Hank Smith:                      00:00:00             Coming up in this episode on followHIM.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:00:03             We look at these scriptures, we look at these figures, and we want them to be perfect. But the whole purpose of this gospel is no one can be perfect because if we’re perfect, then how can God show us his great work through us? Because God is the only one that is perfect. He is the one that we’re striving to be.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:24             Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with John Bytheway, who is a ready scribe in the law of Moses. John, I read that in Ezra chapter seven, verse six, and I thought, that’s John. John is a ready scribe in the law of Moses. I’ve seen you write this year more than ever before. You’ve been taking notes.

John Bytheway:               00:00:49             My Old Testament is getting filled up with a lot of notes from a lot of scholars. I’m ready, willing, and two out of three ain’t bad.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:56             Yeah. Did you know, John, I think that a ready scribe is actually an expert in the law of Moses. The more you write, the more expertise you get. I think you could be an expert at this point.

John Bytheway:               00:01:09             Oh, I don’t know, but I’ll take the compliment as a goal to work on.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:13             The Old Testament can be difficult to understand and we have the right person to explain it to us. John, we are joined today by our first time guest, Dr. Christina Olson. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming on followHIM.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:01:27             Thank you for having me. Honored to be here.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:30             This is going to be so much fun. John, when you think of Ezra and Nehemiah, now if you had asked me this in high school, I would’ve said, bless you. What Nehemiah? I don’t know what that is. Through the years, we’ve come to understand a little bit more about these books. What comes to mind when you think of them?

John Bytheway:               00:01:48             How central the temple was. It always seemed to be about building or rebuilding. And I think had I suddenly had a chance to go back to Israel, I was like, let’s go to the beach. Let’s go to Caesaria, Maritima, right? What is their thing? We got to build the temple.

Hank Smith:                      00:02:05             Yeah. I love it. Christina, as you’ve been preparing, what do you want to do today? What are you looking forward to?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:02:10             First of all, coming off that comment is just introducing what is Ezra Nehemiah? This is a text where many people probably don’t read very often. When I mentioned to my husband that I’m doing this one, he’s like, I don’t quite know what’s in there. What’s actually in Ezra Nehemiah? So he was my guinea pig. It’s not a really common, easy book to read. Literarily, it’s really confusing. Historically, it’s really confusing. It’s in historical books, but it’s not history the way we want to tell history. One of my biggest goals for today is really just to lay down the context. Context is very important as an anthropologist, archeologist, and scholar. To me, context gives you probably half the battle in reading scripture. Where are they writing? What time are they writing? What’s going on that influences how they’re writing and what they’re focusing on? Really talking about the context.

                                           00:02:58             And then there’s a couple really strong themes in Ezra Nehemiah, which again, if you look at big picture, are really helpful to understand. Ezra Nehemiah is a bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament. A time period we kind of forget where you read the Old Testament and you jump to the New Testament and you’re like, what’s in between? There’s actually a lot that happened between these time periods. It’s pretty pivotal actually, especially for setting up the New Testament. I’ve taught New Testament a couple times at BYU and this is where I start. If you want to understand the New Testament, you need to understand everything that happened before that set the stage. But for me, Ezra Nehemiah is an awesome text to show us where did we get from one point to the next, from the kings to the time of Jesus Christ and where’s that bridge between them? And Ezra Nehemiah gives us that.

Hank Smith:                      00:03:46             You know, I think you are right on there. When I teach Isaiah, I don’t teach Ezra and Nehemiah very much, but you’re right, context is half the battle. If they just know who he’s talking about, when he’s talking, all of a sudden, oh, oh, I get it now. I’m excited to learn the context of these books. John, now Christina, this is her first time joining us. She’s out in Waco, Texas. We haven’t met her except for today, but who is this woman?

John Bytheway:               00:04:15             Hank, when I read Christina’s bio, I was like, oh, oh, wow. Oh, oh, wow. So have your oh wows ready here. Christina has a bachelor’s from BYU in ancient near Eastern studies. A master’s from Eastern Carolina University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Archeology. Recently received her PhD in religion, Old Testament from Baylor University where she is. She served a mission in Russia and Kazakhstan and was part of the piloting efforts to start having missionaries learn Kazakh alongside Russian. She’s an archeologist and a biblical scholar. She has worked on archeological projects in Colorado, Italy, and Israel. When have you said those three places altogether, including seven years at the site of Telesafe, Gath, Israel. She was recently awarded a four-month research fellowship of the Albright Institute of Archeology in Jerusalem, wow, to finish her first book based upon her dissertation. She currently lives in Waco with her husband, Peter and their two very active boys. What a background. This is great. We’re excited to hear from you and welcome to followHIM.

Hank Smith:                      00:05:31             John, sometimes when I hear these bios, I think, what have I done with my life? John, I’m old enough to be Christina’s seminary teacher. She’s taken the fast track through her education. This is amazing. Christina, tell me what it’s like to be a young mother writing a dissertation.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:05:46             Yeah, I started my doctorate program with a six-week-old, actually, and was very, very lucky that the day before I started, he slept through the night. And from there on, he slept, which really saved me those first couple years. No, it’s been crazy, but it’s been fun, too, to have them along. When we went to Italy, I took my husband and a son and I was pregnant with my second. So they just came on the journey. Fun opportunity to do that with a family.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:12             That’s fantastic. John and I both have boys in our house so we know a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, I think you said you have. We know about that life. That’s something at least I can add to my bio as well. I’ve had boys in my home. And that’s why we don’t buy brand new stuff.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:06:28             Active was my very nice term for…

Hank Smith:                      00:06:32             Yeah. Active. That’s fantastic.

John Bytheway:               00:06:34             Just check out the baseboards. That’s all you need to know. Look at the baseboards and you’ll know how active our children have been.

Hank Smith:                      00:06:42             Recently, both of you, we moved not too far away, just about 20 minutes. But in moving, we had to take down a bunch of posters in boys’ rooms and found holes in the wall that I did not know existed. I asked my sons about that and they would, oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s when we were wrestling and we just put a poster up over it. Okay, thanks, guys. Let’s read from the Come, Follow Me manual. And then Christina, John and I are ready to learn. I really want to understand these books, but the title of the lesson this week is I Am Doing a Great Work.

                                           00:07:20             The Jewish people had been captives in Babylon for about 70 years. They had lost Jerusalem and the temple and many had forgotten their commitment to God’s law, but God had not forgotten them. In fact, he had declared through his prophet, I will visit you and perform my good word towards you, in causing you to return. True to this prophecy, the Lord made a way for his people to return both to Jerusalem and more importantly, to their covenants. And he raised up servants who accomplished a great work. A governor named Zerubbabel oversaw the rebuilding of the Lord’s house. Ezra, a priest and scribe, helped the people turn their hearts back to God’s law and Nehemiah led the rebuilding of the protective walls around Jerusalem. They met opposition, but they also got help from unexpected sources. Their experiences can inform and inspire ours because we too are doing a great work. And like theirs, our work has much to do with the house of the Lord, the law of the Lord, and the spiritual protection we find in Him. What a great way to start. That even gives us a little bit of the context you were talking about. Christina how do you want to start? What should we do next?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:08:25             To start is just talking about the names of Ezra Nehemiah. Ezra comes from the root word Ezer. You might have heard that word a few times, especially if you go back to your Genesis account. We have the word Ezer kenegdo of Eve. Ezer means help. Scholars think Ezra might be kind of a shortened, a nickname form, Ezrayahu, which is literally God is my, or Yahweh, is my help. So off the bat, we have the name of Ezer, who is God is helping us. This is one of the themes of Ezra Nehemiah. God is helping us. And then you get to Nehemiah that comes from the root word nehem, which means comfort. The -iah at the end is theaphoric, the God name. So God is our comfort. So off the bat, we get the story about God being our help and our comfort, which is what you see throughout the whole book. The story of God helping his people, bringing comfort back to his people who had lost so much and had that despair and destruction in their history.

