The Intertestamental Period: Were There Really 400 Years of Silence?
The Intertestamental Period: Were There Really 400 Years of Silence?
For many Christians, the phrase “the 400 years of silence” is almost as familiar as the phrase “Old Testament.” Malachi closes, God stops speaking, roughly four centuries pass, and then John the Baptist suddenly appears announcing the coming of Christ. Those centuries are commonly called the “intertestamental period,” the supposedly silent space between the Old and New Testaments.
There is only one immediate problem: the Bible never calls this period “400 years of silence.”
That does not mean the idea appeared out of nowhere. There is genuine ancient evidence for a belief that the recognized succession of Israel’s prophets had come to an end. But that is not necessarily the same thing as saying that God ceased speaking, the Holy Spirit ceased inspiring Scripture, or nothing written during those centuries could possibly belong to the Bible.
The distinction matters because the “400 silent years” are sometimes used to defend the shorter Protestant Old Testament. Books such as Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees are dismissed partly because they are associated with a period in which biblical inspiration had supposedly ceased.
But before using the silent period to determine the canon, we should ask a more basic historical question:
Where did Christians get the idea that God was silent for 400 years?
What the Ancient Evidence Actually Says
One of our earliest important witnesses is the Jewish historian Josephus (c. AD 37–100). Writing Against Apion around AD 93–94, Josephus describes twenty-two books that the Jews regarded as possessing unique authority. He then distinguishes them from writings produced after the reign of the Persian king Artaxerxes.
His explanation is important. Later history had indeed been written, Josephus says, but those writings were not regarded with the same authority because there had not been an “exact succession of the prophets” since that time (Against Apion 1.8).
That is significant evidence for an ancient Jewish understanding that something had changed in Israel’s prophetic life.
But notice what Josephus does not say. He does not speak of “400 years of silence.” He does not say that God ceased communicating with His people, that the Holy Spirit became inactive, or that inspired writing became impossible until John the Baptist appeared.
Josephus speaks specifically about the absence of an ἀκριβὴς διαδοχὴ τῶν προφητῶν (akribēs diadochē tōn prophētōn), an “exact succession of the prophets.”
The cessation of a recognized succession of prophets and the cessation of all divine inspiration are not automatically the same claim.
Later Jewish traditions would use stronger language concerning the cessation of prophecy after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Those traditions are important to the history of the idea, but they still do not give us a biblical declaration establishing a divinely ordained “400-year silent period.”
Even the number itself is retrospective. Depending upon how Malachi is dated, roughly four centuries separate the closing era of Old Testament prophecy from John and Jesus. But Scripture never identifies those centuries as a special period of silence comparable to Israel’s forty years in the wilderness or seventy years of exile.
“Four hundred years” is a chronological approximation, not a period of silence defined by Scripture.
The Earliest Christians Complicate the Picture
If the familiar account—Malachi, 400 years without prophets or revelation, then John—had simply been handed down intact from the apostles, we might expect the earliest Christian writers to describe the period that way.
They do not.
Justin Martyr (c. AD 100–165) provides a particularly interesting example. In his Dialogue with Trypho, generally dated to the middle of the second century, around AD 155–160, Justin argues that the Jewish people had “prophets in succession until John” (Dialogue 52). He goes even further, saying that “there never failed to be a prophet among you” until the appearance of Christ.
In the preceding chapter, Justin places the decisive cessation after John, arguing that there were no more prophets in the Jewish nation after him (Dialogue 51).
Justin’s purpose is apologetic, and we should not turn his argument into more than it is. He does not prove that the prophetic office continued uninterrupted in precisely the same form from Malachi through John.
But historically his testimony is extremely important. One of our earliest Christian witnesses was plainly not operating with the later formula of Malachi followed by four centuries without prophets followed by John.
The familiar modern account was therefore not the only way early Christians understood this history.
Augustine: Prophetic Silence Did Not Necessarily Mean Scriptural Silence
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) gives us perhaps the clearest example of why prophetic succession and biblical inspiration should not simply be treated as synonyms.
