Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, where we are working on the tiny little New Testament book of Philemon that was written by the Apostle Paul probably in the early 60s A.D., which is just a little ways into the grand era of the Roman Empire. And in order to understand this very complicated letter that is dealing with a tremendous set of tensions, legally, theologically, morally, relationally, socially, in order to understand this, we got to understand the world into which it was written. So before we unpack this letter, we're taking some time on this podcast to try to understand that world. And anytime you try to understand the world of the New Testament, the big question is how the heck did we go from how things were at the end of the Old Testament to then you just turn one page if you're using a simple Bible, you turn one page like this, and everything's different. How do we go from how it was at the end of the Old Testament to how it is here at the beginning of the New Testament? The Old Testament leaves off around 440 BC. The Persians are in charge, so they're really nice to the Jews. The Jews are allowed to build their second temple and build a wall around it, and they knock it off with the idolatry and marrying between different people groups who worship different gods. They're just, I mean, it seems like things are going pretty well. And then you just get a whole lot of silence, and then you get the New Testament, which starts just a couple years before Jesus is born, and now Persia is gone. The Jews are a subject people group to a new empire we've never even heard of before in the Bible. These are the Romans. Everybody speaks Greek all of a sudden. There's no more Hebrew. What the heck is going on? So we started working on that last week, and that took us into some ancient intertestamental writings that I think cause a lot of confusion. And in our last conversation, I talked about these intertestamental, particularly Greek writings or Greek translations of older Hebrew writings, that there's this catch-all term for just kind of all of them that are Bible or almost Bible. And that catch all term is the Septuagint. There are other writings from this intertestamental period that pretty much nobody thinks is Bible. It's people posing as characters from deep in the Old Testament, kind of writing in their name, sort of a fan fiction thing. Nobody thought it was Bible. And then we also have from this era and on into the New Testament, historical books from people like Philo, who is from Alexandria. We're going to talk more about Alexandria in the next couple of days. Or from a guy named Josephus, who I read from all the time, because he's like the most amazing historian ever, if you're into the kind of stuff that I'm into. So we have all this literature floating around. It can be a little bit confusing, but if you add all of this stuff up, from the end of the Old Testament to the beginning of the New Testament, you get a composite picture of the big history of the world at this time. And you get a composite picture of the political history and the spiritual history of the Jewish people from the time in between the testaments. Now, as we have discussed at great length, Persia was doing fine, I guess. But then in the 330s, along comes this young man, Alexander the Great. Now he was mean, but he was special. And he was really good at battle. Not great at leading an empire, but very good at battle and inspiring his men. He conquered Persia, made his way all the way to the far, far east, like India. Finally, his troops were like, we're done. We hate this. And he's like, all right, fine. And so he went back to Babylon. He died in Babylon at age 32, or some people say 33. And then we get this age of chaos where his generals and bodyguards all squabble for about 40 years over who should get to inherit Alexander's conquest. These guys are kind of monsters, to be clear. These are unprincipled men who use a combination of assassination, battlefield violence, economic pressure, and bribery to get the things they want. They are not pals, their relationships fall apart very, very quickly. And the places they go and take over, they don't integrate very well. And this is a very important point to understand. When you think about Alexander the Great, there's a lot to criticize him for, like, you know, killing tons of people and just attacking the world. Generally, we don't look positively on that. But he did, and his vision was that there'd be this unified world where the cultures would all kind of mingle. And this is a very important point. As he worked his way further east and as he conquered Persia, he started to dress Persian. He started to talk Persian. He started to let Persian lords keep their positions. And he created this half Greek Macedonian and half Persian court system. Everybody would come in and they would kowtow before Alexander the Great. And the Macedonians were like, What? We're companions, we're friends. We greet each other with a manly kiss on the cheek. We don't fall on our faces before our king or our master. We are peers who fight together. And so there's this huge clash of cultures that happen. And Alexander is like the one guy who wants to do the thing where I'm going to use this language on purpose. He wants to do the every tribe, tongue, and nation thing, will be unified in coming to the throne and laying down their crowns before Alexander the Great to pay homage to him as a living God, and this will be the new world order. Well, again, he dies at age 32 or 33, pretty puny God. And one of the things he didn't do very well was convince all of his buddies of his vision. So it isn't just that Alexander dies and his generals just divide everything up. It is also that they completely reject his vision for a synthesized world where all the cultures mush together. Instead, what they do is they promote Greek preeminence everywhere they go. And ultimately it shakes out that three of these generals, I guess Ptolemy was more of a bodyguard than a general, but three of these guys win out. The Antigonid Empire, once again, in Old World Greece, the Seleucids in Turkey and Syria, and eventually Jerusalem, Judea, and then Ptolemy and his descendants are forever associated with Egypt. Just drill that stuff into your brain. Obviously, the Antigonids, they're just Greeks ruling Greeks. So we can kind of set that one aside. But the two occupying empires chart a different course. The Seleucids gradually over time, through the 200s and into the 100s, start to really assert Greekishness over the top of a pretty proud cultural heritage in eastern Anatolia, getting out toward like northern Iraq and stuff, and Syria and Judea. But the Ptolemies in Egypt, they never integrated at all. Ptolemy took