How Alex Conquered the World

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we have reached the intertestamental period, the 400 silent years, the Hellenistic age, whatever you want to call it.

For some reason it always comes in a chunk and we kind of need to break that down, because people did not sit around twiddling their thumbs for 400 years saying, “Ah, we are in the intertestamental period.”

“And nothing can possibly happen here.”

Before we so boldly go where everybody is twiddling their thumbs, a few things about Greece that we kind of skipped over. We got as far as the Greco-Persian Wars, Thermopylae and Salamis and all of that, and then we jumped to the Greek philosophers, the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

From Aristotle, the obvious place to go is Alexander and that takes not a lot of time because he died when he was quite young. But there were some things that happened along the line that at least we probably should mention. This is not exactly a history class, but just so that people know the world didn’t stand still waiting for Alexander to come on the scene.

There was no such thing as Greece. There were city-states that were Greek-ish. They spent a lot of time fighting each other. Occasionally they would band together under the leadership of one or the other of the more prominent city-states, usually Athens or Sparta. So when we look at say Greece, we’re already sort of distorting history.

Of course, Alexander was not technically Greek. He was Macedonian and, from the point of view of other Greek city-states, something of a barbarian, an outlier. But when the history books focus on Greece, they focus on the time just before the coming of Alexander, things that had happened.

Athens and Sparta had become in general the two leading city-states and they form a nice contrast. Sparta is agricultural, landlocked, was founded by people who invaded and took over the local population and thus had to keep an eye on them all the time, so very war-like. If you were a Spartan male you were part of the army after a certain age, and you’d pick up an older male soldier who would look after you, in lots of ways.

Athens was settled a little more peacefully, and while there was this lower class of people who had been there first, the Athenians didn’t have to keep an eye on them so there wasn’t the fear of having to oppress a people just to make sure we don’t lose everything.

Initially the mountains in and about Athens and the other Greek city-states were good for grapes and olives and all of that, but in time the Greeks were such poor managers of their natural resources that that kind of faded out on them. Athens went to the sea and, in going to the sea, planted colonies all over the Mediterranean. This was the Greek colonial age.

Some of those we know. Neapolis is Naples. Marseille in France was a Greek colony. Byzantium, which will become Constantinople and then Istanbul, and Cyrene – these were all Greek colonies. There were Greek colonies on the island of Sicily that Rome came into contact with very early on. In fact, that’s where the word Greek came from because that’s what the Romans called these people. And when they found out they had friends further over they said, “Oh, you’re all a bunch of Greeks.”

“No, we’re the sons of Hellas.”

“That’s what we said – you’re Greeks.”

The Greeks got what they deserved.

They did it to everybody else.

Yes, so when Rome took over they got to call them Greeks, whether they wanted it or not, and it was the wrong name and continues to be the wrong name to this day.

The things that defined these city-states as being Greek are five:

They had a common ancestor, Helen, thus sons of Hellas.

They spoke the same language, more or less.

They in time came to share the same religion, that of the Olympian gods. That took a while.

They observed the same temples and shrines, like the shrine to Apollo at Delphi and that to Zeus in Olympia.

And they all participated in the Olympic games because getting together and fighting with people every four years builds unity, I guess.

It is funny if you’re studying Greek at any point to come across the Spartan names after reading a bunch of Athenian names. My freshman Greek class was struggling to pronounce every single word, because it’s a freshman Greek class. The names especially of the Athenians were hard and my teacher said, “Just wait till you get to the Lacedaemonian names.” Then we encountered some and were like, “This is the worst! How are these the same peoples?”

Speaking of Lacedaemonian – we call them Spartan. Winners get to name everybody else.

After the Greco-Persian Wars these Greek city-states decided to form a league. It was called the Delian League because the treasury was on the little island of Delos, and Athens took the lead. This is the age of Pericles, the Golden Age of Greece, the age when all kinds of famous people put in their appearance on the stage of history for a short time.

We’re dealing with people like Thespis, the first actor, Aeschylus the playwright, Phidias the sculptor, Sophocles, Euripides, other playwrights, Herodotus the so-called Father of History because of course the Bible doesn’t count, Thucydides who tried to describe war in terms of natural causes rather than divine intervention, Hippocrates who tried to find naturalistic causes for diseases and such, Democritus who put forth the atomic theory that everything is made of little indivisible particles called atoms, and Plato and Aristotle and all that.

It’s important to keep emphasizing I think that this was a blip in Greek history. If you read the secular histories, unless you read very carefully and they’re going out of their way to be very honest, one is left with the feeling generally that for centuries or generations Greece was this place that just poured out beautiful architecture and statuary…

Light and learning.

Light and learning, the symbol of freedom, liberty, justice, the good, the beautiful. Most of what we prize as the pinnacle of Greece was really a pinnacle. It was one short generation, and it was a generation where the ruling class was a small percentage of the total population. There were lots and lots of slaves. There were lots and lots of people descended from the original settlers who had no vote, who had no political voice in that culture.

The thing that we have not mentioned – and before we go on we at least have to point at it – is this was also the pinnacle of Greek education, which is to say this was the time when the normal way a young man got educated if he was upper class was to find a male lover who would look after his interests and teach him the ropes of life, because dad was too busy with business to care about Junior. Mom is locked up in the kitchen someplace, and pederasty becomes a way of life for Greek education.

This is not speculation. This is not Christians looking back and wagging fingers. This is what they said of themselves. They were very proud of it and they considered it somewhat barbaric not to have adopted it. Yes, they admit they got it from Sparta, but…

It was institutionalized. It’s throughout the mystery cults. You can think of the worst examples of hazing in college fraternities today and say, “Yeah, we know exactly where they got that.”

Yes, so what you’ve probably been told about the Golden Age of Greece is almost certainly slanted. It may be largely a bunch of lies. Yes, there were smart people who talked about great ideas that were mostly wrong, and created great art which was rather beautiful if somewhat idealistic, and they lived under the rule oftentimes of tyrants, a tyrant being somebody who simply took over because he thought he could do a better job, and sometimes could.

This coexisted with slavery, so you might consider that next time you’re reading a history book about ancient Greece. These were not the nicest people in the world, but before the coming of Christ there weren’t a lot of nice people in the world. That was the reality of the darkness that dominated the whole planet until Jesus came.

So we got as far as this Delian League. That eventually falls apart and Sparta decides it wants to be the big boss, the big dog in the corner, and we get the Peloponnesian War. Peloponnese is the little blob on the end of the Greek peninsula, so basically Sparta and her friends fighting Athens and her friends.

As this is being resolved, and we’re passing into a couple other upheavals, there is a young king named Philip. He is from Macedon. Macedon is to the north. It was Greek-speaking. Christians may remember that when Paul was trying to figure out where to go next in Asia Minor and whether or not he should go eastward back into stuff that was closer to home for him, he had a vision of a man dressed like a Macedonian saying, “Come and bear witness to us.” I forget the exact words of the so-called Macedonian call. So when Paul ends up in Philippi, that’s Macedon. It's Greek-speaking, it’s Greek culture, and yet the other Greek city-states kind of frowned upon it.

Philip spent three years as a hostage in Greece as a result of some of the wars that were going on there, and for his part he kind of liked Greece. He was enamored of the culture and the lifestyle and such. And what do you do when you’re a king and you really admire another country?

You make your country like theirs.

That is so cute but no – you go take their country from them.

I’m not a king.

So he began moving against the Greek city-states one after another, because again there’s no Greece, no unified response, and the city-states have to decide individually one by one what they’re going to do. Some yield. Some fight and lose.

Meanwhile in Athens there’s an orator named Demosthenes who denounces Philip, from which a denunciatory vicious speech – which a couple generations ago was called philippic because of Philip. The other thing we know about Demosthenes is that he was apparently born with kind of a mush-mouth. He stuttered and couldn’t speak clearly. His solution was to go down to the seashore, take a bunch of pebbles and put them in his mouth, and enunciate over the pebbles and over the roar of the ocean to learn to speak well.

Like My Fair Lady with the marbles. If it worked for Demosthenes, it will work for Eliza Doolittle.

He tried to convince Athens that Philip was up to no good, and in the end though Philip took all of Greece, then Philip turned and looked into Asia Minor and beyond at the Persian Empire, which he didn’t like for a number of reasons, largely because it was a) Persian and b) not his. So he decided he would go take that, but he died and his son Alexander III came to the throne.

