The 400 Years ERASED From the Bible

There is a 400 year gap in your Bible, and you probably flipped right past it a hundred times without ever noticing. It's in the seam right between the Old Testament and the New Testament, ending with the last prophet and jumping straight into the birth of Jesus. But hidden inside that single page is a stretch of 400 years. Christians call it the years of silence. This is when God simply stopped talking. When the prophets went quiet, when heaven went dark and nothing really happened, except it's not exactly true. Because those silent years might actually be the loudest, bloodiest, and strangest stretch of time in the entire Bible. This is the era where a Greek king marched into the house of God and sacrificed a pig on the altar to Zeus, where one old man and his five sons took on an entire empire and won. It's the time where an entire Jewish population clawed its way to freedom, where a Jewish dynasty sat on the throne of Jerusalem for the first time in centuries, and were secret books about fallen angels, the cosmos, and the end of the world got sealed into caves and stayed hidden for 2,000 years. So why was God silent during these 400 years and why is so much of it not included in most Americans' Bibles? Well, today, we're gonna find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to "Religion Camp." (chanting) What's up, dude? And welcome back to "Religion Camp." My name is Mark Agdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from every religion, from around the world, from all time forever. Yeah, maybe you've heard me give that spiel before, 'cause it's not changing, 'cause that's what we do, every single Sunday. We're trying to figure out what everyone believes. Everyone around the planet has a different version of God, they believe different types of gods. Maybe they got a bunch of gods, maybe they have one, and it's a man, you know? It's all sorts of different things going on, and I just want to know what everyone is going on about. I was raised Catholic, so I'm fascinated by religious history, and I want to know what you believe. And so, every single day, or every Sunday, we take a new topic and we try to break it down and try to understand what is interesting about your religion. And today, we're going over to the Christian world. Yeah, baby. But before we jump in, I want to say a few things. First off, thanks to you, dude, or a girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in, 'cause every time you click on an episode, comment like anything like that, you help keep the lights on and the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. You also help keep the fire burning in the heart of the man right next to me. He's the Greek freak himself. He's the Orthodox legend. His name is Drumroll, please. What's up, everybody? Christos. It's a religion camp. I have a question. Yes. Does your Bible have macabees in it? I don't think so. I think it does, actually. That's not the point of this episode, okay? The point of this episode is we want to understand what's going on between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and for many of my Protestant evangelical American Christian friends, there's a moment. There is this 400 years of silence. God's doing all sorts of stuff in the Old Testament. He's talking to people. There's apparitions in the desert. There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on. There is miracles happening to the people that live in the Near East. And then it just kind of stops. And it kind of stays that way for seems like almost half a millennium. 400 years, not a short amount of time. America hasn't been around that long. So imagine from the founding of America to now, plus an extra what? 150 years, it's just nothing. And then all of a sudden, the greatest thing of all time, Jesus Christ, God and Carnot, comes down and starts to do miracles again. What's going on? Why is there a period of silence? Why does it seem like nothing happens between the Old Testament into the New Testament? Well, there are many different answers. Myself as a Catholic, we have some of that stuff documented. If you go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, there's some stuff going on in that window that's going on. If you go through history, they tell us what happened in that window and it is crazy. So let's just start off. There's no verse anywhere in the Bible that goes like, "And then God went quiet for 400 years." That's not, it wasn't predicted and it wasn't really even talked about. And that number is an estimate of how much time passed between the events of the last book of the Old Testament. This is generally going by like the American Bible. We'll say like the NIV or something. And then the events of the first book of the New Testament. So scholars will start the clock at the prophet Malachi. Somewhere around like 400 zish BC and they stop it when the New Testament opens with the births of John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ. So when you count the kind of the years between Malachi and John and Jesus, you get roughly four centuries. And some really smart people will call this the inter-testamental period. But historians will also just call this the second temple period. This is obviously referring to the temple that stood in Jerusalem through this entire stretch of time, which is the second temple of the ancient Israelites. But the important question isn't necessarily how long the period was. It was more about why there was silence and what the silence actually means and how different Christian sects have understood this silence. It's not like history paused. It's not like everyone just sat in a hut all day for 400 years. Life went on. People were living, dying, praying, fighting, building, the empires were rising, collapsing, wars were won and lost. And even some of the most influential Jewish literature ever composed was written in that window. So when people say silence, what are they talking about? Well, in the traditional Protestant Christian view, silence just means there's no new prophet. There's no one speaking on God's behalf. No one is basically directing the people of Israel and no new book that everyone agreed belongs in scripture at least through the Protestant lens. Like this is again, this is specifically like a presbyterian going through the Bible. This is like, all right, God's not really interacting with the people that much. So after the last of the Old Testament prophets fell quiet, the general belief was that the time of the prophets was simply over. They had a good run. And if you know those books of the Old Testament, there are a ton of them, 17 in total. And they're broken up into major and minor prophets, books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those kind of guys. And this wasn't only a later Christian idea. There's a Jewish writer from the period who described his own time as quote, the worst stretch since the day the prophets ceased to appear among them. So it seems like this absence was very real in the people living through it kind of felt it. They were like, hey, we have all these stories of old prophets that are talking in chat with God and having a great time and sometimes not a great time, but at least God is there. And it feels like we're in this almost like divine wasteland where we don't really see God. And here's the whole reason we're doing this episode because even though God seemed to be silent to the Israelites during this time, it doesn't mean that nothing was happening and that silence actually is pretty significant. So if the years weren't empty, what was going on? Like what was actually happening in there? So before we fully dive into it, we got to rewind and go over the last few moments of the Old Testament based off of the kind of American Protestant Bible basically before scripture goes quiet. So the ending of the Old Testament was pretty catastrophic for the ancient Jews living in this region and the future is pretty bleak. So this is roughly like 586 BC, okay? The Babylonian Empire storms in a Jerusalem, destroy it, right? They burn the city of the ground and they tear down the temple. This is known as the first temple. If you saw the episode we did on King Solomon, this is the temple that King Solomon built and then they dragged the leaders of Judah off into exile, hundreds of miles away in Babylon. This is the absolute low point in the story for ancient Israel. The kingdom is gone. The, you know, the outsiders came in and sacked the temple. The house of God is just like a pile of rubble and the people are pulled away from the Promised Land. And then a few decades later, the story shifts. A new empire rises, this is Persia. And in 539 BC, the Persians conquer Babylon and the Persian king Cyrus actually let the Jews go home if they wanted to. He says like, Hey, I'm the new king of you guys. I destroyed the people that, you know, destroyed you. So you guys can go rebuild your city and your temple if you want and they're stoked on that. So around 515 BC, they do it. It's finished. This is the second temple and it's a little bit humbler than Solomon's like grand original and the, you know, men who are basically trying to remember the first one from before the exile are said to have wept at the site of the replacement. And yeah, it's a, it's a mixed feeling, you could say. But it's there, you know, they're back and they got their temple back and they're pretty stoked. The sacrifices and the worship are up and running again. And for them, their place of interaction with God is now here. And that more or less is where the Old Testament kind of just stops. The final book in the sort of American Protestant ordering of the Bible is Malachi. And Malachi is not some like, and they lived happily ever after. You know, it's not like a Broadway ending where like, you know, a kid like looks at his childhood bedroom. Like, I'm gonna miss this place. No, it ends with God speaking through the prophet, calling his people out. The priests are lazy. They're giving, you know, God like blemish second rate animals instead of their best sacrifices. People are betraying their spouses, cheating their workers and neglecting the poor. It is a mess. And God is not happy. And more than a few of them are asking where God even is. Like why are we even staying faithful? It feels like God is abandon us. And the wicked are prospering. And it seems like we're in a period of injustice. And so the Old Testament doesn't exactly close on a high note. It closes on this question. Basically like, God, where art thou? And it's precisely that unanswered question that makes the silence feel so heavy. But Malachi doesn't leave us with only that. The very last thing the prophet says is actually a promise. God declares that he will send the prophet Elijah back to his people before the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives. They have something to look at. look forward to. Basically, hey, I'm gonna dip, but a messenger's coming and, you know, someone will prepare the way. Now, keep that promise in mind, because 400 years later, when the New Testament finally opens, the very first figure it introduces to us is a wild man out in the wilderness who, you know, depending on who you ask, looks and feels a lot like Elijah. But we'll get to him. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? It's a power move. 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One quick clarification though, I keep calling Malachi the last book of the Old Testament and that is true in the in Protestant Bibles and generally in Catholic Bibles is the last book. But there are some things that happen kind of not chronologically in order. But in the Jewish Bible, the Tanakhs, the books are actually arranged in a different order. I don't even know if it's necessarily the Jewish Bible. It's basically like what we call like the Hebrew Bible. This is, these are the books that the ancient Jews and modern Jews still refer to as a holy book, basically the book of their prophets. And the books are actually arranged in a different order. The final book for them isn't Malachi. It's actually Chronicles and that would basically translate to like first and second Chronicles for the Christian Bible. So this whole thing that we're talking about, the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament, it doesn't apply to the Jewish timeline. It's just a small detail but I think it's worth mentioning. So the Old Testament basically fades out on a rebuilt temple, a Persian rule, a pretty frustrated people and kind of this promise from God that like, hey, prepare the way, someone is coming to prepare the way, there's another prophet on basically coming through. And then the God of Israel goes quiet and that's kind of the story. And from the West, a new power comes storming over the horizon led by a young man who would conquer the known world before his 33rd birthday. So around 332 BC, that date is probably, if you're a history fan, you're probably aware of it. The most famous conqueror in all of ancient history comes sweeping through the region and his name is Alexander the Great. And he's conquering everything from Egypt to Persia all the way to the edge of India and the little city of Judea just basically gets swept up in the tide overnight, basically without a fight. The Jewish homeland becomes now a part of the Greek world and then comes the twist that shapes the next two centuries. Alexander the Great dies shockingly young, like in his early 30s and he leaves behind no clear secession. There's no air that's, you know, very obvious. So his generals basically carve up his empire amongst themselves, basically just like, all right, Alexander's gone, what do we do? So Judea, as luck would have, it ends up in the worst possible spot on this map. It's right on the border between basically these two rival Greek successors, basically these two Greek states that are basically trying to destroy each other. So to the south, ruling from Egypt are the tolamies and to the north, ruling from Syria are