What happened between the Old & New Testaments
Craig Kaes · Aug 8, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 06
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262310547375

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

You can see from the timeline that there's roughly a 400-year gap there before the start of the New Testament. So the question here is, when we're learning about the history and the culture of time periods, when the books of the Bible are being written, it's clear that we're going to get some sort of insight from studying them. There are no books of the Bible being written here, so how is this relevant to what we're studying? Yeah, that's exactly right. So what was said is that there was stuff going on at that time that impacts the world later. So as we go through this, I'd like you to be asking, you know, what relevance does this have to New Testament times? To give a little perspective relative to what we were talking about last week.

So Israel gets conquered by Assyria in 722. Judah lasts a little bit longer before Babylon comes in. We make it to the close of the Old Testament. And this is the period that we're going to be talking about now. So around about this time period, Persians are big. Here's their kingdom. So we've got Israel over in here. Just massive territory that they've got.

Keep this picture in your mind, because when we get to the Greek kingdom under Alexander the Great, you may find that it looks remarkably similar. So just some of the Persian kings that are leading up to the time period that we're studying. You may see these mentioned in scripture, so this is a reference that you can come back to. Just a couple notes.

Cyrus, general all around, good guy. He allowed the Jews to return. Free to other peoples as well. Xerxes, this I find fascinating. Xerxes was king of Persia. He's thinking that he's quite the great guy. He's certainly got the title. He's got the responsibility. God has other plans. So I know who Xerxes is today because of his relationship to Esther, not because of how cool of a guy he was. We have assorted other kings. Again, this is for reference.

Until we get to Darius III, Darius III is the Persian king who has the distinction of being the one who was conquered by Alexander the Great, and that's how we remember him. It turns out that he met Alexander the Great on the battlefield a couple times. His approach was to run away, because Alexander was mean and scary. So once Alexander conquered, we enter into the Greek Empire. A few things about Alexander the Great.

There's a ton of stuff that we could say about him, so these are just a couple that are pulled out. He was the son of Philip II of Macedon. He had conquered Greece, was mysteriously assassinated. Some of the mystery around this is that, you know, it's under debate, but Alexander could have very well been involved in the assassination of his father.

He named Alexander as he conquered towns, as he conquered across the way and put towns into place. He named them in a way that suggested that maybe he was the most important person on this earth. To give you an idea, some of the names of the towns were Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria. Sixteen of them. He named cities after his horse, his dog, his mom. And he also named a city after his dad, that would be Philippi. So that's where the name of that came from. He was tutored by Aristotle, so I mean, he certainly had the upbringing. In 334, he started his attack.

And next slide is a map, and we'll see just how extensive his attacks were. He trained his soldiers extensively. and was a big strategist and as a consequence he was able to Win in battles where he was greatly outnumbered. I mean on the order of you know, ten to one outnumbered In the in the last battle that where he met Darius the third and conquered him. He was outnumbered easily ten to one He won that by battle by charging Darius through some strategic means and once once he'd killed their leader then panic ensued.

You've got this as a special handout. But Alexander starts over here, cruises along this coastline, comes down, and when he gets into Jerusalem, he's greeted by the Jews. And they say, ooh, we knew you were coming. They whip out the book of Daniel, chapter 8, and they show him you know, that there's going to be a great Greek who's going to come through and he's going to conquer the Persian Empire and that's you. He liked that, you know, they were saying nice things about him.

So he asked them what they wanted and they said, well, you know, we want what we've always wanted, what we wanted when folks were conquered under the Babylonian Empire. We just want to worship our God, have our traditions and keep going the way we are. We don't care who we're paying money to. That's okay with us. We just want to stick with our thing. Well, that's a good deal. So he went ahead with that.

He continued his campaign down along this coast, and here is Alexandria. This is the Alexandria that people tend to think of in Egypt. There were 15 others, but when I'm talking about Alexandria from here on out, that's the one. When he conquered Alexandria, He needed some people to fill in and to make sure that there was no backsliding, that Alexandria would stay conquered.

And he remembered, hey, there were these guys up here. They liked me a lot. So I'm going to grab a bunch of them and bring them down. So Alexandria had a very large Jewish population. And it ends up being an interesting city throughout history. It's where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. It's quite possibly where Mary and Joseph fled when they had to get out for fear of Herod killing Jesus.

Anyway, so he carries along. Right about in here is where he took out Darius III. And so for all these exploits along in here, all these, you know, throughout all of that, their leader's dead. So he's able to use some Persians to attack some Persians. So as he went through, he assimilated Persians, they became part of the Greek Empire and carried on and attacked more Persians. Yonder is Alexandria.

Okay, so Josephus, a famous historian, this is what he had to say about when Alexander came into Israel. This is somewhat under debate. whether this is an accurate account. The folks who don't like that this may be an accurate historical account are the same folks who don't believe in prophecy. And so if the Book of Daniel says that a Greek's going to come in and conquer Persia, and then a Greek comes in and conquers Persia, then we've got to question everything about the historical record.

Okay. So at the time that Alexander's going through and conquering, You've got this as a special handout as well. These are the major Greek colonies, all of these little blocks. So what value did that provide for Alexander? Well, as he went through, in each one of these towns, there was a large population of Greeks. So he could go in and find out how the city worked, who to talk to. before conquering, and then he'd have somebody to put in place when he left. You know, hey, you want to run this city? Great. And so he'd leave Greeks back in charge.

So at the end of Alexander's life, he ended up drinking himself almost to death, but a mosquito got to him first. So after winning all of these battles and charging men in open battlefield and surviving all of that, from the historical record, it sure sounds like he died of malaria. And interesting, whether it be myth or not, on his deathbed, he was asked, OK, so who are you leaving this kingdom to? And he said, the strongest.

So he'd put nothing in place in terms of seeing his kingdom on past his life. He wanted to unify the world under him, but either hadn't given any consideration to what it would be like after him or just didn't care. So after he'd- wrong button. Ha. So after his death, four of his generals divvied up the land, not in the kindest possible way.

The two that are most relevant for us are Ptolemy, who took over Egypt, and Seleucus, Seleucus, who took over the vast majority of the Persian Empire. This is all the Seleucid Kingdom. And then this down here is what Ptolemy ended up with. We'll draw up a red circle around here. The reason for this is this area that's marked in orange was owned by the Ptolemaic Empire. This up here by the Seleucid But that's not static. It didn't stay like that throughout all of history. You can imagine that these areas were really hard to maintain, and so they probably switched hands a few times, and that's true.

Same with this area right in here, where our hotbed of New Testament is going on. This area switched hands between the Seleucid Empire and the Ptolemaic Empire a bunch. And so you can just see the Jews, you know, We're now part of Ptolemy. Now we're part of the Seleucid kingdom.

Back and forth and back and forth. And through it all, they maintained exactly what they had always maintained, which is we don't care who's in charge. We just want to do our thing. And for the most part, they were able to do their thing. We'll look into some exceptions in a bit.

So the impact of the Greek language that Alexander the Great had First, you know, obviously he distributed the language over the eastern Mediterranean So what used to be the the Persian Empire what then became his empire what then was Seleucids and these these other three generals? Empires they all spoke a common language Wrong button There we go He also unified the link the language and Before he went through on his campaign, there were a number of different dialects of Greek. So, you know, I might be from Wyoming, you're from Colorado, and we can't quite understand what the other one's saying.

I know it feels like that sometimes when we go to the South. But that's how it was, and he was able to unify it into one dialect, Attic, for what it matters. The language also ended up getting simplified, so it was a very heady language, good for intellectuals. The common man might have some troubles with it, picking up the subtleties. So the way that all of this was accomplished was he needed a language to be able to communicate across the entire empire with. He had a large number of troops who were not necessarily well-educated, and he needed to be able to speak to them and communicate with them in a single language. So they ended up learning Greek as a second language, a large number of these.

And so when you get somebody who's speaking a language as their second language, it naturally tends to, you know, short sentences. Things are made more explicit. Use of euphemism drops out because we just simply can't understand all of the subtleties of the language. So the subtleties drop out. which is really cool because then when the New Testament comes along and it's written in this language, it's a lot easier to understand. I've forgotten which button. Ah, right one.

Okay, so around 220 BC, Jewish families are allowed to migrate out of this region. It's unclear why the leaders at the time decided that that was a good thing. But they move up into this area up here, encouraged by tax breaks for doing so. So the ruler says, no taxes for 10 years if you move up here. Well, that's like us paying people to live in Alaska. Some people like the idea. Some people don't. 2,000 families liked the idea, and they moved up here.

So if you note, this is 220 BC. 250 years later, when we move into New Testament times, I guess more like 260, 270 by the time Paul's writing to these folks, We have the Church of Ephesus, we have Colossae, we have Galatia, and it becomes more clear why he's talking about these issues with the Jews. You know, when he's writing to the Church at Ephesus about, you know, you've got this Jew issue with the Gentile issue, well, this is why there were so many Jews up there. It's because of something that happened 250 years prior. When he's talking to the Galatians about folks coming in and wanting to put them under law, Who wants to put them under law?

Well, the Jews. And where'd they come from? Right here in about 220 BC. An interesting piece of information is that by New Testament times, this area right in here, Israel, Jerusalem, that neck of the woods, has about a million Jews. Alexandria, Babylon, and this region up in here have about two million Jews. So a large population of Jews outside of Israel. So the Jews move out of Israel.

They lose touch with the Hebrew language. Greek is everywhere. They don't know how to read their scriptures anymore. So there's a big call to translate the scriptures into Greek. And this is the Septuagint. You may also see it referred to as LXX. For 70, there were supposedly 70 translators, intellectuals who are involved in translating the Old Testament.

And it was done in Alexandria about 250. Alexandria, by this point, had become a major intellectual hub. It had the largest library in this area of the world. So the intellectuals wanted to hang out there, and so it made a good place for it to be translated, but also because of the large Jewish population that was there.

In some places, there's a bias toward the Greek culture. Alexandria was under Greek rule. The Septuagint is not typically thought of as common Greek. It's thought of as translation Greek. So for the most part, the ideas are carried across straight away. But in some places, there was some serious interpretation going on, especially with the book of Daniel, which again says the Greeks are going to come in and conquer. And so they enjoyed interpreting that for the folks. And so they were replaced by other Greek versions right off the bat.

Daniel is the one that I know about. An interesting bit about the Septuagint. which is a big Romans 1 experience where, you know, casting off the Almighty God, they decide to worship bugs and creepy crawly things. There was a cult that lasted for a couple hundred years that worshipped the translators. Okay. So from the time of Ezra, there was a group of Jews that held to the Old Testament scriptures. They were very proud of, you know, I'm after Ezra. I'm Ezra's boy. There were a few different Jewish groups that came out of them. And the New Testament talks about some of them, some by name, some not by name.

Of course, we know about the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Interesting that the Pharisees, it seems, came out of the scribes. Sadducees came out of the priests. Zealots, we have Simon the Zealot, so we know about them directly. The scenes are mentioned in Matthew, but I don't believe by name. And the Sakirai, these were some scary guys. They're mentioned in Acts just as the 4,000 assassins who were led out to the desert. Now we'll be talking about the Hasmonean rulers. These are Jews.

So you remember that area, Israel, where it's owned by the Seleucid kingdom and then by the Ptolemaic kingdom and back and forth and back and forth. For the most part, they were allowed to do their thing, regardless of who the ruler was. And when that stopped, then there was a rebellion. Antiochus, this is actually Antiochus IV, was particularly bad.

But in general, they tried to Hellenize the Jews, meaning they wanted them to take on the Greek culture. They wanted them to worship Greek gods as well as their gods. They wanted them to sacrifice to Greek gods. Most of the rulers figured out that that wasn't a good idea when the Jews said, no, we don't like that. Antiochus IV, not so much. So he ended up requesting, trying to force a priest into sacrificing a pig, of all things, in the temple to a pagan god. The priest refused by way of murdering the person who was asking him to do so. And this started a revolution. The Greeks underestimated the power of the Jews. The Jews wiped out the Greeks, and they took the land for themselves.

And this is the time period from which we get Hanukkah. So the Jews can't glorify war or pay tribute to war. So Hanukkah is not about defeating the Greeks and taking their land. However, it is about purifying the temple. So the temple had been defiled by the Gentiles at this point. And so once the Jews conquered, they went through and purified the temple.

And there's a story, I don't know how much of it's mythology, how much of it's real, whereby they lit a lamp. It was supposed to have enough oil for one day. It miraculously lasted for eight days. And so this is how we get Hanukkah. But the general idea is that Hanukkah is about the purification of the temple at the end of this period. The Maccabees was the group that took control and then led.

Around about this time, there was the establishment of two different court systems. Jews could conduct their business in either one, it didn't matter which. There was the Court of Hillel and the Court of Shammai. Hillel tended to take a more liberal view, Shammai a more conservative one.

So Hillel, for example, would say that a woman could divorce for any reason whatsoever. Shammai said no, that only under extraordinary circumstances, if there's unfaithfulness, abandonment, lack of support. So when Joseph says that, I guess it's Matthew 1 when Matthew's talking about Joseph and how he didn't want to disgrace Mary when she was pregnant and it was obviously not Joseph's baby. He didn't want to disgrace her so he's going to send her away quietly. That implies that he was going to divorce her through the court of Hillel because he wouldn't have to establish that there'd been any wrongdoing.

If he'd chosen the court of Shammai, then he would have had to approved unfaithfulness And that certainly wouldn't be that certainly would have been disgraceful and not sending her away quietly By the way, I jump in with questions if you have them as I'm going through this I don't mind being interrupted Okay, so let's enter into the Roman Empire Okay, so The city of Rome had begun its military exploits west of the Greek empires in the 3rd century BC.

So right about the time that Alexander the Great is dying and his kingdom is being split out by these generals, way back then the Roman Empire is already starting to conquer, starting west and moving east toward Greece. By the 2nd century BC, they were right at the edge of the Greek empire. By 63 BC, they'd already taken over Israel. So they moved pretty quickly.

The Romans allowed the Jews limited self-rule and some exemptions to their laws. One of the exemptions Vern talked about last week, which was they were exempted from military service. You can imagine trying to keep somebody in the military when everything that you do in the military violates their religious beliefs. Another such exemption is under Roman law, a man was allowed to have one wife, exactly one wife. The Jews were exempted from that, but they didn't take advantage of that exemption too terribly often.

Here's a picture of the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar, so we're maybe 50 BC. You can see how extensively they've taken over Western Europe. Greece has fallen. They haven't taken Alexandria yet, so this is still under the Ptolemaic regime. this side. So coming from over here just off the screen, we have the Parthian Empire. And around about 40 BC, they come charging into Israel, to Jerusalem in particular.

The Jews may have been involved in that process. I found one place that said that that was true. I haven't done enough research to put my stamp of approval on that. But the Jews may not have been too terribly happy with the Roman Empire, and so they conspired with the Parthians to come in. However, the Romans had not too terribly much trouble pushing them right back out.

So why is this relevant? Well, because they were afraid of what would happen along this border, with Parthians coming back in and conquering again, They decided to put Herod into place. Why Herod? Because he was a wicked, cruel, cruel man who could hold that border, keep the Parthians out, and maintain order in Israel. So they gave him the title as king. It turns out that the Romans weren't too picky about titles. They threw them around willy-nilly. So he got to be king.

He was tyrannical and cruelly paranoid. So this portion from Matthew is, of course, where Herod tries to conspire with the wise men to find out where this Jesus character is. Jesus and Mary and Joseph escape, possibly into Alexandria, definitely out of Bethlehem, because then Herod slaughters every single child in Bethlehem. He also had some of his wives put to death. He had some of his sons killed. Whatever served his purpose, which made him an absolutely perfect person to put in place right on that border to keep the Parthians out because you know that this guy, as sick as he is, is going to maintain order. He was a big builder. A lot of the tourist attractions in that part of the world were put into place by Herod way back when.

This picture over here shows an upgrade. I guess you've got this as a special handout as well. It shows an upgrade to the temple. It turns out that he didn't have quite enough hill to make this upgrade to the temple, so what he did is build fortress walls around the area that he wanted to build, filled those in with dirt. So he essentially, you know, widened the hill that he was on so that he had enough room to do this.

This picture right up here, it kind of looks like a little anthill. It's a mountain. What he did is carved the top off, whittled down into it, and built a fortress inside of there. So out in this region, it's pretty much plains. It's flat. So any hill like this is going to be a great place to look out. He's uphill, so he can defend it very well.

And they can see folks coming from miles and miles and miles away. So these types of things were put up all along that border. Again, his charter was to keep the Parthians the heck out of there. We won't be able to go into this. It's just not going to show up.

But you have this as a special handout, and it might be fun to look through. You'll see folks throughout the New Testament as Herod this or Herod that. This will help you figure out which Herod goes where and how they fit into the family tree. Vern's joke about this is that this is like I'm my own grandpa sort of stuff. This guy's married to this gal. There's a lot of intermarrying and it's kind of weird. But there you go.

Emperor Augustus decided Rome has expanded enough. So let's focus on what we've got and let's make it something that we can really maintain. Let's build it into an empire we can be proud of. And what's cool about that is that he was able to be in power for so very long. I mean, we're looking at 45 years there.