Hank Smith:                      00:09:24             Help and comfort. I think John means restroom. So that’s excellent.

John Bytheway:               00:09:32             Yeah, my parents should have run the etymology down on that one first, shouldn’t they?

Hank Smith:                      00:09:39             Sorry, you’re going to have to get used to our jokes, Christina, along the way.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:09:42              No, it’s good. I’ll take it.

Hank Smith:                      00:09:45             Now, Christina, I want to test my knowledge here. Here’s what I remember so far from what we’ve read. We had the kingdom of Israel. Then they decided they wanted kings. We went Saul, David, Solomon. Then the kingdom broke in half. Northern Kingdom of Israel, Southern Kingdom of Judah. The Northern Kingdom is destroyed or taken by Assyria. Hundred and something years later, the Southern kingdom is taken by Babylon. A lot of these Jews, especially the royalty, the upper class are taken to Babylon. And then King Cyrus, who’s not an Israelite, maybe he saw himself as a liberator. I’m freeing you from Babylon. Go back to Jerusalem. Go rebuild your city. How did I do?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:10:32             Yeah, that’s, in a nutshell. But yeah, I want to get a little more specific to kind of set the scene for what we’re going to talk about in Ezra Nehemiah and what the land looks like as well to get more into what they’re thinking or feeling. So yes, at the end of the kings, Babylonians came in. They tried to rebel a few times. Babylonians ended up destroying the city. When we read the text, the biblical text, it’s written by Judeans. It’s written by those who have that history of kingdom of Judah. It’s written from their perspective, their biases and influences and memory. They’ll talk about certain things in a way that maybe is a little more favorable to them or they remember in a certain way. So they talk about… There’s this grand exodus, this deportation. There’s actually three different deportation of groups of people, during the time of the Babylonians.

                                           00:11:22             And then we have the destruction of the temple in 586, the destruction of the city. It’s this huge big destruction. But actually in the archeological record, they’ve learned a lot more about Jerusalem in recent years about the archeology of Jerusalem during this time, during the Babylonian, and especially Persian periods, to kind of see what was going on during this time where there’s an exile, people are gone. There’s this idea of an empty land that the Bible will refer to. It wasn’t quite so empty. You talked about only those elites were taken away. You see in the city in the destruction layers of the time of the Babylonian destruction, not actually everything was destroyed. There was very distinct spotted destruction. The temple, some of the bigger houses. So you see a very strategic destruction. And then you see later on, there wasn’t really a complete abandonment of the city. You see people starting to build even pretty recently after that destruction, people build onto these destroyed ruins. From the Persian period on, they’re living in the ruins of the city of Jerusalem.

Hank Smith:                      00:12:28             That’s fascinating because isn’t that right where Lehi leaves Jerusalem and he says, look, Jerusalem’s going to be destroyed. You’re saying the archeological record shows it was destroyed, but it was strategically destroyed by Babylon.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:12:41             Mm-hmm.

Hank Smith:                      00:12:42             Interesting. I like that.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:12:44             And especially when you think about, I mean, this is very part and parcel of conquering narratives throughout the ancient years. When powers come in to destroy, they’re going to destroy the main centers of power. They’re going to destroy the temple, the palace, the administrative buildings. And I’ll talk about this later with Nehemiah. They’re going to often pull out bones of the tombs. And so you’re taking away people’s inheritance or claims to the land. Other stories, they salt the earth and so you’re destroying the economy. And then you get, you’re deporting people, you’re destroying their society. So it’s a very strategic destruction of a community of a nation in this kingdom. And that’s what the kingdom of Judah had. It was a very strategic wholesale destruction. It is a wholesale destruction, even though on the personal level, there are still some people living around there. Probably a lot of people related to the temple as we get later into the text. A lot of these are personnel of the temple that are still around this destroyed temple because it’s still sacred site, even though it’s been destroyed. We still have the ruins of the temple. And possibly we have some evidence of pilgrimage to the temple even before it was rebuilt. So it remains an important site and people are still around the temple there and probably in outlying areas.

Hank Smith:                      00:13:59             How heartbreaking to live… Here comes Babylon. They come in, they destroy the temple, and now you’re left looking at what once was.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:14:08             Yeah. A lot of the texts that we get in this, on the Old Testament, a lot of the final form of even the Old Testament itself, we’re realizing more and more that these texts were written during this time period. In Jerusalem and then a few of the exiles that are outside the land, like Ezekiel, they’re writing this period. But they’re really writing even about the history of them when all around them is the ruin. There’s the tombs of the kings, the tombs of their families, and there’s destruction as they’re writing these texts. So it’s a very strong part of their memory. Even as we get into Ezra Nehemiah, they’re building a community, but it’s still a community within ruins. They do eventually build another temple. The temple of Zerubbabel in 515. Temple is destroyed 586. By 515, they finally rebuild a temple. Definitely not to the extent that it had been before. Smaller temple personnel. This whole story, Ezra Nehemiah, is a lot of this combination of sorrow for the past as well as hope for the future. It’s these mixed emotions throughout the whole text that you see Ezra Nehemiah and then with other prophetic books as you’ll talk about, I’m sure later and read more with the other prophets. But it’s this mix. Worship is a mix of sorrow and joy and all these feelings are okay. They’re available.

Hank Smith:                      00:15:25             I occasionally hear from my scholarly friends things like first temple period and second temple period. The first temple period goes from Solomon to Babylon, I guess. And second temple period basically starts around these books, right? Around that time? And goes all the way to Jesus.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:15:42             Yeah. So as historians, we love to categorize, right? We have to set things up straight. Yeah, so you have different periods of time and who’s in control. So you have the Babylonian period, the Persian period, which is when the king conquered the known ancient near Eastern world in 539. The Persian period goes all the way until about 332 with Alexander the Great, where you have the Hellenistic period. And then you have another period called the Hasmonean Period. This is around 140-ish to 37. And this is when we kind of get this little resurgence of Judean independence with the Maccabees. This is where that story of Hanukkah comes from. And then you get to the Roman period with the time of Jesus. During this, if you look now towards the temple in that timeline, you have the destruction in 586 of that first temple of Solomon.

                                           00:16:32             And then 515, it finally is finished. It’s completed. We’ll see in Ezra Nehemiah. They do start the temple in 538 when they first return, but it’s not finished until 515. This marks the start of the second temple period, like the early second temple period. By the time we get to Jesus Christ, Herod has taken the temple observable, made it grander, expanded the foundations. We usually call that the late second temple period. And that’s how they can divide the time between them.