the solutions. But the deeper story here isn't necessarily about which empire is like collecting the taxes. It's more about which culture is taking over. Which culture is seeping in as the tolamics? Is it the solutions? Is it a mix of both? Because you gotta understand, Alexander didn't just conquer territory. He exported Greek everything, like in terms of one person changing the culture of a region, I mean, he was massively influential. I mean, like Greek language, Greek cities, Greek gods, Greek gymnasiums, Greek philosophy, fashion, ideas, like what it even means to live like a good Greek life. And historians have a word for this vast cultural tide that blanketed everything that the Greeks touched and they call it Hellenization. And this is like, if you've ever heard of like the Hellenistic period, this is basically kind of what they're talking about. And this is where things get complicated for the Jewish people living in this land. Because Hellenization was never like a simple, clean story of like, you know, like the Greeks were, you know, terrible bad colonizers and the poor Israelites in this region were, you know, good. Like some Jews despise the Greek influence and they saw it as a moral threat. But other Jews saw it as like good and some of the cultural imports, they actually implemented. And so even they were conflicted. You see, Greek was the language of commerce and, you know, of sophistication of, of like the upper cast of society, so to speak. So some Jewish men even began attending the Greek gymnasium. They're taking on Greek names. They're adopting like a Greek way of life. And that honestly split Jewish society. You have traditionalists on one side being like, no, we are one way and we are one people that behave like this. And then you have the other side that's kind of embracing this kind of like Greek culture. That's pushing society in another direction. There's also one enormously important thing that came out of all of this Greek influence. And for the first time in history, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek. So that translation is called the Septgent. And it's actually a massive deal because now Jews who had grown up speaking Greek instead of Hebrew can actually go back and read their sacred texts. And then later when Christianity explodes across the Greek speaking Mediterranean, the version of the Old Testament that a lot of early Christians are quoting is the Greek one. So a translation that was produced during the silent years of the Bible ended up becoming the very text that basically was kind of the foundational element for the entire early church. So to say it was silent, I think actually misses the point. And of course that divide between the Jewish peoples. The traditionalists against the Hellenized crowd is about to become a massive issue because up in the northern part of Syria, the new salucid king is rising to power. And this one has no intention of just leaving the Jewish people alone. And this one is going to march straight into the temple and basically lay his Greek claim over all of it. His name is Antichus. Antichus the fourth specifically. And he takes the salucid throne around like 175 BC. Now, most of the kings in the ancient world, they would basically get their nicknames after they died. It was like almost like like an homage they would get. And it was usually given to them by people that they ruled. But Antichus, he didn't wait for that. He basically says, Hey, the nickname I want is epiphanies. And that's a Greek word that kind of means what you think it is like epiphany. But the translation and not even exaggerating is God manifest. That's literally what his name is. He's like, Hey, my nickname is the manifestation of God. So you can call me that and call me God man, God manifest whatever you want. But I'm God. That's like the title he chose for himself. So his enemies, historians say they had a different nickname. This is actually really, really funny. So remember, his name is epiphanies. And the people that were under his rule, they called him epimonies literally meaning the mad one. Like they just changed one letter and had like a fire disk. That's a good burn. Shout it to shout it. I'm assuming some Greeks came up with that. That's a good disk. Right? Like God manifest. You could basically be like, Oh, how about dog manifest? Oh, why dog manifest? Because you just changed one letter and it's like, you're not God. You're actually a dog. You know, I'm saying like, you're trying to get it. Yeah. You see what I'm saying, right? So you take epiphanies and you say, actually, it's epimonies. He's the mad one. He's a lunatic, which just tells you something about how people even in his time saw him. So by the time he's in charge, the Jews at the time are really fighting about the whole Hellenistic influence thing. Like are we given up too much of the Greeks? There was a massive power struggle about who gets to serve as high priest. That's obviously a pretty important job. It's like the most sacred office in all of Judaism. And it basically got to a point where there was like a straight up bidding war with men literally bribing Antiochus for this position. One contender outbids others and then a third man who isn't even from the correct priestly family. Like basically like bribes his way to the top over all of them. It's complete chaos and corruption over a very important title in all of ancient Judaism. Antiochus, this self declared God king, he looks at all his infighting and he goes, you know what? I'm going to fix this. I'm getting rid of Judaism. So that's what is that's what his plan is. He's like, I'm just going to get rid of this whole thing. And so we issues a series of decrees. He says, Hey, no more Sabbath, no more Jewish holidays, no more circumcision burn the Torah. You guys all have to worship Greek gods now. And anyone who defies these bands are going to get put to death. Literally, that was like the plan. That's how far he went. And around 167 BC and Tychus entered the temple in Jerusalem. Again, this is like the most holy place in the world for the ancient Jews. This is like the house of God. This is the second temple that they got to rebuild. This is a big deal. And he goes in and he takes the altar and he sacrifices a pig to Zeus on that altar. Now to understand what exactly that means to a Jewish person, especially at the time, the pig is the single most unclean animal in all of Jewish law. And here it is being slaughtered as a sacrifice inside God's house as an offering to a foreign God by a king who's claiming to be a God himself. I mean, the levels of blasphemy here, right? Like you can imagine like if some guy came into like your church and basically was like, I'm going to sacrifice like, I don't know, what would Christians not want to get sacrificed? A human? I'm going to sacrifice a human to Satan. - Jesus. - You're just sacrificing what? - No, you wouldn't sacrifice Jesus because he's, - Oh, he was the greatest sacrifice of all, actually. So you kind of would. - But that's not the here and there. I'm saying if a Satanist went into your church and was like, "Hey, this church is mine now." Also, the guy that's doing it is like the president of America and he's like, "I'm Satan." And then sacrifice is a human to Satan. You would be like, "Hey, this is going a little far." Right? And that's basically what happened. And so the ancient writers actually had a name for this moment. They called it the abomination of desolation. So this is where Jews are out of this point, okay? The Holy Book is outlawed. The most basic traditions carry a death sentence. There's a pig burning on the altar of God. There's a foreign tyrant calling himself God. And you basically have to accept the Greek customs and worship their gods or die. So what do you do? Well, in one village, there's one old man who's about to answer the question with a rebellion. So this rebellion doesn't even start in Jerusalem or in like some big palace. It starts in a tiny village called Motein and there's a single elderly priest named Matathias. Now here's basically what happened. The King's officers arrive in the town and they order the Jews to basically perform a pagan sacrifice. And this is kind of like a loyalty test to see who's gonna go with their religion or who's gonna go with the new Greek religion. And one of his fellow Jews steps forward to actually go through with it, Matathias snaps and kills the guy. And then he kills the King's officer and then he turns to the stunt crowd and shouts, "Basically, let everyone who is zealous for the law follow me." And he runs off into the hills and that is the spark. One old man and his five sons hiding out of the wilderness, launching like a guerrilla war against one of the mightiest empires on the face of the earth. Now, the son who ends up taking command of the fighting is named Judas. And Judas actually goes by a nickname that is defined literally in the story. It's macabious. Now, most scholars believe that this name comes from the Hebrew word for the hammer. Yeah, macabious. Judas, the hammer, macabious. And maybe the coldest name in the whole Bible, I mean, it's crazy. And that name, macabie, gets attached to the whole uprising, right? And like history remembers them as the macabies. Now, the truth is the rebellion should have been crushed in like a week, a rag tag band of Jewish fighters against a professional Greek war machine with like infantry and elephants. You know, like it shouldn't even be a fight. But the macabies know that their land is important and they know their land better than anyone. Anyone in the whole empire. So they're fighting smart, they're fighting dirty and they would like strike and advantage in the hills. And against every conceivable odd, they start winning. They beat back one army and then another one, then another one, and then they literally retake Jerusalem itself. It's one of the craziest come back stories of all time. And the story actually is in the Catholic Bible. Like that's what I mean when I say like the timeline of the Catholic Bible is a little different because as you know, the Catholic Bible and the Protestant American Bible contain a different number of books. And this is one of the ones that's included in the Catholic Bible. The one I read growing up. So they basically marched into the temple and they, you know, the temple is literally like where the pig was like sacrificed to Zeus. And they cleanse it, they tear down the pagan altar, they rebuild a new one, and they rededicate the entire temple to God. And this rededication took place in December of 164 BC. Now that word rededication is pretty important because in Hebrew it's actually a word that you already know. And the word is Hanukkah. Yeah, that's Hanukkah. It's the festival of light celebrating eight nights with the menorah glowing in the window. Every December millions of people light candles to commemorate the victory of the Maccabees. And all of it traces back to this story kind of buried in like these silent years by a lot of American's Bibles. Now remember the famous Hanukkah miracle, the story of the oil? Well, if you never heard it, here's how it goes. The version that everyone knows is like this. When the Maccabees rededicate the temple, they found only enough sacred oil to keep the lamp burning for one day. But miraculously, it burned for eight. That's the whole reason for eight nights, right? You've heard that, I'm saying this song, eight crazy nights. - Eight crazy nights? It's about these eight crazy nights of the oil lasting longer than it should have. So the Maccabees won, but the rebellion didn't just win like one single battle. It won them basically an entire land. Because for the first time in centuries, the Jewish people are now kind of autonomous and able to rule themselves again. And that moment, you know, triumph, freedom, you know, the miracle of like this independent like Jewish kingdom is exactly where the story turns again. So the Maccabee family, whose proper dynastic name is the Hezmonians, built a genuinely independent kingdom. So think about that. After Egypt and then Babylon, Persia, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemy's and the Soluses in the North, centuries of, you know, different people basically trying to control the land. These people now are finally free, they're self-governing and ruled by their own kings. So this is one bright spot in the story that is otherwise like a long procession of like different empires. So surely this is the happy ending, right? It's not. Because the Hezmonian kings start fusing together two offices that probably should never have been in the same hands. So they made themselves both the king and the high priests at once, political power and religious power concentrated into a single bloodline. Now, if you don't anything about any history, these two things are typically separate positions. Like you can go to the empires in like Mesoamerica, the Aztecs, the Maya. You can go to Egypt. Generally you would have, you know, a governing class, the king, and then you would have the religious class, like the priestly class. And every now and again, you know, they would fuse, right? There would be a king that would come along and be like, "I'm actually the priest also." And they would kind of blend it together. Now, this causes a lot of problems. And when they're separate, it also causes problems. It's one of like the defining features of, you know, like human societies. Now, many of the people in the Jews of the time were horrified by this. They saw this as like a corruption of the priesthood. So the very dynasty that had risen up to keep the faith pure are now being accused by their own people of ruining it. And it gets even worse. So the Hezmonian family began to turn on itself. So there's brother against brother. There's assassination attempts, open civil war on the throne, and the descendants of Judas, the hammer, Maccabeus basically dissolve into a fight for power. And that internal rot was precisely the opening that sort of the, I guess the next