OT History - Solomon to Malachi
Vern Peterman · Aug 1, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 05
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262310353878

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, here's where we go. We're looking at here the Old Testament history, Solomon to Malachi. That finishes up the time that the Old Testament includes directly. Obviously there's prophecies, but the Old Testament directly involves this time through Malachi being the last book. We, uh, to keep everybody on the same page here, we had Saul, David and Solomon, uh, with David as kind of the central King figure there. And they each reigned about 40 years. And then the kingdom divided. And of course, of course, it's Solomon, the end of that, that we're going to be looking at this morning. David's kind of our turning point, pivotal fellow here.

Um, looking at Solomon and by the way, as I was going through this, I was just Kind of, I just have to confess, I just kind of go nuts because there's so much stuff that would be really neat to cover. One of the things that comes up, could I ask you to make sure that you get today's handout here, over here, and make sure you have the Old Testament, New Testament chronology. There we go. Anyway, Solomon, we could just spend all day easy going over the things that Like, for example, archaeological things that have been dug up from his time. The Bible makes great claims about the extent of Solomon's kingdom, for example.

And some people have challenged that, saying it sounds a little too much. It's an overstatement. And, of course, then you get to the archaeological questions. Anyway, we could go through a bunch of that and just won't have time for it. But there is a great deal behind it, just so you're aware. that could be presented in person, I find it fascinating.

Under David, this is from last week, remember David was promised a house, throne, and kingdom, and so David's lineage is to remain particularly fulfilled in Christ. Solomon, he held, what you see there in the bright green is modern Israel, and that includes the West Bank territory in the bright green. And Solomon's realm, see how far it goes up? It includes areas that are now in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq. And so it extends quite a ways, even some areas that go, of course, it includes now Jordan. So, so all or portions of half dozen different, you know, modern countries are included in that territory that it held.

I introduce an acronym that you may run into, A.N.E. Ancient Near East, A.N.E. So if you see A.N.E. in some of your writing, you're saying, what is that? I haven't got that disease, have I? And what it is, it's just simply that. It's the way of... Ancient Near East is a little bit of a mouthful, not too bad, but a lot of people will simply say A.N.E. So if you see that in the literature, that's what it's talking about. Under Solomon, Israel's third king, he was the one that sought to building the temple. David was told, you may not. And why? You recall? Yeah, too much blood on his hands. Interesting that the temple is about shedding blood, but he had blood of just, you know, attacks and slaughter on his hands. And so the Lord said, nope, not you.

Solomon was renowned for his wisdom and wealth. The Bible has accounts of it. I made reference to a lot of the investigations in archaeology and things of that sort, even into some of the gold mines, horses stables and things of that sort. He had numerous places where he had horses stables set up with hundreds of horses and chariots ready to go, so that's why he had the territory he held. Both David and Solomon had multiple wives and concubines, a total of a thousand for Solomon. Now, you might say, how do you even remember them? Say, which one are you? I mean, you can imagine this is a little tough.

The thing that would happen is that if Solomon was trying to make a deal with some other neighboring ruler or something of that sort, one of the ways that was customary, and it actually remained even through Europe into the Middle Ages, Was to exchange royal family members and intermarry that way and that was the idea was well You won't attack me because I got your daughter kind of thing, you know, and and so that sort of philosophy You know, he carried out as well, even though he was warned.

Otherwise, yeah, please make sure you get a handout. So you're with us Okay, great And so, anyway, specific warning, the kingdom was split in two after them. You can look at that account on your own time. It reveals a lot, all in, you know, 13 verses. Just, there's a lot in it. But the kingdom was split in two after Solomon. Forty years and you're done. Solomon is known for his wisdom and his wealth, but he was also half-hearted. One of the reasons why the Jews were warned Do not take foreign wives. Do not go intermarrying with the Gentiles.

You're going to pick up their practices. And that's what Solomon allowed. Not only did Solomon build the temple, but he also allowed all these pagan practices to come in. And of course, the wife comes in and she wants to bring her religion, right? And her religion is all this disgusting stuff that we went over earlier with the Canaanites. So the warning wasn't just God being picky.

But it had validity, there was reality to it. And so the kingdom was divided afterwards. This is a historical timeline that we've been kind of using as a reference point. And this is also a handout that you should have gotten last week and hopefully have. Anybody lacking that? Because I think you'll want to have that in order to stay with us. Anybody lacking this handout here? Everybody got it? Okay. And the reason is because this area here is what we're going to be focusing on.

This part of it, from Solomon's reign to the end of the Old Testament, okay? Now, one of the things that I won't be going over in detail, but you can make note of, is that those Bible books there are given a date as to where they fall in the history. And so, the thing is, as we're going through this history, it isn't just a history of things that happened. This is also the place where these books fall into place. They were written in a historical context. They were written in the context of things happening, a culture. And some of the things that were written, once you understand the context, absolutely phenomenal example. Here's Jeremiah. The Jews are going to be attacked by the Babylonians. And he says the most unpatriotic thing, he says, surrender. What? You know? You've got to be kidding. So I mean, you can understand the reaction of people to what he had to say. absolutely phenomenal.

His scribe, Baruch, we have copies, more than one, of Baruch's seal, the impression that was made. One of them has a part of a fingerprint in the clay. I mean, it's real-time, real-life, historical stuff. These are things that really and actually happen.

Okay, we're going to be looking at this part of the graph, and in order to make it easier to read, I've gone to this kind of a format where the letters are a little bit bigger, but that's how it plugs into the chart that you have. Okay? Now, everybody with me so far? Now, one thing that I have done here is I've done the years between in italics and blue to make it easier to see, so you'll need to discern that on your chart. So, you don't have the advantage of color, but just so you recognize the difference there. That's why the numbers are all where they are. All right.

What happened after Solomon is the kingdom divided. The northern kingdom consisted of ten tribes, and that nation now was called Israel. Remember, that was the northern kingdom called Israel. It isn't all the tribes of Israel. So avoid the confusion. Now, the southern kingdom is the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, just those two tribes. And then that, by the way, was one of the reasons why Paul in his Pharisee position was proud to say, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin. We remain faithful. One of the two tribes that remained faithful and stayed with our temple in Jerusalem and the whole nine yards.

Now, here's the political and religious capital in Jerusalem for the southern kingdom, for Judah. The political capital, and look how close it is, We're talking in the neighborhood of 15 miles away is the political capital of the Northern Kingdom, Bethel. And the religious capital, however, is in this area here on the top of Mount Gerizim. There is a temple and the Samaritan copy of the first five books of Moses.

It's all very much the same as the Hebrew, you know, copy that we're used to using except that it places the temple on on garrison Okay, and we'll get to why in a minute here Okay, jump to the New Testament Here is a map in New Testament time see Nazareth there at up in Galilee So here's Joseph and Mary they're heading down to Bethlehem according to the Jewish tradition They wouldn't have gone straight down. They would have taken extra time to go around Samaria because that's the area where that raunchy, awful temple was. So the Samaritans, the people who lived around that area, were rejected to the point where the Jews, you just didn't go into that country. You just didn't go around there.

The other aspect of that, here's Jacob's well. This is a picture taken in 1894. I used this old black and white, and the reason is because right now it's got so much stuff built around it, and there's signs in Arabic and everything, and it's a big tourist thing. This is pre-all the tourist stuff. Now, time jump into the New Testament.

Here's Jesus with the woman at the well. This is the Samaritan woman, remember? John chapter 4. And they're here. to jump back a little bit and so here they are excuse me so here they are and she brings up you know hey you're a Jew and you guys you know you worship in Jerusalem but we worship on and it says on this mountain they're sitting there at the well and they're looking up at the mountain where the temple is so that's why she said she said this mountain is because they could see it right there It was present.

It was where it was located. Here's the mountain right there. And there's approximately the area where they would have been looking up at the mountain. So that's why she didn't name the mountain because of where it was right there. They were looking at it. That's the context and why there's no name given to the mountain.

Alright, now. Back in the Divided Kingdom. Here's the summary of the Divided Kingdom. If you look at those times, The Northern Kingdom, which was Israel, had 209 years of existence, and then it bit the dust when the Assyrians came in and made scrambled eggs out of them. The Assyrian practice was to take people, because one of the differences from one kingdom to the next, what do you do with conquered peoples? The Assyrian philosophy, different from the Babylonians, was let's just move everybody all over the place. We're going to take you and move you here. We're going to take you and move you here. We're going to take you and move you here. And they just scrambled everybody. And that was their approach.

There was another reason why the Samaritans weren't terribly acceptable. You didn't know, are these really Jews or what are they? Okay. Everything was all mixed up. Now, there, these are the 10 other tribes. Excuse me, I've got a crossover here. In the capital it would you switch that but put an arrow on that you see the difference should be should be switched the other way Now one of the things that happened in Israel is you had all these nine dynasties by dynasties, I mean a continuity of different family lines and What you find is about half of the Kings died violent deaths Okay, real nasty Now, anybody guess how many godly kings we got here? By the way, for some reason I got a couple of scrambled in here. The last two should be switched too.

None godly in Israel. I'm not sure why that might happen. I'll have to fix that on the file, but for your sake you'll need to write it down. What you find is that all of the kings of Israel were ungodly. All of them were ungodly. In Judah, entirely the dynasty of David all the way through. There were some violent deaths, but it remained within the line of David all the way through.

You have in your handout set a list of the kings of the divided kingdom to the return from Babylonian exile. So this gives you which kings coming in when, all that kind of a record. So you can look at that on your own, but it's helpful as you're going through and studying these to get a feel for what's the big picture? Who's handing it off to what? One of the things that you'll notice there is you'll find some of the names side-by-side of this king and the other one. Here's what's happening.

What kings would sometimes do is they would have the son as co-regent. Okay, so they would have both as king at the same time. I'm sure they figured out some way to handle the administration of that. But the point being, they would both reign at the same time. So you'll see, here's one king, and then you'll see a co-regency, and then the older king, the father dies, and then the son takes over.

And so that's why you see a few of them side by side. Okay. Now, as we pointed out here, Assyria conquers Israel in 722, that's the end of the Northern Kingdom. No more kingdom after that. The Northern Kingdom, because every one of the kings was nasty, it ran into one situation after another of evil.

Some, like for example, named Jezebel, is even today looked at as, this is a nickname for some nasty lady. Death eaten by dogs, you know? I mean, just terrible. The entire line of kings was awful. And so basically they were cut off by Assyria being brought in.

And isn't this an interesting thing? Was Assyria a godly nation? No. The Lord will use, at times, ungodly nations to bring judgment on one that should have been. And this is the case here. The Lord brought in Assyria to bring this about. One of the interesting things is during this time, we brought it before, this is the time of the prophet Jonah. So here's Jonah comes in and the Lord doesn't just say, okay, you be a prophet to these people in the ten tribes.

I want you to head off to Nineveh. I mean, shocking. What? You want me to do what? Thinking of Jonah and thinking, okay, I'm a prophet to these people, they're Jews, you know, that all sounds good, but going and being a prophet to Nineveh so that they will avoid judgment, that was just incomprehensible. Unthinkable. How could God ask me to do such a thing? And especially since the people of Assyria were profoundly cruel.

Okay. The Assyrian Empire, as in the map we showed here, constituted this. One of the points we made is that lines kept shifting. So when you draw a map, it's only for a particular time. And so this doesn't include Israel, which got included on top of that. Some of the other areas, for example, Judah to the south, was included as what we call a vassal state. Subject and the Assyrians didn't scramble them they they were allowed to maintain their king lineage and To stay in their country as long as they paid a Syria off Okay, so so that when you draw lines of an empire that doesn't necessarily Clarify those kinds of issues too because you'll have some on the periphery that will be like that that will be in a vassal state condition where unlike the rest of the place where the rest of the empire where they scrambled people and and just completely took out the line of kings. They allowed Judah to remain as long as they paid. Okay, so that brings us down to this account here. We're going to take a quick, a little more in-depth look here. Assyria attacked Israel, that's the northern kingdom. When they overcame the northern kingdom, they scattered its peoples. Judah, as we mentioned, had this vassal status where as long as they paid, they were okay. As long as they paid money, they said, OK, we'll let you have your country and your kingdom. Just give us money. And so here's King Hezekiah of Judah.

He inherited the arrangement from his father. But when the king of Assyria died, that's an opportunity for rebellion. Why would that be an opportunity for rebellion? One king of Assyria dies and then The next one is supposed to take over.

Sure, sure. In other words, this is the guy we listen to. Now we've got somebody else. And frequently, if there was a change, there was also some kind of shuffling. You know, you're not general anymore and you're the head of this thing instead of that. There's a little bit of confusion and that's the best opportunity to come in and try to do something different and say, no, I'm not going to do this anymore. Especially since he still had his kingdom together even if he was paying it off.

So Assyria attacked Jerusalem. Hezekiah said, Lord, what am I going to do? I got a mass of soldiers. The soldiers went through. And by the way, I haven't got it up here. The soldiers from Assyria went through and they took, according to Assyrian records, 46 of Judah's cities and towns. And that's the same thing the Bible records. It just doesn't give the number.

So the secular record and the biblical record are in agreement. general description. Second Kings 1934, Isaiah said that the Lord would save Jerusalem. So Hezekiah said, okay, we'll go on that basis. We'll believe what God says through the prophet. We'll go with it.

So here's Sennacherib, okay? And that's, by the way, that's the recorded name in the Assyrian records too, okay? So there isn't any question. Sennacherib, here's the king. He brings his forces against Jerusalem and camps around outside, you know, the way they were going to do in those days, is you camp around and try to wear them out and break through someplace. Well, as they were sleeping, the Lord, the angel of the Lord came through, slew 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, according to two different records in the Old Testament. Sennacherib's record of that event, interesting, look how he puts it. See, no Assyrian king is going to go put in a record and say, hey man, I really got blown out of the water, right?

So what does he say? Look carefully. He made him, that is Hezekiah, a prisoner in Jerusalem, his royal residence like a bird in a cage. What does that not say? He didn't win. So this is interesting what the secular record states it in the most positive possible terms. But the bottom line is he didn't wipe them out. So the secular record and the biblical record agree. in terms of what's said explicitly or covertly. OK.

Back in the scene here, Babylon went through about three stages of attack. First, about 605, they came in and they went and took a number of the outlying cities and took some Jews off to Babylon. Now, notice the difference. The Assyrian process was scramble them, move them around. The Babylonian process is bring those people over to our country, relocate and we'll retrain them to be Babylonian in their thinking. So you see the difference in philosophy carried out and you see it described in scripture. And by the way, that's what we find in the Babylonian records. So what happens is First, he comes and makes an attack in 605, carries off some, comes back again about 7 or 8 years later, and makes another attack and sweeps some.

Finally, he comes in 586 and says, I'm taking you guys out. And that's when he goes and wipes out Jerusalem, destroys the Temple. The Temple that Solomon built, wiped out. Just cleaned off the Temple Mount altogether. So then, He carries them all off to Babylon.

One of the things you'll notice in your handout there, this is the time when Daniel is prophesying. This is the time when you see, you know, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, those names are among the prophets. And interesting, Hezekiah that I mentioned, when Hezekiah was around, and by this time he's off the scene, when Hezekiah was around, he made friends with the Babylonians. And he showed the Babylonians some of the treasures of Jerusalem.