Hank Smith:                      00:17:02             John, we are becoming ready scribes here. I guess.

John Bytheway:               00:17:08             Ready or not. Here we scribe.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:17:11             I mean, that’s another aspect of the ancient world. This idea of memory and this perpetuating of sacred sights. Once a place is holy, it continues to be holy. And it goes back to getting that memory of the holiness and respecting that, what is this holy place and what does it mean for us? And that goes into the temple building account we’re going to get with Ezra, the importance of why. Why do we need to even build a temple here? We’ve been worshiping outside the land for this long. We’ve already starting to figure out we can worship without a temple. Many of them have this need to come back to the temple, to worship at this site, to rebuild it, to bring God’s presence back to his original, the sacred site that they know and they remember.

Hank Smith:                      00:17:54             This is kind of a silly similarity, but it worked for me. Right when the church was tearing down the Provo Temple to rebuild it now, it’s well on its way to being rebuilt, but I went over just as they were tearing it down, watching those machines grab big chunks of the building and pull it off. Even that kind of hurt my heart. I was like, oh, there’s the locker room right here right there. I see it. And I thought, oh man, this would be a difficult thing to watch a temple destroyed by a different country, by your enemies. Also, I like this lesson, Christina, because as Latter-day Saints, we often know the history up until Lehi. Oh, we’ll say, oh, I know the history all the way to Lehi. And then we go away with Lehi and his family. Then we come back for the four gospels. We’re like, when we left, Babylon was about to destroy this. And now one thing led to another and Rome’s in charge. And we just move on. It’s nice to say, all right, let’s let Lehi and his family leave and we’ll stay here and watch what happens here. It’s new ground for a lot of us.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:19:00             Yeah, going back to what I talked about being this bridge between the two Testaments, it really goes back to idea of the temple being the house or the presence of God. This is a very common ancient Near Eastern principle, this idea that if you have a temple, your deity is housed there. If it’s destroyed, it means that one deity let it be destroyed because your God is powerful. It’s not going to happen unless he lets it happen. And then once it’s destroyed, His presence is gone, essentially. The idea that when they go to exile, again, it’s this idea that where’s our God? How do we worship Him? How do we find Him? And these are the questions that set up what kind of Judaism looks like at the time of Jesus Christ. They’re still asking these questions. They’re still asking, where’s God? How are we worshiping Him?

                                           00:19:51             We get the different sects. The Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Zealots, all these different Jewish groups. They arise from these questions of how do we relate to our God now that there’s not a temple? We don’t have our king who is the mediator between God and us. Well, eventually, we get a high priest, but we had, for a while they lost their high priests who were, again, were those connections to God. Before this time period in Ezra Nehemiah, religion and that worship of God was very much centered on your king and your priests. And it trickled down to the people, but it really rested on the king and that authority. What we’re going to see in Ezra Nehemiah is what’s called this democratization of religion, of worship. It really starts to become a personal aspect for the people. It’s now their job. The king is no longer there. It’s not his responsibility to be righteous. He doesn’t affect us. We actually have to be the ones that are righteous and what we do affects the consequences.

Hank Smith:                      00:20:52             You’re right. How do you understand the New Testament without knowing all these different groups that Jesus is going to interact with, how do you understand them unless you understand this story?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:21:02             We go back to the promises that we’ve been talking about with the Abrahamic promises. He talked about we’re going to have land. We’re going to have posterity. We’re going to have the priesthood. And they’ve lost all those. People died. We lost our claim, our inheritance. That’s that posterity part. We lost our claim to the land. What do we do now? We lost all these promises. Is God a false God because we don’t have these promises anymore? Are we going to start just believing what these other people are believing as we’re living over here in Babylon? They’ve been dealing with these issues of all these questions. And then when we get to the New Testament, these are the very specific issues that Jesus Christ addressed. They’re saying, who are we? You are children of God. Where’s our kingdom? Where’s our nation, our people? You’re part of the kingdom of God. Where’s our land? How do we worship? And he shows them. So he’s really answering these questions that came up during this time of being lost.

Hank Smith:                      00:21:58             I’m trying to imagine what this would be like because obviously some of these people are born in Babylon. They’ve never even been to Jerusalem. They’re like go home. And they’re like, this is my home.

John Bytheway:               00:22:10             We have gone through this history of kings not working out very well. I was thinking of this this morning, but we always refer to the kingdom of God. And that’s what you were just saying, Christina. God is supposed to be our king. The mortal kings have not worked out very well. And making alliances with other nations has not worked out very well. Let God be your king, let God be your ally, seems to be kind of a theme of the Old Testament.

Hank Smith:                      00:22:35             I wonder what it would be like to be in Babylon and then to hear that Cyrus is coming and then to hear, okay, go home. I wonder if that’s a shock. Really? We can go home. Yep. Go home.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:22:49             If you’re moving from Babylonian control to Persian control, when the Babylonians were in charge, they had a hands-off administration. They went and destroyed, deported everybody. They would place a governor there. We don’t really have any other indication of them doing much within these different lands and these places. They’re just kind of, I left a destruction, you’re there, good luck. When the Persians come with Cyrus in 539, in that first year of his reign, his big edict is, okay, now everybody who is displaced, go home. All the vessels that were taken from your temples, take back with you. It’s an awesome thing, but it’s also really politically really smart because he sends people back. And now they’re starting to go back to their lands. There’s more places now that he can get tribute from and taxes. The economy’s building up. They have control. And now these people are grateful to this king, Cyrus, who is letting them go back. So it’s inspired, but also really smart and strategic. That’s how God works through our systems.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:50             With that, Christina, are we ready to jump in?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:23:53             Getting into Ezra Nehemiah, I do want to talk a little bit about that literary context. Now that we’ve got that history behind us, where does Ezra Nehemiah as a text fit in with this history? Ezra Nehemiah itself is a pretty confusing text. There’s probably a reason why not as many people read this as much because it’s hard to read. It’s confusing. When it was finally completed, it was completed as Ezra Nehemiah. There’s a pretty good tradition of these were originally put together, but they’re made up of a lot of different texts. You have a lot of different sources. You have letters, you have official documents and genealogies and a few stories and narratives over here. They’re kind of all just kind of put together with themes behind them as far as following Greek tragedy themes and the way they write history. But then you also have the influence of ancient Near Eastern documents and formats and writing.

                                           00:24:46             So it’s a brilliant way of how all these texts are put together. But it’s not the way probably we as modern community want to see a history made. It’s not giving us a very linear story of this happened and then this happened and this happened. Really, when we want to read the story and we read different parts, we kinda want to think of more in terms of, and also this happened at some point. But I’m bringing the story together and bringing different time periods together in a really more of a theological aspect. The person that put this together really wanted to bring out a story and teach a point about the theology of this community and who God is and what he does for us. So when you’re reading straight through, you’ll get to points where you might stop for a minute and you’re like, wait a minute. I thought I was talking about this one guy and now we’re talking about another guy. And you have to figure out what it’s doing. What is the point of how the story is put together?

Hank Smith:                      00:25:39             Okay. So not only are we getting a translation, we’re getting a translation in King James English and we’re also getting an ancient way of putting a history together. I can see why people might see that as a little daunting. Yeah, I can.

John Bytheway:               00:25:55             So Ezra Nehemiah, because I think I read this, was originally one book. They called it Ezra Nehemiah and now it’s split.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:26:04             Yeah. But it seems to be in its final composition once all these pieces were put together, it was put together as Ezra Nehemiah together. But even that, from there, there’s a lot of different traditions and there’s still compositional confusion. Some people put Ezra Nehemiah because the first two verses are the same as the last two verses in Chronicles. Some people say it used to be Chronicles Ezra Nehemiah. Others push back against that and say, oh, they’re just following the traditions of Chronicles in different, even translations, they’re put in different places. In our most Christian English translations, like we see in the KJV, we have Ezra Nehemiah at the end of the historical books. So it’s ending this history of Chronicles, getting into the end and that destruction and a little bit of that post-exile. And then after that, we get the writings or the wisdom books, literature.

                                           00:26:58             In some of the Hebrew traditions, Ezra Nehemiah is put before Chronicles. It’s put in this context, a book that’s called The Writings. So it’s just this group of different books that are just these writings that are different histories or sayings or Psalms, Proverbs. So it’s included in that in the Hebrew traditions. It’s all over. It goes all over. It’s not like the first five books of the Old Testament that are always together always the same. Even past translators, past canons didn’t quite know what to do with Ezra Nehemiah.

John Bytheway:               00:27:31             It’s kind of a casserole.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:27:33             So we should really love that.

John Bytheway:               00:27:34             Yeah. We do casseroles.

Hank Smith:                      00:27:36             That’s right. We should love it.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:27:39             We do casseroles.

John Bytheway:               00:27:39             There’s some broccoli in there or some potatoes. I’m looking at 2 Chronicles 36 at the last verses. And you’re right. Verse 22 and 23 of 2 Chronicles 36. Our verses one, two, and part of three of Ezra.

Hank Smith:                      00:27:54             Christina, I want to ask you, I can picture a listener at home. They’ve got their scriptures open or maybe they’re driving or something and they’re thinking, man, this seems complicated. Maybe I’d skip it or is this really going to matter to me? Why would you say, all right, the Lord wants us to see these texts. Can you persuade me that the Lord wants me to see these? I bet you can.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:28:16             That’s my goal. So maybe let me know at the end if I’ve persuaded you. It’s a harder one because it’s not going to give you a happy feeling all the time. There’s complicated aspects to it, which I think is actually one reason why we should read it. This idea that being a member of the church, being a follower of God is complicated. There’s good parts to it, bad parts to it. God uses really imperfect people. We’re going to see mistakes that Ezra Nehemiah both make. This really draws me into Ezra Nehemiah and really thinking about community. There’s a lot of us, especially in our global world today. I’m teaching anthropology class right now and we talk a lot about global connections and just new global world where we move around a lot. We’re not centered in our families. My mom told stories about growing up. She actually had double cousins, so they grew up all together with their friends and they had this awesome, cool village of their family around them.

                                           00:29:11             Most of us don’t have that, right? I moved to Waco. I have a few family members on my husband’s side and for a while I had a sister-in-law here, which was awesome, but she’s gone now. So it’s really our family by ourselves. It’s this concept of who is our community? Who do we belong to? How can we find these connections? And a lot of Ezra Nehemiah is talking about how to find these connections, finding these anchor points. Where can you connect when you are so different? So really comes Ezra Nehemiah, big picture. It’s a really important and helpful story for understanding this idea of community and identity and what it really means to figure out your place in God’s gospel.

Hank Smith:                      00:29:55             It’s worth the effort. Christina, I was thinking as you were explaining that perhaps we have listeners who are in a rebuilding phase of their life. Something maybe devastating has happened, a loss of a loved one, a divorce, something where they feel like, wow, I’m picking up the pieces here. Maybe these books can also speak to that.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:30:16             Yeah. I think they can. This whole point of Ezra Nehemiah is to show God has not forgotten us. All these things have happened. You think you’ve lost these promises. You’ve lost some of your connections and this identity, but throughout this whole time, God is our, right, the Ezer and Nechem, He is our help and our comfort. Maybe not always in the way you think it’s going to be or quite look like the same as you think or hope for, but he’s going to be there. He will stay with you and build you up to do that.

Hank Smith:                      00:30:49             Kind of the regrowth after the forest fire. I always find that beautiful to see that green coming up through all that charred wood. Okay, what do you want to do next? Thanks for that, Christina.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:30:59             One through six really is a return story. We don’t actually even get to Ezra yet until chapter seven. So it’s laying down the grounds to this overall, we are now returning to Jerusalem. God through Cyrus, who is the king of Persia, gives that edict saying all these deportees, go back home, go back, rebuild your temples. And this was across the board in the texts I like to say, right? This is just for us, but it was for everybody. Again, a political move, but really beneficial to these people who could go back and very focused on rebuilding a temple. These chapters one through six really follow a pattern of an ancient Eastern literature of a temple building account. So it’s building into these traditions, especially if we think about… I know you’ve talked to some others. I heard you’re talking with Carli. She talked about the oral nature of scripture.

                                           00:31:52             In general, people didn’t know how to read in these time periods. Very, very small percentage actually read the books. They’d be hearing all these stories. If you have these patterns of stories, you know what to look for and what to listen for and what to focus on. So if you’re hearing the story of this return to Jerusalem, you can pick out, ah, this is a temple rebuilding story. So I’m going to know there’s going to be this call to rebuild. It has to be through divine command. You cannot build a temple without God being in control with God telling you, you have to build a temple. This can’t be done just by a king alone. So already they’re starting to see, oh, like, okay, the hand of God is in here. This is a divine story we’re hearing of this return and this rebuilding account. And then there’s several other aspects.

                                           00:32:38             You see this with the Temple of Solomon and with the tabernacle as well, this idea of usually there’s like a history of telling us why, what happened to the temple. It was in ruins. Now we need to rebuild, this call to rebuild. Then you get this acquisition of materials, the laying of the foundation of the temple, certain points along the way that are important to building the temple. And then you get to ceremonies at the end of the final dedication, the final stages, and setting up the personnel of the temple. This rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem follows this pattern. You’ll see aspects within there. But also the cool part about this construction is also the fact that they’ve got these Greek influences too. You also have a bit of this Greek tragedy in here, this drama going on within this temple building. We’re not just building the temple, we’re also contending with these adversaries.

                                           00:33:30             So you’re also starting to root for this community, and caring about them and their wellbeing. Want to move even to verses three and four. We mentioned this a little bit earlier, this idea that these are generations of people who are gone from the land. Most of them were born outside the land. So they actually were given the choice. Who feels that call to go up to Jerusalem? Which is another aspect of, again, setting this new form of religion up. It’s saying you do have a choice. You don’t absolutely have to go back to the temple because we’re starting again to figure out this worship away for the temple, what it means to worship God. Even just the way it talks about these people in verse three, who is there among you, of all his people? his God be with them, let them go up to Jerusalem, which is actually the same wording that’s used for people going up out of Egypt.

                                           00:34:18             Then verse four, it says, whosoever remaineth in my place where he sojourneth. They’re already talking about these people, even though they’ve been there for 30, 40 years, this first 539 time. It’s still referring to these people as the word that’s used as ger. And this is refers to being foreigners. It’s saying, even though you’ve been there, you probably were born there, you are still seeing yourself as a Judean. They’re still connecting themselves back to Jerusalem. We are foreigners living in a foreign land. That’s your someone that’s been deported but they are setting themselves apart. They’re saying, we are foreigners in this foreign land because we are still remembering and connecting our capital, our temple, our place where we came from. Which is really goes into that strong memory aspect of we are still the people of Yahweh no matter where we are. And that’s actually really unique.

                                           00:35:10             The fact that we even have this Old Testament like this is really unique because this is that policy of conquest is you scatter people and they’ll forget who they are. But they’re really showing us right here in these first verses, we remember who we are. We remember our past and our heritage. That’s really important for them and what they’re doing and what they’re realizing as this community. So the first part of even being a community, being these worshipers of God is remembering who we are, remembering that we do have that past tradition and this heritage to build off of.

John Bytheway:               00:35:43             Wow. That principle of who am I and whose am I? That’s huge. That’s applicable today, that identity thing. I know that there’s a lot of echoes in the scriptures. Didn’t Abraham say I’m a stranger in a strange land and now they’re, I’m a stranger in a strange land. I like to use that phrase a lot. They echo and repeat things. They’re feeling that way, but now they’re going to go back. Before I put Cyrus in my Hero Hall of Fame, it’s not like he’s saying, oh, nevermind that captivity thing, go home. It’s like you can leave, but pay taxes. Is that right? Whether you’re here, whether you’re staying or whether you’re going back, the Babylonian Revenue Service is still in force, so you still got to pay taxes, but you can go back and build your temple. So I like what you said. It’s a political move.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:36:31             That’s still very much in the background of a lot of these stories in Ezra Nehemiah and other texts is this fact that honestly, even back during the kings, they were never really that independent. There was always somebody bigger around them. Other empires. This whole land of Judah, Israel, they were pretty minor characters in the grand scheme. As much as they like to say how great they were, they were pretty minor. And again, they’re still pretty minor. They’re still within the system, the Persian system. The Persians, in comparison to the Babylonians especially, had a very structured administrative system throughout their empire. But it’s still not as big as Solomon.

                                           00:37:09             Later on, you look at the goods that the king is sending them too. The king does help them build up the temple. This is what’s a little bit strange. Again, Jerusalem is kind of a far out, not super important place, but the fact that the king is giving so much energy, so much goods to be building it up, that’s not common for these out of the way places like that. They’re sending back these vessels and he’s saying, here’s the revenue to help build up that temple. We’ll see that even more too later with Nehemiah. You’re giving a lot of these good things. Still not quite as good as Solomon, but it’s still decent. We have a temple. We’re going to have a temple. And it has the vessels inside that we need to worship God and to do what we need to.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:52             I love it.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:37:53             You really start to see a little bit of connections to the Exodus, to this going up out of the land of Persia. They’re going to leave this land, go to the land of their inheritance. They’re taking with them from their neighbors the goods and the wealth to go and take them to go build the temple. This is what happens when that first Exodus with Moses. So even at the beginning, you start to see these, that this is a repeat return. Like what Moses did, Ezra’s going to now do. So it’s again, connecting to the past, but looking forward to that future saying, this is a repeated history. God is doing this. This is our proof that God is continuing to help us in different ways, but also in the same way.

John Bytheway:               00:38:34             So it’s like a mini Exodus out of Babylon, out of Persian control.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:38:39             With the Come, Follow Me, we do skip chapter two, but I’m going to give a quick plugin for that. It’s a genealogy. They’re actually really important. You’ll see genealogies placed in the text where there’s areas of chaos, of disorganization or times when identity or claims need to be reasserted. This is that time. We’re coming back and we need to reassert our claim. We are the inheritors of this land. You’ll see that a few more times throughout Ezra Nehemiah, these little inserts of genealogy. And this is, again, another ancient New Eastern tradition. When Cyrus came into power, he put himself in the genealogy of the Babylonian kings. He’s saying, I’m actually part of this tradition. Your God is the one that placed me here. Marduk, your Babylonian God, is the one that wanted me to come here and conquer because Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus is the last king, right?

                                           00:39:29             Nabonidus rebelled against Marduk, and he was wrong. I’m coming back because of these Babylonian guards. You insert them, you’ll give a genealogy to give your claim. We see this in the New Testament. We have a couple genealogies for Jesus. In each of them, they’re slightly different. Genealogies aren’t very specific. They can be created. They can be made to make this point of what’s important and what this claim we have. Know that there’s a genealogy and it’s doing important things to, again, establish this claim.

Hank Smith:                      00:39:58             To establish a claim.

John Bytheway:               00:40:00             And I love that the Urim and Thummim is mentioned in verse 63. There’s, they need a priest with a Urim and Thummim.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:40:08             And then we get into chapter three, which comes from our genealogy point. Before 538, when Cyrus sent people back, this is with the governor Sheshbazzar. Chapter one, verse eight, he sends Sheshbazzar, the Prince of Judah, which the word for prince really just means like governor or official. Sheshbazzar is the one who comes back. Then we get to chapter three 20 years later. Now suddenly we have Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, and then Zerubbabel. Two new names come on the scene. If we triangulate our sources with the books of Haggai and Zechariah and our understanding of the Persian kings, talks about them being in the year of Darius who becomes king in 522. So now we have the return of Zerubbabel, who is the son of Shealtiel. He, if we go back to the genealogies from before, from the book of Chronicles, Kings, he is a descendant of David.

                                           00:41:08             We have this final descendant of King David. Who is, right, this scion of what all our hopes and dreams are laid on. The kingdom of David, right? This is their hopes and their, this establishment of the kingdom of David. So they’re saying, even though our people were taken away, our kings were taken away, here we have a descendant of David. This is our hope for the future. And with him came Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, who with his genealogy, if we also look back, he’s connected to the last high priest of Jerusalem. We have a high priest and a king coming back to the land. They come back right off the bat. They actually don’t quite start building a temple yet. They build an altar. We are once again purifying the site. And in verse three, it has this weird phrase.

                                           00:41:53             They set the altar upon his bases, the temple’s foundations, for the fear was upon them because of the people of these countries. When they come back to the land, we’ve talked about before the land wasn’t empty. We had people still living there. We had neighboring people around them. We’ll get into some of those other neighbors from places like Idumea to the South and Aman to the East. Aman to the East and Edom. We had other neighboring regions and powers. It’s always the power struggle. This administration of Persia, these different governors trying to compete for power for how much control they have. There’s people around us. We are laying claim to this area right away. This is our temple, this is our place. Our God is coming back. And that gives us this identity, this claim.