Now skip forward a bit. Why he did what he did he explains later, and let’s hold onto that for a second. But in time, having Greece at his disposal and Greek troops at his disposal, he takes them and leads them across the Hellespont into Asia Minor, and Asia Minor falls.

He confronts the Persian monarch, Darius III, chucks him and drives him off, and begins to move down the Palestinian coast to Damascus, Tyre and Sidon. This is all prophesied in the book of Zechariah, who sort of checks these off one by one.

Alexander goes down and deals with the Philistines, who basically point out Jerusalem and say, “If you didn’t like us, you’re not going to like them at all because they’re not half as nice as we are. They’re going to taunt you and do nasty things, so you probably want to go deal with them right away,” and Alexander turns his army and moves towards Jerusalem. Jerusalem is in no condition to do much of anything. The Persian empire can’t take on this guy, what are they supposed to do?

According to Josephus and the legends that were passed on, the high priest goes into prayer mode, talks to God and pleads “Can’t you do something? Where are your miracles? Isn’t there something we can do to save our city?” The legends say that God spoke to him in one fashion or another – a dream or something – and said, “What you need to do is put on your priestly garments, open up the gates of the city, and have the whole city go out and meet him.” Any way you look at it, this was going to be a good move and so they do. The city gates are opened and everybody is there with palm branches, welcoming their new conqueror, their friend, their future king, and Alexander is nodding and moving along. “This is mine, all mine!”

Then he sees the high priest in his high priestly garments, stops and gets down from his horse and looks at the man and runs up to the man. All of his generals were thinking, “Okay, how has this guy ticked Alexander off so quickly?” Alexander falls on his knees before the priest, who then lifts him up, greets him, and ushers him into the temple, where he shows him the prophecies of Daniel that speak of a great king from Greece coming, a king who will do according to His will and who will destroy the Persian empire, and he helps Alexander offer sacrifices to Yahweh.

When all is said and done, Alexander goes his way and leaves Jerusalem under his special protection, so Jerusalem for a time is fine.

The story continues that Alexander’s generals came to him later and said, “What was that, boss? All these people are bowing to you and cheering you and honoring you, and here you’re honoring this barbarian priest. What’s that all about?”

He says, “When I was in Macedon contemplating whether or not my dad’s idea was any good, whether or not we really had a chance of bringing down the whole Persian empire, I was asleep and I had this dream. I saw this vision of a man very strangely dressed inviting me into Asia Minor, promising me that all this would be mine, and so I went. I never had seen a man dressed like that before or since until today. The man I saw was this Jewish high priest and therefore I do him honor.”

Take that for what it’s worth. That’s Josephus’s account of somebody’s account of why Alexander spared Jerusalem.

Alexander continued down into Egypt, which had been an Assyrian and then a Persian province. It fell into his hands without any real opposition. He founded the city of Alexanderia and made it the cultural center of the coming age.

You were mentioning all the names that we give to this period. This is also called the Alexandrian age, not for Alexander’s sake but for the sake of this city and the museum and library there. It was the cultural center of the world.

Anyhow, Alexander goes out into the Egyptian desert to the Oracle of Ammon and asked the oracle – who for Egypt is on the equivalent of the oracle at Delphi – “My mom used to say that I was a son of Zeus, that in fact Zeus came to her one night in the form of a serpent and lay with her and I was the product. I’m the seed of the serpent, as it were.”

This sounds very familiar.

He asked, “Can you confirm this?”

“Yeah, yeah. Your mom was so telling the truth. That’s exactly who and what you are. You are the son of Ammon Ra of the great king of the gods, and therefore you are a rightful pharaoh. Go be one. You can leave a tip at the door.”

So Alexander goes forth to conquer the rest of the Persian Empire, secure in the knowledge that he is the son of the divine son, the seed of the serpent, the son of God, and therefore in theory unstoppable. He pretty much is.

For his short life.

Yes, for his short life. He got as far as the Indus River, the borders of India, at which point his Greek army said, “We want to go home because this is all we signed on for.” Alexander went into his tent and moped, hoping to break their hearts, but they stood firm. “No, we’re going home. We’re done here.”

