400 Years of Silence?

[The Lord Is There]

The other day while listening to the radio, I heard a well-known pastor refer to the time between the two Testaments as "400 years of silence" on the part of God. He then proceeded to build off of that in his sermon. :scratch Now I know the Apocryphal books were written during that time, but I find it hard to believe God did not interact with people in any meaningful way during that time period. Maybe He really was silent...? But I suppose it's hard to tell because we are currently in an age of Grace, and although there are no new "revelations" (additions to Scripture), it's pretty easy to see God at work in people's lives.

How have others explained this time period and it's lack of Scripture?

[House of Light]

Yes, there were 400 years of silence.

Amos 8:11-12 tells us, thats God's people commanded his prophets not to phrophesy. And Zechariah 7:11-12 tells us that the hearts of God's people turned hard and that they would not listen. This was the reason God had stopped "talking" to his people.

We need to remember that one of the things that set God's people apart was their "hearing" from the Lord. The book of Malachi was dated between 433-400 BC.....and God had put his people on a famine....not of food and water, but of hearing his word.

Just think....the next time the people actually hear from God directly(not counting messages from Gabriel to Mary and Elizabeth), was from a baby wailing in a manger.

[Obadiah]

Not sure how many people over the centuries have felt compelled to offer an explanation. If God wants to issue verbal revelations, He can; if He doesn't want to, He doesn't have to.

One thing I can say is that the rabbis strongly agree that the phenomenon of prophecy ceased with the prophets who prophesied immediately after the exile. "When Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel" (Sotah 48b; when the rabbis speak of the Holy Spirit, they mean specifically the spirit of prophecy). Subsequent to the departure of prophecy, God continued to communicate, according to the rabbis, through something called the Bat Qol ('echo'), in which on rare occasions God would speak audibly from heaven. There are a number of incidents in the gospels which fit the description of a Bat Qol, such as the voice from heaven at Jesus' anointing.

[Robbinson]

Israel was also in exhile and bondage in Egypt for 400 years - an interesting paralell.