Turn the page from Malachi to Matthew and it looks like nothing happened. It is one page. It was four hundred years. In that gap the empire ruling Jerusalem changed three times, the common language of the world changed, the temple was desecrated and cleansed, a Jewish kingdom rose and fell, and a foreign king began rebuilding the temple to buy the affection of people who despised him. None of it is in your Bible. All of it is in the background of every page of the Gospels.

The silence

Malachi closes with a promise that Elijah will come before the great and terrible day of the Lord. Then the prophets stop. No word, no vision, no messenger — for four centuries.

The remnant that had come back from Babylon under Zerubbabel had rebuilt the temple, and the old men who remembered Solomon’s wept when they saw the foundation of the new one, because it was so much smaller. Ezra came eighty years later to teach the Law. Nehemiah came after him to rebuild the wall. And then, nothing.

It is worth sitting with that. The people who were waiting had been waiting for generations, and had every reason to think they had been forgotten. Israel had waited four hundred years in Egypt before Moses came, too. Some of them will have noticed.

Persia gives way to Greece

Persia had let the Jews go home and had largely left them alone. That ended with a twenty-two-year-old Macedonian. Alexander, son of Philip, took the Persian empire apart in a few years, and by 331 BC the known world was Greek. He died in 323 with no heir, and his generals carved up what he had taken.

Greek becomes the language of the world

This is the change that matters most for your New Testament. Alexander’s conquest made Greek the common tongue from Egypt to India, and it stayed that way under Rome. Around 250 BC, in Alexandria, the Hebrew Scriptures began to be translated into Greek — the Torah first, the rest over the following century. That translation is called the Septuagint.

It is the reason a Jewish story about a Jewish Messiah reaches you in Greek. It is also why, when a New Testament writer quotes the Old Testament, the wording is sometimes a little different from your Old Testament. He is quoting the Greek; your Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew.

And it is the reason the story of Jesus could spread as rapidly as it did. Paul preaches in Antioch, Cyprus, Iconium, Philippi, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus and finally Rome, and never once needs an interpreter. He writes letters to all of those places in the same language, and they can be read aloud in any of them and copied and passed on to the next. A message that would have died inside one province had it stayed in Hebrew or Aramaic instead crossed an empire within a single lifetime.

Caught between two kingdoms

Two of Alexander’s generals founded the dynasties that mattered here. Ptolemy took Egypt; Seleucus took Syria. Palestine lay between them, and for a hundred years it was the ground they fought over. Egypt held it first. Around 200 BC Antiochus III of Syria took it, and the Jews came under Seleucid rule.

The desecration

His son was Antiochus IV, who called himself Epiphanes — “God manifest.” He deposed the high priest and sold the office to the highest bidder. He campaigned in Egypt, and while he was gone a rumour reached Jerusalem that he had been killed. The city celebrated. He had not been killed, and when he heard of the celebration he came back and took the city apart. Second Maccabees records eighty thousand destroyed in three days: forty thousand killed, forty thousand sold into slavery.

Then he did the thing that made the rest inevitable. He erected an altar to Zeus on the altar of burnt offering in the temple, and sacrificed a pig on it.

The Maccabees, and a feast Jesus attends

A priest named Mattathias refused to sacrifice to the Greek gods and killed the man who did. His son Judas, called Maccabeus — the hammer — led the revolt that followed. Three years after the desecration, in December 164 BC, they took the temple back and cleansed it. The rededication lasted eight days.

That is Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication. The tradition that one day’s oil burned for eight comes later, from the Talmud, not from the books of Maccabees.

And it is the feast Jesus is attending in John 10:22, when they surround Him in Solomon’s Colonnade and say, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

Consider where He is standing. He is in the temple, at the festival that celebrates the cleansing of that temple from a foreign ruler who claimed to be God manifest, being asked whether He is the one who will do it again. The Jewish kingdom they were remembering lasted from about 142 BC until Rome ended it in 63.

Rome arrives

It ended from the inside. Two brothers of that ruling house, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, fought each other for the throne, and both appealed to Rome to settle it. Pompey settled it by taking Jerusalem in 63 BC and walking into the Most Holy Place to see what was there. He reported that he found it empty.

Judea became a Roman client. An Idumean official named Antipater backed the winning side and was made procurator of Judea by Julius Caesar in 47 BC. His sons were given Jerusalem and Galilee. The younger was named Herod.

Herod

Herod the Great ruled most of Palestine by the time the Gospels open. He was Idumean — descended from Esau, not Jacob — which meant that to his subjects he was not really a Jew, and he knew it. He married into the old royal house and later had his wife killed. He killed three of his own sons. And he rebuilt the temple on a scale beyond Solomon’s, which is the single most effective thing he ever did to buy a loyalty he never earned.

The temple in the Gospels is Herod’s temple. The magnificent stones the disciples point out to Jesus are his. He died in 4 BC, while Jesus’ family was still in Egypt.

Who is in the room when the curtain rises

The Old Testament ends with one people. The New Testament opens with a nation arguing with itself. These are the parties.

Two things follow. First, when Jesus says the dead will rise, the Sadducees object and the Pharisees do not — it is a live argument between them, and He has taken a side. Second, Pharisees and Sadducees wanted the same thing. Both loved God and wanted the nation restored. They disagreed about how: the Sadducees through political arrangement, the Pharisees through keeping the Law. Almost every argument Jesus has in the Gospels sits inside that disagreement.

The synagogue

One more thing came out of the exile, and it is easy to miss because the Gospels simply assume it. With the temple gone and the people scattered, they began gathering wherever they were to read the Scriptures and pray. That gathering is the synagogue, and by the first century there was one in every town of any size.

It is why Jesus has somewhere to teach every Sabbath, in Nazareth and Capernaum and everywhere else. It is why Paul, years later, walks into the synagogue first in every city he enters.

What they were waiting for

By the first century the hope had a shape, and the shape was largely political. Rome was occupying the land. The Messiah, when He came, would be the son of David who drove the occupier out and restored the kingdom.

Hold that alongside what actually happens. The crowd that has just been fed tries to make Him king by force, and He withdraws. He tells people not to say who He is. And when Peter finally says it plainly at Caesarea Philippi, the very next thing Jesus does is begin telling them He is going to suffer and be killed — and Peter, who has just got the title right, rebukes Him for it.

They were not slow. They were expecting the wrong kind of victory.

That is the world. What follows is what it was for.