                                           00:42:44             And the one other interesting aspect, again, of bringing these two timelines together, we had Sheshbazzar, they’re coming out of Persia just like the Exodus, bringing the goods for the temple. And then we’re up to Zerubbabel and Jeshua making sacrifices, building an altar. They are keeping the festival the Feast of Tabernacles or this remembrance of the Exodus. Even verse two, as it is written in the law of Moses, the man of God or the prophet. What we’re doing is because of this law of Moses, which actually usually didn’t connect the law of Moses with the temple. You don’t really see that much in books of Kings and Chronicles really. But it’s starting to connect this idea of this new temple worship with the importance of this law we’re going to establish because again, we’re changing what it means to be in this community. We’re following the law as well as the temple.

John Bytheway:               00:43:40             Those feasts were part of the law. Bring back those feasts. When they were in Babylon, I guess they just didn’t do any of those feasts at that time. Now they’re saying we can start that again because we have a temple. Part of the feast of tabernacles was they went to the temple and poured water on the altar.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:43:59             Yeah. Well, and really, most of these festivals, these feasts, they were pretty temple-centered. They wouldn’t really be a very communal affair except for the one reference in Leviticus. We don’t really have any examples of the whole people actually celebrating this Feast of Booths. It was very much a temple aspect. We’re going to see a little bit later it starts to become for the people a holiday. So yeah, you’re really starting to kind of connect the dots and bring these traditions together for this new community. In chapter three is where you get towards the end. We’re kind of condensing time and we’re going to expand it again as we get to other chapters. But in chapter three, it talks about the builders laying the foundation of the temple. It talks about this joyful celebration. And they’re singing together in verse 11. They’re praising, giving thanks. He is good. The people shout and praise the Lord. Then verse 12, but many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, the ones who had seen the first house, there are a few people who had seen the first temple, had seen it there, had seen it destroyed. And when the foundation of the house was laid before there eyes wept with a loud voice and many shouted aloud for joy.

John Bytheway:               00:45:10             I can’t tell if they’re laughing or crying. I mean, that’s verse 13, right? Yeah.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:45:15             But that’s the cool thing too about the scripture and how you’re reading, because you can kind of take it two different ways. The word weeping doesn’t really have a good or bad connotation. So they could be weeping for sadness for the weeping of the past, which is probably what you’d probably expect or see. Because lamentation was a form of worship. Being sorrowful is a very important part. But also it could be some weeping for joy. We’re getting started now, that weeping for the future.

Hank Smith:                      00:45:45             So it’s like when we found out we were having twin boys. We were happy and sad at the same time. And you couldn’t tell which the tears were for. Because we were happy, but we were also like, oh, wow.

John Bytheway:               00:45:59             Oh, boy.

Hank Smith:                      00:45:59             Our lives are changing dramatically.

John Bytheway:               00:46:02             Yeah. Here it comes.

Hank Smith:                      00:46:05             Or like when your son or daughter goes on a mission, happy for what you have and sad for what you’re losing.

John Bytheway:               00:46:11             Absolutely.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:46:13             Well, we’ll move on briefly to the next couple chapters, but I’ll try not to spend as much time on some of them. We’re going to move from that temple ceremony aspect and then we get part of the drama, the story that gets brought in. In chapter four, now we get our adversaries. Now we get the conflict that comes in. It’s not all just a nice story. We build the temple and we’re good and we’re happy. Or sad. Now we have our adversaries. We have some opposition here coming in where it talks about the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin. They heard that they were building the temple. And at first, they’re actually not adversaries. In verse two, it says they came to Zerubbabel to the chief of the father, so the heads of the families and said unto them, let us build with you, for we seek your God as ye do and we sacrifice unto him since the days of Esar-haddon, so the days of Babylon when other people had also been in the land.

                                           00:47:07             These are people that probably were in the land, possibly had been moved into the land from all these conquests and other, they were deported out of their land, came into this land and men started worshiping the God that was here. Yahweh. We’ve been worshiping your God too. We want to be part of you. We want to help build your temple. But then verse three, Zerubbabel and Jeshua, chief of the Fathers, they say to them, You have nothing to do with us. Basically, you can’t build the temple with us. A lot of times, especially when we’re reading scripture, we really want to see the best of everybody, which is a great trait to have. You want to see the good in everybody. But I think we also need to sometimes acknowledge that there’s not always complete great in everybody. We see these leaders as they’re chosen by God.

                                           00:47:55             They’re the perfect image of how we should be following God and these people of God. So you could explain it in one way saying, oh, yes, they’re not actually Judeans. That makes sense that they excluded them. Yes, because we’re reading the narrative of these people who are writing that story. But on the other hand, they’re excluding people. They’re saying, even though you’ve been worshiping Yahweh for a couple decades now, so you’re very much entrenched in this religion, this worship, no, we’re not going to let you because we’re the elite. We’re the ones that came from exile. We’re going to see a lot more of that, especially as we get to Nehemiah. These really kind of this staking this claim in these boundaries of community, which again is both good and bad. Maybe this is my main theme of Ezra Nehemiah, good and bad together kind of shows this image of the fact that God is using a lot of imperfect people. We look at these scriptures, we look at these figures, and we want them to be perfect. But the whole purpose of this gospel is no one can be perfect. Because if we’re perfect, then how can God show us his great work through us? Because God is the only one that is perfect. He is the one that we’re striving to be.

Hank Smith:                      00:49:01             Christina, I really like that because as a teacher, I might say, well, these guys never do anything wrong. So it was important that you be from the house of Judah, from… Right. Instead, just say, yeah, that’s me. That’s probably not the best way to go. You probably could have made some friends with these people and then they don’t fight you the entire time. You move into a neighborhood, there’s people already there and you’re like, I don’t want anything to do with you. Probably not the best way to make friends and influence people.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:49:30             Yeah, they’re really starting off the bat as like we’re setting our lines. This is our community and no one else. Which probably at the heart of it, you’re like, okay, we understand this. You’re trying to follow God’s law, his commands to be his people, but maybe you’re making some mistakes along the way. Like what you said, they have a lot of problems because of that. They’re kind of the cause of that problem. Sometimes just sitting in that a little bit. Leaders aren’t perfect. We’ve seen that a lot, especially with there’s been a lot of work done in early church history, right? Becoming more clear about what was this church history like? And there are a lot of leaders that were not perfect. And it can still be God’s work and we can still not be perfect.

Hank Smith:                      00:50:06             I love that. If you want perfect leadership, there’s only one guy you can look to. Why do we exclude? Why do we do some boundary maintenance like that? Is it fear? Is it, no, you can’t be part of this because you’ll change it? Even sometimes we act like we’re in junior high. We have our little friend group and no one is allowed into our friend group because we’re elite. And we do that even as adults, even in our own words. Either of you have any thoughts on that, on why we do that? I need to look to your wisdom, both of you.

John Bytheway:               00:50:41             Somebody wrote an essay years ago called Why the Church is As True as the Gospel. His point was because we have to learn to deal with imperfect beings who have to learn to deal with us who are also imperfect and that is part of the refining process of the gospel. I like that so often this year we have talked about the Old Testament’s not telling you be this way, it’s just reporting. This is what they did. It’s not necessarily saying, so you should be this way. Sometimes it’s pointing out that, yeah, that was mean. And you can just go, huh, that was mean.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:51:19             Yeah. I mean, it’s really kind of just showing… We’re looking in the past, we’re looking at big pictures, but people are people. This is like one of the base points of anthropology, this idea that humans are humans throughout history. They don’t change. You always want the basics. You need food, you need shelter, but you need connection. You need community. And that’s part of it. Community building means at some point you build a boundary. So it cuts up to us as where do we build that boundary and how do we build it?