In The City of God, written between AD 413 and 426, Augustine says that after the postexilic prophets Malachi, Haggai, and Zechariah, together with Ezra, the Jews “had no prophets down to the time of the Saviour’s advent” except those appearing when Christ’s birth was approaching (City of God 17.24). He then names Zechariah, Elizabeth, Simeon, Anna, and finally John.
That sounds much closer to the later tradition of prophetic silence.
Yet Augustine simultaneously received a broader collection of books as canonical Scripture.
In On Christian Doctrine 2.8, composed initially around AD 397 and completed later, Augustine explicitly discusses the “canonical Scriptures” and includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and two books of Maccabees among them. In The City of God 18.36, he acknowledges the distinction even more clearly: the books of Maccabees, he says, were regarded as canonical “not by the Jews, but by the Church.”
That combination is enormously important.
Augustine could believe that Israel’s recognized prophetic succession had ceased while simultaneously believing that books associated with this broader period belonged to the Christian canon.
For Augustine, the prophets could be silent while Scripture was not.
That sentence is a summary of Augustine’s position, not a quotation from him. Nor does Augustine settle the canon question simply by holding that position. What he demonstrates historically is narrower and extremely important: an early Christian could affirm a cessation of Israel’s prophets without concluding that God could produce no canonical Scripture during the broader period.
The two propositions were not identical.
Jerome and the “Hebrew Truth”
Augustine’s contemporary Jerome (c. AD 347–420) represents another major development.
Beginning around AD 390, Jerome increasingly defended translating the Old Testament from Hebrew rather than relying primarily upon the Septuagint, the ancient Greek Scriptures widely used throughout the early Church. He appealed repeatedly to the Hebraica veritas—the “Hebrew truth.”
In his Prologus Galeatus, or “Helmeted Preface,” written around AD 391–392, Jerome enumerated the books of the Hebrew canon and said that material outside that collection should be placed among the apocrypha. He specifically distinguished Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit from the Hebrew canon; elsewhere he made similar distinctions concerning Maccabees.
Jerome’s approach was significant precisely because it challenged the traditional position of the Septuagint within much of the Church.
But we should be fair to Jerome. There is no good evidence that Jerome invented the doctrine of the “400 silent years.” His significance here is canonical rather than chronological. His Hebraica veritas supplied Western Christianity with an enormously influential precedent for defining the Christian Old Testament according to the shorter Hebrew collection rather than simply following the broader Greek Christian tradition.
Augustine took a different position. Eastern Christianity likewise continued in a fundamentally Septuagintal tradition.
Those different trajectories would eventually matter greatly for how Christians imagined the centuries before Christ.
The Christian East and the Supposed Biblical Void
The Eastern Orthodox tradition provides an important historical control because its Old Testament remained fundamentally shaped by the Septuagint. To this day, Orthodox Christianity receives a longer Old Testament containing books such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and Maccabees.
For that tradition, the centuries commonly labeled “intertestamental” never required a canon in which those centuries constituted an empty space with no potentially inspired biblical literature.
Even the physical arrangement of ancient Christian Bibles complicates the mental picture familiar to modern Protestants.
Codex Vaticanus, the great fourth-century Greek biblical manuscript, does not end its Old Testament sequence with Malachi immediately before the New Testament. Its Twelve Minor Prophets conclude with Malachi, but they are followed by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, the Epistle of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The manuscript also contains Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit elsewhere within its Old Testament collection.
In other words:
Malachi → blank page → Matthew is not a divinely revealed arrangement of Scripture.
That may seem obvious, but the physical architecture of a Bible can profoundly shape the way its readers imagine biblical history. A modern Protestant reader reaches Malachi, turns the page, and encounters Matthew. The book itself seems to display a great empty space.
Ancient Christian Bibles did not necessarily tell the story visually in that way.
The Reformation Makes the Boundary More Visible
The canonical distinction became much sharper during the Reformation.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) did not simply remove the disputed books from his Bible. In the complete 1534 Luther Bible, they were gathered into a separate section labeled Apocrypha. The heading famously described them as books “not held equal to Holy Scripture” but nevertheless “useful and good to read.”
