Intertestamental Period Essay

Last class we spent a lot of time talking about the “Intertestamental Period” which is the period from 450 B.C. to the birth of Jesus. It’s pretty much the time between the close of the Old Testament to the start of the New Testament, in which a lot of stuff occurred that the writers of the New Testament assume that the readers will know and understand. Because of this time period in between the two Testaments and all the events that occurred during that period Dr. Hall labeled the New Testament a high-context document. One of the main events that occurred during the Intertestamental Period”, that led to hard times for the Jewish people and even the formation of Hanukkah was the Hellenization. This term Hellenization comes from the Greek word

After Alexander the Great died his lands were split apart and given to four separate generals who ruled over one part of his lands. One of those generals was Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and he took Hellenization to a new level and made it forced apon the Jews. He believed that the Jews needed to become like the Greek and he begun to break some of the factors that the Jews identified themselves as. Dr. Hall explained a lot about the Jewish identity and how circumcision, the dietary laws and the calender especially the Sabbath were very important to the Jews and what made them who they were. This connects to the rule of Antiochus IV Epiphanes because he made it his personal agenda to break these three key principles of the Jewish identity. He would do things like slaughter pigs in the temples and attack the Jews on the Sabbath. It was not until the Maccabee family stood up and fought and destroyed Antiochus IV Epiphanes that Hanukkah was formed as to remember the amount of time it took the Maccabee family to cleanse the land after Antiochus IV Epiphanes. That is about how far we got in our class, although we begun to see that the Maccabee line was the line that ruled when Jesus begun to do his work not the line of David and we ended