the title of Pharaoh and made sculptures of himself and his descendants did the same in the style of pharaohs, but they governed from Alexandria. Alexandria is nowhere near what you picture as ancient historic Egypt with all the pyramids and everything else. It's at the very end of the Nile Delta, and they built a glowing monument of Greekism. Like the greatest example of a Greek city ever is what the Ptolemids built after Alexander the Great in Alexandria. They designed this beautiful layout for the street system. The whole thing was built around a mausoleum of Alexander himself. Like his embalmed body was in glass in the middle of the town. You could just go there. And then around that embalmed body of Alexander was a museum in the style of the old museum in Athens. And attached to the museum was the Library of Alexandria with 500,000 volumes. But you know who wasn't in Alexandria? Egypt? Egyptians. It was this little Greek enclave that subjugated all of the Egyptians who worked as effectively illiterate peasants in service of Ptolemy Richards. So this Greek-ish or Hellenistic era is not a particularly moral one. It's a lot of infighting, it's a lot of bribing, and the impulse to jockey for position after the death of Alexander never really goes away until Rome rises to prominence and snuffs out these old feuds. Well, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, they fight back and forth a whole bunch. I'm aware of six wars between the two. There might be more, but kind of I follow a different path of the story after their sixth one. So maybe they have seven or eight or nine, but they definitely have six wars from the time of Alexander the Great until the 160s BC. And eventually, after all of this fighting and everything, the Seleucids end up solidly in control of Jerusalem. Well, what did I say about how these guys maintained power? Everything was a bribe. And so in the Old Testament, Nehemiah ends the Old Testament saying, you know, God remember me. The last few chapters of Nehemiah that everybody kind of forgets because it doesn't seem that dramatic. You know, Nehemiah makes another trip back out after rebuilding the wall and getting it dedicated and everything. He goes back to make sure it's all working and it's not. Outsiders have moved in, they're living in the temple. Like people who oppose to the building of the wall, the bad guys now, are allowed to live in the temple. What are you doing? You just invited in the enemy and you're paying their salary. And Nehemiah's angry. You know, I think it's one of the times in the Old Testament where a leader rips out their beard or whatever. Something performative like that. And he puts all kinds of systems in place to set it all straight. And then he's like, there you go, God, uh, remember me. And that's the end of the Old Testament. Well, it looks like the priests do pretty well for a while after that, through the rest of the Persian age, that is the 400s and all the way up to the death of Alexander in 323. But then through the Hellenistic age, the age of Alexander's generals, that high priesthood falls more and more into disrepair. The people still seem to be fairly pious in and around Jerusalem. In 586 BC, when the Babylonians came, that pressure pushed a whole bunch of Jews into North Africa and East Africa. And Alexandria had a whole district that was just set aside for the Jews in the northeast quadrant of this beautiful Sterling, ancient city. And so there's this huge population of Jewish people there, and they seem to be really pious as well. So Jewish piety is doing great during the Hellenistic age through the 200s. Mostly through the 200s, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids just let the Jews be Jewish. But something changes around 200 BC and the pressure starts ramping up on some of these previously tolerated groups within these Greek empires to say, you need to be more Greek. And to make that happen, we're going to start using our Greek gold to buy off local priests and influential leaders. The Ptolemids were constantly in negotiation with the priests who lived in Memphis, not, you know, not Memphis here, like with the Bass Pro Shop pyramid, but like Memphis and Egypt with like the actual pyramids. Ptolemy was constantly giving them land grants and money, and his descendants did the same to keep them happy so they would vouch for him and the religion and the people would fall into line. Well, the Seleucids took notes on that, and eventually they start trying to buy the high priesthood in Jerusalem. And one Seleucid emperor in particular, who ruled in the first part of the 100s BC, a guy named Antiochus IV Epiphanes, he just jumps the shark. He goes full on in this persecutorial approach toward the Jews. He ousts one high priest and ropes in another named Jason. And Jason, I mean, what do you notice about that name? Does that sound particularly Jewish? I mean, that's my middle name. I'm 0% Jewish. No, Jason is a Gentile name, it's a Greek name. So you've got a high priest in Jerusalem with a Greek name. That's weird. And this Jason fellow gave a ton of money to Antiochus to be invested with this position. Now, throughout history, investiture has been a problem. People trying to buy offices, trying to buy the power of God to hold an office. It's called Simony after Simon Magus in the book of Acts. That's been a problem. It's some of the worst type of religious corruption that can exist. And it was just overt. And the Jewish people in Jerusalem were supposed to just accept this and roll with it. But you live by the sword, you die by the sword. And this corrupt Jason character, a far cry from what the high priests of the late Old Testament had been, he's going to fall out of favor because of the same kind of corrupt thinking and activity that got him into favor in the first place. He's going to be high priest from about 175 to 171. But the stunt he pulls is what is going to set in motion a series of events that will lead to the Jewish people successfully rebelling against Antiochus Epiphanes IV of the Seleucid Empire and his descendants and eventually achieving their own independence. This reality is the thing that you gotta understand between the Old Testament and the New Testament to really get what happened there and how the New Testament and Philemon sets up. So tomorrow we're gonna talk about how the corruption of the high Hellenistic age finally comes home to roost in Jerusalem and all the crazy stuff that comes out of it, including a bunch of stuff that is recorded in the intertestamental books of first and second Maccabees. This story gets juicy. You will not want to miss it tomorrow. More to come. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute five hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.