Lecture 1: The Second Temple Period: From Cyrus to the Herods, 538 BC to AD 70

The lecture, section by section

1. Why the background matters

   The historical, cultural, and religious background of the first half of the New Testament, Matthew 1 through Acts 12, is Jewish: Jesus's earthly life and the church's beginnings unfold in Palestine, and only from Acts 13 onward does the story broaden into the Gentile, Greco-Roman world. Second Temple Palestine has become one of the great topics of the last fifty years, and debates like the new perspective on Paul turn on whether we have rightly understood Jewish thinking in Paul's day. Essex is content to call the era the intertestamental age, but notes the preferred term today is the Second Temple period, since for Judaism, which receives no New Testament, there is no time between the testaments: its Scriptures simply conclude around 400 BC.

2. The Persian period

   The period opens with Cyrus's decree of 538 BC permitting any Israelite to return to Jerusalem to build the temple, recorded in Ezra. The altar is rebuilt, opposition stops the work, building resumes in 520, and the temple is completed in February of 515 BC. The Persian kings, from Cyrus and Darius to the two decrees of Artaxerxes in Ezra 7 and Nehemiah 2, generally support the Jewish religious reestablishment. Yet most Jews never return: wealth and prominence lie elsewhere in the empire, though Jewish identity often had to be kept quiet amid the anti-Jewish sentiment the book of Esther displays. Persia itself is the summing up of the ancient Near East, the widest empire of the ancient world, stretching from the Indus valley to Egypt and the Aegean, and Judea is a tiny district within the province called Beyond the River, usually governed by non-Jews inclined to keep Jerusalem desperate.

3. Alexander the apostle of Greek culture

   Persia falls with startling speed to Alexander the Great between 334 and 330 BC. Tutored by Aristotle, Alexander saw himself as raised up by the gods to spread Greek culture, the highest civilization of its day, planting Greek colonists and Greek cities across the known world so that Greek language and Greek rational, philosophical thinking would replace the old oriental mind. His army never bought the plan; they wanted their loot and their homes, not native wives. Alexander died in 323 BC, and one of the fastest-built empires in human history died with him, divided among four of his generals.

4. Between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids

   Ptolemy took Egypt, and though the southern Levant had not been assigned to him, he took Judea too. Seleucus gained Babylon, the northern Levant, and Asia Minor, and when a decree awarded the south to the Seleucids, Ptolemy's answer was, come and get it: over a century of warfare followed, until the Seleucids finally won Judea at the battle of Panias in 198 BC. Through it all the Jews kept the religious freedom Persia had granted and Alexander had confirmed. Josephus even preserves the story, which Essex notes has no support in Alexander's own records, of the high priest meeting Alexander outside Jerusalem with Daniel's prophecy of the Greek conqueror in hand, a story that shows Josephus took Daniel to be written early, not a Maccabean-era book.

5. Compromise for a better deal

   The Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem through Jews loyal to them, Jews who showed that loyalty by adopting Greek language and Greek ways while remaining somewhat Jewish. Here begin the tensions inside Judaism between those willing to compromise the faith for economic and political benefit, who became the wealthy, landed, aristocratic families, and those who would not. The Seleucids simply outbid their rivals, promising the high-priestly and aristocratic families more money and prominence, and after 198 BC one set of Greek masters replaced another with sympathizers of their own.

6. Rome squeezes, Antiochus strikes

   In 190 BC the Seleucids collided with the rising power of Rome and lost. Rome, not yet ready to occupy the east, chose instead to bankrupt it, imposing a tribute designed to strip the Seleucids of any army that could resist. Broke, the Seleucids went looking for money, and the deals with the Jews were off; even the temple's treasures drew their eye. Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes, invaded Egypt to consolidate the east, and a Roman naval representative turned him back, for Rome had become protector of the Ptolemies. Antiochus, deeply suspicious of Judaism, stripped away Jewish liberties, forbidding copies of the Scriptures and circumcision, and in 168 BC set an idol of Zeus in the temple and sacrificed a pig on the altar, the abomination of desolation, seeking to Hellenize the whole Jewish population.

