, and Babylon. Issued the decree of return.

Cambyses 2 (530 to 522 B.C). Conquered Egypt in 525 B.C. Herodotus tells lurid stories about his madness (Histories 3.27 to 38) that Egyptian inscriptions do not entirely support. Not mentioned by name in Scripture, though the opposition letters of Ezra 4:6 onward come from the reigns just after him.

Bardiya, also called Smerdis, and the usurper Gaumata (522 B.C). A disputed and violent succession.

Darius I the Great (522 to 486 B.C). The king under whom the Temple was completed (Ezra 6). He put down rebellions across the empire and recorded the whole thing on a cliff face at Behistun in three languages, which is Tier Two evidence and also the key that unlocked cuneiform for modern scholarship. He organized the empire into satrapies, built the Royal Road, and invaded Greece, losing at Marathon in 490 B.C.

Xerxes I (486 to 465 B.C). This is Ahasuerus of the book of Esther. The chronology, the extent of the empire from India to Ethiopia (Esther 1:1), the enormous banquet in the third year, the gap of four years before Esther is taken, and the king's temperament all line up with the Xerxes of Herodotus, who spent those intervening years on his catastrophic invasion of Greece. Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea fall in exactly that gap. Herodotus even records the Persian custom of deliberating both drunk and sober (Histories 1.133), which reads on the page of Esther like an inside joke.

Artaxerxes I Longimanus (465 to 424 B.C). The king of both Ezra and Nehemiah. He authorized Ezra's mission in his seventh year (Ezra 7:7 to 8), and Nehemiah, his cupbearer, in his twentieth year (Nehemiah 2:1).

Xerxes 2 and Sogdianus (424 B.C). A few months between them.

Darius 2 Nothus (424 to 404 B.C). The king in whose reign the Elephantine letters were written. He is very likely the "Darius the Persian" of Nehemiah 12:22.

Artaxerxes 2 Mnemon (404 to 358 B.C). Egypt broke free during his reign. His brother Cyrus the Younger revolted and died at Cunaxa in 401 B.C, the campaign Xenophon wrote up in the Anabasis.

Artaxerxes 3 Ochus (358 to 338 B.C). Reconquered Egypt in 343 B.C. Later writers, including Eusebius drawing on earlier chronographers, report that he deported a group of Jews to Hyrcania near the Caspian, which if true is one of the few otherwise unrecorded disturbances of the Persian period in Judea. Tier Four.

Arses, also called Artaxerxes 4 (338 to 336 B.C). Poisoned by the court official Bagoas.

Darius 3 Codomannus (336 to 330 B.C). The last king of Persia. He lost to Alexander at Issus and at Gaugamela and was murdered by his own satrap Bessus while fleeing.

Now read Daniel 11:2 again with that list in front of you.

Daniel 11:2

And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia.

Daniel is speaking in the reign of Cyrus (Daniel 10:1). Three kings follow: Cambyses, the disputed Bardiya, and Darius I. The fourth, far richer than them all, who stirs up all against Greece, is Xerxes I, whose invasion force Herodotus describes as the largest ever assembled and whose wealth was legendary. The verse then jumps immediately to the mighty king of Greece, skipping the remaining Persians entirely, because from the standpoint of the prophecy nothing else the Persians did mattered.

12. Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Rebuilding of a People

The two great figures of the Persian period after Zerubbabel are Ezra the priest and scribe, and Nehemiah the governor. Between them they set the shape of Judaism for the next five centuries.

Ezra came up in 458 B.C with a royal commission that reads almost like a charter of religious autonomy (Ezra 7:11 to 26). He is described in a phrase that ought to be framed on the wall of every teacher:

For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.

Notice the order. Seek, do, then teach. He dealt with the crisis of foreign marriages (Ezra 9 and 10), and he read the law publicly.

Nehemiah came up in 445 B.C, rebuilt the wall in fifty-two days under constant harassment (Nehemiah 6:15), and then did something arguably more important: he presided over a national covenant renewal.

Nehemiah 8:1 to 3

And all the people gathered themselves together as one man into the street that was before the water gate; and they spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month. And he read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law.

Nehemiah 8:8

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

That verse is the seed of everything that follows. Reading the text, giving the sense, causing the people to understand: that is public exposition, and it is the beginning of the office of the scribe and eventually of the synagogue sermon. It is also the origin point of a danger we will trace later, because "giving the sense" is exactly where human tradition can begin to grow over the top of the commandment.

The reforms Nehemiah enforced on his second term are worth listing, because they are the exact issues that will define Jewish identity for the whole period ahead:

Restoration of the Temple chambers and the Levites' portions (Nehemiah 13:4 to 14)

Sabbath enforcement, including shutting the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath so the merchants could not trade (Nehemiah 13:15 to 22)

Separation from foreign marriages, including throwing out a grandson of the high priest who had married into the family of Sanballat the Horonite (Nehemiah 13:23 to 28)

Hold onto that last item. It matters in a few pages.

13. The Jews of Elephantine

Here is a body of evidence almost no congregation has ever heard of, and it opens a window directly into Jewish life in the fifth century B.C.

On the island of Elephantine in the Nile, at the southern border of Egypt near modern Aswan, a Jewish military colony served the Persian crown as a garrison. They had been there since before the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525 B.C, and they were probably descended from Judeans who fled to Egypt after the fall of Jerusalem, the very migration Jeremiah warned against (Jeremiah 42:13 to 22; Jeremiah 44:1). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, archaeologists recovered their archive: Aramaic papyri and ostraca including marriage contracts, property sales, loans, letters, and official petitions. These are Tier Two documents of the first order.

Three findings from that archive matter for us.

First, they had a temple. A functioning sanctuary to the God of Israel, with an altar, standing on the Nile, roughly nine hundred miles from Jerusalem. This is a flat violation of the command that sacrifice be offered only at the place the Lord chooses (Deuteronomy 12:5 to 14). Egyptian priests of the ram god Khnum, whose own temple stood nearby, destroyed it in 410 B.C.

Second, they wrote to Jerusalem about it. In 407 B.C, the community leader Yedaniah and his colleagues wrote to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judah, asking for permission to rebuild. The letter notes that they had already written to Johanan the high priest in Jerusalem and to others, and had received no answer. It also names Delaiah and Shelemiah, the sons of Sanballat, governor of Samaria. Read Nehemiah 12:22 and Nehemiah 2:10 and 2:19 alongside that, and you are looking at the same men, in the same offices, in an independent document unearthed from Egyptian sand. That is a remarkable external confirmation of the world Nehemiah describes.

Third, they kept the feasts, imperfectly but really. A papyrus from 419 B.C, usually called the Passover Papyrus, is a letter from a man named Hananiah to the garrison giving instructions about a festival period involving abstaining from work and from leaven. The document is broken and the word Passover does not survive on the surviving fragments, but the practices described are unmistakably those of the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12:15 to 20; Leviticus 23:5 to 8).

At the same time the archive is troubling. Alongside the God of Israel, the oaths and salutations in these documents invoke names like Anath-Bethel and Herem-Bethel, which is syncretism, and the temple itself was unlawful.

Teacher's Note · What Elephantine Teaches Us

It is tempting to use Elephantine only as proof of Nehemiah's accuracy and stop there. The harder and more useful lesson is that a group of Israelites, sincerely worshipping the God of their fathers, keeping something like the feasts, hundreds of miles from oversight, drifted into an unlawful sanctuary and mixed pagan names into their oaths without apparently noticing anything was wrong. Distance from the assembly and distance from the standard of the written word produced exactly the result you would expect. That is a warning with a very modern application.

14. The Samaritan Break

The Samaritans appear in the New Testament as a settled and separate people with their own temple site, their own priesthood, their own version of the Torah, and a deep mutual hostility with the Jews. Every bit of that developed in the period we are covering.

The origin is in the Assyrian resettlement of the northern kingdom:

2 Kings 17:24

And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.

2 Kings 17:33

They feared the Lord, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence.

When the exiles returned, the people of the land offered to help build the Temple and were refused (Ezra 4:1 to 3). That refusal turned into active opposition, and the opposition acquired a leader:

But when Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they laughed us to scorn, and despised us, and said, What is this thing that ye do? will ye rebel against the king?

Sanballat is not merely a biblical character. He appears in the Elephantine papyri as governor of Samaria, and a later Sanballat appears in the Wadi Daliyeh papyri, a cache of fourth-century B.C legal documents found in a cave north of Jericho, apparently carried there by Samaritan refugees fleeing Alexander's forces and killed in the cave. The Sanballat family were real, hereditary governors of Samaria across generations. Tier Two.

Josephus tells the story of the founding of the rival temple: that a brother of the high priest Jaddua, named Manasseh, married the daughter of Sanballat, was told by the elders of Jerusalem to divorce her or leave the altar, and instead went to his father-in-law, who built him a temple on Mount Gerizim (Antiquities 11.302 to 312, 321 to 325). Josephus places this in the time of Alexander. Nehemiah 13:28 records what looks like the same kind of incident a century earlier, involving a grandson of the high priest Eliashib and the daughter of Sanballat. Scholars argue about whether these are two events, one event misdated, or a family pattern repeated across generations.

Archaeology has settled the main question. Excavations on Mount Gerizim have uncovered a substantial sacred precinct whose earliest phase dates to the Persian period, in the fifth century B.C, well before Alexander. So the Samaritan sanctuary is older than the Josephus story allows. It was destroyed by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus around 111 to 110 B.C (Antiquities 13.255 to 256), which is why in the Gospel of John the Samaritan woman speaks of the mountain in the past tense of worship:

John 4:20

Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

The Samaritans accept only the five books of Moses, in their own textual tradition called the Samaritan Pentateuch, which contains a commandment locating the place of worship at Gerizim. They kept Passover on the mountain, and a small community keeps it there to this day.

Teacher's Note · The Samaritans and Our Lord

Given three centuries of blood between these peoples, the deliberate choices of Jesus become sharper. He goes through Samaria when He does not have to (John 4:4). He makes a Samaritan the hero of a parable told to a lawyer of Israel (Luke 10:30 to 37). Of ten lepers cleansed, the only one who returns to give glory to God is a Samaritan, and Luke calls him a stranger (Luke 17:15 to 18). And He tells the woman at the well that the argument over the mountain is about to be transcended entirely (John 4:21 to 24). None of this is a repeal of the law. It is the exposure of a centuries-old hatred by the One who came to gather.

15. The Men of the Great Assembly and Simeon the Just

Between Nehemiah and the Greek conquest lies about a century that the Bible does not narrate at all. Jewish tradition fills it with an institution called the Great Assembly, in Hebrew the Knesset HaGedolah, described as a body of one hundred twenty elders who succeeded the prophets, established the canon, fixed the liturgy, and passed the tradition forward. The chain is set out at the opening of the tractate Avot:

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly.

This is Tier Five material. It is written down in the second century A.D or later, describing events six centuries earlier. It very likely preserves a real memory that some ordering body existed under Ezra and after him, since somebody plainly collected and preserved the sacred books. But no contemporary document mentions the Great Assembly, and its detailed activities cannot be verified.

Simeon the Just, in Hebrew Shimon HaTzaddik, is named as the last survivor of that assembly (Avot 1:2), and his saying is preserved: that the world stands on three things, the Torah, the service, and acts of kindness. There were two high priests named Simon, one around 300 B.C and one around 200 B.C, and tradition has blurred them. Ben Sira gives a magnificent eyewitness-style description of a high priest named Simon son of Onias coming out from behind the veil, and it is the finest picture we have of Second Temple worship in operation:

Ecclesiasticus 50:5 to 7

How was he honoured in the midst of the people in his coming out of the sanctuary! He was as the morning star in the midst of a cloud, and as the moon at the full: as the sun shining upon the temple of the most High, and as the rainbow giving light in the bright clouds: and as the flower of roses in the spring of the year, as lilies by the rivers of waters, and as the branches of the frankincense tree in the time of summer.

After Simeon, tradition says the chain passed to Antigonus of Socho, and then to a series of five pairs of teachers, the zugot, who carry the transmission down to Hillel and Shammai in the days of Herod. We will pick that thread up in Part Seven.

16. Malachi, the Last Voice

Malachi is usually dated to the middle or later fifth century B.C, contemporary with or shortly after Nehemiah, because the abuses he attacks are the same ones Nehemiah confronted: contemptible offerings, a corrupted priesthood, robbery of tithes, and treachery in marriage. The book is structured as a series of disputes in which God makes a charge and the people answer back.

The charges are worth listing, because they show us the spiritual condition of the community at the exact moment the prophetic voice goes quiet.

Contempt for God's name through blemished sacrifices (Malachi 1:6 to 8)

Priests who caused many to stumble at the law (Malachi 2:7 to 8)

Treachery in marriage and divorce (Malachi 2:14 to 16)

Robbing God in tithes and offerings (Malachi 3:8 to 10)

Words that wearied God, saying that serving Him was vain (Malachi 2:17; Malachi 3:14 to 15)

Against all of that stands a remnant, and God's response to them is one of the tenderest passages in the prophets:

Malachi 3:16 to 18

Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.

And then the closing words of the Old Testament, which are the exact hinge on which this entire study turns:

Malachi 4:4 to 6

Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

The last instruction given to Israel before four centuries of silence is to remember the law. The last promise given is that a prophet will come. The people who kept that instruction through the dark centuries ahead are the people this study is about, and the promise was kept on schedule at the altar of incense in the Temple that Herod was still building (Luke 1:11 to 17).

Part Five · The Belly and Thighs of Brass

17. Alexander the Great

Daniel described him before he was born, and did it in a way that reads like eyewitness reporting.

Daniel 8:5

And as I was considering, behold, an he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes.

A goat from the west, moving so fast its feet do not seem to touch the ground, with one conspicuous horn. Then:

Daniel 8:7

And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with choler against him, and smote the ram, and brake his two horns: and there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground, and stamped upon him: and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand.

And Daniel 11 adds the crucial detail about what happens after:

Daniel 11:3 to 4

And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.

Here is the history it describes.

Philip 2 of Macedon (359 to 336 B.C) built the army: the sarissa phalanx, the companion cavalry, and a professional standing force that made the Greek city-states obsolete. He unified Greece by force at Chaeronea in 338 B.C and was assassinated in 336 B.C while preparing to invade Persia.

Alexander 3 took the throne at twenty. His campaign is one of the fastest conquests in recorded history:

334 B.C, the Granicus. First victory in Asia Minor.

333 B.C. Issus. Darius 3's army broken; the Persian royal family captured.

332 B.C, the siege of Tyre. Seven months. Alexander built a causeway from the mainland to the island city, using the rubble of the old mainland Tyre to do it, and then scraped the site bare. Ezekiel had said the stones and the dust would be laid in the midst of the water and the place would become like the top of a rock (Ezekiel 26:4, 12, 14). The causeway silted up and remains attached to the shore today.

332 B.C, the siege of Gaza, then the entry into Egypt, where he was received as a deliverer and founded Alexandria.

331 B.C, Gaugamela. The decisive defeat of Darius 3. Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis fell in succession. Persepolis was burned.

330 B.C. Darius 3 was murdered by his own satrap Bessus while fleeing east. The Persian Empire was finished.

329 to 325 B.C. Campaigns into Bactria, Sogdiana, and India. He won at the Hydaspes against Porus and then his army refused to go further east.

June 323 B.C. He died in Babylon, aged thirty-two, after a fever.

He was thirty-two years old and master of the known world, and the horn was broken at the very height of its strength, exactly as Daniel 8:8 says.

Our sources for Alexander are all later than he is, because the contemporary accounts by Ptolemy, Aristobulus, and Callisthenes are lost and survive only through quotation. The principal surviving accounts are:

Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, second century A.D, the most sober, built on Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Tier Three or Four.

• Plutarch, Life of Alexander, biographical and interested in character. Tier Four.

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History Book 17. Tier Four.

Quintus Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander, rhetorical and colorful. Tier Four.

Justin, an epitome of the lost Philippine History of Pompeius Trogus. Tier Four to Five, a summary of a summary.

18. Alexander and Jerusalem: History and Legend

Josephus tells a famous story. Alexander, having taken Gaza, marched on Jerusalem in anger because the high priest Jaddua had refused to break faith with Darius. The priests went out in procession in their vestments, and Alexander, instead of destroying the city, bowed before the high priest, explaining that in a dream in Macedonia he had seen this very man who promised him the empire of Persia. He was then shown the book of Daniel, in which it was written that a Greek would destroy the Persian empire, and he took it to refer to himself. He granted the Jews the right to live under their own laws and exemption from tribute in the sabbatical year (Antiquities 11.325 to 339).

Teacher's Note · Handle This Story with Care

This account appears nowhere in Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, or Curtius, none of whom mention a visit to Jerusalem at all. It has obvious apologetic value for a Jewish author writing for a Greek and Roman audience, and it exists in several variant forms, including a rabbinic version in which the high priest is Simeon the Just rather than Jaddua (b. Yoma 69a) and a Samaritan version in which Alexander favors Gerizim. It is Tier Five. It may preserve a kernel: Judea did submit peacefully to Alexander, and Alexander did generally confirm local religious privileges as a matter of policy, which is well attested elsewhere. But no teacher should stand up and present a bowing Alexander as history. Say what it is, and let the hearer weigh it.

What is historically solid is this: Judea passed from Persian to Macedonian rule in 332 B.C without a recorded battle, and the Jews were permitted to continue living under their ancestral law. That policy of religious tolerance is the reason the crisis of 167 B.C, when it was abruptly reversed, came as such a shock.

19. The Diadochi and the Four Horns

Alexander left no viable heir. His half-brother Philip 3 Arrhidaeus was mentally incapable, and his son Alexander 4 was born after his death. Both were murdered. His generals, the diadochi or successors, fought for forty years.

Daniel 8:8

Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven.

Daniel 8:22

Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.

The key phrase is "but not in his power." None of the four came anywhere near Alexander's authority. The wars ran through Perdiccas, Antipater, Eumenes, Antigonus Monophthalmus and his son Demetrius the Besieger, Lysimachus, Cassander, Seleucus, and Ptolemy. The decisive battle was Ipsus in Phrygia, 301 B.C, where Antigonus was killed and the empire settled into four blocs:

1. Cassander in Macedonia and Greece

2. Lysimachus in Thrace and much of Asia Minor

3. Seleucus I Nicator in Syria, Babylonia, and the east

4. Ptolemy I Soter in Egypt, and in practice Judea and southern Syria

The four winds of heaven are four compass directions, and these four kingdoms sit to the north, south, east, and west of the Judean center point. Within a generation the northern and western blocs were absorbed, and the long struggle came down to two: Seleucid Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt. Judea lay directly between them. That is the geography that makes Daniel 11 intelligible, and it is why for the next century and a half the prophecy speaks only of a king of the north and a king of the south.

Daniel 11:5

And the king of the south shall be strong, and one of his princes; and he shall be strong above him, and have dominion; his dominion shall be a great dominion.

Ptolemy I is the king of the south. Seleucus I was for a time a subordinate officer under Ptolemy, took refuge with him after being driven out of Babylon by Antigonus, and returned in 312 B.C with Ptolemy's help to found the Seleucid Empire. He did indeed become stronger than the man he had served under. The verse is a compressed and precise account of that relationship.

20. Judea Under the Ptolemies

From roughly 301 to 200 B.C, Judea belonged to Egypt. This is the quietest century in the whole period, and by every indication it was a good century.

How Ptolemy I took Jerusalem. Josephus, drawing on the Greek historian Agatharchides of Cnidus, records that Ptolemy took the city by entering on a Sabbath under the pretense of offering sacrifice, because the inhabitants would not fight on that day.

There is a nation called the nation of the Jews, who inhabit a city strong and great, named Jerusalem. These men took no care, but let it come into the hands of Ptolemy, as not willing to take arms, and thereby they submitted to be under a hard master, by reason of their unseasonable superstition.

Agatharchides tells this story to mock the Jews for their folly. He is a hostile witness, and hostile witnesses are the most valuable kind, because he has no motive to invent Sabbath observance. Here is a Greek historian in the second century B.C recording, with contempt, that the Jews of Jerusalem would not take up arms on the seventh day. Tier Three, and a very significant piece of evidence for anyone teaching the continuity of Sabbath practice.

Josephus reports that Ptolemy took many captives from Judea and Samaria to Egypt and settled them there, and that many Jews went voluntarily. This is a major step in the growth of the Egyptian diaspora, and specifically of the Jewish community of Alexandria, which becomes one of the largest and most important in the world.

What life was like. The Ptolemies ran Egypt as a tightly organized royal economy, and Judea was administered as part of the province of Syria and Phoenicia. Tax farming was the standard method: the right to collect taxes in a district was auctioned to the highest bidder, who then paid the crown and kept the surplus. This system will matter enormously in a moment.

Our best window into daily life comes from the Zenon papyri, discovered in the Fayum in Egypt in 1915. Zenon was the agent of Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy 2 Philadelphia, and he traveled through Palestine in 259 and 258 B.C. His archive survived. It contains business letters, contracts, receipts, and memoranda mentioning Gaza, Acre, Tyre, Kedesh, and Straton's Tower, dealing with grain, oil, slaves, and livestock. It is Tier Two evidence of the highest quality, and the picture it paints of Judea in the mid-third century B.C is of a peaceful, prosperous, thoroughly commercialized province.

One of the papyri even documents Jewish laborers observing the Sabbath: a brick-making account notes that the foreman did not come to work on that day. Another mentions a Jewish guard. Another preserves letters from a wealthy man named Tobias, writing from a fortified estate at Birta in the Ammanitis, east of the Jordan, sending exotic animals as gifts to the king. We will meet his family next.

21. The Septuagint

Somewhere in the third century B.C, in Alexandria, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek. This is arguably the single most consequential cultural event of the entire four hundred years, because it is the version of the Old Testament that the apostles will carry into the Greek-speaking world.

The traditional account is given in the Letter of Aristes, a Greek document purporting to be written by a court official of Ptolemy 2 Philadelphus. It says that the royal librarian Demetrius of Phalerum urged the king to acquire the Jewish law for the library at Alexandria; that the king freed a large number of Jewish slaves as a gesture of goodwill; that he sent to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem for translators; that seventy-two elders came, six from each tribe; and that they completed the translation of the law on the island of Pharos. Josephus retells the story at length (Antiquities 12.11 to 118). Philo of Alexandria elaborates further, adding that the translators worked separately and produced identical texts by divine inspiration (Life of Moses 2.37).