predator, so to speak, was waiting for. Because a new empire appears on the horizon, but this one was the largest and most formidable that the world had ever seen. And when two Hezmonian brothers fell into a fight over power, one of them makes what may be the single most disastrous decision in all of Jewish history. He invites the new empire to step in and settle the dispute. That will, we will learn to be a massive problem. Because he opened the door and welcomed them inside. And the empire he invited in were the Romans. Yeah, Rome. And as everyone is about to learn, did not want to leave. So now we're in 63 BC. The Roman general Pompey arrived to basically help resolve this Hezmonian civil war. And he did exactly what every other empire did before him. He saw them feuding. He saw the battle. Just like how the Solucids did with the Antiochus. And he basically says, you know what? I'll solve this. I'm going to take over Jerusalem. And just like that, the 100-year experiment and independence is finished. And Judea becomes a Roman province. And this is the world that the New Testament opens into. This is where the silent years transition into the gospels. Now suddenly, and you know, I bet all the context through the New Testament kind of comes into focus here. Caesar paying tributes, the census, Roman governors, literally the crucifixion itself. When the people in the gospels are like begging for a Messiah, a deliverer, someone who will finally throw off these oppressive empires, this is the empire that they're talking about, the empire that had just extinguished their freedom again. Now, Rome itself had no interest in babysitting like this little province directly. Like that's going to be way too much trouble. Like the, you know, supply lines and the messaging lines are way too far away to go from Judea to Rome. So they installed a local like strong man, basically like a client king who would basically do all the legwork, keep the peace, and funnel Rome basically all the taxes and tribute from this far off kind of distant land. And his name is Herod the Great. Now, you probably know him as the villain of the Christmas story, right? He's the paranoid king who hears about like this new king of the Jews and he's being born under a star. And he orders the slaughter of all the infants in Bethlehem. Yeah, that guy. That's where he comes from. It comes from the Romans basically taking over this land from, you know, these people and basically is like, hey, put him in charge. Now, Herod interestingly was actually Jewish by religion. You see, he was raised in the faith and he by all accounts practiced in it, but by blood, his family wasn't originally Jewish at all. And they were ethnically, it means the people that the Old Testament called the edamites who lived in like the rugged country kind of south of Judea. So how does an edamite family who historically is not Jewish become like a Jewish person than like the king of this Jewish region? Well, funny story. Remember the Hezmonean kingdom, the one that, you know, the Maccabees built like that whole thing? Well, at the height of their power around 128 BC, a Hezmonean ruler named John Heracanus conquered the land of the edamians and he gave them a choice. He basically was like, hey, you guys either got to get out of this land or convert to Judaism. And Herod's ancestors were among those who converted, which is kind of like a crazy irony, just like the irony of all this stuff. Like you go into a land, like you're getting conquered, conquered, conquered and then you become in charge and then you conquer someone else and you're like, hey, are there, you know, convert or die or convert or leave? And then they convert and now Herod becomes a Jewish person who's raised with Jewish people. customs. Now make sure you remember that because the family that the Hezmonians forcibly converted is the exact family that will one day wipe the last of the Hezmonians off the map. We'll get to that in a second. It's crazy. This is basically like Game of Thrones. So yeah, Herod is like raised with Jewish customs, but he's not like historically by family lineage Jewish. Now how did he get picked to be like Rome's guy? Well that part goes through his father who is a very shrewd and ruthless and like very ambitious Idomian political operator and his name is Antipater. So when Rome came storming into the region under Pompey, Antipater kind of read the room and kind of hitched his family's fortunes to the winning team. He backed the right horse and so he made himself indispensable to the Romans and did them favors when accounted and got rewarded with real power in the region. So you got to think this guy's living in a region. He's got his family and also the Romans come in and he's like, hey, I'm going to team up with Pompey and the rest of the boys and then they'll help me out. And so when the time comes, he installed his sons at the governing posts and young Herod was one of them. So by the time Rome was looking for a dependable client king to keep Judea in line, Herod was already the obvious choice. He was raised Jewish, so he was able to connect with the local people they were going to be governing. He was extremely loyal to Rome through his father and he had political experience already in like a small government position in the region. There's just one problem. Everyone that he ruled knew that he was not actually ethnically Jewish going back generations. They knew that he was an edamite by blood and basically like a Roman puppet. So too much of the Jewish population, they were like, this guy is the one that's in charge. This is a joke. Like they were like, you were, you were trying to find someone who was going to like relate to us, but we see right through this immediately. So how does a guy with a reputation like that try to manufacture legitimacy? Well, the way that you would do it in the ancient world is you got to try to get a real royal bloodline. And so you marry into it. So Herod marries a woman and her name is Mary Amni. And Mary Amni was a Hezmonean princess like she's a genuine direct descendant of the Maccabees themselves, literally of Judas the hammer of his family. So she was in effect the last living royalty of that heroic rebel dynasty that all the people of the land loved. And by every account, it seemed like Herod actually loved her like a lot, but Herod was also consumed by paranoia as we know. So Mary Amni was living proof of a bloodline more legitimate than his own. So her family actually held a stronger claim to the throne than he ever could. Like the Romans put him in charge, but the people want someone that came from the hammer. You know what I mean? They want someone that actually came from the kingdom of the Maccabees. So one by one, Herod starts destroying them. Her grandfather, her brother, literally who he drowned, her mother, and finally at last Mary Amni herself, the wife that he loved, he had her executed. Think about what that means for the story that we've been telling. So the Maccabees rise up to basically save the Jewish peoples. They force Herod's family to convert. And then way later, Herod himself slaughters the last of their actual bloodline. Holy, I mean, it's like literally you hear it, like you go through it all laid out and you're like, this is game of thrones. It's crazy. So then we arrive at the New Testament. So think about that. Like that's how silent these years were, right? It's like, okay, Old Testament, a bunch of prophets, cool stuff happening, sure. Game of thrones. And then the New Testament, Jesus, all that cool stuff. It's crazy. Now the last thing you need to know about Herod that is really kind of interesting is that he completely renovated and expanded the second temple. So he transformed it into something colossal, literally one of the wonders of the ancient world. So when Jesus and his disciples, he's like talking about the temples, he's walking through the temple in the gospel. They're not going to like some faded relic that was left over from like Persian restoration. They're literally walking into the temple that Herod revamped that he renovated and it is immense and like brand new. So let's hone in on another misconception about these silent years because silent kind of sounds like no writing, no scripture, no books, nothing was going on, obviously that's not true. And not only is not true, it's the opposite. So the Jewish people wrote an enormous amount during these centuries. And some of what they wrote is actually the reason that the Bible traditions have different versions of the Bible. So for example, like I mentioned before, how the Catholic Bible has more books than the Protestant Bible, this is part of the reason why there's a whole set of books. Most of them written in these silent years that Catholic and many Orthodox Christians include in their Bible that Protestants do not. Catholics call these the deuterocononical books, while Protestants will call them the apocrypha. So we're talking books like Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and First and Second Maccabees. These are the very books and the stories that I was just telling you about. Now to be clear, depends who you ask, Protestants didn't delete these books, Catholics didn't add them. It just depends on what faith tradition you ask, right? If you ask a Catholic, they're going to be like, yeah, Protestants took them out. If you ask a Protestant, they're going to be like, yeah, the Catholics added them in. It's like absurd. Look, to be as unbiased as I can as a Catholic, different faith traditions simply drew a different boundary line of what counts as scripture in different places. Okay, that's like the most unbiased way that I can put it even though Martin Luther did come in and try to get rid of a bunch of stuff, he called James like an epistle of straw. That's my bias. Okay, I'm just putting that out there. Do your own research. Anyway, it is basically at his core, as genuine as I can be, a disagreement about canon. And that's the key word here, canon, meaning like the official list of books that we recognize as authoritative scripture. And then sitting entirely outside of any traditions Bible, there is an entire new canon of, I shouldn't say canon, an entire new library of Jewish writing from this era. And so these would be books like First and Second and Third Enoch, which we've talked about on this channel before, the Book of Jubiles, which retells the story of Genesis through a different lens. And we know for a fact that people were reading these texts and like sharing them around because we found them. This is like the Dead Sea Scrolls is what people are talking about when they mention that. This is that legendary cache of ancient manuscripts discovered hidden in desert caves. And it contained copies of these very books, like multiple copies. So the Book of Enoch, like that one isn't in anyone's Bible. Technically it is in the Ethiopian Bible, I'm almost positive. It's just like kind of just a little nuance, but it's not in the Catholic Bible, it's not in the Christian Bible, but it is quoted in the New Testament. So even the New Testament authors knew these texts existed and they were reading them. And based even on, you know, the gospel is like, they're quoting them, right? Or not the gospel is rather the Book of Jude. Now the bottom line is the lights weren't really off. Like people were writing, they were arguing, they were, you know, having all sorts of like crazy experiences. The silence was never about the words like running out. It's more so how different Christian denominations had a different threshold for which books would be considered canon, which ones were not. So if people were still praying, still writing, still reaching for God, why did the Jewish people themselves come to believe that the direct line to heaven had kind of gone cold? Well, the belief is actually really old, even older than Christianity. And it traces back to three men. One is Haggai, the other is Zechariah, and then our old friend Malachai. These are the last of the three prophets, all active right at the dawn of the second temple era. And the ancient rabbis taught that those three died and something died with them. In their words, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel, meaning basically like the prophetic voice that direct like the Lord spoke to me. And this is what happened. That just kind of shut off. So the silence in this period is not about, you know, no books were getting made or no history was being created. It's more so that they felt that the line from the prophets and God was kind of disconnected. But why would God go quiet? That is the question that many people have asked over the centuries. And that's the part that no one really has an answer for. But over the centuries, Jewish thinkers have offered some fascinating theories. Some said prophecies stopped because of sin that the people had drifted so far that they just lost any type of spiritual connection. Others tied it to the exile itself, arguing that the prophetic spirit couldn't really flourish under, you know, the boot of one foreign empire after another that, you know, a soul in mourning and servitude isn't in a state to receive revelations from God. And then there is, you know, another fascinating one. Some say that prophecy faded because it wasn't needed anymore. The idea being that once the temptation toward the old idol worship had gone down and the people finally had, you know, for the Jews, the full Torah to guide them, they didn't need dramatic new prophets appearing to course correct them like every couple of years. They already had everything they needed. And the next thing on the horizon was the Messiah himself. And that's just one view. And on that view, the silence isn't abandonment at all. It's more like God being like, "Hey, the training wheels are off. You guys got it from here until it's time for the Messiah." Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about ultra-focus pouches. Now, if you know anything about me, I love nicotine. I also love caffeine. Now the thing that I didn't consider with nicotine is that around workouts. I'm actually doing myself a disservice because nicotines of vasoconstrictor, it literally narrows your blood vessels, which gives you a little boost, you feel good, but it actually restricts oxygen delivery and it can raise your heart rate, which is the exact opposite of what I want when I'm going to the gym. And that's why I reached out to ultra. I literally saw them online and I was like, "This is cool." So I reached out to them and what I liked about them is that it's a nicotine free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. It literally uses neutropics and adaptogens to provide smooth energy and focus mental clarity without leaving me overstimulated or feeling like I'm going to crash. So I put one in like five minutes before I workout or before I do a podcast or before I go do stand up. And if I feel calm, I feel steady. It lasts for about like one to two hours. My favorite flavor is watermelon, but the blue raspberry is making a real comeback. I love that one. And so if you want focused energy without nicotine or caffeine, I'm telling you, ultra is the way to go. Ultra pouches are awesome. It is the guilt-free pouch. Even if you just like putting in a pouch because it feels nice, ultra has something for you. New customers can even use the code camp, C-A-M-P, to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That is takeultra, U-L-T-R-A. com for 15% off with the code camp. And after you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about ultra. Tell them the mark and crease dose here at the campsite center. Now let's get back to the show. So here's the world that we've been setting up. The tail end of these 400 years of silence, silence. The beginning of the story that so many of us know so well, there's a massive temple that Herod built. Rome is now fully in control with a very paranoid puppet king basically seated on the throne in Herod. You've got the Jewish people basically being ground down under another foreign empire praying more desperately than ever for a deliverer for some type of Messiah to come and rescue them. And then you've got an entire landscape of different Jewish teachings that develop across these centuries. You've probably heard their name, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, all of them arguing fiercely about how to remain faithful to God under the heel of Rome. And once that world kind of falls into place for Christians, the New Testament picks up. It doesn't begin with an army or a king or a voice coming down from the clouds. It begins with an old priest named Zachariah doing his ordinary temple duty when an angel appears beside the altar and tells him that his elderly wife is going to have a son. And that son, the angel says, will go before the Lord in the spirit and the power of Elijah. Now, if you've stuck with me this whole journey, this should sound pretty familiar. This is the exact prophet that Malachi said would come 400 years earlier, Elijah. And after those silent centuries, the very first thing that heaven says is a callback to the Old Testament. And the timeline just continues to unravel. There's a young woman named Mary, a carpenter named Joseph. And there's a baby that's born in Bethlehem under the nose of the same paranoid king that we just watched murder his whole family, including the wife that he loved. These are the stories that a lot of us grew up with, the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, like following a star, Frankincense, Murr. And I didn't really know the full context. And without knowing the buildup, without knowing that this is the turning point that the Jews had been waiting for and praying for for centuries, you can see why this concept of the Messiah or why Christ was so impactful for the people of the region. Again, not even weighing in on the divinity or the truth value of the resurrection, anything like that. You can just see why the period and why the time was so ripe for a Messiah. So the world of the New Testament didn't randomly fall into place. Every single feature of it, the temple of Roman occupation, the desire and need for a Messiah, the Greek language, that the gospels would be written in, the rival religious factions, all of it was forged and constructed during these silent years. The silence was not really silence, it was a buildup. And at last for Christians, the curtain has been raised up. So we call them the 400 years of silence, but after everything we talked about, I think it sounds like kind of the opposite, right? Now you have a crazy king who calls himself a god, sacrifices a pig and the altar to Zeus in the Jewish temple, an old priest in his five sons, stage of rebellion, and then they basically rebuild a Jewish dynasty from nothing. They light a flame that people still have in their windows to this day that all your Jewish friends will be celebrating in December. Every single December more than 2000 years later, people are still paying homage to this story. Entire libraries of writing, angels, visions, the end of the world, the books of Enoch sealed into clay jars in the desert waiting to be rediscovered. That's what happened in the silence. And that's what a lot of Christians have the audacity to be like, "Ah yes, the years of nothing." It's like, okay, I get it, God's not talking to prophets, but there's stuff going on. And the truth is the people living there had no idea that they were standing in the middle of this story. And to take you even a step further, even standing on the verge of one of the next great categorical changes in all of world history. They only knew that for them, the heavens had gone quiet, that their channels of the prophets were done, like there's no word from God. And for them, it didn't feel like a plan was unfolding. They felt like they had been forgotten. But remember what that silence was actually doing. It was letting the people grow. No more prophets running out to catch them every time they stumbled. And for them, at the time, they had the Torah and they had the long hard job of trying to carry it themselves and trying to really understand what it was all about. And they didn't know it yet, but they weren't being abandoned for the ones that converted to Christianity, the ones that followed Christ, they felt they were being prepared for this dawn. Because that's what they say, right? They say the darkest moment is right before the sun comes up. And then in kind of like an occupied backwater under a paranoid king to a young virgin that no one had ever heard of for Christians, the silence is broken. And that is the kind of the story of how the world fundamentally changed. Again, not putting a truth value on Christianity, but more so, just unparalleled. The world was never the same. And that is the buildup. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history of the 400 years of silence that I like to call basically Game of Thrones. I mean, crazy, right? Once I started to understand this, I was like, oh, you get why all the people were like, finally, a Messiah from the House of David. We got what we were waiting for. Like you can understand why people were so desperate to believe. Because like they had been waiting this whole time and being crushed by empire after empire. And they just saw what happened. And then the way the gospels lay it out, I mean, it is like so compelling. Again, I encourage everyone, regardless of your faith background, to read the gospels you're like, dude, this is awesome. It's one of the greatest stories ever told. And then in my opinion, like Jesus Christ is just like the most fascinating again. For me, as a religious person, God, as a non-religious person, just like a person from history, a fascinating person from history. And how he's sort of commemorated and remembered in the gospels is just like, I mean, storytelling 101. It's just crazy. And like the irony with Herod and the salucid, it's just, it's almost too much for words. Christos, did you learn anything? What do you think? It's kinda crazy that they call it the period of silence when there's a whole lot going on. It's so much happening, it's crazy. It's like, it's just, I don't know. I also didn't realize what a problem, the Hellenistic people had with the Jewish people at the time. Oh, in terms of cultural import, makes me feel kind of bad. But, dude, I mean, but you got to handle the Greeks. Y'all are fire. Y'all are fire, bro. You're living in Judea. It's, you know, 300 BC. And we're like, get out of here with that. And then all of a sudden the Greeks pull up and they go, yo, y'all want Greek philosophy? Y'all want Tazikki? Kind of bullied him. Y'all want Euro meat? I mean, I don't know if they had Euro meat at the time. But like, that is fire. Y'all want some like tragedies. Y'all want some plays? Then to outlaw Judaism. I mean, yeah, that part's not great. Don't get me wrong. You shouldn't, you shouldn't crush an entire religion or ethnic group. But the plays, bro, the Euro meat. The suvlaki, Tazikki. I mean, it's like, come on, bro, the Avgolemno soup. What are we talking about? The panakopita, is that what you're talking about, sir? Spanakopita. Spanakopita. I mean, come on, do that. If y'all pulled up with the foamy latte, out of here. The cold one? Yeah, that cold foamy latte. Right, okay. With that thickness at the top. Yeah. I mean, it's pouring out of the cup. And you're telling me that the ancient Israelites, the Jews of ancient Judea, didn't see that and be like, I mean, I got a, what a cinnamon up on top? A little bit of cinnamon. I can't have a little cinnamon. That's all I'm saying, dude. The Greek cultural export, that shit is fire. But, you know, anti-cus coming in. It took it too far. Yeah. You can win the battle with just a little bit of culture. And I'm saying, I don't got to go in there and try to kick the people out, convert them. 'Cause look what happened to Herod, you know what I mean? What did I do for? That, well, Herod got converted by the same kind of tactic. And then what does he do? He kills all the, the last of the bloodline. Crazy irony. Anyway, what do you guys think? Like I said, I don't, I'm not a historian. I'm not a religious scholar. This is just stuff that I was able to put together with the help my friends Sophia, who else made me research. So there's anything I missed. I mean, please drop a comment, let me know. If you grew up with, you know, the Jewish tradition, you heard these stories through a Jewish lens. Tell me if there's anything that's different or that I got wrong in your story. If you grew up Protestant and your understanding of this period was different than my understanding, please let me know. If you grew up Catholic and you remember reading like first and second Maccabees being like, "Whoa, this is, my friends don't have this?" I would love to know what your opinion is. Please drop a comment. I would love to get to the bottom of it. I really, it's interesting 'cause Maccabees and Tobit, were the two books, I remember going to Presbyterian school, having my Bible that my mom gave me and going through it. And being like, oh, it's in this book, like having a conversation with someone like middle school. And they go, that's not in the Bible. And I go, bro, it's in the Bible. Like Maccabees is in the Bible. And they were like, no, it's not. And I was like, it's, I'm holding it. And like it was like, I couldn't believe it. And then they show me their Bible, it's not in there. And I was like, wait, have I been reading the wrong Bible? Like I couldn't, I went home to my mom. We had a whole discussion over like Canon and like Canon law and like what, it's putting the scriptures, all that stuff. And then from that point forward, I think that was the turning point that made me obsessed with like ancient texts and literature. 'Cause I went my whole life. of reading a story, people that I did math class with had a completely different story, and they just didn't believe my story, even though it was in the book at the church that I was going to. I don't know what that was, Kathy's gonna be like, what's up with that? And they're like, yeah, they took them out. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. Again, I don't think the Protestants took them out. It's a part of speech, I'm sorry, Protestants. But it's just fascinating. You read it and you're like, whoa. This is, that was the spark they really kind of ignited it. So it was fun to be able to talk about it today. I didn't even realize it was in that silent period. 'Cause I was not as chronological. I was like, yeah, I went this one and then died it out and then Malachi. But technically, it's like Malachi and then Maccabees in like the chronological setting. Anyway, I digress. Let me know what you think. Also, we did a lot of history today. We talked about a lot of historical topics. A lot of those topics we've actually done episodes on at History Camp, Alexander the Great, all that stuff. You can check those out at History Camp. Also, on the main channel, the literal like the Camp Gagnon main channel where I do a lot of interviews. I've done episodes with Joseph Manning, also talking about Alexander the Great and all of this stuff like King Solomon and sort of the mythos around King Solomon. So if you liked the topics in here, there's going to be a ton of videos on both History Camp and the main channel that you can go check out. Also, we have a secret society Patreon.com/campgagnon if you want to jump in and get every episode of this show at free plus bonus episodes. They never go out to the public plus monthly zooms and just like access to all the cool stuff that we're doing here at the campsite. And if you'd just like to rock with a religious vibe, I mean, you're welcome here every Sunday. We do these episodes once a week. So make sure you subscribe, go to church today or temple or good war or the mosque or wherever you choose to worship. I just think life is better with belief. So just believe something, all right? Anyway, God bless you all. I'll see you next Sunday, peace.