On this page
Between the last page of Malachi and the first page of Matthew there is a blank sheet of paper and roughly four hundred years. People call it the silent period. It is one of the noisiest stretches in the whole story.
Why "silent" is the wrong word
The silence is a feature of the Protestant canon, not of history. No prophetic book in that canon is set in this period, so the Bible appears to stop and restart.
Plenty was written. The books of the Maccabees were written. So were Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and a great deal else that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles carry and Protestant Bibles do not. The Dead Sea Scrolls come from this period and the years just after it.
What actually happens in these four centuries is that the world Jesus is born into gets built. If you skip it, the New Testament opens with a cast you have not been introduced to. Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, synagogues, Samaritans as a separate people, a temple run as a political prize, a client king, and Roman soldiers on the road. None of that is in Malachi.
Under Persia
Malachi is usually placed around 430 BC, though the date is inferred rather than stated. Judah at that point is a small province of the Persian empire, rebuilt after the exile, with a second temple standing and a population a fraction of what it had been.
Persian rule was, by the standards of the time, light. Local religion was left alone, taxes were paid, and the high priest became the effective head of the community — a political role as much as a religious one. That arrangement outlasts the Persians and causes a great deal of trouble later.
This is also the period in which the Torah settles into its central place in Jewish life, and in which the practice of gathering to read and expound it starts to take the shape that becomes the synagogue.
Alexander, and Greek becomes the language
In 332 BC Alexander the Great takes the region on his way to Egypt. He dies in 323 and his generals divide the empire.
Judah sits on the border between two of the resulting kingdoms: the Ptolemies in Egypt to the south, the Seleucids in Syria to the north. For a century the Ptolemies hold it. Around 200 BC the Seleucids take it. Being the ground two empires fight over is not a comfortable position and Judah is in it for a hundred and fifty years.
The deeper change is cultural. Greek becomes the language of administration, trade and education across the eastern Mediterranean. Greek cities are founded. Greek dress, Greek games and Greek philosophy arrive with them.
Some Jews took to it. Others regarded it as apostasy. The split between those two responses is the fault line that everything else in this period runs along.
The Septuagint
Somewhere in the third century BC, in Alexandria, the Hebrew scriptures begin to be translated into Greek. The Torah first, the rest over the following two centuries.
This is one of the most consequential things in the whole period, and it is easy to underrate because it sounds administrative.
It made the scriptures readable to a Jewish population that no longer spoke Hebrew, and to everyone else in the Greek-speaking world. When the apostles quote scripture in the New Testament, they very often quote the Greek. When the gospel goes out to gentile cities, it goes into a world where the Hebrew scriptures were already available in the common language.
It also preserves readings that differ from the Hebrew text, which is why the Septuagint keeps turning up in chronology arguments. Its numbers for the ages of the patriarchs and the length of the sojourn in Egypt are not the same as the Masoretic numbers.
Antiochus and the desecration
In 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who styled himself Epiphanes, moved from encouraging Greek practice to enforcing it.
The temple was rededicated to Olympian Zeus. Sacrifice of pigs was ordered on the altar. Circumcision and sabbath observance were banned on pain of death. Copies of the Torah were destroyed.
This was not a general Hellenistic policy — the Ptolemies had done nothing of the kind — and it was aimed squarely at making Jewish practice impossible. It is the first organised attempt to end the religion rather than tax it.
The Maccabean revolt
The response begins with a priest named Mattathias in the village of Modein, and is carried on by his son Judas, called Maccabeus.
Against expectation, it worked. The temple was retaken and rededicated in 164 BC, which is the origin of Hanukkah. Over the following decades the family, known as the Hasmoneans, won effective independence and then ruled it.
The independence lasted about eighty years and it was not a golden age. The Hasmoneans combined the high priesthood with the kingship, which many regarded as illegitimate on both counts, and the dynasty spent much of its energy on internal war.
The religious parties of the New Testament harden in this period. The Sadducees, drawn largely from the priestly aristocracy, accommodated the ruling power. The Pharisees, drawn more widely, held to strict observance of the law and to traditions beyond the written text. The Essenes withdrew altogether, and are usually connected with the community at Qumran whose library became the Dead Sea Scrolls.
By the time the gospels open, these are not new factions. They are institutions with a century of history and a long list of grievances against each other.
Rome arrives
In 63 BC two Hasmonean brothers, at war over the throne, both appealed to Rome. Pompey settled the matter by taking Jerusalem himself.
Independence was over. What followed was client rule: local kings governing at Rome's pleasure, with Roman legions in reach and Roman taxes to collect.
Herod
Herod, later called the Great, was made king by the Roman senate and took control of Jerusalem in 37 BC. He ruled until his death, which is usually placed in 4 BC, though that date is itself argued over and it matters for dating the Nativity.
He was an Idumean by descent, a convert's son, and never accepted as properly Jewish by the people he ruled. He was also a builder on an enormous scale. The temple he rebuilt is the one the gospels describe, and the one destroyed in AD 70.
He was ruthless enough to execute his own wife and three of his sons. The character in Matthew 2 is recognisably the man the historical sources describe, whatever one concludes about that particular episode.
What had changed by the first page of Matthew
Malachi's readers were a small temple community under a distant Persian governor, speaking Hebrew and Aramaic, with no organised parties and no synagogue system.
Matthew's readers were part of a people scattered across the Mediterranean, largely Greek-speaking outside Judea, reading scripture in translation, meeting in synagogues, divided into schools that disagreed sharply about the law and the resurrection, governed by a client king under Roman occupation, and waiting for a deliverer with a good deal of recent history to shape what they expected one to look like.
Four hundred years did that. Reading the gospels without it is like arriving at the second half of a play.
The related question of exactly when the story restarts is in when was Jesus actually born. The whole period is laid out entry by entry on the exile and return era page.