Teacher's Note · What Is Solid and What Is Not

The name Septuagint, and the Roman numeral 70, come from the seventy-two translators of this account. The core claim, that the five books of Moses were translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century B.C under Ptolemaic patronage, is accepted by essentially everyone, because the Greek Pentateuch demonstrably existed by then and its language is third-century Alexandrian Greek. The rest of the story is another matter. The Letter of Aristées is generally regarded as a Jewish apologetic work written considerably later than it claims, by a Jewish author writing under a Greek name to commend the Scriptures to a Greek-speaking world. Philo's claim of miraculously identical independent translations is Tier Five and should never be taught as fact. It is also demonstrably not true of the resulting text, which varies in style from book to book because different translators worked on different books over a long period.

The rest of the Old Testament was translated over the following century and more. The prologue to Ecclesiasticus, written by Ben Sira's grandson in Egypt around 132 B.C, refers in passing to "the law itself, and the prophets, and the rest of the books" already existing in Greek, which gives us a fixed point for how far the work had progressed and also one of the earliest witnesses to the threefold division of the Hebrew canon.

Why this matters for us. When Paul preaches in a synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia or Thessalonica and reasons out of the Scriptures, the book on the reading desk is very often in Greek. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they frequently quote the Greek. The most famous instance is Matthew's citation of Isaiah 7:14, where the Greek word parthenos means specifically a virgin. The Greek Bible was the missionary Bible of the first century, and God prepared it two centuries in advance.

22. The Tobiads and the Hellenizing of the Aristocracy

Here is where the trouble starts, and it starts exactly where trouble usually starts: with money and with a family that wanted more of it.

The name Tobiah appears in Nehemiah as one of the chief opponents of the rebuilding, "Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite" (Nehemiah 2:10, 19), who had married into Jewish priestly families and had a chamber in the courts of the house of God until Nehemiah threw his furniture out into the street (Nehemiah 13:4 to 9). Two centuries later a man named Tobias is writing to the Egyptian finance minister from a fortified estate in the Ammanitis. The same family, in the same region, still rich, still influential, now fully plugged into the Greek imperial economy. That family continuity is one of the more remarkable facts of the period, and it is confirmed by the Zenon papyri, by Josephus, and by the ruins at Iraq al-Amir in Jordan, where an elaborate Hellenistic building complex stands with the name Tobiah carved in Aramaic letters into the rock nearby.

Josephus preserves a long narrative usually called the Tobiad Romance (Antiquities 12.154 to 236). In it, the high priest Onias 2 refuses to pay the tribute owed to Ptolemy, endangering the nation. His nephew Joseph son of Tobias goes to Alexandria, charms the king, outbids the other tax farmers of Syria and Phoenicia, and secures the whole tax-collecting concession for himself. He holds it for twenty-two years, becomes fabulously wealthy, and shifts real power in Jerusalem away from the high priesthood and toward a Hellenized commercial aristocracy. Later his youngest son Hyrcanus outmaneuverers his brothers and the feud splits the family, with most of the sons siding with the Seleucids and Hyrcanus with Egypt.

Teacher's Note · How Much of the Tobiad Romance Is History?

The narrative in Josephus is a good story, with witty dialogue, court intrigue, and a hero who wins by cleverness. It has the shape of a Hellenistic novella, and its chronology is confused. It is Tier Four. What it certainly reflects, and what independent evidence confirms, is the underlying reality: a powerful, wealthy, Greek-speaking Jewish family east of the Jordan, deeply enmeshed with the Ptolemaic and later Seleucid courts, competing with the high priestly house for control of Jerusalem. That competition is the fault line along which the nation will split in 175 B.C.

What is happening culturally is this. Greek was the language of business, of law, of advancement. Greek education, the gymnasium and the ephebate, was the gateway to citizenship, contracts, and standing. A Jewish family that wanted its sons to succeed faced constant pressure to adopt Greek habits, and the aristocracy adopted them enthusiastically. This is not yet apostasy. It is assimilation, and it prepared the ground for apostasy.

23. The Syrian Wars and the Turn to the North

Between 274 and 168 B.C, the Ptolemies and Seleucids fought six major wars, almost all of them over the strip of land that includes Judea. Daniel 11:6 through 11:20 is a running account of them. Here is the sequence with the relevant verses attached.

First Syrian War (274 to 271 B.C). Ptolemy 2 holds the province.

Second Syrian War (260 to 253 B.C). Ends with a marriage alliance. Ptolemy 2 gives his daughter Berenice to Antiochus 2 Theos, who sets aside his existing wife Laodice to marry her.

Daniel 11:6

And in the end of years they shall join themselves together; for the king's daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement: but she shall not retain the power of the arm; neither shall he stand, nor his arm: but she shall be given up, and they that brought her, and he that begat her, and he that strengthened her in these times.

What happened: Ptolemy 2 died in 246 B.C. Antiochus 2 promptly took Laodice back and set Berenice aside. Laodice then had Antiochus poisoned, and had Berenice and her infant son murdered as well, along with her Egyptian attendants. Berenice did not retain power. Antiochus did not stand. She was given up, along with those who brought her.

Her father died. Every clause of Daniel 11:6 has a corresponding event.

Third Syrian War, also called the Laodicean War (246 to 241 B.C).

Daniel 11:7 to 9

But out of a branch of her roots shall one stand up in his estate, which shall come with an army, and shall enter into the fortress of the king of the north, and shall deal against them, and shall prevail: and shall also carry captives into Egypt their gods, with their princes, and with their precious vessels of silver and of gold; and shall continue more years than the king of the north. So the king of the south shall come into his kingdom, and shall return into his own land.

What happened: Berenice's brother, Ptolemy 3 Euergetes, invaded to avenge her, drove deep into Seleucid territory, and carried enormous plunder back to Egypt, including, according to the Egyptian priests' inscriptions, sacred images that the Persians had taken from Egypt centuries earlier. That last detail earned him the title Euergetes, meaning Benefactor. He outlived his opponent Seleucus 2 by four years. Again, clause for clause.

Fourth Syrian War (219 to 217 B.C). Antiochus 3 the Great attacked south and was met by Ptolemy 4 Philopator at Raphia, near Gaza, in 217 B.C. The Egyptian army won a shattering victory over a much larger force. Polybius describes the battle in detail (Histories 5.79 to 86), including the elephant engagement. Ptolemy 4 then failed to exploit the victory and went home.

Daniel 11:11 to 12

And the king of the south shall be moved with choler, and shall come forth and fight with him, even with the king of the north: and he shall set forth a great multitude; but the multitude shall be given into his hand. And when he hath taken away the multitude, his heart shall be lifted up; and he shall cast down many ten thousands: but he shall not be strengthened by it.

He was not strengthened by it. Within a few years Egypt was in internal revolt and permanently weakened.

Fifth Syrian War (202 to 195 B.C). Antiochus 3 came back, and this time he won. The decisive battle was at Panium, near the source of the Jordan at the site later called Caesarea Philippi, in 200 B.C. He destroyed the Egyptian army under Scopas and drove it back to Sidon.

Daniel 11:13 to 16

For the king of the north shall return, and shall set forth a multitude greater than the former, and shall certainly come after certain years with a great army and with much riches. And in those times there shall many stand up against the king of the south: also the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves to establish the vision; but they shall fall. So the king of the north shall come, and cast up a mount, and take the most fenced cities: and the arms of the south shall not withstand, neither his chosen people, neither shall there be any strength to withstand. But he that cometh against him shall do according to his own will, and none shall stand before him: and he shall stand in the glorious land, which by his hand shall be consumed.

Judea changed hands. In 200 B.C it passed from Egypt to Syria, and it never went back.

24. Antiochus 3 and the Charter of Jerusalem

The Jews of Jerusalem largely welcomed Antiochus 3, opening their gates to him and helping supply his army. He rewarded them with a formal charter. Josephus quotes what he presents as the text of the decree, and it is one of the most valuable documents in his whole work because it reads exactly like a genuine Hellenistic royal letter, right down to the administrative vocabulary:

Josephus, Antiquities 12.142, quoting the decree of Antiochus 3

And let all of that nation live according to the laws of their own country; and let the senate, and the priests, and the scribes of the temple, and the sacred singers, be discharged from poll money and the crown tax and other taxes also.

The charter also provided timber for repairs, exempted the city from tribute for three years, freed captives, and forbade foreigners from entering the inner Temple precinct and unclean animals from being brought into the city.

Notice three things in that decree.

First, the phrase "live according to the laws of their own country." This is the legal foundation of Jewish religious liberty under the Seleucids. When Antiochus 4 revokes it in 167 B.C, he is tearing up his own father's charter.

Second, the mention of a senate. The Greek word is gerousia, a council of elders. This is the earliest clear attestation of the institution that will become the Sanhedrin of the Gospels.

Third, the mention of scribes of the Temple as a distinct professional class alongside priests and singers. The scribes are becoming an established order.

Polybius, a first-rate historian writing within living memory of these events, also records that the Jews of Jerusalem went over to Antiochus and supplied his army (Histories 16.39, preserved through Josephus, Antiquities 12.135 to 136). Tier Three, and independent of Josephus's own interests.

25. Rome Enters the Story: Magnesia and Apamea

Antiochus 3 then made the mistake that changed everything. He pushed west into Asia Minor and Greece, gave refuge to Hannibal, and ran into Rome.

Daniel 11:18 to 19

After this shall he turn his face unto the isles, and shall take many: but a prince for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered by him to cease; without his own reproach he shall cause it to turn upon him. Then he shall turn his face toward the fort of his own land: but he shall stumble and fall, and not be found.

What happened: Antiochus 3 campaigned in the Aegean and Greece, taking coastal cities and islands. Rome sent an army. He was beaten at Thermopylae in 191 B.C and then decisively at Magnesia in Asia Minor in 190 B.C by the Roman commander Lucius Cornelius Scipio, with his brother Scipio Africanus advising. The Roman commander turned the reproach back on him.

The Treaty of Apamea in 188 B.C stripped the Seleucids of Asia Minor west of the Taurus mountains, took their war elephants and fleet, demanded hostages including the king's younger son Antiochus, and imposed an enormous indemnity of fifteen thousand talents payable over twelve years. Polybius records the terms (Histories 21.42), and Livy repeats them (History of Rome 37.55 and 38.38).

Antiochus 3 died in 187 B.C while plundering a temple of Bel in Elymais, trying to raise money to pay Rome. Diodorus and Justin both record it. He stumbled, he fell, and he was not found.

That indemnity is the hinge of the whole story. From 188 B.C onward, the Seleucid treasury is desperate. A desperate treasury will look at a wealthy temple and see a bank. Everything that happens to Jerusalem over the next twenty years flows from a Roman invoice.

Teacher's Note · The Iron Is Already in the Room

Rome has now entered the narrative, roughly a century and a quarter before Pompey ever sees Jerusalem. The legs of iron do not begin with a conquest of Judea. They begin with a treaty imposed on a Greek king in Asia Minor, which quietly determines Jewish history for the next generation. God moves the pieces long before we see the board.

26. Seleucus 4 and the Raider of the Treasury

Seleucus 4 Philopator (187 to 175 B.C) inherited the debt.

Daniel 11:20

Then shall stand up in his estate a raiser of taxes in the glory of the kingdom: but within few days he shall be destroyed, neither in anger, nor in battle.

He is remembered for almost nothing except taxation, and he was assassinated by his own chief minister, not in anger and not in battle. That minister was Heliodorus.

2 Maccabees 3 tells the story of Heliodorus being sent to seize the Temple treasury at Jerusalem, of the high priest Onias 3 protesting that the deposits included the money of widows and orphans, of the whole city in anguish, and of Heliodorus being struck down in the treasury by a heavenly horseman and two young men who scourged him, and then healed at the prayer of the high priest.

Teacher's Note · The Heliodorus Episode

The miraculous portion is Tier Four, coming from 2 Maccabees, which is an abridgment of a lost work by Jason of Cyrene and which is openly written to edify. But something remarkable happened in 2007. Excavators at Maresha in the Judean lowlands recovered fragments of a stone stele containing a letter of Seleucus 4, dated to 178 B.C, appointing a man named Olympiodoros to oversee the sanctuaries of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, and the covering letter is from Heliodorus, described as the king's chief minister. So Heliodorus was real, he held exactly the office 2 Maccabees gives him, and the Seleucid crown was actively asserting administrative control over temples in this region in precisely these years. Tier Two evidence confirming the setting of a Tier Four story. That is how honest history works: the frame is verified even where the miracle cannot be.

27. The Books Written in These Years

Before we reach the crisis, it is worth pausing to survey the literature the Jewish people produced during the Greek period, because it tells us what they were thinking about.

Ecclesiasticus, also called the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Sirach. Written in Hebrew in Jerusalem around 180 B.C by Jesus ben Sira, translated into Greek by his grandson in Egypt around 132 B.C. It is the finest and most sober of the apocryphal books, a wisdom collection in the tradition of Proverbs, and it contains the great catalogue of Israel's heroes beginning "Let us now praise famous men" (Ecclesiasticus 44:1). Its most important theological move is the identification of Wisdom with the Torah:

Ecclesiasticus 24:23

All these things are the book of the covenant of the most high God, even the law which Moses commanded for an heritage unto the congregations of Jacob.

For a Torah-observant reader, Ben Sira is a valuable witness that in the generation just before the crisis, faithful Jews understood the law not as a burden but as the very wisdom of God given to Israel.

Tobit. A pious tale, probably third or early second century B.C, set in the Assyrian exile. Historically confused, and it is worth saying so plainly: it places Tobit as a young man at the fall of the northern kingdom and still alive under Sennacherib, which does not work. Its value is as a picture of diaspora piety: almsgiving, burial of the dead, fidelity in marriage, endogamy, prayer. Fragments in Hebrew and Aramaic were found at Qumran, which shows it was widely read. Tier Five as history, useful as a mirror of the period's devotional life.

Judith. A gripping narrative that opens by calling Nebuchadnezzar the king of the Assyrians reigning in Nineveh, which is a historical impossibility so obvious that many readers conclude the author signals from the first sentence that he is writing a parable, not a chronicle. Its theme is deliverance through unlikely means and strict observance even in an enemy camp. Tier Five as history.

Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. Penitential and anti-idolatry material attributed to Jeremiah's scribe.

1 Enoch. Not one book but a collection, with sections dating from the third century B.C onward: the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams, the Epistle of Enoch, and the Similitudes. Multiple copies were found at Qumran, and it was clearly widely read. It develops the Genesis 6 material at length, and it contains a figure called the Son of Man who sits on a throne of glory. Jude quotes it directly:

Jude 14 to 15

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

Teacher's Note · Jude and Enoch

Jude quoting a line from 1 Enoch no more makes 1 Enoch Scripture than Paul quoting the poet Aratus at Athens makes Aratus Scripture (Acts 17:28), or Paul quoting Epimenides makes Epimenides Scripture (Titus 1:12). An inspired writer may cite a true statement from an uninspired source. The quotation tells us Jude's readers knew the book. It does not tell us the book is canonical, and 1 Enoch contains a great deal that Scripture does not support. Read it as a window into how Second Temple Jews thought. Do not build doctrine on it.

Jubilees. A retelling of Genesis and early Exodus, second century B.C, structured around jubilee cycles.

Fifteen or more copies were found at Qumran, more than most books of the Bible. It advocates a strict

364-day solar calendar, which put its community permanently out of step with the Temple establishment's calendar. This is enormously significant for understanding the Qumran sect, and it shows that calendar was already a dividing line among faithful Jews in this period.

Aramaic Levi, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and related priestly literature. These reflect an intense interest in the priesthood and in a coming anointed figure, sometimes two figures, one priestly and one royal.

1 and 2 Maccabees. Covered in the next section, since they are our principal narrative sources for what happens next.

3 Maccabees. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Maccabees. It tells of a persecution of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy 4, involving drunken elephants turned on the Jews in the hippodrome and a miraculous deliverance. Tier Five.

Wisdom of Solomon. Written in Greek in Alexandria, probably in the first century B.C, philosophically sophisticated and clearly not by Solomon.

Psalms of Solomon. Eighteen psalms written in Jerusalem in the mid-first century B.C, reacting to Pompey. We will return to them.

Part Six · The Little Horn

28. Antiochus 4 Epiphanes

He is the most important single human being in the four hundred years, because more prophetic Scripture is devoted to him than to any other figure of the period, and because what he did to the Temple is held up by the Lord Jesus Himself as the pattern of a still-future desolation.

Who he was. He was the younger son of Antiochus 3. After the Treaty of Apamea in 188 B.C he was sent to Rome as a hostage, and he spent roughly thirteen years there. That detail is worth stopping on. The man who would attempt to obliterate the worship of the God of Israel spent his formative years absorbing the culture of the empire that would eventually destroy the Temple. When his brother Seleucus 4 was assassinated in 175 B.C, Antiochus, who had been exchanged out of Rome and was in Athens, moved quickly, pushed aside his nephew Demetrius, who was still a hostage in Rome, and took the throne.

The name he gave himself. He struck coins calling himself Theos Epiphanes, "God Manifest." Later coins add Nikephoros, "Bringer of Victory," and depict him with the features of Olympian Zeus. This is Tier Two evidence, physical coins in museum cases, and it is decisive. He publicly and officially claimed deity. Polybius records that contemporaries mocked the title by calling him Epimanes, "the Madman," a pun on Epiphanes (Histories 26.1), and describes his erratic behavior: leaving the palace unattended, wandering the streets, drinking with commoners, bathing in the public baths, showering strangers with gifts and then humiliating them.

Now set the coins and Polybius beside Daniel:

Daniel 11:21

And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.

He was not the legitimate heir. The throne belonged to Demetrius. He obtained it by maneuver, not by right, and Daniel calls it flatteries.

Daniel 11:36 to 37

And the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done. Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.

And in Daniel 8, the character portrait already quoted: a king of fierce countenance, understanding dark sentences, mighty but not by his own power, destroying wonderfully, causing craft to prosper, and destroying many by peace (Daniel 8:23 to 25).

29. Jason, Menelaus, and the Sale of the Priesthood

Here is the part that Christians almost always miss, and it is the part that matters most for us. The catastrophe did not begin with a Greek king. It began with Jewish leaders who wanted to be Greek.

99 1 Maccabees 1:11 to 15

In those days went there out of Israel wicked men, who persuaded many, saying, Let us go and make a covenant with the heathen that are round about us: for since we departed from them we have had much sorrow. So this device pleased them well. Then certain of the people were so forward herein, that they went to the king, who gave them licence to do after the ordinances of the heathen: whereupon they built a place of exercise at Jerusalem according to the customs of the heathen: and made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the heathen, and were sold to do mischief.

Read that again. They went to the king and asked permission. The gymnasium was built at their request.

And the phrase "made themselves uncircumcised" refers to a surgical procedure, called epispasm, undergone by Jewish men who competed naked in the Greek athletic games and were ashamed of the covenant sign in their flesh. Paul alludes to the practice when he tells the Corinthians that a man called while circumcised should not become uncircumcised (1 Corinthians 7:18).

The sequence of events:

175 B.C. Jason, brother of the legitimate high priest Onias 3, went to Antiochus 4 and bought the high priesthood with a bribe, offering a higher annual tribute. He also paid extra for permission to establish a gymnasium and an ephebate in Jerusalem and to enroll the men of Jerusalem as citizens of a Greek-style polis to be called Antioch. Onias 3 was deposed.

2 Maccabees 4:13 to 15

Now such was the height of Greek fashions, and increase of heathenish manners, through the exceeding profaneness of Jason, that ungodly wretch, and no high priest; that the priests had no courage to serve any more at the altar, but despising the temple, and neglecting the sacrifices, hastened to be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus called them forth; not setting by the honours of their fathers, but liking the glory of the Grecians best of all.

The priests abandoned the altar to go to the gymnasium. That is where the nation was.

172 B.C. Menelaus, who was not even of the high priestly line, outbid Jason and bought the office out from under him. Jason fled. Menelaus could not pay what he had promised, so he stole gold vessels from the Temple to cover it (2 Maccabees 4:32). When the deposed Onias 3 publicly exposed the theft, Menelaus arranged his murder (2 Maccabees 4:33 to 34). The murder of a righteous high priest by a purchaser of the office is the low point of the whole period.

169 B.C. Antiochus 4 invaded Egypt, and while he was there a rumor spread that he was dead. Jason returned with a force and attacked Jerusalem to retake the office. Antiochus, hearing of it, treated the city as being in revolt. On his way back he entered the Temple and plundered it.

1 Maccabees 1:21 to 24

And entered proudly into the sanctuary, and took away the golden altar, and the candlestick of light, and all the vessels thereof, and the table of the shewbread, and the pouring vessels, and the vials, and the censers of gold, and the veil, and the crowns, and the golden ornaments that were before the temple, all which he pulled off. He took also the silver and the gold, and the precious vessels: also he took the hidden treasures which he found. And when he had taken all away, he went into his own land, having made a great massacre, and spoken very proudly.

168 B.C. Antiochus invaded Egypt again. This time Rome intervened. The Roman envoy Gaius Popillius Laenas met him outside Alexandria, handed him the Senate's ultimatum to withdraw, and when Antiochus said he would consult his advisers, Laenas drew a circle in the sand around the king's feet and told him to answer before he stepped out of it. Antiochus withdrew. The episode is recorded by Polybius (Histories 29.27) and by Livy (History of Rome 45.12), and it is the single most humiliating moment of his reign.

Daniel had this too, and named the fleet:

Daniel 11:29 to 30

At the time appointed he shall return, and come toward the south; but it shall not be as the former, or as the latter. For the ships of Chittim shall come against him: therefore he shall be grieved, and return, and have indignation against the holy covenant: so shall he do; he shall even return, and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant.

Chittim is a term for the western maritime powers, used in the Old Testament of Cyprus and the coastlands. The Dead Sea Scrolls use the same word, Kittim, for the Romans. Antiochus was turned back by ships from the west, and he came home grieved, and he took it out on the covenant people, and he did it in league with Jews who had already forsaken the covenant. The verse describes both the humiliation and the collaboration.

30. The Abomination That Maketh Desolate

167 B.C. Antiochus issued a decree, and it was not a tax measure. It was an attempt to abolish the religion of Israel by law.

1 Maccabees 1:41 to 50

Moreover king Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom, that all should be one people, and every one should leave his laws: so all the heathen agreed according to the commandment of the king. Yea, many also of the Israelites consented to his religion, and sacrificed unto idols, and profaned the sabbath. For the king had sent letters by messengers unto Jerusalem and the cities of Juda, that they should follow the strange laws of the land, and forbid burnt offerings, and sacrifice, and drink offerings, in the temple; and that they should profane the sabbaths and festival days: and pollute the sanctuary and holy people: set up altars, and groves, and chapels of idols, and sacrifice swine's flesh, and unclean beasts: that they should also leave their children uncircumcised, and make their souls abominable with all manner of uncleanness and profanation: to the end they might forget the law, and change all the ordinances. And whosoever would not do according to the commandment of the king, he said, he should die.