That distinction matters because it changed the physical and conceptual architecture of the Bible:
Old Testament → Apocrypha → New Testament.
The books had not disappeared, but they had been separated from the Protestant Old Testament proper and gathered into an intermediate category.
In subsequent Protestant history, many Bibles eventually omitted the Apocrypha altogether. The ordinary Protestant reader increasingly inherited a Bible in which Malachi ended the Old Testament and Matthew immediately began the New.
We should resist the temptation to reverse-engineer the history. We cannot demonstrate that separating or eventually removing the Apocrypha caused Christians to invent the doctrine of the 400 silent years. The development was more complicated than that.
But the developments certainly fit naturally together. A shorter Hebrew-based canon, the separation and eventual disappearance of the Deuterocanonical books from many Protestant Bibles, and the visual transition from Malachi directly to Matthew all made the conception of an empty period easier to imagine.
At roughly the same stage of Christian history, the language used to describe that period also becomes noticeably stronger.
From “A Kind of Silence” to Four Hundred Years
John Calvin (1509–1564) provides an important point along that development.
In his sixteenth-century commentary on Malachi 4, Calvin says that before Christ there was “a kind of silence on the part of God,” explaining that God did not send prophets “for a time.” Calvin connects this with Malachi’s command to remember the Law of Moses: during the absence of prophets, Israel was to cling to what God had already revealed.
That is recognizably closer to later Protestant language.
Yet Calvin speaks of “a kind of silence.” He does not give us the fully developed popular expression “the 400 silent years.”
By the seventeenth century, however, we can document the four-hundred-year formulation explicitly.
Matthew Poole (1624–1679), whose English biblical annotations were published posthumously beginning in 1683, comments on Malachi 4:5:
“Though the spirit of prophecy cease for four hundred years…”
At the expiration of those years, Poole says, the Elijah-like messenger would appear in John the Baptist.
That is an important marker in the historical trail. We should not claim that Poole invented the idea or that nobody expressed it before him. Our surviving evidence does not justify that conclusion. But by the late seventeenth century we can clearly document Protestant interpretation explicitly describing the spirit of prophecy as ceasing for four hundred years.
The formulation persisted.
John Wesley (1703–1791) wrote in his eighteenth-century Explanatory Notes on Malachi 4:5:
“Though the spirit of prophecy cease for four hundred years…”
Again the period between Malachi and John is explicitly defined as four centuries in which the prophetic Spirit had ceased.
By the nineteenth century the terminology had become even more direct. The influential Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, first published in the nineteenth century, states in its comments on Malachi 4:
“After Malachi there was a silence of four hundred years.”
Now we have arrived at language immediately recognizable to generations of Protestant Christians.
When Prophetic Silence Becomes the Cessation of Inspiration
The development becomes especially clear in the early twentieth century.
In 1914, American Bible teacher H. A. Ironside (1876–1951) published a book whose title left nothing ambiguous: The Four Hundred Silent Years.
In its preface, Ironside describes the period as extending from the time:
“when the voice of inspiration ceased”
until the announcement of the Messiah’s advent.
Later in the book he makes the claim still more explicit: “The voice of inspiration had ceased” and was not heard again until the coming of Christ.
This is considerably stronger than Josephus.
Josephus had spoken of the absence of an exact succession of prophets. Augustine could recognize an absence of Jewish prophets while receiving a broader canon. Calvin spoke of “a kind of silence.” Poole and Wesley spoke explicitly of the spirit of prophecy ceasing for four hundred years. Nineteenth-century Protestant commentary could simply call the period “a silence of four hundred years.” And Ironside could describe it as the period during which “the voice of inspiration ceased.”
These statements are historically related, but they are not identical.
A tradition concerning the cessation of Israel’s recognized prophetic succession had gradually developed, within parts of Protestant interpretation, into the much broader proposition:
Malachi → inspiration ceases → approximately 400 silent years → New Testament revelation begins.
The first proposition has genuine ancient historical support.
The complete formulation is much harder to establish either from Scripture itself or from the earliest Christian evidence.
What Does “Intertestamental” Actually Mean?