Ding! So the Babylonians say, hey, we don't want to let this loose, we want to get that stuff. See? And so now, now is payback time. Hezekiah was preserved from the Assyrians, but made a big mistake in letting the Babylonians know what was there to be had. So here's the Babylonians looking at the records of what's in Jerusalem, and they said, hey, we do not want to let this nugget go. So, they lose at 586, Nebuchadnezzar comes in and just takes them out. Takes out all of Jerusalem, takes everybody lock, stock and barrel, moves them to Babylon.

What you see in the book of Daniel is a recording of Daniel going through the Babylonian training. New names, you don't get to keep your name. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were Daniel's friends, well that's their Babylonian names. So everybody gets a new name. You get renamed, You get trained under a different culture.

You learn our astrology, our history and astronomy, everything. You just, you get retrained because they want to brainwash you into being a Babylonian. So that's the Babylonian, you know, philosophy carried out. And that's what you see described in the Old Testament. All these Jews are in Babylon. Then what we see, here's the Babylonian empire and look, look at the extent of it.

Basically it's, it's a lot of the Assyrian empire. little bit more and that's about it now the Persian Empire comes in while Daniel's still there in Babylon and what we find in in the book of Daniel is at the very night when the Persians came in right Belshazzar it gets wiped out and the Persians come in look at how big the Empire is much larger Empire okay much greater Empire and Daniel gets a part of that too but also, as we'll study later, changes in culture. Among those changes being, what do you do with the captured people? The Persian philosophy, not like the Assyrians, not like the Babylonians, Persian philosophy is send the people back to their land, help them rebuild their places, build their culture, get their cities built back up, Just make them pay. So what does that do?

That brings the Jews back, and they rebuild the temple. Not just rebuild it, but they rebuild it with Persian support. We'll make sure you got everything you need to get the job done. So they rebuild the temple. Now, it is not as great a temple as the one Solomon had. So guess what?

The much older folks who had seen the first temple, when they saw it, the new one cried. When the ones who had not seen the first temple saw this one, they cheered. So when everybody came together, it was a mixture of crying and cheering. If you'd seen the old one, it was tears. If you'd not seen the old one, it was cheers.

Now, temples rebuilt, you have 85 years then until the close of the Old Testament. Here is a picture of the second temple, however, This is rebuilt under Herod the Great, who was the one who was ruling over the area of Judea in the time around Christ's birth. So this is more grand and glorious than this temple would have been rebuilt, but it gives you the idea.

Haggai 2.9, which was built during a time when the temple was partly rebuilt and they kind of slowed down with it. So the book of Haggai is to encourage them. Zechariah, by the way, is a book also written at the same time.

He says, the latter glory of this house will be greater than the former. Why would the glory of this house be greater than the glory of Solomon's house, even though it's not as grand a building and not the original? This is the one that Christ came into. This is the one that the Lord himself walked into. He went in and cleaned out the money changers and things of that sort.

So, here's Haggai 2.9. It was also written to Zerubbabel, who was the governor under the Persian rule during that time. And if you look at the genealogy of Jesus, that's a name that you will see in the lineage of Jesus. So, interesting connections.

Here's Jerusalem's walls. Now, I gotta make a note that these walls were, there was some rebuilding done during the same time as Europe was having a reformation. This was the Muslims went in and did some rebuilding of the walls. One of the things that they did, see this? This is the gate that Jesus went in and out of when he came in, for example, on what's called, I think mistakenly, the Triumphal Entry. He would have gone through those gates. The, uh, because it got to the Muslims that the Jews Messiah was going to come through that gate, they walled it up and put what you see down below. Those are a bunch of Muslim graves. They figured if we, if we seal it up and put Muslim graves in front of it, that'll keep them from coming back. Okay. So anyway, that's the story.

Zachariah 9, 9 also written during the rebuilding of the temple. This is the one where it says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you. He is just and endowed with salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey. So both of these Haggai and Zechariah prophecies were to encourage the people, get finished on this temple, and at the same time, prophecies coming out of each of those guys that point to the time of Christ and the first coming. Isn't that neat? Cool stuff.

