Social conditions of the Jews during the days before the Birth of Jesus

THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE JEWISH NATION

DURING THE DAYS OF THE BIRTH OF JESUS

“There is no one righteous, not even one;

there is no one who understands,

no one who seeks God.

All have turned away,

they have together become worthless;

there is no one who does good

not even one.

Their throats are open graves;

their tongues practice deceit.

The poison of vipers is on their lips.

Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.

Their feet are swift to shed blood;

ruin and misery mark their ways,

and the way of peace they do not know.

There is no fear of God before their eyes”.

Infallibility means Omnipotence to carry on any design and Omniscience to see the move of anybody else. It is from this standing point that God speaks as a Prophet and portraits for the future the social conditions of the Jews during the days immediately before Christ. When God wrote the above lines He was not condemning the Jews to be worthless people, He was seeing the effects of the moves of His enemy upon the Jewish Nation.

To seek the root of those social conditions of the Jews during the life time of Jesus we could head back as far as the Fall of the First Father of the Jewish Nation. But God spoke long time after that and in consequence we should stick to His vision from that moment onward. To see that what He saw and made Him talk the way He did we have to land in the days of Antiochus III and remember his words about the Jews:

“I am persuaded that they will be well disposed guardians of our possessions, because of their piety toward God, and because my predecessors have been witnesses to them that they are faithful, and do with promptness whatever they are required to perform. You shall give every one of their families a place for building a house, for planting a vineyard, and for raising grain. They shall pay no taxes on their fruits for ten years”.

Yes, the Jews before the days of Judas the Maccabee (165-161 BC) were far away from the picture God lined in His above Vision. It is for us to see in the days of the Maccabees the beginning of the Vision whose end would put on the scene that worthless generation who dared to put their hand on the Son of God.

The Harvest of Good Men began immediately after Antiochus III. The first harvester was Antiochus IV. How many good men were killed before the rising of Judas, and how many good men were lost during the days of Judas the Maccabee? The 800 hundred and one with which massacre ended the glorious war of the hero it was the cherry of the pie.

To give a number of the good men that fell in the line of duty during the campaigns of Judas would be an absurd. No less than will it be to draw a number about the myriads of good men that followed the road to glory in the days of Jonathan (161-143 BC). The suite did not rest for long in the womb, and Jonathan gone, another hero took his place, and as Simon (143-135 BC) was walking the path to the tomb there were by the thousands those who had no fear to follow the man to the doors of Heaven. The number? Well, God only knows. We can guess that to win over an empire, even if the imperial Seleucids were falling away before the Romans, and because they were fighting for survival the Seleucid were most wild, the Jews had to put on the line of duty many good men from all over the World of the Dispersion. And to think contrariously it is to surrender intelligence and to choose to be a fool. We will get back to this point later on.

But if the world thought that with the victory of the Maccabees the harvest of good men was over, the world was wrong. There is an evil worst than war, and it is called Civil War. John Hyrcanus (135-105 BC) did not stop the harvest of good men among the Jews, though in this occasion the line of duty had to be more with the conquest of the heritage of Israel. The real civil war harvest did start with Alexander Jannaeus, king of the Jews (105-76 BC). In one single day, among hundreds of other days equal to it, Alexander killed six thousand good men. It is not of my intention to follow the history of Alexander, which you my read by opening A HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE 175 BC-70 AD, By SHAILER MATHEWS, among other many books to find around for free in the web. Out of the reading you will agreed with me that the harvest of good men among the Jews during the days of Alexander topped any number we could sign for.

After the Jewish Civil War and during the reign of the Good Old Queen Salome (76-66 BC) the harvest of god men kept going on, though in a different way. Then came the struggle of the Last of the Asmoneans against the all-powerful Pompey. Soon after the Roman Civil War spread its net upon the Middle East, and there were many petty battles to be fought. With the victory of the great Julius Caesar the Jews won a Protector, but by his death they won the worst of evils : an Arab-Palestinian sit of the throne of Jerusalem! From the year 40 BC to the Birth of Jesus, Herod the First began the larger harvest of good men ever undertaken on Jewish soil; not even the wicked Antiochus the Fourth did raze so many lives as the son of Antipater the Idumean did in his forty years of tyranny.

With the murder of Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, that took place under the doors of the Temple, the last of the good men among the Jews was gone. Simon and Joseph cannot be set on the list, because Simon was too old to do good or evil, and Joseph flew away to Egypt immediately after the death of Zacharias. Under Archelaus (sometime between 4 BC-6 AD) the massacre of the Jews kept going on, but that was more a bleeding that a massacre as his father understood this word. Thus when Joseph returned from Egypt to Judea the social condition of the land of the Jews we can picture it out in the way of the Prophet: