Why "silent"? Because the last of the Hebrew prophets had spoken. Malachi ends the Old Testament looking forward, promising that God will "send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD" (Malachi 4:5–6), and then the prophetic voice falls quiet for centuries. The New Testament itself marks the gap: Jesus says "all the prophets and the law prophesied until John" (Matthew 11:13; compare Luke 16:16), treating the long intertestamental stretch as the pause before the story resumes. So the period is "silent" only in the narrow sense that Protestants count no inspired book within it; in plain history it is one of the most eventful chapters the Jewish people ever lived. The Jews who greet Jesus in the Gospels, synagogues, scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, a rebuilt temple, a hunger for the Messiah, a hatred of foreign rule, were all shaped in these four hundred years.
Between the Testaments
The four hundred "silent" years
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Every cited verse, in full. Tap any reference to open it in the reader.
- Malachi 4:5bsb
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome Day of the LORD.
- Malachi 4:6bsb
And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. Otherwise, I will come and strike the land with a curse.”
- Matthew 11:13bsb
For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John.
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