Now, the wall of Jerusalem at the Eastern Gate is sealed according to prophecy. You can look that up yourself, these references in Ezekiel. And it appears from those prophecies also to be where Christ will come in His return. So exactly how it happens, I don't know, but it looks like He comes back through those gates which are now sealed up. And it doesn't seem to matter that Moslem graves are planted there on the ground either. Okay, so here's the divided kingdom, the close of the Old Testament.

One of the things that, you know, you can do with this chart here that has the books, as you're studying through various parts of the Old Testament, you can look at, okay, where does this fit in the picture of what was happening? What was taking place? And think also of what's the mindset of the people? Some of the, for example, take a look, I think it's on the right, the book of Psalms is listed there. What's the age range that you see in the Book of Psalms?

1410 to 430. I mean, we're talking about a thousand years to assemble the Book of Psalms. I mean, it's really a stretch. It is everything from songs by Moses all the way to things that were pulled together at the very last part of the Old Testament over this 1,000-year period. So the Book of Psalms is really a scattered bunch of books in terms of time, songs that are all pulled together. You can think of it as this. It's Israel's national hymn book assembled over 1,000 years' time.

And to kind of get the picture of when these things are taking place, what does that mean if you're looking at history and culture for the Psalms, can you look at one particular history and culture for the whole thing? No. If we take the lesson that we've been learning here, you have to look at what's the history of each Psalm. Because each Psalm has a history.

Moses would, you know, cross the Red Sea with the Israelites and there would be a psalm that would come out of that. David would go through various events in his life. Some of them were victorious and some of them were tragic. And he would write a psalm. You would see psalms later that had to do with, you know, we're in Babylon and we're just sorry to the core, you know. We're lamenting, you know, our hearts are ripped out. Jerusalem, you know.

So what you see is it is the expression of people throughout centuries of time. One thousand years time, all pulled together in one book. Again, it comes back to this point. As you're looking through each passage, look at what's the history and culture behind each one.

It is not proper for us to interpret based on emotions, but it is proper for us to understand the emotions and the passion and the drama that is built into the context. When David is lamenting something, it's heartfelt and it's real. But when you read about, here's in Psalms and the Jews are lamenting that here they are by the waters of Babylon and they're so sorry for what they've had and lost. That was real. That was a real sorrow. Jumping ahead into the New Testament, Here's Peter, and he's seen the Lord crucified, and he's denied Him three times. How do you think he feels? Whoa. Yeah.

I think the thing that's key, this is certainly a challenge intellectually, but it doesn't just stay there. This stuff goes to the heart and to the core of human experience and human feelings. And that's okay. I mean, it's all right to go there, realizing that it's fact that is the basis for the feeling. It's reality. Okay. Josephus. He's writing, he was a contemporary of the apostles, born about 37 AD, so he would have overlapped the time of the apostles, been a little bit of a younger generation, but overlapped in time. He's writing in the first century.

He lists all the books of the Old Testament that we now have included, He does not include, however, Ruth and Judges, excuse me, Ruth and Lamentations, and those are assumed to be not listed because smaller books like that, that historically were included, would be on the same scroll. For example, we have like 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Samuel, those were broken apart originally, the same book. Okay? And so, If we assume that he didn't list Ruth and limitations because they would have been included under the scroll of the same author and being a smaller book, then he listed all the books.

But he also said this, from Artaxerxes, the successor of Xerxes, that is under the Persian Empire, until our time, everything has been recorded but has not been deemed worthy of light credit with what proceeded because the exact succession of the prophets ceased.

That is, the Old Testament was closed. Because we don't have any more prophets, and we're done writing. Nobody's added anything more beyond these books. And this speaks to the closure of the Old Testament canon. It was recognized that the prophets wrote, they were done writing, and this is it. So the Old Testament is complete.

Now, as we get through here, you can just make multiple reference to this as you're going through and studying, because I think it's a real valuable tool. The one comment I would make is sometimes, for example, Daniel says 605, and sometimes the actual recording may have started in 605, but it continued on for a time. So just be aware of that. Some of the dates may indicate you know, a portion of the time of writing and not the whole spread of time.

