SUBJECT:  Bible

QUESTION:  How much time was there between the Old Testament and the New Testament?  What was happening in history?

ANSWER:

It was about 400 years.

The time of the Old Testament ended about 430 BC.

A good explanation of this is in Halley's Bible Handbook.

Found a similar write up on the Internet:

The period between the testaments

 
There is a period of some 400 years between the books of Malachi and Matthew in the Bible. There were many changes that took place in the Holy Land during this time that changed Jewish society before the introduction of Jesus and His teaching. Knowledge of these transformations can help us better understand the Gospels and the flow of thought that influenced Israel’s reaction to Him.

Political Changes:

Malachi was written during the Persian period. The Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and captured most of the inhabitants in 686 BC. The Persians eventually conquered Babylon and King Cyrus allowed the Jews to go back and rebuild the temple in 536. Ezra and Nehemiah guided the re-building of the Temple and the city walls. There is not much else known about this era except that the Persians were more tolerant of Israel than most other conquerors had been.

Alexander the Great swept in from Greece in 332 BC. Lands that had been under the control of Egypt, Persia, Babylon and Assyria were now Greek holdings. He was tolerant of the Jewish settlement and encouraged many of them to settle in Alexandria, Egypt. He established Greek language and culture all over his short-lived empire. Alexander died at the young age of 33 and his empire was divided between four of his generals.

Palestine was under Egyptian (the Ptolemies) control until about 198 BC when Syria (the Seleucids) recaptured it. Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 BC) of Syria tried to Hellenize (make them adopt Greek customs and language) the Israelites, but to no avail. He made a determined effort to exterminate the people and their religion. He attacked Jerusalem, desecrated the Temple by offering a pig on the altar and installing an altar to Zeus. Jews were forbidden to worship, circumcision was outlawed, the scriptures were burned, ownership of them was made illegal and many Jews were taken into slavery or tortured.

The Maccabean revolt, in response to the cruelty of Antiochus, led to a century of independence for Israel. The years 167 – 63 BC are known as the Maccabean Period. Judea was ruled by the Hasmonean priest-rulers for most of this period. It was infighting that led two rival high priests to invite the Romans to come and settle the dispute. General Pompey came and settled the dispute by making Palestine part of the Roman Empire. King Herod, a Roman appointee, was administering the area when Jesus was born. It was Herod who rebuilt and expanded the Temple in an effort to win the favor of the people. It was also Herod that had the babies of Bethlehem slaughtered shortly after Jesus’ birth.

Cultural Change:

 If Alexander’s Empire didn’t last very long politically, it endured culturally. His generals worked hard to establish Greek thought and language into the local cultures under their domains. The Romans adopted the Greek language and it became the “lingua franca” of their world.

Geographical Changes:

The elaborate road system and common language, along with the Peace of Rome made travel possible and many Jewish settlements sprang up all over the world. The synagogue was now a standard site all over the Diaspora.

There are five areas of Palestine that concern readers of the New Testament:

Galilee, an area of 50 by 30 miles, was an area where the Assyrians had deported all of the Jews and non-Jewish settlers had been moved in to replace them. Galilee is a mixed pagan-Jewish population when Jesus appears.

Samaria is a little smaller than Galilee. Jewish inhabitants who had avoided the Assyrian deportations had remained in Samaria and established their own worship based on the five books of Moses. They had their own temple on Mount Gerazim. When Nehemiah was rebuilding the temple at Jerusalem, the Samaritans were not welcome in any way and the political and religious separation continued into Jesus’ day.

Judea was basically the old area of Judah, which included Jerusalem.

The Decapolis (ten cities): Gadara is one of the cities. It is where Jesus sent demons into a herd of pigs. He was popular in the Decapolis.

 Perea was a small territory east of the Jordan. Jesus did much of His teaching there and left from there on his final journey into Jerusalem.

Religious Changes:

New parties of Judaism emerged between the testaments as a result of Alexander and his successors’ attempts at Hellenizing the world. These parties were a reaction to the pressure from the gentile world to assimilate into the Greek culture and language.

The Pharisees saw themselves as defenders and interpreters of the Law and tradition. The Pharisees stressed the “oral” law and ritual purity. They would not come into contact with sinners. Jesus often clashed with them but he also had many interesting conversations and contacts within that school.

The Sadducees were more politically connected than the Pharisees were. They were conservative theologically, in that they only accepted the Pentateuch as scripture. The Sadducees tried to accommodate the Romans and protect their political position.

The Zealots were totally opposed to Roman occupation.

Language and Writing:

Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the common language after the Babylonian exile. Hebrew is the language of the Old Testament. By Jesus’ time, it was only a religious language and was understood by the priests and rabbis. Latin was the language of Rome but not of the Empire. Greek was the common language of the world coming into the New Testament. The Apostles wrote in Greek. The Jewish Bible was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) because many Jews were fluent in Greek and Aramaic but not in Hebrew.

The combination of a world at peace under Roman might, a system of roads and a common language encouraged a large Diaspora throughout the Empire. With synagogues in every city the first Christian missionaries, who were Jewish, had a place to go and preach. The conditions were ideal for the spreading of the Good News.

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There is also a good article on the Internet, "The 400 years between the Testaments" which is posted at:

http://www.templemount.org/0240.html