And according to at least one legend, Alexander said, “My astronomers tell me there are other worlds in the sky, and I have not even conquered one.”

We feel so bad for you, Alexander.

Yes. He went back to Babylon, and Rachel is going to tell us the theories concerning his death in just a second, but one thing that does fit at this point is Alexander had been trying to find a way to merge the Greek peoples with the Persian peoples, to merge the two cultures – the Greek empire he had created with the Persian empire that existed. He thought it would be great if there were a world capital that was appropriately located, and as he returned he found what was left of Babylon and said, “Wow, what a perfect site for a world capital!”

What an original thought!

Yes. “I will make this the center of my empire and the center of world government.” He was dead very shortly after that because God had said of Babylon that it’s never going to be rebuilt. So Rachel, tell us about Alexander’s death.

He was only 32 at the time and had appeared to be wonderfully healthy and strong, and then he suddenly got sick and died 11 days later. There has been no end of theories of what caused this, because it wasn’t immediate so it seems like maybe it was some sort of sudden onset disease, or maybe somebody was trying to assassinate him but it was a slow assassination. The biggest problem is they don’t have his body, and therefore they cannot do any sort of exhuming or autopsy. They have to depend on sources from almost 2500 years ago, so again the theories go all over the place.

The latest theory is that he may have contracted West Nile virus, because it seemed that he had sudden onset of fever, neurological symptoms, and extreme abdominal pain. The other favorite theories include necrotizing pancreatitis and encephalopathy with some peritonitis mixed in, to give him the fever with the stomach pain. Others include things like Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and some things I can’t even pronounce.

They go through this whole list of all these diseases and then end with, “or arsenic poisoning.” I don’t think that takes 11 days to kill you, but maybe I’m wrong.

Well, you see, he stopped for 11 days to visit these nice old ladies, to have some tea and wine with them.

And every day they put a little bit in his cup. So whatever it was, it was very sudden. He seemed perfectly fine and then just dies like that.

Nobody was prepared for his death obviously, because he was only 32 years old. Granted, he had been a military leader now for 16 years, but still they would have expected a lot more from him. The theories go all over the place, and if you want to go down a deep hole you could probably spend hours in all the literature that has been produced by “What killed Alexander?”

Side note – I was always under the impression that Alexander died at 33, and then when I started doing my research for this I kept seeing the number 32 all over the place. Eventually, the one site that yielded 33 was Brittanica. What is going on here? Finally I said, “All right, I simply have to count.” It turns out that he was about one month short of being 33.

So Brittanica rounds, nobody else does.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to round up or round down. Because he hasn’t technically reached it yet by a month, we’re going to say 32.

32 and 11 months.

It sounds like you’re a small child. “I’m 32 and 11/12.”

What happens next was foretold by Daniel, and I want to read two of the passages. This is Daniel 8 starting in verse 3.

Then I lifted up mine eyes and saw, and behold there stood before the river a ram which had two horns, and the two horns were high but one was higher than the other, and the higher came up last.

The animals and beasts in Daniel’s vision represent empires. This is one that has two dimensions, the second one coming up last, the Medes and the Persians.

I saw the ram pushing westward and northwards and southward so that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will and became great. And as I was considering, behold, a he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes [one powerful point of force].

And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power. And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with choler against him and smote the ram and broke his two horns. And there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and stamped upon him and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand. Therefore the he goat waxed very great and when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven.

And out of one of them came forth a little horn which waxed exceeding great, toward the south and toward the east and toward the pleasant land [that’s Canaan]. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven, and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.
Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host [probably the high priest] and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And a host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression [that is the transgression of God’s people] and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practiced and prospered.

And there’s a bit more. We do have an interpretation, in case we missed it. Later on Daniel was told –

The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia and the rough goat is the king of Grecia, and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king. Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power. And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full [this is God’s people transgressing] a king of fierce countenance and understanding dark sentences shall stand up. And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power, and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper and practise and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.

And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many. He shall also stand up against the Prince of princes [that would be a messiah] but he shall be broken without hand.

