The Living Bread › The 400 Silent Years › What Are the 400 Silent Years?

Between the Testaments

What Are the 400 Silent Years?

The 400 silent years are the roughly four centuries between the last Old Testament prophet, Malachi, who wrote around 430 BC, and the opening of the New Testament in the ministry of John the Baptist and the birth of Jesus. They are called silent because no prophet whose words were received into the Hebrew Scriptures spoke in that span. Yet the silence was not absence. Empires rose and fell, a common language spread across the world, the Old Testament was translated into Greek, and a scattered people learned to long for their Messiah. God was not idle. He was preparing the world for the coming of his Son.

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.Malachi 4:2 (KJV)

Why they are called the silent years

The Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins in the same book, bound together in a single Bible, but between the last page of Malachi and the first page of Matthew there lies a gap of roughly four hundred years. Across that stretch no prophet arose in Israel whose words were received into the Hebrew Scriptures. The voice that had spoken through Moses and Samuel, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos and Malachi fell quiet. For four centuries there was no Thus saith the LORD written down and kept as Scripture. That is why the period is called silent, and why it is also named the intertestamental period, the time between the Testaments.

The silence was felt keenly by the people who lived through it. The first book of Maccabees, a Jewish history from the second century BC that Catholic and Orthodox Christians include in their Bibles and Protestants read as valuable history, records that in those days there was great distress in Israel, and it speaks more than once of a time when no prophet had appeared and no one knew how long the trouble would last. The people knew the prophets had ceased, and they waited, hoping God would speak again.

How long was the silence, and when did it fall

The figure of four hundred years is a round number, and honesty requires saying so. Malachi is usually dated to around 430 BC, near the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, when the exiles had returned from Babylon and rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. From there to the appearance of John the Baptist and the birth of Jesus is close to four centuries, and the tradition has settled on four hundred as the memorable number. The exact span depends on how one dates Malachi and where one marks the end, whether at John the Baptist, at the birth of Christ, or at the start of the Gospel record. The point is not a precise count but a long stretch of prophetic quiet.

It is worth noting that the silence was of a particular kind. It was not that God did nothing and that history stood still. On the contrary, these were some of the most eventful centuries the region ever knew. The silence was the silence of canonical prophecy: no new word was added to the Scriptures, no prophet stood in the gate of the temple with a fresh oracle for the whole nation. Life went on, and God was at work in it, but the writing of Scripture paused.

The Jewish tradition itself marked this ending. The rabbis taught that with the last of the post-exilic prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the spirit of prophecy departed from Israel, and that afterward God's guidance came through a fainter voice, a mere echo of the old prophetic word. Whatever one makes of that idea, it shows how keenly the people felt the change. The age of the great prophets, who had thundered against kings and comforted the exiles, had closed, and a long season of waiting had begun.

It helps to remember what the Old Testament had already promised before it fell silent. The prophets had spoken of a child to be born who would be called Wonderful, of a righteous Branch from the line of David, of a shepherd to come out of Bethlehem, of a servant who would bear the sins of many, and of a new covenant written on the heart. All these promises stood waiting through the silent years like seeds in winter ground. The silence was not a cancelling of the promises but a pause before their keeping, and the whole weight of Israel's hope leaned forward, across four centuries, toward the day they would come true in Christ.

What Malachi left ringing in the air

The last prophet did not close with despair. Malachi ended the Old Testament looking forward. He promised that unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings, a line the church has always read as a promise of Christ, the light that would rise on a waiting world. And Malachi closed the Hebrew canon with the promise that God would send Elijah the prophet before the great and dreadful day of the LORD, to turn the hearts of fathers and children toward one another.

So the Old Testament does not trail off. It ends on a note of expectation, pointing beyond the silence to a messenger who would prepare the way and a Sun of righteousness who would rise. When the New Testament opens, it takes up exactly these threads. The Gospels present John the Baptist in the spirit and power of Elijah, the very messenger Malachi foretold, and they present Jesus as the light that had dawned. The silence, read this way, is the held breath between a promise and its keeping.

God was still at work in the silence

The great lesson of the silent years is that the silence of God is not the same as the absence of God. Behind the quiet, the whole world was being made ready. In these four centuries the Persian Empire gave way to Alexander the Great, and the Greek language spread until it became the common tongue of the eastern Mediterranean. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into that common Greek, so that for the first time the promises of Israel could be read by the nations. The synagogue rose as a house of prayer and teaching in every town where Jews lived. The temple was defiled by a foreign king and then cleansed by the Maccabees. Rome came and laid its roads and its peace across the world. And in Judea a longing for the promised Messiah grew sharp and hopeful.

Every one of those developments would matter when Christ came. The apostle Paul would later write that when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son. The fulness of the time was not an accident. It was prepared, patiently, across four silent centuries. The people heard nothing new from heaven, but heaven was arranging the stage of history so that when the Word finally spoke, in a manger in Bethlehem, the whole world was ready to hear.

Reading the silence as a Christian

For the believer, the silent years are a comfort and not a puzzle. There are seasons in every life when God seems to say nothing, when the heavens feel like brass and the old assurances have gone quiet. The four hundred years teach that such silence can be the very time God is doing his deepest work. Israel did not know, in the long quiet, that the pieces were being set for the coming of the Christ. They only knew the waiting. And then, in the words of the Gospel of Mark, the time was fulfilled, and the kingdom of God was at hand.

The silence ended not with another prophet and another scroll, but with a person. The Word that had spoken through the prophets came in the flesh. That is why the silent years lead so directly to Jesus, and why the whole story is finally not about four hundred silent years at all, but about the One toward whom all of it was quietly moving.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

Related: The Persian and Greek empires · How God prepared the way · Who is Jesus? · The 400 Silent Years hub