Adam and Eve by Raphael (Raffaello Santi of Urbino), 1509-1511.
When God created Adam and Eve the world was good. They fell into disobedience and sin was brought into the world. This tainted everything and brought death to all. But before the creation God had a plan in place to restore mankind. Even as he put a curse on the world, he made this promise of a future redeemer:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. Genesis 3:15
Although created by God, Adam and Eve inclined toward their own desires and by listening to Satan man became the Devil’s adopted offspring. But there would be a future offspring of woman, one not of any man, who would eventually crush the head of evil. His name would be Jesus.
However, in those early times, men grieved God so much by their depravity he considered wiping all off the face of the Earth. Still, he remembered his promise of The Redeemer and God never breaks a promise. God found one righteous man and his family to save a sample of each living creature. Noah was not the promised Redeemer of course. Noah did not redeem mankind. He merely preserved it and allowed it to start anew. The sinful nature that began with Adam was preserved along with mankind and the promise of a coming Redeemer was still needed.
Among the survivors, of the Flood God had used to destroy his creation were Noah’s three sons. All the people living upon the planet today descended from those three.
The inhabitants of what we call the Middle East basically descended from Shem. Thus they are known as Semites. Shem’s grandson was Eber. Jewish tradition holds that Eber refused to help in the building of the Tower of Babel and he was allowed to retain his own language, the original language of mankind. Eber’s descendents were Eberites. However, the name Eber was sometimes shown as Heber (I had an Uncle Heber named for him) and in time his descendents and their language was called Hebrew. A further descendent of Eber was Abrams, who was renamed by God as Abraham. He was to become the great patriarch of the Hebrews and they were God’s Chosen people from whom the Redeemer would one day come and they were to show God’s way to the world. (The name Jew referred to those of the Tribe of Judah, but the name eventually came to mean all those of the Hebrew faith.)
Despite the fresh start, as the population grew, people again turned to wickedness, even the Chosen People. God sent prophets to warn them and call them to repentance, but they ignored and sometimes even killed these messengers. Finally, God dispersed the Hebrews and sent many into captivity in Babylon. The country of Israel and Judah was taken from them and Jerusalem and the temple destroyed. The Law itself was lost to the people for decades.
In 539 B.C., King Nabonidus surrendered Babylon to the Persian King Cyrus without a fight. Within the year, the first Jews were allowed to return to their former homeland. By 516 B.C. a new temple had been built.
Ezra, accompanied by about 5,000 former exiles, arrived out of Babylon in 458 B.C. Nehemiah was overseeing the building of a reconstructed wall around Jerusalem, and after its completion in 445 B.C., Ezra stood and read the Law of Moses to the assembled people. (The Book of the Law had been rediscovered during construction.) Since the Law had been lost, the people were overjoyed at hearing it again. They forsook idols and returned to accepting the One and Only Mighty God.
Despite these incredible events, a mere 15 years later the Jews had strayed again. They were sacrificing blemished animals, showing their disrespect to God, and they were marrying foreigners. Why was it bad to marry foreigners? Because God had promised a redeemer and he had promised this redeemer would be a direct and unblemished descendent of Abraham and of David. If the Jews continued to marry with foreigners that ancestry would be lost and God’s plan could not be fulfilled.
So in 430 B.C., God raised up a prophet named Malachi who warned the Jews of coming judgment if they didn’t repent. His prophecies came with assurances of God’s love for them and a promise of salvation. And so it was with these words in Malachi quoting God that the Old Testament comes to an end:
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. Malachi 4:5-6
We have 400 silent years between the Old and New Testaments; between the prophesies of Malachi and the Birth of Our Lord, Christ Jesus. Much changed in the world in those years.
Alexander the Great defeated Persia in 331 B.C. King Darius was killed by his own men. Alexander went on to rule the known world until 323 B.C., when he died under mysterious circumstances.
His empire was divided among four of his top generals and split into four sectors ruled thusly: Seleucus (Asia), Ptolemy (Egypt), Lysimachus (Thrace) and Cassander, son of Antipater over Macedonia/Greece. (Many think of Cleopatra VII [69 B.C. - 30 B.C.] as Egyptian, but she was Macedonian/Greek being the last Ptolemy ruler of Egypt, which upon her death became part of the Roman Empire. Her father was Pharaoh Ptolemy XII Auletes his sister, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, was most likely her mother. (Cleopatra VII was married to two of her own brothers, before having her famous liaisons with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.)
The Jews, after Alexander, came under Seleucid rule. However, when the Seleucid King Antiochus defiled the Jewish Temple in 167 B.C. (a foreshadowing of the future Antichrist), Judah Maccabeus led a Jewish Army, which defeated the Seleucids. This began what is called the Hasmonean Rule of Palestine. However, in 63 B.C., the great Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem and Israel once again lost its independence and came under Roman Rule.
In 42 B.C., Mark Antony appointed Herod tetrarch of Galilee. The Jews resented him because he wasn’t a Jew. He was an Idumean with an Arabian mother. (Idumea was the Greek name for Edom, which bordered Judea on the south. This was a land populated by the descendents of Esau, Edom being another name of his. Esau was the brother of Jacob. The Edomites were perpetual thorns in the side of the Israelites. Given the history between Israel and Edom, it is no wonder the Jews were not happy to have Herod named their king.) During the Parthian War, Herod had to flee because the Jews sided with the Parthians. But after the war and order was restored, Rome reinstated Herod as the sole ruler of Judea. Thus in 37 B.C., Herod the Great was King of the Jews. He was ruling when Jesus was born.
During the Hasmonean Rule arose three important factions among the Jews: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes.
The Pharisees were spiritual leaders to the extreme. They not only embraced the Law, but also began to add to it their own interpretation and traditions. They did, however, believe in an afterlife, the judgment of the wicked and a coming Messiah.
The Sadducees were an elite priestly group, yet liberally embraced Greek ways into their lives. They insisted on a literal interpretation of the Law rejecting the ideas of the Pharisees, including resurrection. Their lives revolved around ritual and the Temple. They disappeared from history with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
The Essenes didn’t like either of the other two groups. They became monks, moved to the desert and strictly obeyed dietary laws and being celibate. They are associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
During this time a body came into existence known as the Sanhedrin (sitting together). It was a ruling institution for the Jews, a sort of Supreme Court and legislature rolled into one. It consisted of 71 Jewish elders and was presided over by a President and a Chancellor. Members of the Sanhedrin did not gain a seat by election. The supplanted a sitting member on the council be establishing superior knowledge of the Law. (Nicodemus and Saul [Paul) held seats in the council at times.) Both Pharisees and Sadducees were members of this group.
Another group often mention is Scripture were the Scribes. These were akin to attorneys.
So when we come to the beginning of the New Testament and the birth of Jesus, the world is quite different than it was when Malachi talked of a coming prophet like Elijah. The Persian Empire has been replaced by the Roman Empire. The King of Judea is not of the line of David, but a non-Jew named Herod. The Jewish religion and tradition is not being directed by God’s chosen prophets, but is in the hands of the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. It is also a time when many Jews are earnestly expecting the promised Messiah to come as a king that will defeat Rome and rule as David once did. This is the world at the time the Christ came.