The Roman Caesars, the first act of business when they got into office was to look at the stuff that their predecessor had put into place and decide which of those things to throw out. Sometimes these guys would only be in office for six months, a few years, so the next guy who came along would look at everything that they put in place and say, no, that's not what I like, I'm going to throw that away and I'm going to put in whatever feels good to me. Because Augustus was in office for so long, he was able to put just a really consistent, stable pattern into place.

This is what the Roman Empire is all about. And because that was entrenched, I mean, we're talking 45 years, so a generation and a half, two generations under his rule. Because we've got a couple generations under his rule, Once he was out of office, folks weren't so apt to overturn what was in place at that time. So if they throw out what Augustus came up with, they've got a revolution on their hands.

Here's the Roman Empire around the birth of Christ. It's in the green. You've got this as a special handout as well. Note that by the birth of Christ, Alexandria is now under control of the Romans. And you can see this orange area over here. These are where the Parthians are. So this is the border that has got to be held by Herod.

So this fascinated me in Roman history just as it fascinated me in American history. We have Eisenhower come in place and all of a sudden we connect every single thing up in the whole country. We've got an enormous highway system and I just marvel at the amount of effort that went into that. Same thing here in Rome, under Augustus, we built roads, we built roads, we built roads. The roads were built by Roman soldiers and they were a lot harder to build than American roads because we just drop asphalt along the ground.

I mean, there's some flattening, That's about it. And if it cracks, that's okay. We'll come along and smush some more asphalt in there a little while later. But these guys, they had some massive machines that they wanted to move across the country in very short order. A lot of really impressive war machines. And so they needed a stable road system that was going to be in place and that they could move on quickly without having to worry about repairs. So they would dig down tremendous distances and put sand. and gravel, and smaller rocks, and bigger rocks, and build up the roads to the point that 2,000 years later, some of them are still in use today. Also extensive, you can see how you can get most anywhere from anywhere across these roads.

So again, what did the Jews want? We'll pay taxes to whoever you want us to pay taxes to. We don't care who we're ruled by. Just let us do our thing. So what's their thing? Well, it included the priesthood, so they're still doing their sacrifices. And the Sanhedrin, which was their court system made up of Sadducees and Pharisees. To give you a sense of how the split was, Sadducees maybe 10, 15, somewhere on that order, with the rest of the 71 members of the Sanhedrin being Pharisees. Why is that important? Well, the Sanhedrin, they believed in the written law. So first five books, this is what they buy. What'd they say? Yeah, I did mean the Sadducees, thank you. So they believe in the written law, and that's it.

The Pharisees, believe in an oral law as well, which I think is fascinating since the Pharisees came out of the scribes. So these people who are responsible for writing down every word of the written law exactly verbatim also believe in an oral law that explains the written law. So this is handed down from generation to generation and was eventually written down in the Talmud. And that's what the Talmud is about.

The Sadducees coming out of the priests. They're a minority in this group, so they've got to pretty much go along with what the Pharisees say. So the Pharisees are running the Jewish courts, and they're believing in something outside of the Word of God. Okay, so details around the birth of Christ. We have Augustus, the emperor, so he's put the road system together, he's put political stability into place, he's stopped expanding and started working on maintenance. Herod was king, brutal, evil man.

Jews had a major population in Egypt and specifically in Alexandria, so Joseph and Mary can have a safe harbor when it comes time to flee. And so the time is right for Christ to come along. So when he did, what's the climate? The Roman Empire had provided political stability. You'll remember that the region, Israel, had changed hands numerous times, but under Augustus had achieved some stability. Also, excellent roads on which to carry the gospel. So Paul can write a letter to Ephesus and Paul can write a letter to Colossae and get it there. Greek culture brought along the language, which was very well suited to the New Testament scriptures.

What was good about it? Well, it's a very exact language. You can think of it as kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces have to fit into place for something to work. So the clarity is remarkable in the New Testament. Contrasted with Hebrew, which is much more of a pictorial agricultural sort of language. It just doesn't have the preciseness.

Also, the language had been spread so thoroughly that the gospel could be written in one language and understood by so many different people. The spread of the Jewish culture gave this empire a better understanding of the Old Testament So they understood things like, oh, this is where sin came from, and this is why it's good that we're being saved from it. And this is what law did to people.

So next week will be on the life of Christ. All right. Let's close. Lord, thank you for this time that we've had together. Thank you for being in control of everything, for your sovereignty, for your ability to guide history so that people can know you. how big your power is. Thank you for being in control of all things. Amen.