That wraps up, but in chapter 11, which we began to look at last time, we have something similar. The revealing angel says, starting in verse 1 –

Also I in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I stood to confirm and to strengthen him. And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all [that would be Xerxes] and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia.
And a mighty king [this would be Alexander] shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven and not to his posterity nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.

Rachel, did you look further at what happened after Alexander’s death?

After Alexander’s death we have four of his generals who divide up his empire, so the great world empire doesn’t last for very long. Instead we get smaller empires that will at time be friends with each other, and at times be at war with each other, and will then produce different dynasties.

In Egypt we get the Ptolemy dynasty from Ptolemy founding that. The other one that we tend to focus on because it’s more to do with Daniel’s prophecy and what happens to God’s people to the north is the Seleucid dynasty that starts from Syria, the Syria and Babylon area, and that interim space where we have God’s people will kind of go back and forth between the two. Sometimes one side will be more favorable to the Jewish people, and sometimes the other, and sometimes they will attack, kill, and try to destroy God’s people and go for rounds of genocide.

I believe that you did research in the Books of the Maccabees?

On the Maccabean rebellion, yes.

For people who do not know, when you were a child doing sword drills – that’s where a teacher calls out a book and a chapter and verse in the Bible and you’re supposed to find it real fast – some smart-alecky teacher eventually would say, “First Maccabees, chapter 3,” and everyone would start to turn and then realize, “Wait a second.”

“That’s not in my Bible.”

It’s in Roman Catholic Bibles, though, not because it should be but simply because it is. So there’s the reference for those of you who may have never heard of Maccabees before. You might have been told about it or it might have been mentioned in some Sunday School drill once upon a time.

It’s not inspired scripture, it’s written in Greek and doesn’t claim to be the work of a prophet. It’s very much a political sort of document and it describes how bad things got under one of the Seleucid kings. But Rachel, before I have you talk about that thing, as we go on in Daniel I just want to read a couple verses picking up where I left off in Daniel 11:5 –

And the king of the south shall be strong, and one of his princes; and he shall be strong above him, and have dominion; his dominion shall be a great dominion. And in the end of years they shall join themselves together, for the king's daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement…

And he goes on with king of the north, king of the south, king of the north, king of the south, until eventually that back and forth is broken and the last Seleucid king mentioned is Antiochus Epiphanes. We have the Christian holiday in some Christian circles of Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the world. Epiphanes means ‘God manifest.’

So this guy had no ego whatsoever.

No, no. What he did have was an ongoing rivalry with the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. The Pharaohs were descendants of Alexander’s generals, so they’re Greek-speaking, Greek culture, Greek literature, Greek philosophy and all that, but they conformed to proper usages and so the Ptolemies called themselves Pharaohs.

When the reigning Pharaoh died he left a young son behind, and Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian king, who at this point controlled Palestine, said, “Oh, I’m sure the little boy needs the help of his uncle Epiphanes. Let me go down and see if I can be of comfort and aid and kind of run things for him.”

What he didn’t know was that the late Pharaoh had willed oversight of the kingdom and the boy to this little city on the far side of the Mediterranean that no one had ever really heard of, this place called Rome that had ships stationed at Cyprus. So by the time Antiochus got to the borders of Egypt with his army, he ran into a Roman ambassador with his army.

The Roman ambassador went out to meet him, told him to go home, Antiochus demurred, and the Roman ambassador took a stick and drew a circle around him and said, “Do not step out of that circle until you’re ready to go home, or you’re going to deal with my army.”

Antiochus fumed and fussed and went home in a really bad mood, and once again the Philistines were not helpful. “You know what the Jews have been doing while you were gone?”

Up to this point Antiochus had been trying to play nice guy to the younger Jewish generation and convince them that it was cool to be Greek, and all the cool kids are doing it. He built an amphitheater and a theater, pushed Greek culture, Greek language, and invited these young men to participate in the Olympic Games, which were done in the nude. Some of them, for fear of embarrassment, applied needle and thread and something to make themselves not seem circumcised.

But when Antiochus got back from the encounter in Egypt he had just had enough. “These Jews are too much trouble. This ends now.” Rachel, can you pick it up from there?