Look carefully at what was targeted, because it is a specific list, and it is the exact list a pronomian believer would expect an adversary to attack:

The daily sacrifice and the offerings

The Sabbath

The appointed feasts The dietary distinctions, enforced by making Jews eat swine's flesh

Circumcision, the sign of the covenant

The Scriptures themselves, which were torn up and burned (1 Maccabees 1:56 to 57)

The enemy did not attack the idea of God. He attacked the commandments that mark out a people as belonging to God. That is worth sitting with.

1 Maccabees 1:54

Now the fifteenth day of the month Casleu, in the hundred forty and fifth year, they set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and builded idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.

An altar to Olympian Zeus was erected on the altar of burnt offering, and swine were sacrificed on it. 2

Maccabees adds that the Temple was renamed for Zeus and filled with riot and revelry (2 Maccabees 6:2 to 4).

Now put Daniel beside it.

Daniel 11:31

And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.

Daniel 8:11 to 12

Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised; and prospered.

And the response of the faithful, described in a single devastating verse:

Daniel 11:32 to 35

And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits. And they that understand among the people shall instruct many: yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil, many days. Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little help: but many shall cleave to them with flatteries. And some of them of understanding shall fall, to try them, and to purge them, and to make them white, even to the time of the end: for it is yet appointed a time.

"The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits." That is the Maccabean revolt, prophesied by name of character three and a half centuries in advance. "They that understand among the people shall instruct many" is the teaching remnant, and their reward in that generation was the sword, the flame, captivity, and spoil.

Teacher's Note · On the 2300 Days

Daniel 8:14 gives the duration as two thousand and three hundred days, or literally two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings, until the sanctuary is cleansed. Two readings are common. If the phrase counts full days, 2300 days is about six years and four months, which reaches back from the rededication in December 164 B.C to roughly 170 B.C, the period of Menelaus, the murder of Onias 3, and the first plundering. If the phrase counts individual evening and morning sacrifices, that is 1150 days, roughly three years and two months, which fits the interval from the desecration of the altar to its rededication very closely. Godly interpreters have taken both. This is a genuine open question and belongs in a note, not a sermon point. Neither reading is necessary to see that the prophecy landed.

31. The Martyrs

The persecution produced the first sustained body of martyr literature in Jewish history, and the New Testament refers to it.

Mothers who circumcised their sons were executed with their infants hung about their necks (1

Maccabees 1:60 to 61). A group who fled to caves to keep the Sabbath were attacked on that day, and refused to defend themselves, and a thousand died (1 Maccabees 2:29 to 38). Eleazar, an aged scribe, was tortured to death for refusing to eat swine's flesh, and refused even the offer of his friends to let him substitute lawful meat and merely pretend, on the grounds that the young would be led astray by his pretense (2 Maccabees 6:18 to 31). A mother and her seven sons were tortured to death one by one, each confessing hope of resurrection, the mother exhorting them in their own language and dying last (2

Maccabees 7).

Now read the roll of faith in Hebrews with these accounts in view:

Hebrews 11:35 to 38

Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: and others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

"Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection." That phrase corresponds with striking exactness to the Maccabean martyrs who were offered release if they would eat, and refused, in hope of the resurrection. And "they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth" is a nearly verbatim description of the faithful hiding from Antiochus (1 Maccabees 2:28 to 31; 2 Maccabees 5:27; 2 Maccabees 6:11).

Teacher's Note · What This Tells Us

The writer to the Hebrews assumed his readers knew this history. He did not explain the allusion, which means it was common knowledge in the first-century assembly. That is a good argument for teaching it in ours. It does not make 1 or 2 Maccabees Scripture. It means the Holy Spirit, inspiring the writer of Hebrews, honored the faith of men and women whose story is recorded outside the canon. Faithfulness is not confined to the pages of the Bible, and God keeps a book of remembrance for those who fear Him (Malachi 3:16).

32. Mattathias and the Revolt

The revolt began in a village called Modein, about seventeen miles northwest of Jerusalem, when a royal officer arrived to enforce the sacrifice.

1 Maccabees 2:19 to 22

Then Mattathias answered and spake with a loud voice, Though all the nations that are under the king's dominion obey him, and fall away every one from the religion of their fathers, and give consent to his commandments: yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers.

God forbid that we should forsake the law and the judgments. We will not hearken to the king's words, to go from our religion, either on the right hand, or the left.

A Jew stepped forward to sacrifice on the pagan altar. Mattathias, a priest of the course of Joarib, killed him and the king's officer, tore down the altar, and cried out through the city:

Code: 1 Maccabees 2:27.

Whosoever is zealous of the law, and maintaineth the covenant, let him follow me.

He and his five sons fled to the hills. The book explicitly compares his act to that of Phinehas (1 Maccabees 2:26, 54; Numbers 25:7 to 13).

The Sabbath decision. Early in the revolt a thousand faithful Jews died without resisting because they would not fight on the Sabbath. Mattathias and his company then made a ruling:

1 Maccabees 2:40 to 41

And they said one to another, If we all do as our brethren have done, and fight not for our lives and laws against the heathen, they will now quickly root us out of the earth. At that time therefore they decreed, saying, Whosoever shall come to make battle with us on the sabbath day, we will fight against him; neither will we die all, as our brethren that were murdered in the secret places.

Teacher's Note · Fighting on the Sabbath

This is a serious question and deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. The decision made at Modein was to fight when attacked on the Sabbath, in self-defense, not to conduct offensive operations on it. That distinction matters. The law itself already permits, and in some cases commands, work on the Sabbath that preserves life: the priests labored in the sanctuary on the Sabbath and were blameless (Matthew 12:5), circumcision was performed on the eighth day even when it fell on a Sabbath (John 7:22 to 23), and an animal fallen into a pit was pulled out (Matthew 12:11 to 12). The Lord Jesus states the governing principle plainly: it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath days (Matthew 12:12), and the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). Preserving life is doing well. The Maccabean ruling was, in this respect, sound, and it is also worth noting that the enemy chose that day precisely because he knew what the Sabbath meant to them.

Mattathias died in 166 B.C, charging his sons to be zealous for the law and to give their lives for the covenant of their fathers (1 Maccabees 2:49 to 70).

33. Judas Maccabeus and the Cleansing of the Temple

Judas, surnamed Maccabeus, took command. The nickname is usually explained as deriving from a word for hammer.

His campaign was a masterclass in irregular warfare against superior forces:

Wadi Haramia and the death of Apollonius, whose sword Judas carried for the rest of his life (1 Maccabees 3:10 to 12)

Bethh-horon, where Seron's force was routed on the ascent (1 Maccabees 3:13 to 24)

Emmaus, 165 B.C, where Judas divided the Seleucid army by attacking the camp while a detachment hunted for him in the hills (1 Maccabees 3:38 through 4:25)

Bethh-zur, 164 B.C, against Lysias, opening the road to Jerusalem (1 Maccabees 4:28 to 35)

Then, in December 164 B.C, exactly three years after the desecration, they took the Temple mount, found the sanctuary desolate and the courts overgrown with shrubs, tore down the defiled altar, built a new one of unhewn stones according to the law (Exodus 20:25), made new vessels, and rekindled the lamps.

1 Maccabees 4:52 to 56

Now on the five and twentieth day of the ninth month, which is called the month Casleu, in the hundred forty and eighth year, they rose up betimes in the morning, and offered sacrifice according to the law upon the new altar of burnt offerings, which they had made. Look, at what time and what day the heathen had profaned it, even in that was it dedicated with songs, and citherns, and harps, and cymbals. Then all the people fell upon their faces, worshipping and praising the God of heaven, who had given them good success. And so they kept the dedication of the altar eight days, and offered burnt offerings with gladness, and sacrificed the sacrifice of deliverance and praise.

1 Maccabees 4:59

Moreover Judas and his brethren with all the congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness.

This is the origin of the Feast of Dedication, in Hebrew Hanukkah. And the New Testament records that the Lord Jesus was present in the Temple during it:

John 10:22 to 23

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch.

Teacher's Note · The Feast of Dedication and the Appointed Times

This one requires care, and it needs to be said openly rather than avoided. The Feast of Dedication is not one of the appointed times of the Lord in Leviticus 23. It was ordained by men, by Judas and the congregation, as the text says in so many words (1 Maccabees 4:59). It stands in the same category as Purim, which was likewise established by Mordecai and the Jews upon themselves and their seed (Esther 9:27 to 28). A national day of the thanksgiving for a real deliverance is not sin, and the Lord's presence in the Temple during it is recorded without a word of rebuke, just as He kept company with the nation on other occasions. But it must not be leveled up to the status of a commanded feast, and the familiar story of a single cruise of oil lasting eight days is not found in 1 or 2 Maccabees at all. It appears first in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Shabbat 21b), centuries later. Tier Five. The reason the feast lasted eight days is given plainly in the source: eight days is the length of the Feast of Tabernacles, which they had been unable to keep in the mountains that year (2 Maccabees 10:6). Teach what the earliest sources say, and label the later legend as legend.

The death of Antiochus 4. He died in 164 B.C in Persia, on campaign, after a failed attempt to plunder a temple at Elymais. Polybius records the attempted temple robbery and his death (Histories 31.9). 1 Maccabees 6 and 2 Maccabees 9 both give accounts, with 2 Maccabees adding a graphic deathbed repentance that is Tier Four rhetoric. Daniel had said of the little horn that "he shall be broken without hand" (Daniel 8:25), and he was: not killed in battle by a human enemy but struck down by illness far from home.

34. Jonathan, Simon, and Independence

The revolt did not end with the rededication, because the Seleucid garrison still held the citadel in Jerusalem, called the Acra, and the religious victory had to be turned into a political one.

Judas continued fighting. He made a treaty with Rome in 161 B.C, the text of which 1 Maccabees preserves (1 Maccabees 8:23 to 32). It is the first formal contact between the Jewish nation and the power that would eventually destroy the Temple, and 1 Maccabees 8 contains a fascinating and rather naive Jewish assessment of the Roman republic as a nation of faithful allies who never wore a crown. Judas was killed at Elasa in 160 B.C, fighting against overwhelming odds and refusing to flee (1 Maccabees 9:1 to 22).

Jonathan (160 to 142 B.C) succeeded him and proved to be a superb politician. In 152 B.C, with two rival Seleucid claimants bidding for his support, he accepted appointment as high priest from Alexander Balas and put on the holy garments at the Feast of Tabernacles (1 Maccabees 10:21).

Teacher's Note · Why This Moment Divided the Nation

This is the fracture point for everything in Part Seven, so it must be understood clearly. The Hasmoneans were priests, of the course of Joarib, and therefore Aaronic. That is not in question. But they were not of the high priestly line of Zadok, which had held the office since Solomon (1 Kings 2:35), and which Ezekiel singles out for honor (Ezekiel 44:15). And the office was conferred on Jonathan not by God, not by lineage, but by a Greek pretender to the Syrian throne in exchange for military support. To a great many devout Jews who had backed the revolt precisely because they cared about the law, this looked like the very thing they had fought against: the high priesthood as a political prize.

Some accepted it as a necessity. Some walked away. That division produced the parties we meet in the Gospels.

Jonathan was captured by treachery and executed by the Seleucid general Trypho in 142 B.C.

Simon (142 to 135 B.C), the last surviving brother, achieved what none of the others had. In 142 B.C the Seleucid king Demetrius 2 granted full remission of tribute, which was effectively recognition of independence.

1 Maccabees 13:41 to 42

Thus the yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel in the hundred and seventieth year. Then the people of Israel began to write in their instruments and contracts, In the first year of Simon the high priest, the governor and leader of the Jews.

In 141 B.C the Acra finally fell and the garrison was expelled (1 Maccabees 13:49 to 52). In 140 B.C a great assembly formally confirmed Simon and his descendants in office, and the decree was engraved on bronze tablets and set up in the Temple precincts. 1 Maccabees preserves it, including the clause we noted at the beginning of this study:

1 Maccabees 14:41

Also that the Jews and priests were well pleased that Simon should be their governor and high priest for ever, until there should arise a faithful prophet.

That is an extraordinary sentence. The nation is granting a hereditary priesthood and rulership, and in the same breath admitting that it has no prophetic authority to do so, and that the arrangement stands only until God speaks again. They knew. They put their own provisional status into the founding document of the dynasty.

The description of Simon's brief golden age is one of the most beautiful passages in the apocryphal books, and it deliberately echoes the language of Micah and Zechariah:

He made peace in the land, and Israel rejoiced with great joy: for every man sat under his vine and his fig tree, and there was none to fray them.

Simon was murdered in 135 B.C, along with two of his sons, at a banquet at the fortress of Dok near Jericho, by his own son-in-law Ptolemy son of Abubus, who was trying to seize power (1 Maccabees 16:11 to 17). The book of 1 Maccabees ends there, with the accession of Simon's surviving son John Hyrcanus.

On the sources for this period. 1 Maccabees is a Tier Three source of real quality: written in Hebrew, probably within a generation or two of the events, restrained in tone, preserving documents, and notable for the fact that it does not report miracles. 2 Maccabees is Tier Four: written in Greek, an abridgment of the lost five-volume work of Jason of Cyrene, openly rhetorical, covering a shorter period and stopping earlier, theologically richer on resurrection and martyrdom but far more given to wonders and to round numbers. Where they disagree on detail, 1 Maccabees is generally the better witness. Josephus draws heavily on 1 Maccabees for this period in Antiquities Book 12 and 13, which is why he is largely a secondary witness here rather than an independent one.

Part Seven · The Rise of the Sects

Open the Gospels and the parties are simply there, fully formed, with no introduction. Matthew records John the Baptist confronting "many of the Pharisees and Sadducees" at the Jordan (Matthew 3:7) as though the reader already knows who they are. The Old Testament never mentions either group. They were born in the years we have just walked through, and specifically in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt.

The foundational reference is Josephus, who introduces all three schools at once, and he places the introduction in the period of Jonathan, around 150 B.C:

Josephus, Antiquities 13.171

At this time there were three sects among the Jews, who had different opinions concerning human actions; the one was called the sect of the Pharisees, another the sect of the Sadducees, and the other the sect of the Essenes.

That is our earliest datable notice. It does not necessarily mean they were founded at that exact moment, only that they were recognizable groups by then. The roots go back further, into the crisis under Antiochus.

35. Where the Sadducees Came From

The name. Almost certainly derived from Zadok, the priest who remained loyal to David during Absalom's revolt and to Solomon during Adonijah's attempted coup, and whose house was given the high priesthood in place of the house of Eli.

1 Kings 2:35

And the king put Benaiah the son of Jehoiada in his room over the host: and Zadok the priest did the king put in the room of Abiathar.

Ezekiel singles out this line for honor in his vision of the restored Temple:

Ezekiel 44:15

But the priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from me, they shall come near to me to minister unto me, and they shall stand before me to offer unto me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord God.

In Hebrew, "sons of Zadok" is bene Tsadoq, and the party name Tsedduqim, rendered Sadducees, most likely comes from it. A secondary suggestion connects the name to tsedeq, meaning righteous, but the priestly derivation is far better supported.

The social base. The Sadducees were the party of the Temple aristocracy: the chief priestly families, the wealthy landowners, and those who held office. Josephus says so plainly, noting that this doctrine is received by only a few, but those of the greatest dignity, and that they are able to persuade none but the rich (Antiquities 18.17; Antiquities 13.298). Acts confirms the same connection, describing "the high priest, and all they that were with him, (which is the sect of the Sadducees)," (Acts 5:17).

Their doctrinal positions, in Scripture's own summary:

Acts 23:8

For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both.

Josephus adds that they rejected the notion of fate entirely, holding that men are the sole cause of their own good and evil (Antiquities 13.173), and that they held the soul to perish with the body (Antiquities 18.16). And critically, on the question of tradition:

Josephus, Antiquities 13.297

The Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the law of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers.

How they arose. When the Hasmoneans took the high priesthood in 152 B.C, and especially once they combined it with civil and then royal power, the priestly establishment reconstituted itself around the new dynasty. The Sadducean party is essentially that establishment: those who accepted the arrangement, held the offices, ran the Temple, and later negotiated the accommodation with Rome. Their political survival depended on the Temple and on stability, which is precisely why they reacted the way they did to a preacher whose followers might bring Roman intervention:

John 11:47 to 48

Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation.

A crucial point for a Torah-observant reader. The Sadducees said they held only to the written word. That sounds admirable, and in one respect it was: they were right to reject binding traditions that were not commanded. But holding the written text and understanding it are two different things, and the Lord Jesus told them so in the sharpest possible terms:

Matthew 22:29

Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.

And then He proved the resurrection to them out of the Torah itself, from the one section of Scripture they most respected:

Matthew 22:31 to 32

But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

When they disappeared. With the Temple. The Sadducean party had no existence apart from the sacrificial system and the priestly hierarchy, and when Titus burned the sanctuary in A.D 70 the party evaporated within a generation. Pharisaac Judaism survived because it was built around the study and application of the law, which can be carried anywhere.

36. Where the Pharisees Came From

The name. From the Hebrew perushim, meaning the separated ones. Whether the name was originally self-chosen or given by opponents is debated. The sense is clear enough: separation from ritual defilement, from the practices of the nations, and from those who did not keep the law as they understood it.

The root. The Pharisees almost certainly grew out of the group 1 Maccabees calls the Hasidim, in Greek Asidaioi, meaning the pious or the loyal ones.

1 Maccabees 2:42

Then came there unto him a company of Assideans, who were mighty men of Israel, even all such as were voluntarily devoted unto the law.

These were the men who joined Mattathias not for national independence but because the law was under attack. And the very next thing 1 Maccabees tells us about them is decisive for understanding the split that followed. When Alcimus, a man of Aaron's line, was appointed high priest by the Seleucids, the Hasidim were the first to seek peace with him, on the grounds that a priest of the seed of Aaron had come:

1 Maccabees 7:12 to 14

Then did there assemble unto Alcimus and Bacchides a company of scribes, to require justice. Now the Assideans were the first among the children of Israel that sought peace of them: for said they, One that is a priest of the seed of Aaron is come with this army, and he will do us no wrong.

Sixty of them were killed for their trouble (1 Maccabees 7:16). But notice the priorities. Their concern was the legitimacy of the priesthood and the freedom to keep the law, not political sovereignty. Once religious freedom was secured, their interest in the war ended. When the Hasmoneans went on to make themselves priest-kings, the heirs of the Hasidim were the ones who objected.

Notice also the phrase "a company of scribes" in that passage. The scribes and this pious movement are already associated in the 150s B.C.

The break with the Hasmoneans. Josephus records the moment. John Hyrcanus I had been a disciple of the Pharisees. At a feast he asked them to tell him if they saw anything wrong in him, and one Eleazar told him he should lay down the high priesthood and content himself with governing the people, alleging that his mother had been a captive and therefore his priestly qualification was in question. Hyrcanus was enraged, and when the Pharisees as a body proposed only a light punishment for the man, he broke with them entirely, abolished the observances they had established, and went over to the Sadducees (Antiquities 13.288 to 298).

Teacher's Note · The Same Story in Two Traditions

The Talmud records a strikingly similar account, but sets it in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus rather than Hyrcanus, with a sage named Judah ben Gedidiah making the accusation (b. Kiddushin 66a). Both cannot be exactly right. Josephus is closer in time and is Tier Four here; the Talmudic version is Tier Five. What both traditions agree on, and what is therefore likely historical, is that at some point a Hasmonean ruler was publicly challenged over his fitness for the high priesthood by this party, and that a permanent and bitter breach followed. That breach shaped Judean politics for a century.

Their doctrine. The Pharisees held the resurrection of the dead, angels and spirits, a coming judgment with reward and punishment, and a providence that works alongside human responsibility (Acts 23:8; Antiquities 18.12 to 15). On these points they were right, and the New Testament says so. Paul, on trial, could stand in the Sanhedrin and claim the Pharisaic position as his own:

Acts 23:6

But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question.

Their popular base. Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees had the ordinary people, and Josephus notes it repeatedly. They were not primarily priests. They were craftsmen, farmers, and teachers who took the holiness required of priests and voluntarily applied it to everyday life, eating ordinary meals in a state of ritual purity, tithing scrupulously, and organizing themselves into fellowship groups. That impulse, to take God's holiness seriously in the kitchen and the field and not only in the sanctuary, is genuinely admirable, and it is the reason they were loved by the common people.

Their failure. The Lord Jesus never rebuked them for keeping the commandments. He rebuked them on two specific counts, and it is important for a teacher to state both accurately.

First, for elevating human tradition to the level of commandment, and then using tradition to nullify commandment:

Mark 7:6 to 9

He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written,

This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.

Mark 7:13

Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

Second, for meticulous observance of the small things while abandoning the weightier matters:

Matthew 23:23

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

Read that last clause carefully, because it is the whole matter in six words: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. He does not tell them to stop tithing herbs. He tells them to do justice and mercy and faith without dropping the rest.

That is not an abolition of the law. It is a rebuke for keeping the easy parts and skipping the hard ones.

Teacher's Note · What We Should and Should Not Take From the Pharisees

It is common in modern preaching to use "Pharisee" as shorthand for anyone who takes obedience seriously. That usage is careless and it is unbiblical. The Pharisees were not condemned for obeying God. They were condemned for hypocrisy, for pride, for laying burdens on others they would not carry themselves (Matthew 23:4), for loving the chief seats (Matthew 23:6), and for substituting their own additions for God's actual commandments. Our Lord's own instruction was to hear what they taught from Moses' seat while refusing to imitate their conduct (Matthew 23:2 to 3). The warning for us is exact and it cuts both ways: a believer who loves God's law must guard against turning his own convictions and applications into commandments binding on others, and must not let precision in small matters replace judgment, mercy, and faith.

37. The Essenes and the Scrolls of the Dead Sea

The Essenes are never named in the New Testament, and yet we now know more about them than about any other group of the period, because in 1947 a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock into a cave at Qumran.

What Josephus and Philo say. Josephus gives the longest description of the three schools to the Essenes, far longer than to the other two (War 2.119 to 161). He describes a community that despises riches and holds property in common, that avoids marriage in its main branch though another order permitted it, that observes ritual bathing before meals, that eats in silence in a communal refectory as a sacred act, that reveres Moses so highly that blaspheming his name is a capital offense, and that is stricter than any other Jews in resting on the seventh day, refusing even to move a vessel or relieve themselves on it. He gives their number as about four thousand. Philo describes them similarly in Every Good Man Is Free 75 to 91, also giving the number four thousand, and Pliny the Elder places a community of them on the western shore of the Dead Sea, north of Engedi (Natural History 5.17).

