ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 11 · Daniel 11:29-35; John 10:22-30
No prophet speaks. Greeks, an abomination on the altar, the Maccabees, Rome and Herod. Jesus walks in Solomon's porch at the feast that remembers it.
After Malachi, somewhere around 430 BC, Scripture records no prophet in Israel for about four hundred years, and the Jews who lived through those years knew it. 1 Maccabees, written around 100 BC, mentions three separate times that there was no prophet among them (1 Maccabees 4:46; 9:27; 14:41). The rabbis later said the same in the Tosefta (Sotah 13:3): when Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.
The books that cover these years are the Apocrypha. They are used here as history, and only as history. They were written in the silence, none of them claims a prophet's authority, and 1 Maccabees says plainly that there was none to claim. The Jews never put them in their Bible. The Apocrypha section of this site sets out the whole question; for the events of these centuries, 1 Maccabees is the best record anyone has.
In 332 BC Alexander the Great took the land without a battle. After his death his generals divided the empire between them. Egypt's Ptolemies held Judea for a century, and the Seleucids of Syria took it from them in 198 BC. Greek speech, Greek cities and Greek habits came in everywhere, and there were men in Jerusalem glad to have them. 1 Maccabees 1 says that certain Jews built a gymnasium in the city, had their circumcision disguised, and forsook the holy covenant. A good part of the pressure on Israel in these years came from Israelites.
Then came Antiochus IV, who styled himself Epiphanes, god made manifest. In 167 BC he stripped the Temple, forbade circumcision, burned every copy of the law his men could find, and built an altar to Zeus on top of the altar of burnt offering. 1 Maccabees 1:54 calls it the abomination of desolation and dates it to the fifteenth of Chislev in the 145th year of the Greek kingdom, which is December 167 BC. Pigs were sacrificed in the holy place. Mothers who had their sons circumcised were put to death with the babies hung round their necks.
Daniel had seen this king coming centuries before: one who would pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate (Daniel 11:31). Daniel had also said how the faithful would answer him: the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits (Daniel 11:32).
In the village of Modein an old priest named Mattathias refused to sacrifice to the king's gods, and when another Jew stepped forward to do it, Mattathias killed him on the altar and fled to the hills with his five sons. His son Judas, nicknamed Maccabeus (the hammer), fought a guerrilla war and beat one Syrian army after another. In December 164 BC, three years to the day after the altar was defiled, Judas cleansed the Temple, built a new altar of uncut stones, and dedicated it with eight days of feasting (1 Maccabees 4:52-59). The Jews have kept that feast ever since as Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication.
The family did not stay heroic. Their descendants, the Hasmoneans, took the high priesthood and the crown together, which the law never allowed, and fought one another for both. In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey took Jerusalem and walked into the holy of holies to see what was there. The Roman Senate made Herod, an Idumean, king of the Jews in 40 BC, and by 37 BC he had taken Jerusalem for himself. About 20 BC Herod began rebuilding the Temple on a grand scale, and the work was still going on when Jesus stood in it: Forty and six years was this temple in building (John 2:20).
These were the centuries that made the world of the Gospels: a synagogue in every town, Pharisees and Sadducees, the Old Testament in Greek (the Septuagint), Roman roads from one end of the sea to the other, and a people watching for the Messiah. Paul says that when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son (Galatians 4:4). This is the time he means.
John sets one winter scene in it: it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch (John 10:22-23). At the feast that remembered the cleansing of the Temple, the crowd pressed him to say whether he was the Christ, and he told them, I and my Father are one (John 10:30). Judas Maccabeus had cleansed a house that Rome would one day burn. The man walking in its porch was the one whose body death could not keep, and whose blood cleanses his people for good.