Sure. When he returns he decides to go for total adoption of Greek culture among the Jews, and proceeds to go and defile the temple, erect an idol on the altar and sacrifice on the altar, thus fully defiling the temple. He then outlaws the basic elements of outward signs of being Jewish, such as circumcision and observing the Sabbath, and actually makes them punishable by the death penalty.

Pretty much we see in the law that not keeping those is supposed to give you the death penalty, and he flips it on its head to say, “If you do them, now I’m going to punish you,” and makes it so that they shouldn’t be praying and shouldn’t be in any way acting like they are Jewish.

After doing this in Jerusalem he begins to spread out into the countryside. Basically they start setting up idol altars or defiling altars they find, forcing the Jewish communities out there to sacrifice to these idols or face punishment that Antiochus Epiphanes had set up.

They continue in this way until they meet a priest named Mattathias, who has a number of sons. Mattathias refuses to sacrifice; in fact, he prevents others from sacrificing to the false gods, because the officers of Antiochus Epiphanes were trying to go around and force everybody to do this, so he steps in, stands up to them, and tears down the idols and instead calls for everyone who is zealous for the law and who stands by the covenant to follow him, which is a quote from 1 Maccabees.

From there he and his sons become the center of a multiyear revolt. Mattathias begins it, but he dies in the middle and his son Judas takes over, who is actually the one given the term Maccabees, which means ‘hammer.’ It’s funny that we get a number of people in history that get to be ‘the hammer.’

A screwdriver doesn’t work.

There’s something less poetic about that.

Applied force. So Judas is able to start what we would call a guerilla warfare style against Antiochus Epiphanes, leading towards creating an actual army. He’s able to beat Antiochus and his forces multiple times, particularly one where Antiochus sends somewhere around 60,000 men against Judas, and he wins by praying to the Lord and asking the Lord to deliver them, and they have what we would consider a miraculous victory, until they’re finally able to defeat Antiochus’s enemies and retake Jerusalem.

That is where we come to something we know now where they have to rededicate the temple because it’s been defiled. They go to do that and find when they want to burn the oil on the menorah, they only have enough oil for one day, but miraculously the Lord causes it to last for 8 days, so we get what will be celebrated even by Jesus in the New Testament as the feast of Hannukah, or Hannukah in modern times. It’s the Festival of Lights because they were lighting the menorah in the temple.

I saw one report that said it happened on December 25. I’m a little suspicious that they knew that exact date, that it’s exactly Christmas as we now call it, but it is generally around that time of year and so that’s where it continues today as the Jewish holiday of that time period.

There’s a really great vocal parody song. The original song is Dynamite by Taio Cruz, but the vocal group that writes the parody and performs is called The Maccabeats – a fun musical pun there. They tell the story of the Maccabean revolt, and I want to say that everything I know about the Maccabean revolt is from that. That’s not true because I did read Maccabees in college, but everything I remember about the Maccabean revolt is from that song.

There’s a certain truth there for music teachers.

Yes. Back to Daniel, this is what Daniel says concerning Antiochus Epiphanes. It’s actually a very long section, but this is toward the end, starting in 11:29 –

At the time appointed he shall return and come toward the south [into Egypt]; but it shall not be as the former or as the latter. For the ships of Chittim [Cyprus, there’s a Roman galleon stationed there] shall come against him: therefore, he shall be grieved and return and have indignation against the holy covenant. So shall he do. He shall even return and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant.
And arms shall stand on his part and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate. And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries, but the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.
And they that understand among the people shall instruct many, yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity and by spoil, many days. Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little help, but many shall cleave to them with flatteries. And some of them of understanding shall fall, to try them, and to purge and to make them white, even to the time of the end, because it is yet for a time appointed.

Then the narrative shifts in the prophecy.

This whole section describing the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic kings is so accurate in its forecasting that liberals traditionally have looked at Daniel and said, “Well, of course it’s absolutely accurate because it was written after the fact. How else could he possibly know all these things? So Daniel was not written by Daniel but by some other pious Jew who deliberately perpetrated a pious fraud upon his people. He wrote in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes to encourage them, and his prophecies are nothing more than history recorded as prophecy. So we don’t have to worry about any of you fundies trying to pass this off as fulfilled prophecy. It actually was written way after the fact.”