John Bytheway:               00:51:48             If you were just to jump into the New Testament, you might not understand why they even avoided walking through their lands. We often say, well, they had intermarried, but there’s a more of a history here too about the temple at first starting to offer help and then hindering is what it says in the italics at the beginning of chapter four. So would this also be part of the backstory of the Samaritans as they’re portrayed in the New Testament?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:52:17             I’m going to complicate this a little bit too, because I like to do that. Yes, we do start to see this antagonism, this clear story of this us versus them. We have these names of these regional layers around them. Sanballat was the governor whose seat was in Samaria. But if we go back to that compositional history of Ezra Nehemiah and this fact that it was written later, some people think Hellenistic times, so after the time of Alexander. Some people even think it might have been completed during the time of the Hasmonean period. So this is the time of the Maccabees when they’re establishing the king of Judah and very, very much having issues with the people in Samaria, especially with them who had, they had built their temple in about 450BC decades after the Jerusalem Temple. So they’re competing between these two different temples and these capitals.

                                           00:53:07             Actually, during the Hasmonean period, that 140 to 37BC, as you see a lot of this conflict rising. The stories were composed more towards that time. They’re writing these issues into the story now. And this goes back to that history when we’re jumping between different peoples and communities. You didn’t see any of these issues with Sheshbazzar. And later there’s another little aspect where you actually have a governor who likes them. Later, Tatnai comes in chapter five who’s like, hmm, why are you building this? Okay, God commanded you. There’s a decree. Okay, cool. So there’s no antagonism there. So you start to see these pictures of a little bit of differences, but also archeologically as well, first, they don’t start out as enemies. They don’t start as antagonists. They’re all just people of these different regions. There’s squabbles between their leaders as most political systems are.

                                           00:54:01             But it’s really later that you see some of this antagonism starting maybe rooted here and started here. It’s kind of written into that history. And this goes back to that memory and why they’re writing this story. They’re putting this establishing, especially if it’s during the Hasmonean period when they’re saying, we are a kingdom. This is our history. We came back to the land. It was just us. We are the people of Judah. We are setting that boundary. It is our people. It is not the Samaritans and their temple. It is Jerusalem and our temple. And that’s what brings a little bit, a bit of the complication to Ezra Nehemiah. When we talk about our own traditions, our histories, how much do we change things up a little bit? Unintentionally or intentionally? This is one aspect of what I study is this idea of memory. It’s really important to understand who we are by understanding what we remember in our traditions, but they can change or they can look different for different people. For them, it’s really important to start to show there are some issues between us, even though originally we didn’t quite have that issue before.

Hank Smith:                      00:54:57             This I think is a crucial skill to understand in reading scripture. I try to teach it to my students when we read 1 and 2 Nephi. These aren’t written as he’s going. These are written, he is an old man and he’s looking back. Very difficult to write all that has happened since then out of the story. This is probably written hundreds of years later and they’re saying, okay, here’s our history. And the conflict that’s happening when they’re writing is written into the history. That makes sense.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:55:31             Yeah. We see that in the New Testament. They’re talking about stories about Jesus. Several of them weren’t alive during the time of Jesus. They’re repeating stories. They’re bringing in their current issues and it’s affecting how we’re reading the text. And that’s something we need to kind of keep in mind sometimes when we’re reading. You’re like, oh, they hated everybody. They didn’t really. There’s an issue they’re dealing with now. Or maybe that’s how we relate to the text too. We see all this conflict and we’re like, maybe we need a pause or our context with where we’re living or understanding what’s going on.

Hank Smith:                      00:56:02             So into my history, I build in this bad guy who probably wasn’t the bad guy in real, but he’s a bad guy now in my life. I’m going to write him in. That’s a complication when you start to understand it. It’s like, oh, wow. It opens up the why of the text that maybe it didn’t happen exactly like this, but I’m writing it a certain way because of when I’m writing the history. Wow, that’s fun. Also makes it hard to know what actually happened.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:56:28             Yes. Why it’s difficult to read Ezra Nehemiah, because you don’t have the history that we want to see with this timeline. And why they’re jumping between these stories and time periods because they’re trying to get this idea across to set the stage of what it looks like for them and how we’re building this people of God of who we are. Even in chapter four, we’re getting more time skipping. So it talks about these adversaries coming, them writing letters to the King of Persia to complain about these Jews who are building a temple. And they’re saying, why are you building a temple? You shouldn’t be. And they write to the king saying, hey, this guy’s building a temple. That shouldn’t happen. They’re going to rebel against you because if you start to take power and you’re building your own temple, your own city, that means you’re undercutting the authority of the king. So it actually talks about three different letters that are written, but we only get one of the letters.

                                           00:57:18             So they mentioned writing a letter to Xerxes who wasn’t even a king until 486. This is like going back to the time of Ezra. So now we’ve skipped forward even more. And then they talk about Artaxerxes who was king in, starting in 465. So that’s the time of Nehemiah. We’re in the time of Zerubbabel and Jeshua, supposedly. And they’re doing the time of King Darius who is king in 522. They’re thrown all the time around to get across this point that they’re antagonists and they are trying to get the power of the Persian Empire to come and stop this work because they’re upsetting the balance and the region.

John Bytheway:               00:57:55             It’s kind of fun to read the letter. Be it known unto the king, the Jews, which came up from thee which are come up to Jerusalem, building the rebellious and the bad city. I’ve never heard it called that before. It gets in verse 12. The bad city and have set up the walls there. They’ve joined the foundations, be it known unto the king if this city be builded. How do they get possession of that letter anyway?

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:58:19             Yeah. This is coming from a Persian king and they didn’t actually rebel against the Persian king. It was against the Babylonians. So they’re pulling from history. They weren’t rebellious during these kings and the Persian kings. They were rebellious during the Babylonian kings.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:32             I can see why this is complicated, but it’s fun. Is this chapter, like, this is why the Samaritans or those people up there, this is why they’re the bad guys. Look at what they did to try to stop us.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:58:44             Yeah. And that’s what bringing in these antagonists and these letters and these stories you’re going to keep, we’re going to keep seeing throughout this idea they’re trying to set up this history of we have been building this temple despite opposition, going towards this is the power of God working in it. We are doing this great work. God is making sure it’s happened despite all these conflicts and these oppositions that you keep seeing over and over, even though they come from later. So they’re setting that drama of the story. I’m proving to you that this is what’s happening, even though I’m going to take my proof from a couple, like hundred years later.

John Bytheway:               00:59:20             I can hardly imagine people being opposed to building a temple. Can you imagine that, you guys?

Hank Smith:                      00:59:24             Yeah. I can’t imagine that would ever happen in this world. Well –

John Bytheway:               00:59:27             Who would do that?

Hank Smith:                      00:59:30             So they’re put together to show, like, Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C. Look at all this proof that they’re the worst. They need more room to write in scripture.

John Bytheway:               00:59:42             These margins just aren’t doing it, but yeah.

Hank Smith:                      00:59:45             It’s fun to have an expert here, John, to show us this because there’s no way I would’ve known this.