None of this means the word intertestamental is useless. Historians need some convenient way to describe the centuries connecting the Persian-period biblical world with the Roman world into which Jesus was born.
And those centuries were anything but uneventful.
Alexander the Great transformed the eastern Mediterranean. Greek language and culture spread throughout the region. Jewish Scriptures were translated into Greek, producing the Septuagint that would become enormously important to early Christianity. Judea passed through competing empires. Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the Jerusalem Temple. The Maccabean revolt followed, leading to the Temple’s rededication and eventually the Hasmonean dynasty. Rome entered Judea. Pharisees, Sadducees, and other Jewish movements emerged within this changing political and religious world.
By the time we reach Matthew, the political, linguistic, and religious landscape of Judaism has been transformed.
The New Testament assumes that world rather than stopping to explain how it came into existence.
John, for example, tells us that Jesus was in Jerusalem during the Feast of Dedication—Hanukkah (John 10:22), a feast originating in the Maccabean rededication of the Temple.
So “intertestamental” can function perfectly well as a chronological convenience.
The problem begins when the label becomes theological—when “between the Testaments” quietly comes to mean a divinely ordained period in which God gave no inspired Scripture.
Scripture itself never makes that equation.
And for Christians whose Old Testament continued to contain literature associated with these centuries, the period was never simply an empty biblical wasteland between Malachi and Matthew.
The Circular Problem
This brings us to the reason this history matters.
The “400 silent years” are sometimes used as evidence against the Deuterocanonical books:
These books cannot be inspired because they were written during the centuries when inspiration had ceased.
But how do we establish that inspiration had ceased?
If the answer is that there are no inspired books between Malachi and the New Testament, we have simply assumed the very conclusion we are attempting to prove.
Consider the logic:
Why aren’t these books inspired?
Because they were written during the 400 years when there was no inspired Scripture.
How do we know there was no inspired Scripture during those 400 years?
Because none of the books written during those centuries are inspired.
The argument has gone in a circle.
None of this proves that Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Maccabees, or any other disputed book belongs in the canon. That question must be decided from its own historical, textual, and theological evidence.
The point here is narrower but important.
The “400 silent years” cannot serve as independent evidence against these books if the existence of the silent period already depends upon excluding these books from inspired Scripture.
The canon must help us determine whether these centuries contained inspired Scripture. We cannot first assume that they contained none and then use that assumption to determine the canon.
So, Were There Really 400 Years of Silence?
The answer depends entirely upon what we mean by silence.
If we mean that something significant changed in Israel’s recognized prophetic life, yes, there is ancient evidence for that. Josephus is an important witness, and later Jewish and Christian traditions likewise recognized some form of cessation or disruption in the classical prophetic succession.
But if we mean that God completely stopped speaking, the Holy Spirit ceased inspiring Scripture, and nothing written during those centuries could possibly have been inspired, that is a much larger proposition.
And we should not treat it as though the Bible plainly says it.
Scripture never announces a 400-year suspension of inspiration. Justin Martyr does not fit neatly into the familiar Malachi-to-John model. Augustine could recognize a cessation of Israel’s prophets while simultaneously receiving a broader Christian canon. Jerome’s preference for the Hebrew canon provided an influential alternative trajectory. Eastern Christianity retained a Septuagintal Old Testament containing books associated with these centuries. After the Reformation, language about divine silence becomes increasingly explicit until Protestant commentators eventually speak straightforwardly of four centuries without the prophetic Spirit and, ultimately, of the cessation of inspiration itself.
That history does not settle the canon debate.
It does something more modest, but still important: it prevents a later theological formulation from being mistaken for something Scripture explicitly teaches.
There may indeed have been centuries without the recognized succession of Israel’s classical prophets. There was certainly an extraordinary expectation that God would act decisively again, and that expectation makes the arrival of John the Baptist all the more dramatic.
But that is not quite the same thing as saying God was silent for 400 years.
Perhaps, then, the question Christians should ask is not, “What happened during the 400 years when God stopped speaking?”
Perhaps we should begin one step earlier:
Where does Scripture ever say that He did?