That’s called desperation.

Yes. “The evidence that it was written after the fact consists of your insistence that prophecy does not exist.”

“That’s more your presupposition issue than the text issue.” It also ignores the fact that Daniel is one of the last books that we have before the 400 silent years. It gives God’s people a road map and a reassurance that God is still in control and he’s still orchestrating redemptive history towards that point of the stone coming to crush these coming empires, so that when they don’t have all that reassurance of prophets they can still look back to Daniel.

That really struck me today, I think for the first time, of how much of a comfort that must have been. It’s kind of like when I’m taking my little girl to the doctor and she’s going to get a shot or whatever, it’s like, “I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen and it’s going to be really awful for a brief moment. I need to tell you about it ahead of time so that you know that it’s planned, that there’s a reason, and it will be over quickly.”

That never worked with me, but if it worked with Gretchen that’s great.

Gretchen is pretty circumspect about these things. I’m thankful.

I had a real paranoia where needles and sharp things like wasp stingers were involved. I got over it when I had to go through a whole bunch of blood tests one year.

Anyhow, to step back for a moment and to sum up, we call it the 400 silent years because after Nehemiah and Malachi there is no prophetic voice. There’s no Shekinah glory visible in the temple. There are no miracles. All forms of supernatural revelation go on hold but, as you’ve said, we have Daniel’s countdown.

We have the empires – Golden (Babylon), argent (Persia), bronze (Greece), iron (Rome). We have the chronology implied in the 490 years from the decree of Cyrus to the coming of Messiah the prince. We have Daniel 10-12 that mark off the king of the south, the Seleucid kings, the Ptolemaic kings – this is how they’re going to act back and forth. We still have one last ungodly king who appears before Messiah and we’ll talk about him later. It's all there.

God’s people meanwhile are scattered throughout the world. They have these things called synagogues where they meet on the Sabbath day to worship, to pray, to read the Old Testament scriptures, and they turn around and evangelize their Gentile friends and win many to the God of Israel.

This should sound really familiar because this was exactly what the church was going to be called. God already is working with a sort of proto-church to get his people used to this kind of life – disperse through a pagan world, worshipping the Lord on one particular day, the worship being centered around the Word, the reading of scripture and sermons based upon it. What’s missing is the sacraments.
There was a still a temple standing where sacrifices were still being offered, but most Jewish people never saw it, and although they were supposed to go to Jerusalem for Passover if they could, many just flat-out couldn’t. So this became God seeding the ancient world not only with an ongoing testimony to the coming Messiah, but also God laying out bases of operation for the apostles when they showed up.

James could say at the council of Jerusalem, “Every city has a synagogue where Moses is read.” And every time we follow Paul in the book of Acts he goes first of all to the Jewish synagogue in town and starts there and then reaches out to the Gentiles, so God is using this very deliberately.

Another thing that we haven’t said is that as Alexander’s troops spread across what had been the Persian empire, they took their language with them, what we know as Koine Greek, which is the language in which the New Testament was written and became the second language of the ancient world, even superseding Latin. Latin is great as a legal language but it’s not great for eloquence and other things. So everybody learned Greek, and when God had the apostles write the New Testament there was one obvious language that everybody could actually read.

Meanwhile there’s Rome and that’s where we need to go next before we come to Jesus. We’ll go back and pick up Rome.

I mentioned Alexandria. This is the heart of Hellenistic culture – Hellenic is Greek, Hellenistic is Greek-like, the culture that permeated this time and these countries with Greek literature, Greek philosophy, Greek language, Greek art forms, Greek rulers, Greek all over the place. That gives a common background against which the apostles can write the New Testament and make sense of it.

So that’s where we are, but before we can take that next step out of the silence into God speaking again, we’ve got to go back and pick up Rome, so we’re going to go back a few hundred years, back to the Trojan War, back to Aeneas, back to Romulus and Remus. We’ll zip through the kingdom, the republic, the oligarchy, and the empire. We’ll start that process, Lord willing, next time.

I look forward to it. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations for today?

I have one. I used to do this all the time and I’m trying to do it now. Ladies, you may be better at this already because you have these things called purses and you can put stuff in them and carry them around. Guys just have pockets.

