Sunday, November 6, 2011

Historical Gaps in the Bible


It's interesting that scripture does not provide a record of God's chosen people during two long periods of time. The first gap was during the time following Joseph's death when the families of the 12 patriarchs went gradually (or suddenly?) from being guests of Pharaoh to being slaves. Meanwhile, there was tremendous cultural flux in Canaan and surrounding lands that would later greatly influence the course of events during the conquest of the promised land and the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel in the midst of areas which had a great deal of ethnic and religious diversity.

The second gap was during the fall of the Persian Empire, followed by rise of the Greek Macedonian/Selucid Empires. As the Selucid Empire crumbled, the successful Maccabean revolt (from which comes the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah commemorating the re-dedication of the temple) established the Hasmonean dynasty. Israel then existed as an independent Hasmonean state for 100 years before the rise of the Roman empire and the birth of Jesus. So there was a lot going on. The history of these two periods is well worth studying in order to better understand the bracketing events in the Bible, even though apocryphal books such as 1&2 Maccabees are not included in the Protestant canon of scripture.