John Bytheway:               00:59:50             Yeah, me neither. So you say there were three letters, but we’re only hearing one.

Dr. Christina Olson:         00:59:54             Yeah, we don’t get the other, the other letters. So they’re assuming someone knows those letters.

John Bytheway:               01:00:00             Then I’m looking at the bottom line in verse 24, then ceased the work of the house of God, which is at Jerusalem.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:00:07             So we’ve gone back in time again.

Hank Smith:                      01:00:09             If I’m a reader of the history when it’s published, it’s meant to persuade me too, right? That we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, we were rebuilding, they tried to stop us.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:00:21             Yeah. Now the temple stopped, right? So there’s a halt in our plans. And then we get to chapter five. We’re again back to the time of Zerubbabel, Jeshua. It mentions Haggai and Zechariah. These are names we’re kind of familiar with. We have those books, the prophetic books, which I’m sure you’ll talk about in other weeks. It just mentions them. The fact that the prophets are there, they’re there at this foundation of building the temple. We read later in Haggai, they’re complaining about the fact that the temple’s not built yet. You’ve been here for this many decades and there’s no temple yet. What are you guys doing? But here in chapter five, we have Ezra Nehemiah saying, okay, now we are building the temple. Our prophets prophesied it. We have this interesting connection to the prophets. Also, this is the very last time that we see Zerubbabel mentioned.

                                           01:01:12             We probably have these prophets here. They’re excited. Zerubbabel’s here. We have our Davidic king coming back. We have our high priests. We have our prophets. Zerubbabel is here. They begin to build the temple of Jerusalem, and then we never hear about Zerubbabel from here on out. He kind of silently disappears from the scene. No one knows what happens. There’s plenty of theories. You no longer have your Davidic king figure. We have our temple, it gets built in a couple years. In 515, we don’t hear Zerubbabel’s not part of any of this. This is one of those times, again, we’ve gone back in the past where probably these, some of these tensions aren’t there as much, where it talks about this governor, Tatnai, who is one of the Persian governors, probably was installed about the time of King Darius. So he’s kind of on a general survey of this province and seeing what’s going on.

                                           01:01:59             He’s not antagonistic at all. He’s just asking, you’re building your temple. Who said you could do that? What’s the backstory? Tell me what’s going on. And then he sends to Babylon, these guys said that God is the one who commanded us to do it rather than Cyrus, which is interesting. They’re focusing on God being the one to command them to build the temple. But he goes back to the king and says, these people say they had a decree they could build a temple. Is this true? In chapter six, you get this response from Darius. So we’re still staying in the same time this time. We get that response from Darias saying, we looked in our records and oh yeah, Cyrus said they could go back and build their house or build the temple of God. Let them keep building it. An interesting contrast between these two relationships with these different governors maybe given that indication that the history is not quite as neat as we think or they want to show us.

                                           01:02:51             We get more here. Now he’s saying, yes, let them rebuild and then here’s some more stuff to give them to help build their… Here’s some more provisions. Here’s more goods to go in their temple. So it’s giving the, a little more idea of like a resurgence of building this temple. Even though we’re focused on Zerubbabel, we’ve gotten the indication that that building had ceased. There’s pretty good indication that Sheshbazzar did lay the foundation back in 538 and there’s been construction. There has been work on it. It’s just not done yet. That’s the issue. The temple is not complete yet. We’ve been here for this long. We need this temple.

John Bytheway:               01:03:26             I love the letters going back and forth. That’s just fun. That, reminds me of some Book of Mormon stuff.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:03:32             Yeah. And the cool thing about these letters too, actually, if you’re reading in the Hebrew Bible, it actually switches to Aramaic, which is the official language of letters in the Persian Empire. Basically, like, the general language of the empire was Aramaic. To kind of keep the official nature of these texts, they leave it in Aramaic as they’re writing these. And then when they go back to the narrative a little bit later, they’ll switch back to Hebrew again.

Hank Smith:                      01:03:56             Rebuilding is not as linear as you might think. I’m going to rebuild my life after some tragedy. It might not be a perfectly linear process. You have ups and downs in the rebuild. It’s kinda like the Jazz. Right.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:04:14             I was going to say the Salt Lake Temple, but Jazz is too. It took them 40 years. At one time they had to cover the foundations and redo it all. So it’s the same kind of concept. Sometimes it does take a long time and doesn’t always look exactly like you think it’s going to look.

Hank Smith:                      01:04:28             Because you want to say, oh, it’s going to be amazing. We’re back. We’re going to rebuild. And it actually is, yeah, it’s amazing, but it’s also a struggle. We got to keep our energy up. We got to persevere because it’s not going to be as easy or as perfect as we thought to rebuild. I like that. That’s very human.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:04:44             Towards the end, when Darius makes his decree saying, yes, go let them build their temple. No one disturb them. And then in verse 11, part of this declaration is, I’ve made this decree. Whoever alters this word or basically opposes it or does something against it. Let timber be pulled down from his house and let him be hanged thereon. Some translations are impaled on this. Let his house be made a dunghill. There’s some pretty strong language for if you don’t do this, it’s pretty serious consequences. Your house will be a dunghill. Good insult there.

Hank Smith:                      01:05:15             It seems like a dig towards their enemies. If you don’t like us rebuilding the temple, well, look what he said about you.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:05:21             And then we finally get the completion of the temple. It’s dedicated. Everybody comes to celebrate. It has this huge long list of sacrifices. So this is another concept I bring up with my students in New Testament class. When we’re talking about the temple and going to the temple to celebrate to sacrifice, we think about our temples today. It’s a very pure, very clean, peaceful atmosphere. It is not peaceful. If you talk about how many sacrifices they had, that’s a really bloody day. There’s a lot of smells, a lot of blood. It’s a really sensory experience to worship, to celebrate the temple and to worship. It would be very sensory for your whole body. This is a full plan.

John Bytheway:               01:06:02             Yeah. Imagine the noise, the smells, the animals. There are days when I think of that and think, I’m kind of glad we’re not doing law of Moses anymore. Because this would be a noisy, messy place to come worship.

Hank Smith:                      01:06:16             One time I was in Jerusalem and I had like a, one of those smoothies they offer, you know, almost everywhere. I took a wrong turn down like a butcher alley and oh my goodness, it was smelly. There was animal parts everywhere. And you’re like, wow. I like what you said there, Christina. This is a sensory experience.

John Bytheway:               01:06:38             Yes, that’s a good way to put it. They had open markets in the Philippines when I was on my mission and I was like, oh, this is changing my relationship to meat. It was something. Sensory experience is a good way to put it.

Hank Smith:                      01:06:53             And also that burning meat too. You live in Texas. There’s some barbecue joints.

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:06:58             All my neighbors have smokers. We smell it quite often. It’s good barbecue.

Hank Smith:                      01:07:02             All right, let’s keep going. What do we do next?

Dr. Christina Olson:         01:07:04             Yeah. So we have these sacrifices and it refers again to according to the Book of Moses. And then it talks about the celebration of the Passover. But once again, we’re connecting to the Passover, the Exodus, this return, just like it was for the people from Egypt as they’re setting God back in the temple, back in their presence.