And anyway, that's this section of time here that we'll finish up. Next week, we're going to be going into, come on here, there we go, what happened between the Old and New Testaments. Now, why would we talk about that? Why don't we just skip to the New Testament history? Why would we talk about what happened between? Okay, first of all, there's a whole lot of time, about four centuries, okay? Yeah. I'm sorry, what? I had several people say something here. Ah.

Yeah, what's happening is, yes indeed there is this 400 year gap, but the gap is not irrelevant. Because if we don't understand what happened in that 400 year time, there are some things we're going to be asking ourselves about we won't have answers to. Who are the Pharisees? Who are the Romans? How come we got Greek? You know, I mean, all these questions here, there's no answer for them if we don't look at this.

So it's important that we look at them. As a matter of fact, I would say that using the same principle, you want to match your understanding of the history and culture to the time. This is essential because a great many of the things that happened during that 400 year period of time impacted the background of the New Testament profoundly. And so we want to take a look at that.

One of the things we pointed out in the church history class the Romans built enough roads to go around the globe twice I Mean phenomenal, especially the way they did it was all hand work. They dug down deep Some of those roads are still being used. They're so well built after 2,000 years The Romans said did basically made a setup for traveling Okay The Greeks came in and provided this language platform.

And frankly, for the character of the gospel, Greek is a better language than Hebrew, because Greek has some precision that Hebrew lacks. Hebrew is more of a pictorial language, almost closer to the hieroglyphics in a sense, more of an ideogram idea, whereas Greek is much more precise and specific, and it has the ability to explain things that Hebrew does not. So, great value there.

The other thing is that the Jews, once they got scattered around, and by New Testament times there's twice as many Jews, at least, outside of Israel as inside. They got scattered around and they were telling people who were in these other places things about the Old Testament, giving Old Testament backgrounds. So God was laying things out. So this segment of time between the Testaments is not the least bit irrelevant. As a matter of fact, it's very important to understand. So anyway, we'll go into that next week. Questions? I always like to ask for questions, although I don't get too many. Too fast? Yes, Dave.

Yes, the Psalms were written over about a thousand year period of time. What's interesting is as you go through it, it's not entirely chronological. But what you will see is occasional evidence that it was kind of collected up when it was partway done. I forget which of the Psalms it says in one of the versions that's in Greek. It says this is the summing up of all the Psalms of David, but it's only partway through and we have other Psalms of David afterwards. So it's interesting, it's like somebody collected it up and then said this is what we've got and then they added more. So it was added over time and it isn't all chronological. What you will find is either in the context itself or in notes that are not just added to our modern Bibles.

But we're in the original text. There'll be notes. You know, this will say this is a song of David. This is a song of Moses. This was a song of David when he so and so, you know, and it'll give you the historical context or the author enough so that you can match it up and see where it fits.

Yeah. The Samaritans had a temple and and they carried out everything Let me back up. The Samaritans only had the first five books. They didn't regard the rest of the books as inspired. We do have a Samaritan Pentateuch, a Samaritan Torah that they use, and it's very much the same as the one that's in Hebrew that the Jews used, except for it places the temple there on the mountain there above Jacob's well instead of in Jerusalem.

But yes, they had a temple, they had the priests and the whole deal. They had sacrifices and all that. But because of the location, because obviously once you start changing locations, start changing who's doing what, the rest of the Jews, this is just absolutely despicable. To them it was just completely unacceptable. Plus with all the the mix-up, you weren't sure if I got Jews or Gentiles in there. To them, they just couldn't even stomach the thought of that, so they just wouldn't even go in the land.

