By S. Kent Brown

Editor’s note: This information comes from a new book, The Lost 500 Years: What Happened Between the Old and New Testaments,
by S. Kent Brown and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel.

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Above all else, the fall of Jerusalem and its temple in July 587 BC shaped the future of the Israelite people ever after. The Babylonian forces fell on the city as a hammer, permanently fragmenting any cohesion that people had enjoyed.

Only after this catastrophe, which the city’s citizens could have avoided if they had listened to the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 34), do we learn of Jewish people living away from the holy center in such disparate places as Asia Minor and Upper Egypt. In effect, the small colony of Lehi and Sariah was a part of the forced dispersion. The aftermath can be best described as gloomy.

For fifty years the refugees bided their time in Babylon. Their wait came to a promising end when the new Persian monarch, Cyrus (550–530 BC), issued a decree in 538 BC that allowed Jews to return to their former homeland (Ezra 1). Of those living in Babylon, only a few returned. Those who stayed would become the ancestors of the largest group of Israelites in the New Testament era, vastly outnumbering those who returned to ancient Palestine.

Over time, the Babylonian Jews would bring leadership and aid to those living in and around Jerusalem. One thinks of Nehemiah and Ezra as well as the support that Jewish partisans in ancient Palestine received during the monumental struggle against Rome in AD 66–70.

The return of the exiles was both energizing and disappointing. People were glad to come home. They had talked about this day for a long time. But those who remembered the city as it had been were tortured with the view of blackened homes and blighted buildings. Through the eyes of the prophet Haggai, who became God’s mouthpiece in 520 BC, we learn that the returnees successfully rebuilt their own homes but cared for little else, including the broken temple and collapsed city walls (Hag. 1:2, 4).

Haggai and his contemporary, Zechariah, cajoled and coaxed citizens into rebuilding the temple so that divine blessings could once again flow into the society. Even then, the resulting structure made those weep who could recall the splendid temple of Solomon from their youths (Ezra 3:12). It would not be until the winter of 20/19 BC that major renovations, under the direction of King Herod, would begin to fashion the temple into one of the most imposing monuments in the Roman world.

Of course, the temple stood at the center of everything. Its mere presence, along with its ceremonies and regulation of worship life, instilled a sense of purpose and symmetry and unity within the society. Because of the temple’s weighty importance, priests became the most important members of the community.

Oddly, the temple also became a divisive object. The Samaritans, the living descendants of those who had populated the northern kingdom of Israel, sought to help the recently returned Jews in their rebuilding efforts. But the former exiles refused (Ezra 3:1–4:3). In their eyes, the northerners had lost their identity as true Israelites when waves of immigrants arrived after the fall of their kingdom in 722 BC to the Assyrian King Sargon II (722–705 BC; 2 Kgs. 17:22–41). The rancor that developed would split the Jews in the south from the Samaritans in the north for centuries.

We can see a tiny piece of that split by looking at the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the old well of Jacob (John 4).

In this conversation we see that one of the dividing walls between Samaritans and Jews arose within the nettlesome question of where to build the temple and where to worship. The Samaritans knew that the earliest Israelites in the country came to the northern city of Shechem to celebrate the ritual entry into the Promised Land (Joshua 8:30–35). They also knew that God had given Joshua a commandment to build a sanctuary on Mount Ebal, overlooking Shechem, and that one had stood for decades at Shiloh, not far south of the valley of Shechem. In fact, in the Bible the Samaritans read that a future temple was to stand on Mount Gerizim, which arose on the south of the valley and was full of springs (Deut. 27:1–8). They built that temple in the latter part of the fourth century BC, but little of it remains because it was razed by the Jewish priest-king John Hyrcanus in 128 BC — an act that permanently divided Jews and Samaritans thereafter.

Of all the personalities who influenced Jewish society during the intertestamental period, the most important was Alexander the Great. His sweeping conquest of the vast Persian Empire in the late fourth century BC not only subdued ancient Palestine, putting it under the foot of Greek overlords, but also spread Greek culture across the land and its people. The almost immediate growth of Greek temples and schools (gymnasia), theaters and libraries, impacted large portions of the population, leading some to embrace Greek ways and driving others to fiercely oppose such manners, a situation that persisted well past the New Testament era.

Naturally, we cannot minimize the lasting contributions of Nehemiah and Ezra, men who grew up in Babylonia but lived much of their adult lives in Jerusalem. Nehemiah, appointed governor of Judea and, according to Josephus, arriving in Jerusalem in 440 BC, galvanized people into rebuilding the protecting wall around the city in fifty-two days (Neh. 2:1–5:16). Moreover, he brought order into a society that, save for the leadership of the priests at the temple, had not enjoyed real unity for a century and a half.

After he was appointed as governor a second time, beginning in 433 BC (Neh. 13:6), he regularized worship so that priests and Levites received their share of the offerings that came to the temple and he forbade merchants from bringing their wares to the city on the Sabbath (Neh. 13:12–13, 16–21).

Ezra instituted religious and social reforms that lasted hundreds of years after his time. Bearing a letter from the Persian sovereign Artaxerxes (465–424 BC), he apparently arrived in Jerusalem in August 428 BC. At the feast of Tabernacles in October, he and his associates read the law at the temple from the Hebrew record, a record that no one in the society could readily understand. So he and his fellows provided a translation into Aramaic, the language which people had acquired during the long years in Babylon (Neh. 8:1–8, 13, 18).

This was evidently the first exercise in translating and commenting on the sacred scripture orally, a tradition that reached into the New Testament era as demonstrated by Jesus who, in the synagogue at Nazareth, read a text from Isaiah 61 and then commented on it in the local tongue (Luke 4:16–27).

A second important reform took place in a driving rainstorm two months later. People in the society had married non-Jewish spouses and were raising their children in a dual-cultural atmosphere. Ezra led his people to reject this way of life and even to divorce their non-Jewish spouses (Ezra 10). We can only imagine the pain that this caused people across the city and the countryside. It was a time of severe testing. But under the leadership of Ezra, people persevered, changing their lives forever. Thus, within a few months, Ezra reshaped much that endures and endears in his society.

Ezra’s reading of the law in a now strange tongue brings up the entire matter of scripture during the intertestamental era. The Israelites who lived before the Babylonian exile spoke Hebrew. Those who returned from exile had adopted Aramaic, the language of their captors, a sister language to Hebrew, much as Spanish and Italian are sister languages.

The Hebrew Bible seems to have taken much of its current shape in the intertestamental age, possibly under the influence of Ezra, though it would not be fixed fully until the ninth century AD. To be sure, Lehi’s catalogue of the collection on the brass plates illustrates that some of the scripture had already been brought together before 600 BC (1 Ne. 5:11–15). But following the exile Jewish readers who no longer understood their beloved Hebrew texts faced new challenges.

For those who lived in Greek-speaking regions, especially Lower Egypt, the necessity for an understandable version of scripture presented itself as early as the third century BC. Hence, Jewish savants in Egypt began the loving process of translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek, a process that seems to have taken several decades, despite the famous story recorded in the ancient Letter of Aristeas that seventy-two scholars from Jerusalem translated the whole of the Bible in a few weeks. The result was the Septuagint, which eventually became the Bible to which the Apostle Paul and other Christian missionaries appealed when preaching in the Roman world. The Septuagint, incidentally, expands the canon of scripture because it includes more books than the Hebrew Bible, specifically the fourteen books accepted by Roman Catholics.

Of course, the Hebrew version of scripture remained paramount. Worshipers in ancient Palestine read from it regularly in synagogue services. But because not all could understand its meaning, other people in the synagogue would re-render the text in Aramaic or offer an interpretation, as Jesus did in Nazareth. These re-renderings came to be known as Targums, from the Hebrew root that means “to interpret.” At first, such Targums were in oral form. But people eventually came to feel the need to preserve in writing the best re-renderings and interpretations of scripture.

Other Jews chose different paths for preserving and deciding on the shape of scripture. The Essenes of the Dead Sea venerated the books of the Hebrew Bible, except for the book of Esther (which does not mention God in its record). In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls have preserved variant versions of some biblical texts, including Isaiah and Jeremiah, showing that the Essenes felt little or no tension in reading scriptural records that differed one from another.

In addition, it is clear that they venerated a larger group of scripture books than did the Jews who were responsible for preserving and copying the Hebrew Bible as it has come to us. The Essenes held as authoritative such works as the book of Jubilees, a text that retells the early chapters of the Bible, and the book of First Enoch which is quoted as scripture by the New Testament epistle of Jude (Jude 1:14–15).

The Samaritans chose an entirely different path. They came to venerate only the Pentateuch, the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy. They did not accept the historical, prophetic and other works that appear in the current Hebrew Bible. One reason seems to be that in those books the temple in Jerusalem was called the worship center of the nation. Quoting the Lord’s words to Solomon, we read: “I have hallowed this house [the temple], which thou has built, to put my name there for ever” (1 Kgs. 9:3; also 8:16–19; 2 Sam. 7:13; etc.).

As a result of their decision, the Samaritans did not enjoy access to the riches of the other books of the Bible. One of the casualties of the Samaritans’ decision was their lack of a Messiah in their doctrinal repertoire. Most other Jews looked forward to a Messiah; typically, the Samaritans did not. To her credit, the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at the well believed that a Messiah would come, and that belief allowed her to accept the Savior (John 4:25).

The long centuries between Malachi (ca. 450 BC) and the first New Testament records saw sweeping changes, from kings and princes to priests and foreign rulers, from a unified people before the exile to many chastened people living away from Judea, from reliance chiefly on the temple to a realization that scripture can and will offer consolation and guidance. At base, when we leave the pages of the Old Testament and immerse ourselves in the pages of the New, we find ourselves in a world transformed by a myriad of influences that had intersected people’s lives for both good and ill.


Information about the book:
S. Kent Brown and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, The Lost 500 Years: What Happened Between the Old and New Testaments
A Special Illustrated Edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006).