What Qumran added. The settlement excavated at Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, and the roughly nine hundred manuscripts recovered from eleven caves nearby, transformed the picture. The scrolls fall into three groups:

Biblical manuscripts. Fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther. The great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1 is a nearly complete copy of Isaiah roughly a thousand years older than the previously oldest known Hebrew manuscript of the book, and it is substantially the same text. That is Tier Two evidence of the transmission of Scripture, and it is one of the most powerful apologetic facts available to a teacher.

Known non-biblical Jewish works. Copies of 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and Aramaic Levi, showing what this community read.

Sectarian compositions. The community's own writings, which is where the history is.

The key sectarian documents:

The Community Rule (1.Q.S). The constitution of the group: entry procedures, a two-year probation, common property, a hierarchy, discipline, and a stark theology of two spirits, of light and darkness, in which every man walks.

- The Damascus Document (C.D). Known already from copies found in a Cairo synagogue storeroom in 1896, and then confirmed at Qumran. It describes a movement that went into exile "in the land of Damascus," and it is unusually severe on Sabbath observance and on calendar.

- The War Scroll (1.Q.M). A liturgical battle plan for the final war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, in which the enemy is called the Kittim.

- The Habakkuk Commentary (1.Q.p.Hab). A verse-by-verse reading of Habakkuk applied to the community's own time, introducing the Teacher of Righteousness and his enemy the Wicked Priest.

- 4.Q.M.M.T, sometimes called Some of the Works of the Law. A letter setting out roughly two dozen points of legal disagreement, almost all concerning purity and the Temple, which appear to be the reason the group separated. Its positions are frequently the stricter ones that rabbinic sources attribute to the Sadducees, which has complicated the older picture considerably.

- The Temple Scroll (11.Q.T). A rewritten Torah presenting an idealized Temple and its laws in God's own voice.

- The Copper Scroll (3.Q.15). A list of buried treasure engraved on metal, unlike anything else in the collection.

- 4.Q.521, sometimes called the Messianic Apocalypse, which speaks of the works the Lord will do in the days of His Anointed, including healing the wounded, giving life to the dead, and preaching good news to the poor. Compare our Lord's answer to John's disciples (Matthew 11:4 to 5; Luke 7:22).

- 11.Q.Melchizedek (11.Q.13), which presents Melchizedek as a heavenly deliverer proclaiming liberty in a final jubilee. Compare Hebrews 7.

- The calendar. The Qumran community followed a 364-day solar calendar rather than the lunar-solar reckoning used at the Temple, which meant they kept the appointed times on different days from the Jerusalem priesthood. Calendar was not a side issue to them. It was the fault line, and it is important enough that the next part of this study is devoted to it.

- Who the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest were. The commentaries speak of a priestly teacher to whom God made known the mysteries of the prophets, and a Wicked Priest who pursued him to his place of exile, even on the Day of Atonement. The most common identification places the Teacher in the mid-second century B.C and the Wicked Priest as one of the early Hasmoneans, often Jonathan or Simon. This is a reconstruction, not a certainty.

Teacher's Note · Guarding Against Overreach on the Scrolls

Two errors are common. The first is the popular claim that the scrolls contain suppressed gospels or prove that Christianity was invented. They contain nothing of the kind.

There is no New Testament text at Qumran and no Christian document. The second error is the equally popular claim that John the Baptist or Jesus was an Essene. There is no evidence for it. The similarities that get cited, wilderness location, immersion, and an expectation of a coming Anointed One, are shared features of the period. The differences are enormous: our Lord ate with publicans and sinners, touched lepers, and sent His disciples into towns, all of which are the opposite of the Qumran program of separation. What the scrolls genuinely give us is priceless in two ways. They confirm the extraordinary stability of the Hebrew text of Scripture across a thousand years, and they show us the range of Jewish belief in the century before Christ, which makes the Gospels read far less strangely.

38. The Zugot, the Sanhedrin, and the Synagogue

The zugot. Jewish tradition names five successive pairs of teachers who carried the chain of transmission from Antigonus of Socho to the generation of Herod. The list, from Avot 1:4 to 12, is:

1. Yose ben Yoezer and Yose ben Yohanan, in the days of the persecution under Antiochus

2. Joshua ben Perahiah and Nittai the Arbelite

3. Judah ben Tabbai and Simeon ben Shetach, in the days of Alexander Jannaeus and Salome Alexandra

4. Shemaiah and Abtalion, in the days of Herod

5. Hillel and Shammai

Josephus independently mentions two of these figures under Greek forms of their names, Pollion and Samaias, as men who courageously opposed the court's capitulation to the young Herod (Antiquities 15.3 to 4, 370), which gives the tradition an external anchor at that point.

Hillel and Shammai founded the two great rival schools whose disputes fill the Mishnah. Hillel's school was generally the more lenient in application, Shammai's the stricter. The disputes are almost never about whether to obey but about how, which is itself an important observation about the period.

Teacher's Note · A Word on the Chain

Reading the chain of Avot 1:1 as a claim to an unbroken oral law delivered at Sinai alongside the written law is the traditional rabbinic understanding, and we do not hold it. The Scriptures themselves are the deposit (2 Timothy 3:16 to 17), and the Lord Jesus set human tradition and God's commandment in direct opposition (Mark 7:8 to 9). What the chain does preserve, and preserve usefully, is a historical memory of who was teaching in Israel across these centuries, and the names are almost certainly real even where the theology built on them is not.

The Sanhedrin. The council of the Gospels is called in Greek the synedrion, and its ancestor is the gerousia named in the charter of Antiochus 3 around 198 B.C. By the New Testament period it is a body of seventy-one, presided over by the high priest, containing both Sadducees and Pharisees, meeting in Jerusalem, with authority over religious and much civil law, though the power of capital punishment was restricted under Rome (John 18:31). We see it in action at the trial of our Lord (Matthew 26:59), in the arrests of the apostles (Acts 4:5 to 7; Acts 5:21), in the trial of Stephen (Acts 6:12), and in the hearing of Paul (Acts 22:30 through 23:10).

The synagogue. Nobody knows exactly when or where the synagogue began. The most reasonable reconstruction is that it developed among the exiles in Babylon, where there was no Temple, and matured through the Persian and Greek periods until it existed in every town. By the first century it is universal and unremarked. Our Lord taught in synagogues as a matter of course (Matthew 4:23; Luke 4:16), and James can say in the council at Jerusalem:

Acts 15:21

For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath day.

Archaeologically, first-century synagogue buildings have been identified at Gamla, Masada, Herodium, Magdalar, and elsewhere. The Theodotus Inscription, a Greek stone plaque found in Jerusalem, records a priest and synagogue ruler named Theodotus who built a synagogue for the reading of the law and the teaching of the commandments, along with a guest house for travelers from abroad. It is generally dated before A.D 70 and is Tier Two evidence for a synagogue functioning in Jerusalem itself, in the shadow of the Temple.

That is the institution the apostles will use as their delivery system for the Gospel across the empire. Paul's standard practice was to go to the synagogue first in every city (Acts 13:14; Acts 14:1; Acts 17:1 to 2; Acts 18:4). Without the four hundred years, there is no synagogue network, and the missionary strategy of the book of Acts is impossible.

39. Zealots, Herodians, Boethusians, Samaritans

The Zealots and the Sicarii. Josephus describes a fourth philosophy founded by Judas of Galilee at the time of the census under Quirinius in A.D 6, agreeing with the Pharisees in everything except an unconquerable passion for liberty and a refusal to call any man lord (Antiquities 18.4 to 10, 23). Gamaliel names him in the Sanhedrin:

Acts 5:37

After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed.

The Sicarii, named from the short dagger called a sica, were assassins who killed collaborators in crowds during festivals. One of the twelve apostles is called Simon Zelotes, that is, Simon the Zealot (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), and the presence of a former Zealot and a former tax collector in the same group of twelve is one of the quiet miracles of the Gospels.

The Herodians. Mentioned three times in the Gospels, always in alliance with the Pharisees against Jesus (Matthew 22:16; Mark 3:6; Mark 12:13). Not a religious sect but a political faction supporting the Herodian house. The alliance is telling: on the question of tribute to Caesar they were natural enemies, and they set the trap together anyway.

The Boethiusians. A group named in rabbinic sources, associated with the priestly house of Boethus, whom Herod elevated to the high priesthood. They are usually treated as closely allied with or a branch of the Sadducees, and they figure in disputes about the counting of the omer and the date of the Feast of Weeks.

The Samaritans. Discussed in Part Four. By the first century they are a fully separate community with their own Pentateuch, their own priesthood, their own site of worship, and their own expectation of a coming restorer called the Taheb, which stands behind the Samaritan woman's statement that Messiah is coming (John 4:25).

The Therapeutae. A contemplative Jewish community near Alexandria described by Philo in On the Contemplative Life, living in solitude, studying, and gathering for a sacred vigil every fiftieth day. Whether they were connected to the Essenes is unknown.

The am ha'aretz. Not a sect but a category: the people of the land, the ordinary Jews who did not belong to any fellowship and did not observe the purity practices of the Pharisaic groups. The contempt in which they were held surfaces in a single line in John:

John 7:49

But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.

Those are the people to whom our Lord principally went.

40. The Tradition of the Elders

One more thing has to be traced, because it is the single most important religious development of the four hundred years apart from the Scriptures themselves.

The chain of causation is easy to follow and entirely understandable at each step. There is a written commandment. The commandment must be applied to a situation it does not explicitly address.

A respected teacher gives a ruling. The ruling is remembered, repeated, and eventually treated as authoritative. Over generations, the rulings accumulate into a body of practice that stands alongside the text. And then, at some point, a ruling is used to get around the very commandment it was meant to protect.

Our Lord gave the textbook example:

Mark 7:10 to 13

For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought

for his father or his mother; making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

A man could declare his assets dedicated to God and thereby escape the duty of supporting his aging parents. The commandment is explicit (Exodus 20:12; Exodus 21:17). The tradition is a workaround. And the Lord's verdict is not that the tradition was merely unnecessary but that it made the word of God of none effect.

This tells us exactly where the line runs, and it is a line every serious believer has to be able to see.

Applying a commandment is necessary and good. Scripture itself models it. Nehemiah 8:8 describes giving the sense so the people could understand. A teacher who explains what "no work" means for a modern household is doing what the office requires.

Elevating the application to the level of the commandment is where it goes wrong. The moment my judgment about how to keep a commandment becomes a test of fellowship, I have begun to build the thing our Lord condemned.

Using the application to escape the commandment is the final corruption. That is Corban.

Teacher's Note · Why This History Belongs in a Pronomian Teaching

Anyone who holds that God's commandments still stand has to reckon honestly with this history, because it is the history of people who held exactly that and still went badly wrong. The Pharisees did not err by caring about the law. They erred by adding to it, by making their additions binding, and by letting the additions crowd out judgment, mercy, and faith.

Deuteronomy had already forbidden the addition (Deuteronomy 4:2; Deuteronomy 12:32). The four hundred years show us what happens when that warning is not heeded, and the Gospels show us the Lord of the Sabbath walking straight into the middle of it. This is not a story about them. It is a mirror for us.

Part Eight · The Calendar Wars

Of all the conflicts running through the four hundred years, the one modern readers most often skip is the fight over the calendar. That is a mistake, because to the people living through it, the calendar was not a scheduling convenience. It was the question of who has the right to say when God is to be worshipped. Empires understood that instinctively, which is why an empire that wanted to break Israel always went after the calendar, and why the first thing Antiochus banned after the sacrifices was the Sabbath and the feast days (1 Maccabees 1:45).

This part covers three separate calendar conflicts that all run through this period. The first is internal, between Jews who agreed the feasts were binding but could not agree on which day they fell. The second is external, between the reckoning God gave Israel and the reckoning Rome brought with it. The third is the one that outlived them both.

41. Why the Calendar Was Never a Small Thing

Start with the fact that God put time-keeping into the creation account before He put man in it.

Genesis 1:14

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.

The word rendered "seasons" is the Hebrew moed, and it is the same word used all through Leviticus 23 for the appointed times. The lights in the sky were given, among other purposes, so that Israel would know when to keep the feasts. The Psalmist says it directly:

Psalm 104:19

He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.

And the feasts themselves are described in a way that leaves no room for human invention:

Leviticus 23:1 to 4

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts. Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath of rest, an holy convocation; ye shall do no work therein: it is the sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings. These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons.

Twice in three verses they are called the feasts of the Lord, and once He calls them plainly "my feasts." And note the phrase "in their seasons," which presupposes that the seasons are fixed by God and discovered by men, not assigned by men.

That is why a calendar dispute in this period was never merely technical. If your neighbor keeps the Day of Atonement on a different day than you do, then either he is working on the holiest day of the year or you are. There is no version of that disagreement that both parties can shrug off.

42. How the Hebrew Calendar Actually Worked

Here is the system as it operated while the Temple stood. It is worth laying out in full, because most believers have never seen it described.

I've day ran from evening to evening. This is stated in the creation account, where each day closes with the formula "the evening and the morning were the first day" (Genesis 1:5), and it is commanded explicitly for the Day of Atonement:

Leviticus 23:32

It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.

This is why the Gospel writers note that the women rested on the Sabbath and came to the tomb as the first day was dawning (Luke 23:56 through 24:1), and why Mark records people bringing the sick to Jesus "at even, when the sun did set" on a Sabbath (Mark 1:32), because the Sabbath had ended at sundown.

The week ran in a fixed cycle of seven with no adjustment ever. This is the most important structural fact about the biblical calendar, and it separates it from every other calendar in the ancient world. Consider the units:

The day is set by the rotation of the earth, which anyone can observe.

The month is set by the moon, which anyone can observe.

The year is set by the sun, which anyone can observe.

The week is set by nothing in the heavens at all.

There is no astronomical body whose motion produces a seven-day cycle. Seven days does not divide evenly into a lunar month or a solar year. The week has exactly one source, and Scripture states it plainly:

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

The week is a memorial of creation and nothing else. It is not adjusted, intercalated, or synchronized to anything. It simply runs.

The month began with the new moon. The Hebrew word for month, chodesh, is from the root meaning to be new, and it is the same word used for the new moon itself. The new moon was a marked day with its own offerings:

Numbers 10:10

Also in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over your burnt offerings, and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings; that they may be to you for a memorial before your God: I am the Lord your God.

Psalm 81:3

Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day.

The year was anchored to the barley harvest. This is the part almost nobody teaches, and it is the mechanism that keeps the whole system honest.

Exodus 12:2

This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.

Deuteronomy 16:1

Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the Lord thy God: for in the month of Abib the Lord thy God brought thee forth out of Egypt by night.

The Hebrew word abib is not a proper name in origin. It describes the state of grain that is green and in the ear, not yet hard. It is used that way in the account of the plague of hail:

Exodus 9:31

And the flax and the barley was smitten: for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bolled.

That word "ear" is abib. So the first month of the year is the month in which the barley reaches that stage, and it has to be, because on the day after the Sabbath of Unleavened Bread a sheaf of the firstfruits of the harvest must be waved:

Leviticus 23:10 to 11

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest: and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath the priest shall wave it.

If there is no barley ready, there is no sheaf, and the feast cannot be kept. So the agricultural reality of the land forced the calendar to stay aligned with the solar year. Twelve lunar months come to about 354 days, which falls roughly eleven days short of a solar year. Left alone, the feasts would drift backward through the seasons, as they do in a purely lunar calendar.

The barley requirement made drift impossible. When the grain was not ready, a thirteenth month was added.

Who decided. In the Second Temple period, the month was declared by the court in Jerusalem on the testimony of witnesses who had seen the new crescent. The procedure is described in detail in the Mishnah tractate Rosh Hashanah: witnesses came, they were examined separately, the court weighed their testimony, and the month was sanctified. Then the news had to be spread across the country and to the diaspora, and it was done by a chain of beacon fires lit on the Mount of Olives and relayed hilltop to hilltop, from Sartaba to Grofina to Hauran to Bethh Biltin (Mishnah, Rosh Hashanah 2:2 to 4). The Mishnah also records that when the Samaritans began lighting false fires to confuse the signal, the beacons were abandoned in favor of messengers.

The decision to add the thirteenth month was made by a small court, and rabbinic tradition lists the criteria they weighed: the state of the barley, the ripeness of the tree fruit, and the position of the sun at the equinox (Tosefta, Sanhedrin 2:2).

Teacher's Note · The Weight of These Sources

Everything in the preceding two paragraphs comes from rabbinic literature written down between about A.D 200 and A.D 500, describing a procedure that ended with the Temple. That is Tier Five. It is very likely a genuine memory of how the system worked, because the writers had no reason to invent a procedure they could no longer use, and because the Sadducees and the Qumran sect argue against Pharisaic calendar decisions in ways that only make sense if such a court really existed. But it cannot be quoted as though it were Scripture. What is Tier One is the underlying requirement: a lunar month, a barley-anchored year, an unbroken seven-day week, and appointed times that belong to God.

One more layer. Above the yearly cycle sat the sabbatical and jubilee cycles:

Leviticus 25:8

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.

Sabbatical years were actually observed in this period, and we have external confirmation. Josephus records that the defenders of Jerusalem suffered from famine during a sabbatical year, and 1 Maccabees notes that Simon's forces at Bethh-zur ran short because it was a sabbatical year:

1 Maccabees 6:53

But there was no victuals in the city, because it was the seventh year: and they that had escaped into Judea from the heathen, had eaten up the residue of the store.

That is a passing detail nobody would invent, and it is good evidence that the land-rest command was being kept.

43. The Fracture Within: The 364 Day Calendar

Now the first conflict, and it was between Jews who all agreed the feasts were commanded.

I ne community at Qumran, and the circles that produced the book of Jubilees and the Astronomical Book of 1 Enoch, followed a completely different calendar from the Temple. It had 364 days, divided into four quarters of ninety-one days each, made up of months of thirty, thirty, and thirty-one days.

The reason that specific number was chosen is arithmetic, and it is clever. 364 divided by 7 is exactly 52. That means every date in the year falls on the same day of the week, every year, forever. Passover always falls on the same weekday. The Day of Atonement always falls on the same weekday.

No feast can ever collide with the Sabbath, and no calculation is ever needed. The book of Jubilees insists on this system as a divine ordinance and denounces the lunar reckoning as a corruption:

Jubilees 6:36 to 37 (paraphrased)

The book charges that there will be those who observe the moon, and that this will disturb the seasons, causing them to keep the feasts on days that are not appointed, and to make a polluted day a holy day.

The problem with the 364-day year is obvious as soon as you say it out loud: the solar year is about 365 and a quarter days. A 364-day calendar loses more than a day every year, and within a couple of decades the feasts would be a month out of season. The scrolls give no clear mechanism for correcting it. Some scholars propose a periodic added week; the texts do not say.

Whatever the fix was, the consequence for the community was total. They were keeping the Day of Atonement on a day when the Temple priesthood was doing ordinary business, and the Temple was keeping it on a day when they were not. The Habakkuk Commentary contains an accusation that turns on exactly this: it charges that the Wicked Priest pursued the Teacher of Righteousness to the house of his exile, to swallow him up, on the Day of Atonement, the day of their rest (1.Q.p.Hab 11). Read that carefully. The Wicked Priest was travelling on the Day of Atonement. He would only do that if, on his calendar, it was not the Day of Atonement. It was on theirs.

There is more calendar material at Qumran than most people realize. A whole class of documents called the Mishmarot texts (4.Q.320 through 4.Q.330) coordinate the twenty-four courses of the priests from 1 Chronicles 24 with this calendar, listing which priestly course serves in which week across long cycles. Someone invested enormous labor in this.

Teacher's Note · Calendar Disagreement Among Sincere People

This is one of the most useful and most humbling facts in this entire study, and it should be taught with care. Here are Jews who loved God's law, who copied Scripture with extraordinary devotion, who separated themselves from a corrupt priesthood at real cost, and who kept the appointed times with rigor. And they could not agree with other equally sincere Jews about what day it was. This should produce two effects in us. The first is caution about certainty on calendar questions, since men more zealous than we are landed in different places.

The second is a refusal to treat the question as unimportant, because they certainly did not. The right posture is to hold our own practice with conviction and to hold our judgment of other believers' practice with restraint.

There is one more internal dispute worth naming, because it shaped the Feast of Weeks. Leviticus 23:11 says the sheaf is waved "on the morrow after the sabbath," and Leviticus 23:15 to 16 counts fifty days from that morrow. Everything depends on which Sabbath is meant. The Pharisees understood "sabbath" here as the first high day of Unleavened Bread, which fixes the count to a calendar date. The Sadducees and Boethusians, and the Qumran community as well, understood it as the weekly Sabbath, which fixes the wave sheaf and therefore Pentecost always on the first day of the week. This is a real, documented, first-century dispute among people who all held the feast to be binding, and it is preserved in rabbinic sources and reflected in the Qumran calendar.

44. The Roman Calendar and How It Was Built

Now the second conflict, and it is a collision between two entirely different ideas of what a calendar is for.

The origins were a mess. Roman tradition held that the earliest calendar, attributed to Romulus, had ten months and about 304 days, beginning in March, with the remaining winter days simply not counted. The evidence for that tradition is still sitting in our own calendar: September, October, November, and December mean the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months, and they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. The names never caught up with the reform.

Numa, the second traditional king, was credited with adding January and February, producing a year of 355 days built on lunar months.

The intercalation was corrupt. Because 355 days falls about ten days short of the solar year, the Romans inserted an extra month, called Mercedonius or Intercalaris, of twenty-two or twenty-three days, usually after the twenty-third of February. The decision of whether to insert it belonged to the college of pontifices, and it was made politically. A magistrate who was a friend got a longer year in office. An enemy got a shorter one.

Tax farming contracts and debt terms could be lengthened or shortened by the same means. By the middle of the first century B.C the Roman civil calendar was roughly three months out of alignment with the seasons, meaning their harvest festivals were falling nowhere near the harvest.

Hold that beside what we just described in Israel, where the calendar was locked to the barley in the field. Two systems, and one of them could be bent by a bribe.

The Julian reform. In 46 B.C, Julius Caesar, advised by the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, scrapped the whole arrangement. He fixed the year at 365 days with one extra day every fourth year, giving an average of 365.25 days, and he abandoned any pretense of tracking the moon. The months became arbitrary lengths chosen to make the arithmetic come out.