Is that what you're looking for? Yeah. Yes? The first Psalms were written by Moses, chronologically, written by Moses, and that was just before 1400. This was as they were going through the Exodus. And so you see some of the Psalms reflecting that Exodus. And then you see a great number of the Psalms written by David. And so that's around the year 1000. So almost four centuries later, here you have a whole collection that's added to it. And then other Psalms subsequent to that stretched out to the very end and the close of the Old Testament era. Does that answer your question? A lot of those will have some authorship, but not necessarily... There's no great names that come to mind in terms of when this happened.

I would say, I would say this, that a lot of the return to, okay, here's the law, here's the Old Testament, is credited to Ezra. And so by the time we get to the New Testament era, the Pharisees, they're saying, hey, we're after Ezra, you know, we like this guy. They all tried to picture themselves as following in Ezra's tradition. But, and so Ezra had a part in collecting these things up towards the end. But But some of the psalms we don't have a specific authorship for. If you don't see it in the context and you don't see a note to that effect.

But it was towards the end and like I said before there are various places where there's indications that somebody had collected them up but the collection wasn't complete yet. Other questions? Yes? Yeah, and there are people who have gone through it and, okay, there's this one and this one and this one and looked at the source of each one and looked at the historical context. It's not in straight pure chronology, so you have to look at each one.

But there are people who have gone through and said, okay, this happened here and happened here and happened here. One of the things that I did, and you may have even gotten a copy of it, I gave Nancy a, you know, You've seen people have written programs to read through the Bible in a year. This one program that I gave Nancy a copy of was one that it's read through chronologically. And the idea is to match up the psalm with the context of the historical document. So you're reading them side by side in context, historically, as opposed to just reading through things sequentially. But yeah, people have done that, where they look very carefully at, okay, what's in this, and even what words crop up, because certain words showed up at a certain period of time. And when those show up is a help in dating things. Other questions? Thoughts? Buzzer went off? Okay. If you haven't got some prior things, Let's get you updated here. So see me afterwards here.

And let's pray. Thank you, Lord, as we look at this kind of quick sweep of the history of the Old Testament. Lord, we we do indeed see your your handiwork in the things that you have brought together. What a tremendous thing that over a period of thousand years of writing would be So well sewn together and interwoven Such as to speak your truth, and we give you thanks for that in Jesus name Do you have time for a quick illustration? Okay, let's try this This is I think a good way for Christians to kind of picture history and Because we're talking about history and I keep talking about it like we're in it. Think of it this way. See this little end over here? That's creation. Then on this end, that's the end of this world. Time as we know it. And right about where my finger and thumb are, there's the cross.

We are inside that timeline, aren't we? And our perspective of time is we're looking back at here's the events that have happened and we're looking forward to here's the events that are going to take place. And we're inside there and we're basically, we cannot easily jump other than mentally we can picture this happened or that happened or this is going to happen. But we can't get there. God is standing like somewhat analogous to the idea of this pen. God is standing outside of time.

And so for him, he looks, here's Christ. But because time has no relevancies outside of it, he can say Christ was slain before the foundation of the world. He has no problem with prophesying something. To him, it's all happening at once. He says, I can look here and I can tell these people here that Christ is going to come. And here I am here in our time, and I can tell you that there's going to be a tribulation, and that there's going to be a millennium, and there's going to be an end of time, because he's standing outside looking at it. To him, it's all one present event. He has no trouble at all saying, well, I see what's happening, I'll tell you. And so, from the Lord's standpoint, looking outside, he looks at it, there's no limitation at all.

The one limitation, if you will, is God, in order to deal with the problem that happened here, had to step into man's history at the cross and the burial and the resurrection. He had to step into history to deal with the problem, step into the timeline. But isn't that amazing? As we look at the name of God, Jehovah, which is a contraction in the Hebrew, that contraction is brought forward in Revelation.

For he who was, and is, and who is to come. Or he is and was, I think they slip it, but the idea is past, and future, and now. It's all the same thing to him. He knows it all, the end from the beginning, and stands outside of it. So, when we're talking to the Lord about things, you know, He's not limited by our time limitations. We're sitting there trying to look down the pipeline. He's standing outside of it. It's a neat thing. Okay, thank you.