The Silent Years

Malachi is the last prophetic book that this site, with the Hebrew canon and the churches of the Reformation, receives as Scripture before John the Baptist. No verse in the Old Testament narrates Alexander, or Antiochus, or the cleansing of the altar in the days of Judas Maccabeus. The New Testament opens with a people who already have Pharisees, synagogues, a temple Herod has enlarged, and a hope of a king. Something happened in between. The silence is not a blank in the world. It is a blank in the canon.

God is not absent because a new book is not being added. The law is read. The temple service goes on. Children are born into the promises. The silence means you cannot quote a prophet of this age the way you quote Isaiah, because this age did not add one to the book.

What the outside books tell

1 Maccabees, which is not canon, tells the political story with unusual sobriety. Alexander defeats Persia and dies. His officers split the empire. The land ends up between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, needing money and wanting one people with one law, forbids circumcision and the sacrifices, burns the books of the law, and on the fifteenth day of Chislev in the 145th year of the Greek kingdom sets a desolating sacrifice on the altar in Jerusalem. Daniel 11:31 Daniel had spoken of an abomination that makes desolate. Jesus will later speak of one still to come, and tell the reader to understand. Matthew 24:15 The Maccabean desecration is the history in between. It is not the whole of what Jesus is talking about. It is the pattern his hearers already knew.

Mattathias, a priest, refuses the king's sacrifice and kills the king's officer. His son Judas, called Maccabeus, fights a war he should not win. In the 148th year, on the twenty-fifth of Chislev, they cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate the altar for eight days. That is the feast of Dedication, Hanukkah, which John's Gospel assumes Jesus is in Jerusalem for. John 10:22 The feast is in the New Testament. The book that first tells the eight days is not in the canon. Both of those sentences can be true.

2 Maccabees tells part of the same years with more sermon, more martyr story, and a Greek style. It is a summary of another man's work. It is useful and it is not Scripture. A book can be true about a war and still not be added to the Bible.

After Judas dies, his brothers Jonathan and Simon hold power. Their family, the Hasmoneans, become priest-kings. 1 Maccabees ends in Simon's day. The later sons are known from other histories. In 63 BC Pompey takes Jerusalem for Rome and enters the holy place. The independent kingdom is over. Herod, an Idumean backed by Rome, is king from 37 BC. He builds, including the temple courts the disciples will admire, and he dies, on the usual dating from Josephus, in 4 BC. The Gospels are born into his last years. None of that paragraph is a verse. It is why the timeline puts a shaded band here instead of pretending Malachi is followed the next morning by Matthew.

Daniel, and the other books of the age

Daniel's visions speak of kings of the north and the south, a contemptible person, and a desecration, with a precision that critical scholars say must have been written in the 160s, during the events, as history dressed as prophecy. The book itself is set in Babylon and the first year of Cyrus, and it presents the visions as given then. Daniel 1:1 This lesson will not settle that argument by insult. A book that names the years of Antiochus before they happen is either a prophecy or a fraud written in the middle of the war. The timeline leaves Daniel's story in the exile, where the book places the man, and it leaves the Maccabean events in this band, where they happened, without using 1 Maccabees as if Moses had written it.

The other books often bound with the Greek Old Testament, and not in the Hebrew canon, belong in this age as writing even when their stories are set earlier. Sirach is a wisdom book from Jerusalem around 180 BC, translated by the author's grandson in Egypt later in the century. Tobit is a pious tale set in Assyrian exile. Judith is a tale whose Nebuchadnezzar and whose dates do not fit the history. Wisdom of Solomon is Greek, later, often placed in Egypt. Baruch is set in the exile and written later. Greek additions grew onto Esther and Daniel. They are marked on the timeline as not in the canon. Some of them are worth reading as witnesses to how Jews thought while no prophet was adding a book. None of them is a text to preach as "the LORD said."

The band ends when a word comes again, not as a new writing prophet in the old sense first, but as a voice in the wilderness. John comes preaching a baptism of repentance, and he points at a man. The fifteenth year of Tiberius is the date Luke is willing to give. That is the next stretch of the line.

A book from these years can tell a true history and still not be Scripture. The question is whether it was received as one of the writings God gave. Jesus spoke of "the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44).

Unrollnot-in-the-canon