To reset the alignment, the year 46 B.C itself was given 445 days. Roman writers called it the last year of confusion.

The new calendar took effect on the first of January, 45 B.C, and it is the direct ancestor of the one on the wall of every house in the western world.

The names. This is where the collision with a Torah-observant conscience becomes visible, and it needs to be stated accurately rather than dramatically.

- January, from Ianuarius, named for Janus, the two-faced god of doorways, beginnings, and endings.

- February, from Februa, the Roman purification rites held in that month.

- March, from Mars, the god of war.

- April, uncertain; either from aperire, to open, or connected with Aphrodite.

- May, from Maia, an Italic goddess.

- June, from Juno, chief goddess of the Roman state.

- July, originally Quintilis, the fifth month, renamed Iulius for Julius Caesar in 44 B.C, after his assassination.

- August, originally Sextilis, the sixth month, renamed Augustus for the emperor in 8 B.C.

- September through December, the numbered leftovers.

Two of the twelve months of the calendar the whole world uses are named after Roman emperors, and one of those emperors is the man named in Luke 2:1.

The year began with a god of beginnings. The Roman civil year had been moved to the first of January in 153 B.C, when the consuls began taking office on that date. Before that it had begun in March. So the world's New Year's Day is the feast day of Janus, and it is a date with no relationship to any agricultural or astronomical event whatsoever. Compare Exodus 12:2, where God tells Israel which month begins their year, and ties it to the deliverance from Egypt and to the ripening grain.

The day began at midnight. The Romans reckoned their civil day from midnight to midnight. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, surveys the variety among nations and notes that the Babylonians counted from sunrise, the Athenians from sunset, the Umbrians from midday, and the Roman priests and the civil authorities from midnight (Natural History 2.79). Israel counted from sunset, on the authority of Genesis 1. Two civilizations occupying the same territory did not agree on when a day starts, and the disagreement was not trivial: it determines when the Sabbath begins and ends.

The Romans had no seven-day week. This surprises people. The Roman civil rhythm was the nundinum, a cycle of eight days ending in the nundinae, the market day, when country people came into town, business was done, and schools were out. In Roman calendars the days of this cycle were marked with the letters A through H. It had no religious content of the kind the Sabbath has, and it was not synchronized across cities: market day in Pompeii fell on a different day from market day in Cumae and in Rome.

The seven-day week arrived from outside. Two separate seven-day traditions converged on the Roman world in exactly this period. One was the biblical week of the Sabbath, carried everywhere by the Jewish diaspora, which by the first century was highly visible: Roman writers comment on it constantly, usually with contempt. The other was the astrological planetary week, in which each day was assigned to one of the seven moving heavenly bodies known to antiquity and named for the deity associated with it: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn.

The earliest traces of the planetary week in Italy appear in the late Republic and early Empire. The earliest firmly dated inscriptional evidence includes a graffito from Pompeii referring to the sixth of February in A.D 60 as dies solis, the day of the Sun, and the town was buried in A.D 79, which gives us a hard latest date. Writing in the early third century, Cassius Dio says that the practice of naming the days after the seven planets was a relatively recent development but had by his time become established among the Romans and everyone else (Roman History 37.18). The eight-day and seven-day cycles ran side by side for generations, and the nundinal cycle eventually died out.

This is why the days of the week in English and in the Romance languages are named after planetary deities: Saturn's day, the Sun's day, the Moon's day, and then in most of Europe the days of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, which in English were replaced by their Germanic equivalents, Tiw, Woden, Thor, and Frig.

Teacher's Note · What This Does and Does Not Prove

Two claims often get made here, and one of them is sound while the other overreaches.

The sound claim: the names of our months and days are drawn from pagan deities and Roman emperors, and the civil calendar we use is a Roman construction with no connection to the appointed times of Scripture. That is simply documented fact, verifiable from Roman inscriptions and Roman writers.

The overreach: that the seven-day week itself is pagan in origin, or that the Roman planetary week somehow shifted or corrupted the biblical Sabbath cycle. The evidence does not support that. The planetary week was an astrological overlay applied to a seven-day cycle; it did not create one, and there is no evidence anywhere of a break or reset in the weekly cycle. When the planetary names were adopted, the day the Jews had always kept as the Sabbath was the one the Romans called Saturn's day, and it is the day the western world still calls Saturday. The naming is pagan. The count is unbroken. Keep those two facts distinct, because conflating them hands critics an easy target.

45. Two Calendars, Two Worldviews

Set them side by side.

Table: Columns: The Calendar of Scripture, The Calendar of Rome. Row 1. Day begins. The Calendar of Scripture: At sunset (Genesis 1:5; Leviticus 23:32). The Calendar of Rome: At midnight, by civil convention. Row 2. Week. The Calendar of Scripture: Fixed seven-day cycle from creation, never adjusted (Exodus 20:11). The Calendar of Rome: Originally an eight-day market cycle; later a seven-day cycle named for planetary deities. Row 3. Month. The Calendar of Scripture: Lunar, beginning at the new moon (Psalm 81:3). The Calendar of Rome: Arbitrary fixed lengths, no relation to the moon after 45 BC. Row 4. Year begins. The Calendar of Scripture: The month of Abib, when the barley is in the ear (Exodus 12:2; Deuteronomy 16:1). The Calendar of Rome: The first of January, the month of Janus.

Table: Columns: The Calendar of Scripture, The Calendar of Rome. Row 1. Kept aligned by. The Calendar of Scripture: The state of the harvest in the land. The Calendar of Rome: A leap day inserted by mathematical rule. Row 2. Who sets it. The Calendar of Scripture: God, and men discover it (Leviticus 23:2, 4). The Calendar of Rome: The state, and men decree it. Row 3. Named for. The Calendar of Scripture: Numbers, and later Babylonian month names adopted in exile. The Calendar of Rome: Roman gods and Roman emperors. Row 4. Purpose. The Calendar of Scripture: To know when to meet with God. The Calendar of Rome: To administer an empire.

The last two rows are the heart of it. One calendar exists so that a people will know when to appear before their God. The other exists so that taxes can be collected, magistrates can take office, and contracts can be dated. They are not two versions of the same thing. They answer different questions.

Where they collided in this period:

- Antiochus 4 made the keeping of Sabbaths and feast days a capital offense (1 Maccabees 1:45), which is an imperial claim to control sacred time.

- Ptolemy I took Jerusalem by walking in on a Sabbath (Josephus, Antiquities 12.4 to 6).

- Pompey built his siege ramps on Sabbaths because the defenders would not interfere with construction on that day (Antiquities 14.63 to 64).

- Julius Caesar's decrees exempted Jews from military levies, and Josephus preserves the documents; a soldier who cannot march or fight on the seventh day is useless to a legion, so Rome's practical solution was exemption rather than accommodation (Antiquities 14.226 to 227).

- Dating documents was genuinely confusing. 1 Maccabees dates events by the Seleucid era, counting from 312 B.C, which is why it says the abomination was set up "in the hundred forty and fifth year" (1 Maccabees 1:54). Josephus uses Olympiads, consular years, and regnal years. The Jews used regnal years and their own months. Any merchant in first-century Judea had to be fluent in several systems at once.

- Roman contempt. Tacitus explains the Sabbath as evidence of Jewish laziness and says the seventh year is spent in idleness too (Histories 5.4). Juvenal mocks it in the same terms. Seneca, quoted by Augustine centuries later, complained that by resting one day in seven the Jews lost a seventh of their lives. This is a hostile witness chorus, and its value is that it proves beyond doubt that first-century Jews everywhere were visibly keeping a seventh-day rest, which the Romans found both baffling and irritating.

Daniel's line about times and laws. One verse is regularly brought into this discussion, and it should be handled with precision.

Daniel 7:25

And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.

Teacher's Note · How Far This Verse Reaches

The verse describes the little horn of the fourth beast. It says he will think to change times and laws, which is a claim of intent and presumption rather than a statement that God's times were actually altered. Many teachers apply this to calendar changes in church history, and the application is understandable. But two cautions are in order. First, the verse is about a specific power in a specific vision, and it should not be turned into a general-purpose proof text for every calendar grievance.

Second, and more importantly, "think to change" is a verdict on the presumption, not an admission that the change succeeded. God's appointed times are what they are. No emperor and no council relocated the seventh day. What a power can do is compel or persuade people to observe something else, which is a different and lesser thing. Teach the verse for what it says: that a coming power would presume to legislate over sacred time, and that God has already named the presumption.

47. What Happened Afterward

This study ends at A.D 70, but the calendar story has a tail that every hearer will ask about, so here it is briefly, clearly labeled as beyond our period.

The Jewish calendar became calculated. With the Temple gone and the court eventually scattered, declaring the month by witnesses in Jerusalem became impossible. Over several centuries the observational system gave way to computation. Jewish tradition credits the publication of a fixed calculated calendar to the patriarch Hillel 2 around A.D 358 or 359, using a nineteen-year cycle of intercalation adapted from Babylonian astronomy. The tradition of a single dramatic publication is first attested much later and is disputed by historians, who see a more gradual transition; but the outcome is not disputed. The calendar in use in Judaism today is calculated, not observed, and it can differ from what direct observation of the crescent and the barley would give.

The Christian calendar diverged from the Jewish one deliberately. At the Council of Nicaea in A.D 325, the dating of the Christian Passover observance was standardized in a way that detached it from the Jewish reckoning. Constantine's circular letter afterward, preserved by Eusebius, is explicit about the motive, urging that the celebration have nothing in common with the practice of the Jews (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.18). A generation later, a regional synod at Laodicea, usually dated to the A.D 360s, issued a canon forbidding Christians to rest on the Sabbath in the Jewish manner and directing them to honor the Lord's Day instead, with anathema attached (Council of Laodicea, Canon 29).

Constantine's day of rest. In A.D 321 Constantine made the dies Solis, the day of the Sun, a legal day of rest for city dwellers, exempting farmers so the harvest would not be lost. This is often described as the moment the Sabbath was changed. That is not quite what the document does. It is a civil rest law using the pagan name for the day, issued by an emperor whose own coinage had honored Sol Invictus, and it is one step in a long process rather than the whole of it.

The Gregorian correction. The Julian year of 365.25 days is about eleven minutes too long, and over centuries that accumulated. By 1582 the drift was ten days, and Pope Gregory 13 dropped them, moving directly from the fourth of October to the fifteenth. The seven-day cycle was not touched: the fourth was a Thursday and the fifteenth was a Friday. That detail is worth knowing, because it is often cited incorrectly as a break in the week.

Teacher's Note · Where We Land

Our position is that God set the appointed times, that they were not repealed, and that the moral and covenantal weight of the seventh day and of the feasts of Leviticus 23 stands. Our position is also that a believer should be able to explain, calmly and accurately, where the modern civil calendar came from, without overstating the case. The month names are pagan. The day names are pagan.

The year begins on a date chosen by Roman politics. None of that is disputed by anyone, and none of it requires exaggeration. What we do not claim is that anyone succeeded in moving the seventh day, because nobody did.

Part Nine · The Hasmonean Kingdom

For about eighty years, from 142 B.C to 63 B.C, the Jewish people were independent for the first time since Zedekiah. It is a period that begins in glory and ends in a bloodbath, and understanding why is essential, because the failure of the Hasmonean kingdom is what makes the New Testament's insistence on a different kind of King so pointed.

47. John Hyrcanus I

John Hyrcanus I ruled from 135 to 104 B.C, and by any secular measure he was a great success. He survived a siege by the Seleucid king Antiochus 7 Sidetes, and then, when the Seleucid empire collapsed into dynastic chaos, he expanded aggressively in every direction.

His conquests:

Madaba and the region east of the Jordan

Samaria and Mount Gerizim. He destroyed the Samaritan temple around 111 to 110 B.C (Antiquities 13.255 to 256), and later razed the city of Samaria itself. This act permanently deepened the hatred that we see everywhere in the Gospels.

Idumea, the old territory of Edom, to the south. And here he did something with enormous consequences.

Josephus, Antiquities 13.257 to 258

Hyrcanus took also Dora and Marissa, cities of Idumea, and subdued all the Idumeans; and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; and they were so desirous of living in the country of their forefathers, that they submitted to the use of circumcision, and the rest of the Jewish ways of living; at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than Jews.

Teacher's Note · Forced Conversion

There is no way to make this anything other than what it is. Circumcision was imposed on a conquered population under threat of expulsion. Nothing in the law of God authorizes that. The covenant sign is given to those who enter the covenant, and the stranger who joins himself to the Lord does so willingly (Isaiah 56:6; Exodus 12:48). A people who had themselves been forcibly de- circumcised by Antiochus two generations earlier now forcibly circumcised somebody else. This is what happens when zeal for God's law is fused to state power and national ambition, and it is a lesson worth teaching plainly. It also has a direct consequence: the Herods were Idumeans, descendants of the people Hyrcanus converted at swordpoint. The Edomite king who tried to kill the infant Messiah (Matthew 2:16) was on the throne because of this policy.

Hyrcanus also broke with the Pharisees during his reign, as described in Part Seven, and went over to the

Sadducees. And he was the first Hasmonean to strike his own coins, which survive in quantity and are

Tier Two evidence. They bear the legend, in paleo-Hebrew script, "Yehohanan the High Priest and the

Council of the Jews." Notice what is not there: he did not call himself king.

48. Aristobulus I and Alexander Jannaeus

Aristobulus I ruled barely a year, from 104 to 103 B.C, and Josephus says he was the first of them to put a diadem on his head (Antiquities 13.301). He imprisoned his own mother and let her starve to death, and had his brother killed. The dynasty founded to defend the law now had a king who was not of David's line wearing a crown, holding the high priesthood, and murdering his family.

Alexander Jannaeus ruled from 103 to 76 B.C, and his reign is the darkest chapter of the period. He was an aggressive and often unsuccessful campaigner who expanded the kingdom to nearly the borders of Solomon's, and he was violently opposed at home by the Pharisees and their supporters.

The conflict became open civil war. Josephus reports that at one Feast of Tabernacles, while Jannaeus was officiating as high priest, the people pelted him with the citrons they were carrying for the feast, and he responded by having six thousand of them killed (Antiquities 13.372 to 373). The war that followed cost, by Josephus's count, fifty thousand Jewish lives over six years. And then came the atrocity that defines him:

He did also the most barbarous action in the world to them; for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes.

A Jewish high priest crucifying eight hundred Jews while dining with concubines and watching. That is where eighty years of independence had arrived.

There is a Tier Two corroboration. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the commentary on Nahum (4.Q.p.Nah) refers to "the Lion of Wrath" who hangs men alive, which is almost certainly a reference to this event, written by a contemporary community.

Teacher's Note · Why the Kingdom Failed

The Hasmoneans failed for a reason that Scripture had already identified. God had separated the offices. The priesthood belongs to Aaron (Numbers 18:7). The throne belongs to Judah and to David (Genesis 49:10; 2 Samuel 7:16). When Uzziah, a legitimate Davidic king, tried to burn incense in the Temple, he was struck with leprosy on the spot (2 Chronicles 26:16 to 21). The Hasmoneans, who were priests, took the crown, and the fusion corrupted them within two generations. The offices are only ever lawfully united in one Person, of whom Zechariah prophesied: "he shall be a priest upon his throne" (Zechariah 6:13), and the writer to the Hebrews explains at length that His priesthood is not Aaronic at all but after the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 7:11 to 17). The failure of the Hasmonean experiment is therefore not just a sad piece of history. It is a negative argument for the necessity of Christ.

49. Salome Alexandra and the Pharisee Ascendancy

Salome Alexandra, the widow of Jannaeus, ruled from 76 to 67 B.C, and the nine years of her reign were remembered as a time of peace and plenty. She could not hold the high priesthood herself, so she appointed her elder son Hyrcanus 2 to it, and she reversed her husband's policy entirely by restoring the Pharisees to power.

Josephus is grudging about this, complaining that she gave them too much authority, and reporting that they used it to settle old scores by executing those who had advised the crucifixions (Antiquities 13.408 to 415; War 1.110 to 114). Rabbinic tradition, unsurprisingly, remembers her reign fondly, and associates it with the sage Simeon ben Shetach, said to have been her brother.

Her death set off the catastrophe.

50. Civil War, Antipater, and the Coming of Rome

Salome had two sons. Hyrcanus 2 was the elder, weak, and already high priest, and he was backed by the Pharisees. Aristobulus 2 was the younger, energetic, ambitious, and backed by the Sadducees and the army. They went to war over the throne immediately.

Into that vacuum stepped a man from Idumea named Antipater, whose family had been converted at swordpoint by John Hyrcanus. He attached himself to the weak brother Hyrcanus 2 and became the real power behind him, and he brought in the Nabatean Arabs as allies. Judea was now a three-way civil war with foreign involvement.

Both brothers then made the fatal decision to appeal to Rome.

Pompey the Great was in Syria in 63 B.C, in the process of dismantling what was left of the Seleucid Empire and reorganizing the whole east. Three Jewish delegations came to him at Damascus: one from Hyrcanus, one from Aristobulus, and one from the people themselves, who according to Josephus asked to be rid of kings altogether and to be governed by their priests (Antiquities 14.41).

Pompey decided for Hyrcanus. Aristobulus's supporters seized the Temple mount and held out. Pompey besieged them for three months, and the Romans noticed something about the defenders:

Josephus, Antiquities 14.63 to 64

And had it not been our practice, from the days of our forefathers, to rest on the seventh day, this bank could never have been perfected, by reason of the opposition the Jews would have made; for though our law gives us leave then to defend ourselves against those that begin to fight with us and assault us, yet does it not permit us to meddle with our enemies while they do any thing else.

The Romans built their siege works on the Sabbath, because the defenders would not interfere with construction on that day. Note carefully that Josephus explains the distinction the Maccabees had already drawn: defend yes, initiate no. And so the Temple fell on a Sabbath in the autumn of 63 B.C. Twelve thousand Jews died, and Josephus records that the priests continued their sacrifices while being cut down and did not flee.

Then Pompey did the unthinkable. He walked into the sanctuary and entered the Holy of Holies.

Josephus, Antiquities 14.71 to 72

But there was nothing that affected the nation so much, in the calamities they were then under, as that their holy place, which had been hitherto seen by none, should be laid open to strangers; for Pompey, and those that were about him, went into the temple itself, whither it was not lawful for any to enter but the high priest, and saw what was reposed therein, the candlestick with its lamps, and the table, and the pouring vessels, and the censers, all made entirely of gold, and a great quantity of spices heaped together.

Tacitus records the same event from the Roman side (Histories 5.9), and notes that Pompey found no image of a god inside, which fascinated Roman writers. To his credit, Pompey took nothing and ordered the Temple cleansed and the sacrifices resumed the next day. It made no difference to how the act was felt.

What the Jewish community thought of it is preserved in the Psalms of Solomon, eighteen psalms written in Jerusalem within a generation of these events. They are Tier Three for the sentiment of the period, and they are one of the most valuable documents we have for understanding the messianic expectation the New Testament walks into. Psalm 2 laments the sinful foreigner who battered down the fortified walls and trampled the sanctuary. Psalm 8 accuses the leaders of Jerusalem of defiling the sanctuary themselves and says God brought the man from the ends of the earth as judgment. And Psalm 17 does something no earlier Jewish text had done so explicitly: it prays, at length, for a Son of David to purge Jerusalem, to shatter unrighteous rulers, to gather a holy people, and to reign in righteousness, and it insists that he will not trust in horse and rider and bow but in the Lord.

That is the atmosphere. Independence had failed. The priest-kings had proved corrupt. A pagan general had walked into the Holy of Holies. And out of that despair the nation began looking, hard and specifically, for the promised Son of David.

The settlement. Pompey stripped the Hasmoneans of the kingship. Hyrcanus 2 was left as high priest and ethnarch, a subordinate ruler. Judea was made tributary to Rome and attached to the province of Syria. The coastal and Greek cities were detached and organized as the Decapolis, a name the Gospels use (Matthew 4:25; Mark 5:20; Mark 7:31). Aristobulus 2 and his sons were carried to Rome to walk in Pompey's triumph.

The legs of iron had arrived, and they never left.

Further Roman depredations before Herod:

54 B.C. Marcus Licinius Crassus, on his way to disaster against the Parthians, stripped the Temple treasury of two thousand talents and all the gold, breaking an oath he had sworn not to touch it (Antiquities 14.105 to 109). He died at Carrhae the following year.

48 to 47 B.C. Antipater and Hyrcanus 2 supported Julius Caesar in Egypt, and Caesar rewarded them. Josephus preserves a series of decrees in which Caesar and the Roman senate confirm Jewish rights: to live by their own laws, to send the Temple tax to Jerusalem, to assemble, and, importantly, exemption from military service on account of the Sabbath (Antiquities 14.190 to 216). These decrees are the legal foundation of Jewish religious liberty across the empire for the next century, and they are one reason the early assembly, seen initially as a Jewish sect, enjoyed a period of legal cover.

43 B.C. Antipater was poisoned. His sons Phasael and Herod took over.

40 B.C. The Parthians invaded, installed Aristobulus 2's son Antigonus as king, mutilated Hyrcanus 2's ears so that he could never again serve as high priest (a maimed man being disqualified, Leviticus 21:17 to 23), and drove Herod out.

Herod fled to Rome. And there, in the winter of 40 B.C, the Roman Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a century earlier. It declared an Idumean, whose grandfather had been circumcised at swordpoint by a Jewish conqueror, to be King of the Jews.

Part Ten · The Legs of Iron

Li. Rome and the Fourth Kingdom

Before we walk through the Roman period, it is worth setting the prophetic frame in place.

Daniel 2:40

And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

Daniel 7:7

After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.

Notice that the fourth beast has no animal comparison. The lion, the bear, and the leopard are all recognizable creatures. The fourth is simply "dreadful and terrible," and Daniel remarks specifically that it was "diverse from all the beasts that were before it" (Daniel 7:7, 19, 23). Rome was different in kind. Babylon, Persia, and Greece were all conquerors who imposed a king. Rome imposed a system: law, roads, citizenship, engineering, taxation, and a legion that never went home. It absorbed rather than merely ruled.

And it is precisely this iron that gets mixed with clay in the feet, in a mingling that will not hold together (Daniel 2:41 to 43). The stone strikes there. That part of the prophecy is not the subject of this study.

What is the subject of this study is what the iron did to Judea between 63 B.C and A.D 70.

52. Herod the Great

Herod ruled from 37 to 4 B.C, and to understand the New Testament you have to understand him.

Who he was. An Idumean, that is, an Edomite, from the family Hyrcanus had forcibly converted. His mother was a Nabatean. In Jewish eyes he was a half-Jew at best and a foreigner in practice, and he knew it. He was appointed King of the Jews by the Roman Senate in 40 B.C at the urging of Mark Antony and Octavian, and he had to conquer his own kingdom, taking Jerusalem after a five-month siege in 37 B.C with Roman help.

What he did to secure the throne. He executed the Hasmonean claimant Antigonus, whom Mark Antony had beheaded, the first time Rome had executed a king in that manner. He then set about eliminating every remaining Hasmonean:

- Executed forty-five leading members of the Sanhedrin who had supported Antigonus (Antiquities 15.5 to 6)

- Had his teenage brother-in-law Aristobulus 3, whom he had appointed high priest and who was dangerously popular, drowned in a swimming pool at Jericho in a staged accident (Antiquities 15.53 to 56)

- Executed the aged Hyrcanus 2 (Antiquities 15.173 to 178)

- Executed his own wife Mariamne, the Hasmonean princess he apparently genuinely loved, in 29 B.C, and then her mother Alexandra

- Executed his sons by Mariamne, Alexander and Aristobulus, in 7 B.C

- Executed his eldest son Antipater five days before his own death

Augustus is reported to have made a pun on the similarity of the Greek words for pig and son, saying it was better to be Herod's pig than his son, a jest preserved by Macrobius (Saturnalia 2.4.11), Tier Five but memorable and in character.

Why Matthew 2 fits. Given all of the above, a man who killed his own wife, three sons, a mother-in-law, a brother-in-law, and forty-five judges is not going to hesitate over the infants of a village when he is told a King of the Jews has been born (Matthew 2:16). The massacre at Bethlehem is not recorded outside the Gospel, but Bethlehem was a small village and the number of male infants under two would have been perhaps a dozen or two. In the context of Herod's other atrocities, it would not have registered in the imperial record. The event fits the man exactly.

His builder's legacy. Herod was one of the great builders of the ancient world, and much of what he built survives:

- Caesarea Maritima, an entire artificial deep-water harbor built with hydraulic concrete, and the city where Cornelius was converted (Acts 10), where Paul was imprisoned for two years (Acts 23:33; Acts 24:27), and where Herod Agrippa I died (Acts 12:19 to 23)

- Masada, a palace-fortress on a desert plateau

- Herodium, an artificial mountain and palace where he was buried

- Sebaste, the rebuilt Samaria, named for Augustus

- Antonia, the fortress overlooking the Temple, named for Mark Antony, and almost certainly the barracks into which Paul was carried (Acts 21:34 to 37)

- The rebuilt fortresses of Machaerus, where Josephus says John the Baptist was executed (Antiquities 18.116 to 119)

Josephus records that Herod's execution of John was a matter of political fear rather than only the personal offense the Gospels describe, which is not a contradiction but an additional angle. And Josephus's account is a valuable external confirmation that John the Baptist was a real and widely known figure whose execution the Jewish public blamed for Herod Antipas's later military defeat.

Lill. The Temple Herod Built

This is the single most important thing he did for our purposes, because it is the building in which almost every scene of the Gospels set in Jerusalem takes place.

Herod began the reconstruction in the eighteenth year of his reign, roughly 20 or 19 B.C (Antiquities 15.380). He doubled the size of the Temple mount by building enormous retaining walls and filling in the platform, creating the largest sacred enclosure in the ancient world. Portions of those retaining walls stand today, including the section known as the Western Wall. The sanctuary itself was rebuilt by priests trained as masons so that no unqualified person entered the holy areas, and Josephus says that part was completed in a year and a half, while work on the courts and outbuildings continued for decades.

John records a Jewish statement about the duration:

Code: John 2:20.

Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?

Counting from 20 or 19 B.C brings us to roughly A.D 27 or 28, which fits the chronology of the Gospels. Work on the complex was not finished until about A.D 63, some seven years before the Romans burned it.

The Temple's layout matters for reading the Gospels and Acts:

The Court of the Gentiles, the huge outer platform open to all, where the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals operated (Matthew 21:12), and around whose porticoes teaching took place, including Solomon's Porch (John 10:23; Acts 3:11; Acts 5:12)

The soreg, a low barrier separating the outer court from the inner. Warning inscriptions in Greek and Latin were mounted on it forbidding foreigners to pass on pain of death, and two of these stones have been recovered, one complete in Istanbul and one fragmentary in Jerusalem. Tier Two. This is the "middle wall of partition" Paul says Christ broke down (Ephesians 2:14), and it is the accusation that started the riot which led to Paul's arrest (Acts 21:28 to 29).

The Court of the Women, containing the treasury where the widow cast in her two mites (Mark 12:41 to 44; Luke 21:1 to 4)

The Court of Israel and the Court of the Priests, with the altar of burnt offering

The Holy Place, where Zacharias was burning incense (Luke 1:8 to 11)

The Holy of Holies, empty since the ark was lost, entered once a year on the Day of Atonement

The veil torn from the top to the bottom at the death of Christ was the veil of this Temple (Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45), and the writer to the Hebrews builds an entire theology on it (Hebrews 10:19 to 22).

Liv. The Roman Emperor's of the New Testament World

Here is the list a teacher needs, with the biblical intersections.

Julius Caesar (dictator, assassinated 44 B.C). Not an emperor, but his decrees granting Jewish religious liberty shaped the whole period, as noted above.

Augustus, born Octavian (27 B.C to A.D 14). Named in Scripture:

Luke 2:1

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

He established the Pax Romana, the peace that made travel and commerce across the Mediterranean possible, and therefore made the missionary journeys of Acts feasible. He divided Herod's kingdom among his sons after Herod's death in 4 B.C.

Tiberius (A.D 14 to 37). The emperor of the entire public ministry of Christ. Luke dates the beginning of John's ministry to his fifteenth year:

Luke 3:1 to 2

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

That single sentence is a chronological anchor of remarkable precision, and every one of those officials is independently attested. The coin brought to Jesus in the question about tribute was a denarius bearing Tiberius's image and title (Matthew 22:19 to 21).

Caligula, properly Gaius (A.D 37 to 41). Insane, and he nearly caused a war. In A.D 40 he ordered a colossal statue of himself set up in the Temple at Jerusalem. Philo of Alexandria, who led a Jewish embassy to him, describes the crisis at length in On the Embassy to Gaius, and Josephus covers it as well (Antiquities 18.261 to 309). The governor of Syria, Petronius, deliberately stalled, and the Jewish population gathered in tens of thousands offering to be killed rather than permit it. Caligula was assassinated before the order was carried out.

Teacher's Note · A Near Miss With Prophetic Significance

In A.D 40, within a decade of the crucifixion, a Roman emperor claiming divine honors came within months of erecting his own image in the Temple. It did not happen, but the fact that it very nearly did shows the church of that generation exactly how live the warning of Daniel 11:31 and Matthew 24:15 was. This is one reason the early believers read the Olivet Discourse with such urgency.

Claudius (A.D 41 to 54). Named twice in Acts. A famine in his reign prompted the relief offering from Antioch (Acts 11:28), and he expelled Jews from Rome:

Acts 18:2

And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome:) and came unto them.

Suetonius reports the same expulsion, and gives a reason that has interested commentators ever since: that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because they were continually making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus (Life of Claudius 25.4). Many take Chrestus as a garbled reference to Christ and the disturbances as synagogue conflict over the Gospel. That reading is probable but not certain, and it belongs in a note.

Nero (A.D 54 to 68). The Caesar to whom Paul appealed (Acts 25:11 to 12) and in whose household there were believers (Philippians 4:22). He launched the first imperial persecution after the fire of Rome in A.D 64, described by Tacitus in a passage that also provides pagan attestation of Christ's execution under Pilate (Annals 15:44). Paul and Peter are traditionally held to have died under him. It was during his reign, in A.D 66, that the Jewish revolt broke out.

Galba, Otho, Vitellius (A.D 68 to 69). The Year of the Four Emperors, a Roman civil war that briefly relieved pressure on the Jewish rebels.

Vespasian (A.D 69 to 79). Commander of the war in Judea, proclaimed emperor by his troops, and he left his son to finish the siege.

Titus (A.D 79 to 81). Destroyed Jerusalem in A.D 70. His triumphal arch still stands in Rome, and its relief carving shows the menorah, the table of shewbread, and the silver trumpets being carried through the streets. Tier Two evidence, in stone, of the plunder of the house of God.

Domitian (A.D 81 to 96). Traditionally the emperor under whom John was exiled to Patmos (Revelation 1:9).

55. Governors, High Priests, and the House of Annas

Herod's kingdom was divided at his death in 4 B.C:

Archelaus, ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. So brutal that Joseph was afraid to return to Judea because of him (Matthew 2:22). Deposed by Augustus in A.D 6 and banished to Gaul.

Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea from 4 B.C to A.D 39. The Herod of most of the Gospel narrative: he beheaded John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1 to 12), Jesus called him "that fox" (Luke 13:32), and Pilate sent Jesus to him during the trial (Luke 23:7 to 12).

Philip, tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis from 4 B.C to A.D 34, named in Luke 3:1. He rebuilt Caesarea Philippi, where Peter made his confession (Matthew 16:13 to 16).

Roman prefects and procurators of Judea governed after Archelaus was deposed. The most important:

Coponius (A.D 6 to 9), under whom the census of Quirinius and the revolt of Judas of Galilee occurred

Pontius Pilate (A.D 26 to 36 or 37). Attested independently by Josephus, by Philo, by Tacitus, and, decisively, by the Pilate Stone, a limestone block found at Caesarea in 1961 bearing his name and title. Tier Two.

Antonius Felix (about A.D 52 to 59), before whom Paul was tried (Acts 23:24 through 24:27). Tacitus says of him that he exercised the power of a king with the mind of a slave (Histories 5.9).

Porcius Festus (about A.D 59 to 62), before whom Paul appealed to Caesar (Acts 25 and 26)

Gessius Florus (A.D 64 to 66), whose corruption and provocations Josephus blames directly for the outbreak of the revolt

Herodian rulers of the later period, all in Acts:

Herod Agrippa I, grandson of Herod the Great, ruled A.D 41 to 44. He killed James the brother of John, imprisoned Peter, and died at Caesarea (Acts 12:1 to 4, 20 to 23). Josephus gives a nearly identical account of his death, including the flattery of the crowd calling him a god and his sudden and agonizing collapse (Antiquities 19.343 to 350). Two independent sources, one Christian and one Jewish, describing the same death in the same terms.

Herod Agrippa 2 and his sister Bernice, before whom Paul made his defense (Acts 25:13 through 26:32). Agrippa 2 held the right to appoint the high priest and oversight of the Temple.

The high priesthood under Rome. This is essential background for the Gospel trials. The office had become a political appointment, sold and revoked at the pleasure of Herod, the Romans, and later Agrippa 2. Josephus lists twenty-eight high priests between Herod's accession and the destruction of the Temple, a period of about one hundred seven years, where formerly the office had been for life.

The dominant family was that of Annas , in Greek Ananus, appointed by Quirinius in A.D 6 and deposed in A.D 15. He was succeeded over the following decades by five of his sons and by his son-in-law Caiaphas , who held the office from about A.D 18 to 36. This is why Luke can speak of Annas and Caiaphas together as if there were two high priests (Luke 3:2), and why John records that Jesus was taken first to Annas (John 18:13). Caiaphas held the title. Annas held the power.

An ossuary bearing the name Joseph son of Caiaphas was discovered in a burial cave in Jerusalem in 1990, and a stone weight and other finds have added to the evidence for the family. Tier Two.

Teacher's Note · The Priesthood at the End

By the time Christ stood before the Sanhedrin, the high priesthood had passed from the sons of Zadok to a purchased office in the gift of a pagan governor, held by a family whose wealth came from the Temple markets. The nation had lost the priesthood as a divine institution long before it lost the building. When the writer to the Hebrews argues that we have a great high priest who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens (Hebrews 7:26), he is writing to people who knew exactly what the alternative looked like.

56. Gamaliel and the Young Man from Tarsus

Gamaliel the Elder, called in Jewish tradition Rabban Gamliel, was the grandson of Hillel and the leading Pharisaic teacher of his generation. He appears once in Scripture, and he appears well:

Acts 5:34 to 39

Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space; and said unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men. For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought. After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found fighting against God.

That is a Pharisee of the school of Hillel doing exactly what a wise man should do: counseling patience and warning the council against the possibility of opposing God Himself. The Mishnah preserves a tradition of his standing: that when Rabban Gamaliel the Elder died, the glory of the law ceased, and purity and abstinence died with him (Mishnah, Sotah 9:15). Tier Five for the wording, but consistent with Luke's description of a man "had in reputation among all the people."

Paul sat under him. Paul says so twice, and the wording is precise:

Acts 22:3

I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day.

Philippians 3:4 to 6

Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.

Everything in this study converges here. Consider what Paul was:

- A Roman citizen by birth (Acts 22:28), which was only possible because Rome had absorbed the east, and which saved his life at least twice (Acts 16:37 to 39; Acts 22:25 to 29) and got him to Rome itself (Acts 25:11)

- A Greek speaker, at home in the koine that Alexander's conquests had made universal, able to preach in Athens and write to Corinth

- A Hebrew of the Hebrews from a diaspora city, formed by the synagogue network that grew up during these centuries

- A Pharisee trained in Jerusalem under the leading teacher of the school of Hillel, meaning he was formed by the entire tradition of legal reasoning that developed after Ezra

- Equipped with the Greek Scriptures, translated in Alexandria two and a half centuries before he needed them

The apostle to the Gentiles is, personally, the product of the four hundred years. God did not merely permit these centuries to pass. He used them to build a man.

Paul renounced confidence in the flesh, not the law of God. He counted his pedigree loss for Christ (Philippians 3:7 to 8), and yet he could still say, on trial, "so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets" (Acts 24:14), and "neither against the law of the Jews, neither against the temple, nor yet against Caesar, have I offended any thing at all" (Acts 25:8), and he wrote plainly that the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good (Romans 7:12). What he abandoned was the attempt to be justified by his own performance, and the traditions of the fathers that had grown over the commandment (Galatians 1:14). Distinguish those two things carefully, because a great deal of confusion in the modern church rests on collapsing them.

57. The Revolt and the Destruction of the Temple

The causes were long in building. Corrupt and rapacious governors, especially Gessius Florus. Crushing taxation. Repeated religious provocations. Growing Zealot violence and assassination. A rigid Roman refusal to understand what the Temple meant. And an internal Jewish civil war between factions that was, by the end, killing more Jews than the Romans were.

The course of the war:

A.D 66. Florus took money from the Temple treasury. Riots followed. The priest Eleazar son of Ananias stopped the daily sacrifice offered for the emperor, which was a formal act of rebellion. The Roman garrison was massacred after being promised safe conduct. The governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, marched on Jerusalem, reached the walls, and then unaccountably withdrew, and his army was ambushed and mauled at Bethh-horon.

A.D 67. Vespasian arrived with three legions and systematically reduced Galilee. Josephus himself commanded there, was besieged at Jotapata, surrendered, and famously predicted that Vespasian would become emperor, which is why he survived to write the history we depend on.

A.D 68 to 69. The war paused during the Roman civil war. In Jerusalem, factions under John of Gischala, Simon bar Giora, and the Zealots fought each other inside the city and burned each other's grain stores, which Josephus says destroyed the food supply that could have sustained a long siege.

A.D 70. Titus besieged Jerusalem from spring. The city was packed with Passover pilgrims. The famine that followed is described by Josephus in terms too horrifying to reproduce here, including the account of a woman who ate her own child (War 6.201 to 213), which is a direct fulfillment of the covenant curses (Deuteronomy 28:53 to 57; Leviticus 26:29).

The daily sacrifice ceased on the seventeenth of Tammuz (War 6.94).

The Temple burned in the month of Ab. Josephus claims Titus wished to spare it and that a soldier threw a firebrand against orders (War 6.236 to 266). The Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, apparently drawing on the lost portion of Tacitus, says the opposite, that Titus deliberately ordered its destruction to root out both Judaism and Christianity (Chronicle 2.30). Historians debate which account to prefer; Josephus was writing under Flavian patronage and had reason to protect Titus's reputation. Tier Four both ways, and it should be presented as an open question.

The city was taken, the population killed or enslaved, and Josephus gives a figure of 1.1 million dead, which is certainly too high but conveys the scale.

Masada held out until A.D 73 or 74, ending in the mass suicide of its defenders as described by Josephus (War 7.320 to 401).

What the Lord had said:

Matthew 24:1 to 2

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

Luke 19:41 to 44

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.

Luke 21:20 to 22

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.

Did the believers escape? Eusebius records that the assembly in Jerusalem, warned by a revelation given before the war, left the city and settled at Pella in the Decapolis east of the Jordan (Ecclesiastical History 3.5.3). Epiphanius reports the same. Tier Four to Five, since Eusebius is writing in the fourth century, but it is the earliest tradition we have, it is consistent, and the withdrawal of Cestius Gallus in A.D 66 provided exactly the kind of window in which such a flight would have been possible.

And Daniel had said it:

Daniel 9:26

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.

The order in that verse is not accidental. Messiah is cut off first. Then the city and the sanctuary are destroyed. That is the sequence of the first century, in the correct order, written six centuries in advance.

Teacher's Note · Handling A.D 70 Responsibly

Two errors need to be avoided here, and both are common. The first is to treat A.D 70 as the total and final fulfillment of everything in the Olivet Discourse and Revelation, so that nothing remains ahead. That reading cannot account for a great deal of what those passages say, including the gathering of the elect from the four winds, the visible return, and the resurrection.

The second error is to treat A.D 70 as merely an interesting historical footnote with no prophetic weight at all, which cannot account for the plain and specific words of our Lord to that generation about that Temple. Both the near fulfillment and the greater one ahead should be held. That is the pattern of prophecy throughout Scripture. The third error, and the gravest, is to use this history as a weapon against the Jewish people. Paul forbids that explicitly and at length (Romans 11:1, 11, 17 to 22, 25 to 29), warning grafted branches not to boast against the natural ones. Teach this history with sorrow, not satisfaction. Our Lord wept over that city (Luke 19:41), and so should we.

Part Eleven · Bringing It Together

58. Daniel 11 Line by Line

Here is the whole chapter set against the history we have walked. Read the verse, then read what happened.

Table: Columns: Verse, The Text, The History. Row 1. Verse: 11:2. The Text: Three kings in Persia, then a fourth far richer, stirring up all against Greece. The History: Cambyses, Bardiya, Darius I, then Xerxes I and the invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Row 2. Verse: 11:3. The Text: A mighty king ruling with great dominion, doing according to his will. The History: Alexander 3 of Macedon, 336 to 323 BC. Row 3. Verse: 11:4. The Text: His kingdom broken and divided toward the four winds, not to his posterity. The History: Alexander's heirs murdered; the empire divided among the successors, settled at Ipsus in 301 BC. Row 4. Verse: 11:5. The Text: The king of the south strong, and one of his princes stronger still. The History: Ptolemy I Soter in Egypt; Seleucus I Nicator, once his subordinate, founds a greater empire. Row 5. Verse: 11:6. The Text: A marriage alliance that fails, the daughter given up along with her attendants and her father. The History: Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy 2, married to Antiochus 2; Laodice has both her and Antiochus killed, about 246 BC. Row 6. Verse: 11:7 to 9. The Text: A branch of her roots invades the north, plunders their gods and vessels, outlives the northern king. The History: Ptolemy 3 Euergetes invades in the Third Syrian War, carries off enormous plunder, outlives Seleucus 2. Row 7. Verse: 11:10. The Text: His sons stir up and assemble a great force, one comes and overflows. The History: Seleucus 3 and Antiochus 3; Antiochus campaigns south. Row 8. Verse: 11:11 to 12. The Text: The king of the south moved with anger, the great multitude given into his hand, but he is not strengthened. The History: Ptolemy 4 defeats Antiochus 3 at Raphia in 217 BC and fails to follow it up. Row 9. Verse: 11:13 to 16. The Text: The northern king returns with a greater army after certain years and none can stand; he stands in the glorious land. The History: Antiochus 3 wins at Panium in 200 BC; Judea passes permanently to the Seleucids. Row 10. Verse: 11:14. The Text: Robbers of thy people exalt themselves to establish the vision, but fall. The History: Jewish factions siding with Antiochus against Egypt, including the Tobiad party. Row 11. Verse: 11:17. The Text: He gives the daughter of women, corrupting her, but she does not stand on his side. The History: Antiochus 3 gives his daughter Cleopatra I to Ptolemy V; she sides with her husband and Egypt. Row 12. Verse: 11:18. The Text: He turns to the isles and takes many, but a prince causes his reproach to cease and turns it back on him. The History: Antiochus 3 campaigns in Asia Minor and Greece; Rome defeats him at Magnesia in 190 BC. Row 13. Verse: 11:19. The Text: He turns toward the fort of his own land, stumbles and falls, and is not found. The History: Antiochus 3 dies in 187 BC while plundering a temple in Elymais to pay the Roman indemnity. Row 14. Verse: 11:20. The Text: A raiser of taxes in the glory of the kingdom, destroyed within few days, neither in anger nor in battle. The History: Seleucus 4 Philopator, remembered for taxation, assassinated by his minister Heliodorus in 175 BC. Row 15. Verse: 11:21. The Text: A vile person, not given the honour of the kingdom, obtaining it by flatteries. The History: Antiochus 4 Epiphanes usurps the throne from his nephew Demetrius. Row 16. Verse: 11:22 to 24. The Text: Overflowing forces broken, the prince of the covenant, deceitful dealing, scattering plunder among his followers. The History: The removal of Onias 3; Antiochus 4's habit, noted by Polybius, of extravagant public gifts. Row 17. Verse: 11:25 to 27. The Text: Campaign against the king of the south, betrayal from within the southern court, two kings lying at one table. The History: The Sixth Syrian War; Ptolemy VI betrayed by his own courtiers and later negotiating with Antiochus. Row 18. Verse: 11:28. The Text: He returns with great riches, his heart against the holy covenant. The History: The plundering of the Temple in 169 BC. Row 19. Verse: 11:29 to 30. The Text: He returns south but not as before, for the ships of Chittim come against him, and he vents his fury on the covenant, in league with those who forsake it. The History: 168 BC: Popilius Laenas and the Roman ships turn him back at Alexandria; he allies with the Hellenizing party in Jerusalem.