7. The Maccabean revolt and the Hasmonean priest-kings

   In 166 BC the priest Mattathias rose against the Hellenizing program, and through his son Judas Maccabeus, Judas the hammer, the revolt prevailed. Being a priestly family, the Hasmoneans took the high priesthood to themselves around 150 BC, holding it in trust, they said, until God raised up a true high priest from Zadok's line, and won independence in 142 BC. Yet Essex underlines what the celebration obscured: independence came under the shadow of Rome. The Roman senate declared the Jewish state and its Hasmonean rulers friends of Rome, so that an enemy of the Jews was now an enemy of Rome, and Rome expected loyalty in return.

8. The Hasmonean expansion

   The Judea of the return was a temple state reaching roughly forty miles in any direction from Jerusalem. Under the protection of Rome's friendship the Hasmoneans spread far beyond it. Hyrcanus I annexed Idumea, whose people, descendants of Esau, were converted to Judaism in a day, and crushed the Samaritans, destroying their rival temple near Shechem on Mount Gerizim, which fixed the mutual hostility of Jew and Samaritan that runs on into the New Testament. Aristobulus I added Galilee around 104 BC, where a Jewish minority lived among Gentiles, and Alexander Jannaeus added the territories that would become the Decapolis, the Mediterranean coast, and lands south of Galilee, so that by 76 BC Rome recognized a broad Jewish domain under the Hasmoneans.

9. Pompey, Antipater, and Herod the Great

   After Alexander Jannaeus the dynasty tore itself apart: his sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II fought over the high priesthood, Hyrcanus called for Roman help, and in 63 BC Pompey, who had taken Antioch and ended the Seleucid empire three years earlier, took Judea. Rome preferred to rule through loyal native client kings rather than station legions everywhere, and found its man in Antipater the Idumean, Hyrcanus's chief minister, who as an Idumean could never be high priest but could control the one who was. When Antigonus, loyal to Aristobulus's line, seized Judea, Antipater's son Herod the Great appealed to the Roman senate, was granted the expanded Hasmonean domain, raised an army, defeated Antigonus, and ruled as client king from 37 to 4 BC over Judea, Samaria, the coast, Galilee, Perea, and the Gentile territories beyond.

10. Herod's heirs and the Roman governors

    At Herod's death his will divided the land among three surviving sons: Archelaus received Judea and Samaria, Antipas received Galilee and Perea, Philip the Gentile northeast, and Rome detached the Greek-speaking Decapolis. Archelaus ruled so poorly that in AD 6 Rome removed him, and for most of the New Testament period Judea and Samaria lay under Roman governors headquartered at Herod's Roman city of Caesarea, coming to Jerusalem only for the three annual feasts and ruling day to day through the Sanhedrin and the temple police. Except for the brief reign of Herod Agrippa I from 41 to 44, governors ruled from AD 6 to the temple's destruction in 70. So in the Gospels, Herod Antipas is the Herod of Jesus's Galilean ministry, but when Jesus enters Judea he stands in the jurisdiction of the Roman governor, from 26 to 36 Pontius Pilate. The events of the New Testament occupy the last hundred years of the whole story, roughly 4 BC to AD 100.

1. Essex traces how Persia, Greece, and Rome each unknowingly prepared the stage onto which Jesus was born. Where in this long story do you most clearly see God governing history through empires that never knew him, and how does that steady you about the powers of our own day?

2. The compromise that began under the Ptolemies, trading fidelity for wealth and standing, produced Judaism's aristocracy. Where does the same trade present itself to Christians now, and what makes it as attractive today as it was then?

3. Jewish independence in 142 BC was real, yet it rested on Rome's favor and ended in Rome's rule. What does that pattern suggest about hopes that rest on political protection, and where should the people of God finally place their confidence?