Flaming Dictionaries, and What It Meant for the Magi to Call Jesus the King of the Jews

The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

Historical Context of the Nativity

- God’s covenant with Israel

o The Promised Land was given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the Jews would be Yahweh’s people, and Yahweh would be their God.

o However, Israel was disobedient, and worshipped other gods, and did many other wicked things besides, so God then handed Judah and Israel over to their enemies.

- Babylonian Captivity

o The Assyrians captured the northern kingdom of Judah in 721 BC; the Babylonians conquered Israel in 597 BC; both of these events came to pass just as God had sent the prophets to forewarn and promise the people.

o With these two successive conquests, of Judah and Israel, many Jews were killed, or carried into foreign lands, or fled, or else were ruled over in their ancestral homeland by foreigners.

o The Babylonians and Assyrians both were conquered and subsumed by the Achaemenid Persian empire.

- Hellenization

o With Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persians, his empire took possession of Judea.

o After the death of Alexander, four of his generals divided the empire, and the part containing what had formerly been Israel was ruled by the Seleucids starting in 281 BC.

o The Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes, ruling from 175-164 BC, persecuted the Jews, desecrating the temple in Jerusalem, and forcing the high priest and other devout Jews to eat pork, which they were forbidden to do.

o This led to what was known as the Maccabean revolt in 167-160 BC, in which the Jews led by a certain warrior group called the Maccabees drove the Seleucids out, and established nominal Jewish self-government in the region again from about 110-63 BC.

o A characteristic of this government, called the Hasmonean dynasty, was a reduction in the influence of both Hellenism and Hellenistic Judaism.

- Roman Conquest

o The Hasmoneans were conquered by the Roman general Pompeius in 63 BC, thus ending, until modern times, meaningful Jewish self-rule.

o As a client kingdom of the Roman empire, particularly under Herod the Great after the Roman Senate declared him “King of the Jews” in 37 BC, Judea was effectively under Roman rule.

- Herod the Great

o As a vassal of the Roman empire, Herod got his position because of his father’s close relationship with the Roman general and dictator Julius Caesar.

o To give you an idea of how ruthless he was, his mother-in-law was a part of the Hasmonean dynasty, and plotted at one point to restore the former dynasty to power by installing Aristobulus III, a member of her family, as the high priest, then sending him off to meet with Mark Antony, who was then in the midst of fighting a civil war with Octavian over who would be the Roman emperor after the assassination of Julius Caesar.

§ Herod was just so sure Aristobulus III would replace him as King of the Jews if he met with Antony that he arranged for the assassination of Aristobulus.

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