Table: Columns: Verse, The Text, The History. Row 1. Verse: 11:31. The Text: Arms pollute the sanctuary, take away the daily sacrifice, and place the abomination that maketh desolate. The History: December 167 BC: the altar to Olympian Zeus erected on the altar of burnt offering, swine sacrificed. Row 2. Verse: 11:32. The Text: Corrupting by flatteries those who do wickedly, but the people that know their God shall be strong and do exploits. The History: The Hellenizers versus Mattathias and the Maccabean revolt. Row 3. Verse: 11:33 to 35. The Text: They that understand instruct many, yet fall by sword, flame, captivity and spoil; helped with a little help; many cleave with flatteries; some fall to purge and make white. The History: The martyrdoms; the initial small success of the revolt; opportunists joining once it succeeded. Row 4. Verse: 11:36 to 39. The Text: The king exalts himself above every god, speaks marvellous things against the God of gods, honours a god of forces. The History: Antiochus 4's coins calling himself God Manifest, and the imposition of Olympian Zeus worship. Row 5. Verse: 11:40 to 45. The Text: The time of the end, a final northern king, tidings out of the east and north, planting his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain, and coming to his end with none to help. The History: Here the text moves past what Antiochus did. He did not die between the seas at Jerusalem; he died in Persia. Most readers, including many historicists, take these verses as reaching beyond the near fulfillment.

Teacher's Note · Where the Chapter Turns

Almost everyone who reads Daniel 11 carefully notices that something changes somewhere around verse 36 or verse 40. Up to that point the correspondence with Seleucid and Ptolemaic history is so tight that the pagan critic Porphyry concluded the chapter had to be written after the fact. After that point the details stop fitting Antiochus. He did not die in the glorious holy mountain between the seas. He died at Tabae in Persia. Godly interpreters have handled this in several ways.

Some hold the whole chapter describes Antiochus and read verses 40 to 45 as prophecy he failed to fulfill because God cut him short. Some hold the text shifts to a final ruler of whom Antiochus was a type. Some hold both are in view at once, the way many prophecies operate on two levels. This study takes the last position, and states it as a position rather than a certainty. What is beyond argument is that verses 2 through 35 landed with a precision that no critic has ever satisfactorily explained away.

59. The Four Kingdoms Chart

Two things stand out when the chart is laid out this way.

Daniel 8 skips Babylon entirely. The vision begins with the ram, because by then Babylon was already finished as a concern. The prophecy narrows as it approaches the crisis point.

Daniel 7 does not end with Rome. It ends with a courtroom:

Table LIX: Columns: Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Daniel 8, The Empire, Dates, Its Impact on the Jews. Row 1. 1. Daniel 2: Head of gold. Daniel 7: Lion with eagle's wings. Daniel 8: (not shown). The Empire: Babylon. Dates: 605 to 539 BC. Its Impact on the Jews: Destroyed the Temple, carried Judah into exile, ended the Davidic monarchy. Row 2. 2. Daniel 2: Breast and arms of silver. Daniel 7: Bear raised on one side, three ribs. Daniel 8: Ram with two horns, the higher last. The Empire: Medo-Persia. Dates: 539 to 332 BC. Its Impact on the Jews: Permitted the return, funded the Second Temple, gave the law legal standing in Judea. Row 3. 3. Daniel 2: Belly and thighs of brass. Daniel 7: Leopard, four wings, four heads. Daniel 8: He-goat with a notable horn, then four. The Empire: Greece. Dates: 332 to 63 BC. Its Impact on the Jews: Imposed Greek language and culture, produced the Septuagint, produced the crisis of 167 BC. Row 4. 4. Daniel 2: Legs of iron, feet of iron and clay. Daniel 7: Dreadful beast with iron teeth and ten horns. Daniel 8: (not shown). The Empire: Rome. Dates: 63 BC onward. Its Impact on the Jews: Ruled Judea at the coming of Christ, crucified Him,. Row 5. Daniel 2: Daniel 2. Daniel 7: Daniel 7. Daniel 8: Daniel 8. The Empire: The Empire. Dates: Dates. Its Impact on the Jews: Its Impact on the Jews. Row 6. Its Impact on the Jews: destroyed the Temple in AD 70. Row 7. 5. Daniel 2: The stone cut without hands. Daniel 7: The Son of man and the everlasting dominion. Daniel 8: (not shown). The Empire: The kingdom of God. Its Impact on the Jews: Set up in the days of these kings, never destroyed, fills the whole earth.

Daniel 7:13 to 14

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

That title, Son of man, is the one our Lord used of Himself more than any other, and when He used it before the Sanhedrin He quoted this very passage, which is precisely why they tore their clothes:

Matthew 26:64

Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

They knew exactly which chapter He was citing.

60. The Seventy Weeks: Setting the Dates

This is the one prophecy in Scripture that puts a number on the arrival of the Messiah, and it is the reason the nation was actively watching when John began to preach. It deserves to be worked out with real dates rather than gestured at.

The Text

Daniel 9:24 to 27

Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he

shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

Step One: What a "Week" Is

The Hebrew word is shabua, a seven. It is a unit of seven without specifying seven of what, exactly as our word "dozen" is twelve of something unnamed. Three lines of evidence establish that the units here are years.

The context is a count of years. Daniel was reading Jeremiah and counting seventy years of desolation when this answer came:

Daniel 9:2

In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem.

He asked about seventy years. The answer came back in seventy sevens.

The seventy years of exile were themselves a count of sabbatical years. This is the strongest argument, and it is stated outright:

2 Chronicles 36:21

To fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.

The land was owed seventy sabbatical years, which is seventy cycles of seven, which is 490 years of missed rest. Gabriel answers a seventy-sabbatical judgment with a seventy-sabbatical restoration. Seventy sevens of years is 490 years, and it is also exactly ten jubilee cycles (Leviticus 25:8).

Scripture elsewhere uses a day for a year in prophetic counting (Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:5 to 6).

So: 70 times 7 equals 490 years. Broken by Gabriel into 7 weeks (49 years), then 62 weeks (434 years), then 1 week (7 years).

Step Two: Where the Clock Starts

Daniel received this in the first year of Darius, about 539 or 538 B.C (Daniel 9:1). The 490 years do not start there. They start "from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem," and Daniel is being told about a decree still in the future when he heard it. That distinction matters, and it is where most confusion begins.

There are four candidate decrees in the Persian period.

Table: Columns: Decree, Date, Text, What It Authorized. Row 1. Decree: Cyrus. Date: 538 BC. Text: Ezra 1:1 to 4. What It Authorized: Rebuilding the house of God. The city is not mentioned.. Row 2. Decree: Darius I. Date: about 520 BC. Text: Ezra 6:1 to 12. What It Authorized: Confirmation of Cyrus, funding the Temple. Again the Temple, not the city.. Row 3. Decree: Artaxerxes I, 7th year. Date: 458/457 BC. Text: Ezra 7:11 to 26. What It Authorized: Ezra's commission: Temple funding, and beyond that the appointment of magistrates and judges, the enforcement of the law of God and the law of the king, with authority to punish by death, banishment, confiscation, or imprisonment..

Table: Columns: Decree, Date, Text, What It Authorized. Row 1. Decree: Artaxerxes I, 20th year. Date: 445/444 BC. Text: Nehemiah 2:1 to 8. What It Authorized: Timber and authority to rebuild the wall and the city..

The first two are usually set aside because Daniel 9:25 specifies restoring and building Jerusalem, not the sanctuary. The real contest is between the third and the fourth, and both have serious arguments.

The case for Ezra 7 (458/457 B.C): the commission restores a functioning Jewish polity with courts, judges, and legal authority, which is what restoring a city means in the ancient sense, not merely stacking stones. And Ezra himself, describing what the decree accomplished, uses the very language of the prophecy:

Ezra 9:9

For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.

The case for Nehemiah 2 (445/444 B.C): it is the only decree that explicitly concerns the wall and the city, and Daniel 9:25 says "the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times," which is a nearly verbatim description of Nehemiah's fifty-two days of building with a sword in one hand (Nehemiah 4:17 to 18).

Step Three: The Two Main Rekonings, With Dates

Reckoning A: 457 B.C, counted in ordinary solar years.

Remember there is no year zero, so crossing from B.C to A.D you subtract one.

Table: Columns: Segment, Span, Dates, Event. Row 1. Segment: Start. Dates: 457 BC. Event: Ezra's commission takes effect. Row 2. Segment: 7 weeks. Span: 49 years. Dates: 457 to 408 BC. Event: Jerusalem restored "in troublous times" (Ezra and Nehemiah). Row 3. Segment: 62 weeks. Span: 434 years. Dates: 408 BC to AD 27. Event: The four hundred years of this study. Row 4. Segment: End of 69 weeks. Span: 483 years. Dates: AD 27. Event: Messiah the Prince: the baptism and anointing of Jesus. Row 5. Segment: Midst of the 70th week. Span: 3.5 years. Dates: AD 30 or 31. Event: Messiah cut off; sacrifice and oblation caused to cease. Row 6. Segment: End of the 70th week. Span: 3.5 years. Dates: AD 34. Event: The covenant confirmed with many; the gospel goes to the nations.

The arithmetic: 483 - 457 = 26, plus 1 for the missing year zero = A.D 27.

What lands there is precisely what the prophecy names. "Messiah" means Anointed One, and Jesus was anointed at His baptism:

Acts 10:37 to 38

That word, I say, ye know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from Galilee, after the baptism which John preached; how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.

And Luke dates that event by an independent yardstick, the fifteenth year of Tiberius (Luke 3:1), which lands in A.D 27 or 28 depending on how Tiberius's years are counted. Two independent clocks, one prophetic and one imperial, arriving at the same place.

"In the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease" then falls three and a half years later, at the cross, where the veil was torn from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51) and where, in the reckoning of heaven, the sacrificial system was finished:

Hebrews 10:12 to 14

But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

And the last half-week runs to about A.D 34, the period of the apostolic preaching to Israel in Jerusalem, ending around the stoning of Stephen and the scattering that carried the gospel outward (Acts 7:59 through 8:4).

Reckoning B: 445 or 444 B.C, counted in 360-day years.

This reckoning begins from Nehemiah's decree, and it has to solve an obvious problem: 483 ordinary years from 445 B.C lands in about A.D 39, well after the crucifixion. The solution proposed is that a prophetic year is 360 days, on the argument that Scripture equates forty-two months, 1,260 days, and "a time, times, and half a time," which yields 360-day years (Revelation 11:2 to 3; Revelation 12:6, 14; Daniel 7:25; Daniel 12:7).

Sir Robert Anderson worked this out in The Coming:

69 weeks times 7 years times 360 days equals 173,880 days

- Start: Nisan 1, 445 B.C, which he fixed as March 14, 445 B.C

- End: April 6, A.D 32, which he identified as Nisan 10, the day of the triumphal entry

Harold Hoehner later revised it, placing the twentieth year of Artaxerxes in 444 B.C:

- Start: March 5, 444 B.C

- End: March 30, A.D 33, the triumphal entry

The appeal is obvious. The prophecy appears to land not on a year but on a single day, and that day is the one occasion in His ministry when Jesus deliberately presented Himself publicly as King and accepted the acclamation (Luke 19:37 to 40), immediately followed by the weeping over the city and the words "because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation" (Luke 19:44).

Teacher's Note · Be Honest About the Arithmetic

This calculation is enormously popular and it is repeated in a great many books and pulpits without being checked. It should be checked. Careful critics have shown that both Anderson and Hoehner mixed calendar systems, using Julian dates while applying mean solar or Gregorian year lengths to compute the interval. Recalculated consistently, the number of days between Anderson's two dates comes out to about 173,883 rather than 173,880, and between Hoehner's dates to about 173,885. There are also questions about whether Nisan 1 in those years fell on the dates assigned. None of this touches the larger point that 483 years from a Persian decree lands in the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. What it does mean is that a teacher should not stand up and claim the prophecy is accurate "to the very day" as though that were settled. Present the reckoning, present the objection, and let the hearer weigh it. Overstating a good case is how a good case gets destroyed.

Table: Columns: Reckoning A, Reckoning B. Row 1. Decree. Reckoning A: Ezra 7, seventh year of Artaxerxes I. Reckoning B: Nehemiah 2, twentieth year of Artaxerxes I. Row 2. Date. Reckoning A: 458/457 BC. Reckoning B: 445/444 BC. Row 3. Year length. Reckoning A: Ordinary solar years. Reckoning B: 360-day prophetic years. Row 4. End of 69 weeks. Reckoning A: AD 27. Reckoning B: AD 32 or AD 33. Row 5. Identified as. Reckoning A: The baptism and anointing. Reckoning B: The triumphal entry. Row 6. The 70th week. Reckoning A: Continuous: AD 27 to 34, crucifixion at the midpoint. Reckoning B: A gap, with the 70th week still future. Row 7. Main strength. Reckoning A: No special year length needed; "Messiah" naturally means anointing. Reckoning B: Matches the explicit "wall and street" language of Daniel 9:25. Row 8. Main weakness. Reckoning A: Requires reading Ezra 7 as a decree about the city. Reckoning B: The arithmetic does not verify as precisely as claimed.

Step Five: The 70th Week

The two reckonings part company most sharply here, and the difference should be stated plainly rather than smoothed over.

The continuous reading takes the seventieth week as running straight on from the sixty-ninth, A.D 27 to A.D 34. The one who "confirms the covenant with many" is Christ, who confirmed the promises made to the fathers (Romans 15:8) and whose blood is the blood of the new covenant (Matthew 26:28). "In the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease" is the cross. The destruction of the city in verse 26 then falls after the 490, which is exactly how the verse orders it: Messiah cut off first, and then the people of the prince destroy the city and the sanctuary. On this reading A.D 70 is a consequence of the prophecy, not a part of the count.

The gap reading takes the seventieth week as still future, separated from the first sixty-nine, with the one confirming the covenant being the coming prince of verse 26 rather than Christ. It points out that the six accomplishments of verse 24, including bringing in everlasting righteousness and sealing up vision and prophecy, are not yet fully realized, and that the abominations and desolation of verse 27 read most naturally alongside Matthew 24:15 and 2 Thessalonians 2:3 to 4.

Teacher's Note · How We Hold This

This study has argued throughout that prophecy can carry more than one fulfillment, and that principle applies here as much as anywhere. The 483 years landing on the ministry of Jesus is, in our view, secure on either reckoning, and it is the part with real teaching weight. What happens with the final seven is the genuinely contested part, and godly men have landed on both sides for centuries. A teacher can present the count to Messiah with confidence and present the seventieth week as an open question without any loss of integrity. In fact that is the honest thing to do.

Step Six: Why This Is Not Date-Setting

A distinction has to be drawn sharply, because the same objection always comes.

Counting backward over completed history is not date-setting. Daniel 9 was given precisely so the people would know when to expect the Anointed One, and the record shows that they did. Luke reports that the nation was in a state of active expectation when John appeared:

And as the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ, or not.

Nobody had to tell them a clock was running. And when the Lord wept over Jerusalem, He held them accountable for not knowing the time of their visitation (Luke 19:44), which is only just if the time was knowable.

Predicting the day of His return is date-setting, and it is forbidden. Our Lord could not have been plainer:

Matthew 24:36

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Acts 1:7

And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.

So: date the first coming, because Scripture dated it. Do not date the second, because Scripture forbade it. That line is clean, and every generation that has blurred it has embarrassed itself and damaged the credibility of the Word in the eyes of those watching.

Step Seven: From Daniel to Christ, End to End

Finally, here is the whole span in one place, since that is what this study is about.

Table: Columns: Marker, Date, Years From Daniel's Prayer. Row 1. Marker: Daniel's prayer and Gabriel's answer (Daniel 9:1 to 2). Date: 539/538 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: 0. Row 2. Marker: Decree of Cyrus, the first return. Date: 538 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 1. Row 3. Marker: Second Temple completed. Date: 516 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 22. Row 4. Marker: Decree of Artaxerxes to Ezra: the clock starts. Date: 457 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 81. Row 5. Marker: Nehemiah's wall completed; the city restored. Date: 445 to 408 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: 93 to 130. Row 6. Marker: Malachi, and the silence begins. Date: about 430 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 108. Row 7. Marker: Alexander conquers Persia. Date: 332 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 206. Row 8. Marker: The abomination of Antiochus 4. Date: 167 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 371. Row 9. Marker: The Temple cleansed. Date: 164 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 374. Row 10. Marker: Pompey enters the Holy of Holies. Date: 63 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 475. Row 11. Marker: Herod begins rebuilding the Temple. Date: 20/19 BC. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 518. Row 12. Marker: The baptism of Jesus: end of the 69 weeks. Date: AD 27. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 565. Row 13. Marker: The crucifixion: Messiah cut off. Date: AD 30 or 31. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 569. Row 14. Marker: End of the 70 weeks. Date: AD 34. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 572. Row 15. Marker: The city and the sanctuary destroyed (Daniel 9:26). Date: AD 70. Years From Daniel's Prayer: about 608.

From the decree to the Anointed One: 483 years, exactly as written. From Daniel's prayer in Babylon to the voice from heaven at the Jordan saying "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17): roughly five and a half centuries, every one of them accounted for in a single paragraph handed to an old man in exile who was praying about somebody else's seventy years.

61. On Multiple Fulfillments

This study has read Daniel's four kingdoms as literal empires that literally rose and fell, and the little horn of Daniel 8 as a man who literally desecrated the sanctuary in 167 B.C. Some readers will want to know whether that empties the prophecy for the future. It does not, and here is why.

Scripture itself reuses fulfilled prophecy. The clearest case is the very passage we have been studying. Antiochus set up the abomination in 167 B.C. Two centuries later, the Lord Jesus, standing in Herod's Temple, told His disciples:

Matthew 24:15

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)

He puts it in the future. Not "as you know, this happened under Antiochus," but "when ye shall see." The pattern was set in the second century B.C. It was invoked again for the first century A.D. And Paul describes a man of sin sitting in the temple of God showing himself that he is God (2 Thessalonians 2:3 to 4), which is the same shape a third time.

Other prophecies work the same way. Isaiah's sign to Ahaz had a near reference and a far one that Matthew applies to the virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:22 to 23). Hosea's line about calling God's son out of Egypt refers historically to the Exodus and is applied by Matthew to the child Jesus (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15). Joel's outpouring is declared by Peter to be "that which was spoken by the prophet Joel" at Pentecost (Acts 2:16), yet the cosmic signs of that same passage plainly reach further.

The reason this works is that God's dealings have a shape, and the shape repeats because the enemy's strategy repeats and God's character does not change. A ruler exalts himself, defiles the holy place, forbids the worship of God, persecutes those who keep His commandments, and is broken without human hand. That happened. It will happen again. Recognizing the first does not cancel the second; it teaches us what to watch for.

Teacher's Note · Two Cautions

First, this principle is not a license to find anything anywhere. A pattern claim must be grounded in what the text actually says, and the near fulfillment has to be real history, not a guess. Second, and this needs saying plainly, none of this permits date-setting. Our Lord said that of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but his Father only (Matthew 24:36), and that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons (Acts 1:7). Every generation that has ignored that has been humiliated, and has brought reproach on the Gospel. Study the pattern. Watch. Do not set dates.

62. The Silence Broken

Step back and look at what four hundred years produced.

A common language. Alexander's conquests made koine Greek the language of the entire eastern Mediterranean, and Rome kept it there. Every book of the New Testament was written in it. A letter from Paul in Corinth could be read in Rome, in Ephesus, in Antioch, and in Alexandria without translation. No such thing had ever existed before, and nothing like it would exist again for many centuries.

A translated Bible. The Scriptures went into Greek beginning in the third century B.C. When the apostles preached to God-fearing Gentiles in synagogues from Pisidia to Macedonia, the Old Testament was already in a language those hearers could read.

A road system and a peace. Rome built roads and suppressed piracy, and the Pax Romana meant a man could travel from Jerusalem to Rome with reasonable safety. Read the itineraries of Acts and notice how often Paul simply takes a ship or walks a highway that Rome built.

A dispersed people. From Babylon, from Ptolemy's deportations, from voluntary migration and trade, Jewish communities existed in nearly every significant city in the empire, each with a synagogue, each reading Moses every Sabbath (Acts 15:21). The apostles had a prepared audience and a prepared venue in every city they entered.

A body of Gentiles already attracted to the God of Israel. The God-fearers, described repeatedly in Acts as those who feared God or worshipped God, were Gentiles who attended synagogue, kept much of the moral law, and had not become proselytes. Cornelius is the model (Acts 10:1 to 2). Lydia is another (Acts 16:14). These were the first and readiest hearers of the Gospel among the nations.

A legal framework. Caesar's decrees, preserved by Josephus, protected Jewish religious practice across the empire. For the first crucial decades, while the assembly was understood as a movement within Judaism, that protection extended over it.

And a hunger. Independence had been tried and had failed. Priest-kings had been tried and had corrupted. Roman order had been imposed and was hated.

The Psalms of Solomon had cried out for a Son of David. Qumran was waiting in the desert for an anointed deliverer. Simeon in the Temple was waiting for the consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25). Anna the prophetess spoke of Him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). The Samaritan woman at the well knew that Messiah was coming (John 4:25). Even Herod's own scribes could tell him instantly where the Christ should be born (Matthew 2:4 to 6).

Galatians 4:4 to 5

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

The fulness of the time is not a poetic phrase. It is a description of everything catalogued above. God was not absent for four hundred years. He was building a stage.

And the last thing the last prophet had said, before the silence closed in, was this:

Malachi 3:1

Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in:

behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts.

Four centuries later, a priest of the course of Abia was burning incense in the sanctuary at the hour of prayer when an angel stood on the right side of the altar (Luke 1:5 to 13). The messenger was announced. And roughly thirty years after that, the Lord whom they sought came suddenly to His temple, exactly as promised, and turned over the tables of the money changers in the very courts Herod had built.

The silence was over.

Part Twelve · The Library

63. Annotated Source List

This is the list of everything referenced in this study, with what it is, when it was written, and how much weight it can carry. A teacher should be able to hand this to a hearer and say: go check.

The Apocryphal Books

These are the books included in the Greek and Latin Bibles and printed in the original 1611 King James Version between the Testaments, and later removed from most printings.

1 Maccabees. Written in Hebrew, probably around 100 B.C, surviving in Greek. Covers 175 to 134 B.C. Sober, restrained, document-preserving, and the best narrative source for the revolt. Tier Three.

2 Maccabees. Written in Greek, an abridgment of the lost five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene, covering 180 to 161 B.C. Rhetorical and given to wonders, but preserves genuine material and is the source for the martyr accounts. Tier Four.

Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Ben Sira. Jerusalem, about 180 B.C, translated by the author's grandson in Egypt about 132 B.C. The prologue is one of our earliest witnesses to the threefold canon. Tier Three for its own period.

Tobit. Third or early second century B.C. Historically confused; valuable as a picture of diaspora piety. Tier Five as history.

Judith. Second century B.C. Historically impossible in its opening premise. Tier Five as history.

Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. Second century B.C or later. Penitential and anti-idolatry.

Wisdom of Solomon. Alexandria, probably first century B.C. Not by Solomon.

3 Maccabees. Not about the Maccabees. A persecution legend set in Ptolemaic Egypt. Tier Five.

1 Esdras. A Greek variant account of Josiah through Ezra, containing the story of the three young bodyguards debating what is strongest, which is not in canonical Ezra.

2 Esdras, also called 4 Ezra. An apocalypse from around A.D 100, after the destruction of the Temple, wrestling with why God allowed it.

Additions to Esther and Daniel (the Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon).

Prayer of Manasseh.

Teacher's Note · Our Position on These Books

We hold to the sixty-six books. The Apocrypha is not Scripture, and no doctrine should rest on it. Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate, distinguished the canonical books from these and said the latter were read for edification of the people but not for establishing doctrine. That is exactly our use. We read 1 Maccabees the way we read Josephus or Polybius, as history. Note also that 2 Maccabees contains a passage on prayer and offerings for the dead (2 Maccabees 12:43 to 45) that has been used to support a doctrine Scripture does not teach, which is one very concrete illustration of why the distinction matters.

The Pseudepigrapha

Jewish writings from the period attributed to ancient figures who did not write them.

1 Enoch. A composite work, third century B.C onward. Widely read; quoted in Jude 14 to 15. Includes the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Similitudes with their Son of Man figure, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch.

- Jubilees. Second century B.C. A retelling of Genesis on a 364-day solar calendar. Fifteen or more copies at Qumran.

- Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Farewell speeches attributed to Jacob's sons, with heavy interest in a coming priestly and royal deliverer. Christian interpolations complicate the text.

- Psalms of Solomon. Jerusalem, mid-first century B.C, reacting to Pompey. Psalm 17 is the fullest pre-Christian prayer for a Davidic king outside the canon. Tier Three for the sentiment of its generation.

- Letter of Aristeas. The Septuagint origin story. Tier Five for its details, useful for its existence.

- Sibylline Oracles, Book 3 especially, Jewish propaganda in Greek hexameter from Egypt.

- Assumption of Moses, also called Testament of Moses. First century. Apparently the source of the dispute over the body of Moses that Jude mentions (Jude 9).

- Aramaic Levi Document. Priestly material found at Qumran and in the Cairo Genizah.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Roughly nine hundred manuscripts from eleven caves at Qumran, plus finds at Masada, Wadi Murabba'at, and Nahal Hever. Discovered from 1947 onward. Tier Two.

- 1.Q.Isa ^{a} , the Great Isaiah Scroll. Nearly complete Isaiah, about a thousand years older than the previously oldest Hebrew copy.

- 1.Q.S, the Community Rule.

- C.D, the Damascus Document.

- 1.Q.M, the War Scroll.

- 1.Q.p.Hab, the Habakkuk Commentary. Teacher of Righteousness and Wicked Priest.

- 4.Q.p.Nah, the Nahum Commentary. The Lion of Wrath who hangs men alive.

- 4.Q.M.M.T. Legal disputes over purity and Temple practice.

- 11.Q.T, the Temple Scroll.

- 3.Q.15, the Copper Scroll.

- 4.Q.521, on the works of the Lord's Anointed.

- 11.Q.13, Melchizedek.

Josephus

Flavius Josephus, born Joseph ben Matthias about A.D 37, a priest of Hasmonean descent, a commander in Galilee in the revolt, a captive of Vespasian, and afterward a writer under Flavian patronage in Rome. He is our single most important non-biblical source for this whole period, and his bias must be kept in mind: he wrote to explain the Jews to a Roman audience and to protect his patrons' reputation.

- The Jewish War, seven books, written about A.D 75. Covers the Maccabean period briefly and the revolt in detail.

- Antiquities of the Jews, twenty books, completed about A.D 93 or 94. The full history from creation to the revolt. Books 11 through 20 cover the period of this study.

- The Life, an autobiography and defense.

- Against Apion, two books, an apologetic work that preserves quotations from Manetho, Hecataeus, Agatharchides, Berossus, and Menander of Ephesus, which is why it is so valuable.

The standard English translation in the public domain is that of William Whiston, 1737, which is the one quoted in this study and the one most readers will have.

Philo

Philo of Alexandria, about 20 B.C to A.D 50, a Jewish philosopher and a leader of the Alexandrian community.

- On the Embassy to Gaius, an eyewitness account of the Caligula crisis and of the delegation to Rome.

- Against Flaccus, on the anti-Jewish violence in Alexandria in A.D 38.

- Every Good Man Is Free, containing his description of the Essenes.

- On the Contemplative Life, on the Therapeutae.

- Life of Moses, containing his account of the Septuagint translation.

Greek and Roman Historians

- Herodotus, Histories, fifth century B.C. The Persian wars, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes. Essential background for Esther.

- Xenophon, Anabasis and Cyropaedia, fourth century B.C. Persia from the inside.

- Polybius, Histories, second century B.C. The best historian of the period, with firsthand knowledge of Rome's rise and access to participants. Antiochus 3, Raphia, Magnesia, Apamea, Popillius Laenas, and the character of Antiochus 4. Tier Three.

- Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, first century B.C. Broad and uneven.

- Livy, History of Rome, late first century B.C. The war with Antiochus 3 and the treaty terms.

- Strabo, Geography, about A.D 20. Includes an account of the Jews and Pompey's campaign.

- Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, second century A.D. The most sober Alexander source.

• Plutarch, Lives, second century A.D. Alexander, Pompey, Crassus, Antony.

- Quintus Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great, first century A.D.

- Appian, The Syrian Wars and The Civil Wars, second century A.D.

- Justin, Epitome of the Philippine History of Pompeius Trogus, an abridgment of a lost work.

- Tacitus, Histories Book 5 and Annals. His excursus on Jewish origins is hostile and often inaccurate, but Annals 15.44 is important independent attestation of Christ's execution under Pilate.

- Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, about A.D 121. The Chrestus notice in Claudius 25.4.

- Cassius Dio, Roman History, third century A.D. Includes Pompey's capture of Jerusalem on a Sabbath.

- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, about A.D 77. Locates the Essenes by the Dead Sea.

- Agatharchides of Cnidus, second century B.C, surviving through Josephus. Ptolemy I taking Jerusalem on the Sabbath.

- Hecataeus of Abdera, about 300 B.C, surviving through Josephus and Diodorus. An early Greek description of the Jews. Some of the material Josephus attributes to him is regarded as coming from a later Jewish writer, hence the label Pseudo-Hecataeus.

- Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek about 280 B.C, surviving in fragments through Josephus and Eusebius.

- Manetho, an Egyptian priest writing in Greek in the third century B.C, surviving in fragments, largely through Josephus's rebuttals.

Documentary and Archaeological Evidence

Tier Two throughout, and the most valuable material in the list.

- The Babylonian Chronicles, including the Fall of Nineveh, Chronicle and the Jerusalem Chronicle.

- The Nabonidus Chronicle and the Verse Account of Nabonidus.

- The Harran Stelae of Adad-guppi, mother of Nabonidus.

- The Jehoiachin ration tablets from Babylon.

- The Cyrus Cylinder, British Museum

- The Behistun Inscription of Darius I.

- The Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Tablets.

- The Elephantine papyri, including the petition to Bagoas of 407 B.C and the Passover Papyrus of 419 B.C.

- The Wadi Daliyeh papyri, fourth century B.C Samaritan legal documents.

- The Zenon papyri, 259 to 258 B.C, Ptolemaic administration in Palestine, including Tobias.

- The Heliodorus stele from Maresha, 178 B.C.

- Seleucid and Hasmonean and Herodian coinage, including the coins of Antiochus 4 styling him Theos Epiphanes.

- The Temple warning inscriptions forbidding Gentiles to pass the barrier.

- The Theodotus Inscription, a pre-A.D 70 synagogue dedication from Jerusalem.

- The Pilate Stone from Caesarea, 1961.

- The Caiaphas ossuary, Jerusalem, 1990.

- The Arch of Titus in Rome, showing the Temple vessels carried in triumph.

- The Gerizim excavations, showing a Persian-period sanctuary.

- Iraq al-Amir in Jordan, the Tobiad estate, with the name Tobiah carved in the rock.

- First-century synagogue buildings at Gamla, Masada, Herodium, and Magdala.

Rabbinic Literature

Tier Five for events of this period, since it is written down centuries later, but often preserving genuine memory.

- The Mishnah, compiled about A.D 200. Tractate Avot for the chain of transmission and the zugot; Sotah 9:15 on Gamaliel.

- The Tosefta, a supplement to the Mishnah.

- The Jerusalem Talmud, about A.D 400, and the Babylonian Talmud, about A.D 500 to 600. The Hanukkah oil story is at b. Shabbat 21b; the Hyrcanus or Jannaeus confrontation at b. Kiddushin 66a; the Alexander legend at b. Yoma 69a.

- Megillat Taanit, the Scroll of Fasting, a very early list of days on which mourning was forbidden, preserving Hasmonean-era commemorations.

- Seder Olam Rabbah, a chronological work whose reckoning of the Persian period differs sharply from the Greek and Persian sources, compressing it by roughly one hundred sixty years. Teachers who encounter that discrepancy should know it exists and that this study follows the documentary and Greek chronology.

Early Christian Sources

- Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History and Chronicle, fourth century A.D. The Pella tradition at 3.5.3; preserves fragments of earlier chronographers.

- Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, about A.D 407. Invaluable because it preserves and answers the arguments of the pagan Porphyry, whose own work is lost. Jerome's summary of Porphyry's chapter-by-chapter historical identification of Daniel 11 is one of our oldest detailed readings of that chapter against Seleucid history.

- Julius Africanus, third century, chronographer, an early attempt to date the seventy weeks.

- Sulpicius Severus, Chronicle 2.30, early fifth century, on Titus's intentions toward the Temple, possibly preserving lost Tacitus.

- Epiphanius, fourth century, on the flight to Pella.

64. Master Timeline

The Babylonian Period

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 626 BC. Event: Nabopolassar founds the Neo-Babylonian empire. Row 2. Date: 612 BC. Event: Fall of Nineveh. Row 3. Date: 605 BC. Event: Carchemish; Nebuchadnezzar 2 accedes; first deportation from Judah including Daniel. Row 4. Date: 597 BC. Event: Jerusalem taken; Jehoiachin deported; Zedekiah installed. Row 5. Date: 586 BC. Event: Jerusalem and the Temple destroyed. Row 6. Date: 562 BC. Event: Death of Nebuchadnezzar; Evil-merodach frees Jehoiachin. Row 7. Date: 556 BC. Event: Nabonidus accedes; Belshazzar governs Babylon. Row 8. Date: 539 BC. Event: Babylon falls to Cyrus in October.

The Persian Period

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 538 BC. Event: Decree of Cyrus; the first return under Sheshbazzar and Zerubbabel. Row 2. Date: 536 BC. Event: Altar rebuilt; sacrifices and feasts resume; foundation laid. Row 3. Date: 530 to 522 BC. Event: Cambyses 2; conquest of Egypt in 525 BC. Row 4. Date: 522 BC. Event: Darius I accedes; Behistun inscription. Row 5. Date: 520 BC. Event: Haggai and Zechariah prophesy; the work resumes. Row 6. Date: 516 BC. Event: Second Temple completed. Row 7. Date: 486 BC. Event: Xerxes I accedes. Row 8. Date: 483 to 473 BC. Event: The events of the book of Esther. Row 9. Date: 465 BC. Event: Artaxerxes I accedes.

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 458 BC. Event: Ezra's return. Row 2. Date: 445 BC. Event: Nehemiah's return; the wall rebuilt in fifty-two days. Row 3. Date: about 430 BC. Event: Malachi; the prophetic voice falls silent. Row 4. Date: 419 BC. Event: The Passover Papyrus at Elephantine. Row 5. Date: 410 BC. Event: The Elephantine temple destroyed. Row 6. Date: 407 BC. Event: The petition to Bagoas. Row 7. Date: 404 to 358 BC. Event: Artaxerxes 2. Row 8. Date: 358 to 338 BC. Event: Artaxerxes 3 Ochus; Egypt reconquered. Row 9. Date: 336 BC. Event: Darius 3 accedes.

The Greek Period

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 336 BC. Event: Alexander 3 accedes in Macedon. Row 2. Date: 334 BC. Event: The Granicus. Row 3. Date: 333 BC. Event: Issus. Row 4. Date: 332 BC. Event: Tyre and Gaza fall; Judea submits; Egypt taken; Alexandria founded. Row 5. Date: 331 BC. Event: Gaugamela; Babylon, Susa, Persepolis. Row 6. Date: 330 BC. Event: Darius 3 murdered; the Persian empire ends. Row 7. Date: 323 BC. Event: Alexander dies at Babylon. Row 8. Date: 323 to 301 BC. Event: The wars of the successors. Row 9. Date: about 320 BC. Event: Ptolemy I takes Jerusalem on a Sabbath. Row 10. Date: 301 BC. Event: Ipsus; the empire settles into four. Row 11. Date: 301 to 200 BC. Event: Judea under the Ptolemies. Row 12. Date: about 280 to 250 BC. Event: The Torah translated into Greek at Alexandria. Row 13. Date: 274 to 271 BC. Event: First Syrian War. Row 14. Date: 260 to 253 BC. Event: Second Syrian War; Berenice married to Antiochus 2. Row 15. Date: 259 to 258 BC. Event: Zenon's journey through Palestine. Row 16. Date: 246 BC. Event: Berenice and Antiochus 2 murdered. Row 17. Date: 246 to 241 BC. Event: Third Syrian War; Ptolemy 3's great plunder. Row 18. Date: 223 BC. Event: Antiochus 3 accedes. Row 19. Date: 219 to 217 BC. Event: Fourth Syrian War. Row 20. Date: 217 BC. Event: Raphia; Ptolemy 4 defeats Antiochus 3. Row 21. Date: about 200 BC. Event: Panium; Judea passes to the Seleucids. Row 22. Date: 198 BC. Event: The charter of Antiochus 3 to Jerusalem. Row 23. Date: 190 BC. Event: Magnesia; Rome defeats Antiochus 3. Row 24. Date: 188 BC. Event: Treaty of Apamea; the indemnity imposed; Antiochus 4 to Rome as hostage. Row 25. Date: 187 BC. Event: Antiochus 3 dies plundering a temple; Seleucus 4 accedes. Row 26. Date: about 180 BC. Event: Ben Sira writes in Jerusalem. Row 27. Date: 178 BC. Event: The Heliodorus stele. Row 28. Date: 175 BC. Event: Seleucus 4 assassinated; Antiochus 4 seizes the throne; Jason buys the high priesthood. Row 29. Date: 172 BC. Event: Menelaus outbids Jason; Onias 3 murdered.

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 169 BC. Event: Antiochus 4 plunders the Temple. Row 2. Date: 168 BC. Event: Popillius Laenas turns him back at Alexandria. Row 3. Date: 167 BC. Event: The decree abolishing the law; the abomination set up on the altar in Chislev.

The Maccabean and Hasmonean Period

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 167 BC. Event: Mattathias revolts at Modein. Row 2. Date: 166 BC. Event: Mattathias dies; Judas Maccabeus takes command. Row 3. Date: 165 BC. Event: Emmaus. Row 4. Date: 164 BC. Event: Beth-zur; the Temple cleansed and rededed at Chislev; Antiochus 4 dies in Persia. Row 5. Date: 161 BC. Event: Treaty with Rome. Row 6. Date: 160 BC. Event: Judas killed at Elasa; Jonathan succeeds. Row 7. Date: 152 BC. Event: Jonathan appointed high priest by Alexander Balas. Row 8. Date: about 150 BC. Event: Josephus first notes the three sects. Row 9. Date: 142 BC. Event: Jonathan killed; Simon succeeds; the yoke of the heathen taken away. Row 10. Date: 141 BC. Event: The Acra falls. Row 11. Date: 140 BC. Event: The great assembly confirms Simon and his heirs. Row 12. Date: 135 BC. Event: Simon murdered at Dok; John Hyrcanus I accedes. Row 13. Date: about 132 BC. Event: Ben Sira's grandson translates his work in Egypt. Row 14. Date: about 111 BC. Event: The Samaritan temple on Gerizim destroyed. Row 15. Date: about 110 BC. Event: Idumea conquered and forcibly circumcised. Row 16. Date: 104 BC. Event: Aristobulus I; first Hasmonean to wear a diadem. Row 17. Date: 103 BC. Event: Alexander Jannaeus accedes. Row 18. Date: about 88 BC. Event: Eight hundred crucified in Jerusalem. Row 19. Date: 76 BC. Event: Salome Alexandra accedes; the Pharisees restored. Row 20. Date: 67 BC. Event: Civil war between Hyrcanus 2 and Aristobulus 2. Row 21. Date: 63 BC. Event: Pompey takes Jerusalem; enters the Holy of Holies; Judea becomes tributary to Rome.

The Roman Period

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: 54 BC. Event: Crassus plunders the Temple treasury. Row 2. Date: 48 to 47 BC. Event: Julius Caesar's decrees confirming Jewish rights. Row 3. Date: 43 BC. Event: Antipater poisoned. Row 4. Date: 40 BC. Event: Parthian invasion; Antigonus installed; Herod declared King of the Jews at Rome. Row 5. Date: 37 BC. Event: Herod takes Jerusalem; Antigonus executed. Row 6. Date: 20 or 19 BC. Event: Herod begins rebuilding the Temple. Row 7. Date: 4 BC. Event: Herod dies; the kingdom divided among Archelaus, Antipas, and Philip. Row 8. Date: AD 6. Event: Archelaus deposed; Judea placed under Roman prefects; census of Quirinius; revolt of Judas of Galilee. Row 9. Date: AD 6. Event: Annas appointed high priest. Row 10. Date: AD 14. Event: Tiberius accedes. Row 11. Date: about AD 18. Event: Caiaphas appointed high priest.

Table: Columns: Date, Event. Row 1. Date: AD 26. Event: Pontius Pilate appointed prefect. Row 2. Date: about AD 27 to 29. Event: John the Baptist begins preaching; the ministry of Jesus begins. Row 3. Date: about AD 30 to 33. Event: The crucifixion, resurrection, and Pentecost. Row 4. Date: AD 37. Event: Caligula accedes. Row 5. Date: AD 40. Event: The statue crisis; Philo's embassy to Gaius. Row 6. Date: AD 41. Event: Claudius accedes; Herod Agrippa I made king. Row 7. Date: AD 44. Event: Herod Agrippa I dies at Caesarea. Row 8. Date: about AD 49. Event: Claudius expels Jews from Rome. Row 9. Date: AD 54. Event: Nero accedes. Row 10. Date: about AD 59 to 62. Event: Paul before Felix, Festus, and Agrippa 2; the voyage to Rome. Row 11. Date: about AD 63. Event: The Temple complex finally completed. Row 12. Date: AD 64. Event: The fire of Rome; the first imperial persecution. Row 13. Date: AD 66. Event: The revolt begins; Cestius Gallus withdraws. Row 14. Date: AD 67. Event: Vespasian reduces Galilee; Josephus captured. Row 15. Date: AD 68 to 69. Event: The Year of the Four Emperors; factional war inside Jerusalem. Row 16. Date: AD 70. Event: Titus besieges Jerusalem; the daily sacrifice ceases in Tammuz; the Temple burns in Ab. Row 17. Date: AD 73 or 74. Event: Masada falls.

A Closing Word

The four hundred years are not a gap in the story. They are a chapter of it, and it is a chapter about what God does when He appears to be doing nothing.

He kept a people alive through a tyrant who set out to erase them. He preserved a text through men who burned every copy they could find. He raised up a family of village priests who refused to bow, and then let their dynasty rot so that no one could mistake a Hasmonean for the promised King. He let an Edomite build the most magnificent Temple in the world, and then walked into it as a carpenter's son. He allowed Greek to become the world's language, Roman roads to be laid across three continents, and synagogues to be planted in every port, and He did all of it centuries before there was a Gospel to carry along them.

And through it all He was keeping a book of remembrance for those who feared Him and thought upon His name (Malachi 3:16). We do not know most of their names. We know they hid in caves rather than eat swine's flesh. We know they died rather than leave their sons uncircumcised. We know they were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection (Hebrews 11:35). And we know that the world was not worthy of them.

The silence was never absence. It was the long, patient, invisible work of a God who does not change, preparing the fulness of the time.

Hebrews 11:39 to 40

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

Related Notes

The rest of this series

Church History - 1

Prophecy and the last days

End Time Chronological Study

Signs of the Times

The Kingdom of God

The Writing on the Wall

The law, the covenants, and the sects

The Nature and Authority of God's Law

Which Laws Remain

The Two Covenants and the Yoke of Bondage

The Pronomian Covenant Framework

The Sermon on the Mount

The calendar and the appointed times

Moedim in the Church

The Feasts as Spiritual Calendar

The Sabbath

Pagan Holidays Part 2 The Calendar of the Nations

The Passover

The writings outside the canon

How We Got Our Bible

The Book of Enoch

The Book of Jubilees

The Book of Jasher

Scripture Books Referenced

Through the Word - Genesis

Through the Word - Exodus

Through the Word - Leviticus

Through the Word - Numbers

Through the Word - Deuteronomy.

Through the Word - 2 Samuel

Through the Word - 1 Kings

Through the Word - 2 Kings

Through the Word - 1 Chronicles

Through the Word - 2 Chronicles

Through the Word - Ezra

Through the Word - Nehemiah

Through the Word - Esther

Through the Word - Psalms

Through the Word - Isaiah

Through the Word - Jeremiah

Through the Word - Ezekiel

Through the Word - Daniel Through the Word - Hosea

Through the Word - Amos

Through the Word - Haggai

Through the Word - Zechariah

Through the Word - Malachi

Through the Word - Matthew

Through the Word - Mark

Through the Word - Luke

Through the Word - John

Through the Word - Acts

Through the Word - Romans

Through the Word - 1 Corinthians

Through the Word - Galatians

Through the Word - Ephesians

Through the Word - Philippians

Through the Word - 1 Thessalonians

Through the Word - 2 Thessalonians

Through the Word - 2 Timothy.

Through the Word - Titus

Through the Word - Hebrews

Through the Word - Jude

Through the Word - Revelation

On the books quoted here that are not Scripture

This study also quotes 1 and 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, Jubilees, Josephus, Philo, and the Mishnah. They are read here as history, not as Scripture, and they are deliberately kept out of the list above.