I don’t know how many complaints I’ve had from my wife and daughters about guys having pockets, but with purses you can put bigger things in them, like books. But what I’m thinking of is more something along the line of small journals, things you can make notes in, things you can write story ideas in, keep addresses, write down directions, write down clever things that you or somebody else have said.

I used to do this. I found my old journal/notebook and it’s full of my mom and dad’s personal biographies, their stories as they told them to me. “Wow, that’s really cool. I’m glad I had something to write in.”

So I recommend that male or female, you find a way to carry a writing instrument and writing material with you so that you can record snippets of your life, your thoughts, wonderful things you hear. Some of you may already do this for sermons. Just expand it and see what God may do with this in your life. At the end of the week or month go back and flip through and say, “Oh! Wow, I forgot all about that.” I used to write down quotes from TV shows. I still have those. So that’s my recommendation. Emily?

That idea reminds me of a commonplace book. Of course I have my bullet journal, but I hear a lot of people raving about how wonderful it is to keep a commonplace book.

My recommendation for today is highly local to northern California, so Listener, if you’re in northern California I recommend giving some amount of business to The Baker and the Cakemaker in Auburn. They have pastries. You know we went to Switzerland this summer and I got back and was like, “There’s nowhere to get pastries.” I mean there are pastries. You know what Starbucks has, but it’s not the same – the fresh fruit on the custard, the things you would see on The Great British Baking Show. I was like, “We just don’t have that.”

Then we stopped one day at The Baker and the Cakemaker in Auburn CA and they had pastries with nectarines on them and custard and it was a delight. I said, “David, next time I’m complaining that nowhere around here has pastries, remind me that this place exists.” They do close at 4 in the afternoon, which is better than a bakery in Europe, but not as good as the Starbucks as far as convenience.

Have you ever been to the French bakery in Monterey?

No. I don’t think I’ve been to Monterey since I was like 2 years old.

I am not an authority on pastries, but given my wife’s repeated returns to said bakery it must be awfully good, on the order of, well, a French bakery. So when in Monterey look it up. It’s easy to find. It’s not so easy to find a parking place anywhere near, but aside from that you’ll find it easily enough. Rachel?

I’m continuing on my recommendations of podcasts that I have been listening to. This one is actually available through two different podcasts because the Alicia Childers podcast re-released a podcast from another group called All The Things, which is put on by the Center for Biblical Unity.

The original one is longer than the one she put up because she clips it, so depending on which link you want, but it’s on the woke right. It was very fascinating and completely not something I had heard about at all. Even the lady on the podcast was starting to go, “I’m starting to see these things. Is this an actual movement developing?”

It’s basically that through social media and various other places there seems to be a rising rhetoric of those on the right starting to pick up a lot of the language of the woke left, but inserting their own terms and people. They are becoming the oppressed. The oppressed are the white males. The oppressors are all these others that have been holding them down.

One of the interesting things was in the middle of it it seems to have a rise in antisemitism coming in, which links in with a lot of the Israeli war going on right now, so there seems to be a lot of negativity towards them and a return to seeing the Jewish people as one of the primary instigators of all the evils of the world in a lot of ways.

It’s fascinating and not something I was aware of at all, so I put it out there for those of you that find such things interesting.

I had come across the fringes of such things and had not considered that it could actually be a thing with force behind it.

You hold one side down and eventually they jump up and start hitting back, and that’s kind of what they’re saying on the podcast. “You who claim to be oppressed have become the oppressors. And guess what? Now the other side is hitting back.”

On their own terms.

But they’re using the same language, which is what’s really interesting. They’re using a lot of that Marxist language that seems like it shouldn’t belong.

Always new battles to fight, and it’s always the same battle over and over.

All the same things still apply on why we shouldn’t follow that.

This has been great. Thank you both so much for this conversation. A big thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling and supplying our wonderful editing software. We really appreciate it. David saves so much time. Thank you!

A big thank you also to our transcriptionist who makes the show available in your inbox via our Substack, if you’d like to subscribe to that. Just look us up on Substack, Halting Toward Zion.

If you’d like to get in touch with us you can send us an email at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Good night and thanks for listening. See you next time.