Hank Smith: 00:01 Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:10 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:15 As together-

Hank Smith: 00:16 We follow him. Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name is Hank Smith. I am your host. I am here with my co-host, who I say is doing a great work and cannot come down. John, that is you. You are doing a great work, and I don’t know what the second half means. But you cannot come down.

John Bytheway: 00:40 No. That’s when they call, “Dad, will you come down and do the dishes?” “I’m doing a great work. I can’t come down.” 

Hank Smith: 00:45 Yeah, really. “I’m doing a great work up here on my podcast.”

John Bytheway: 00:48 It’s a good application.

Hank Smith: 00:50 I cannot come down. Well, John, that phrase comes from the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah, say that a bunch of times in a row. We have a wonderful friend of ours and a brilliant scholar to join us on our podcast this week. Tell our audience who is with us.

John Bytheway: 01:11 Yes, we have Dr. Jared Ludlow with us. He’s been teaching in ancient scripture since 2006. Previous to that, he spent six years teaching religion and history at BYU Hawaii. Sounds like a wonderful assignment. And served as chair of the history department in Hawaii. He received a bachelor’s degree from BYU in Near Eastern studies, a master’s from UC Berkeley in biblical Hebrew, a PhD in Near Eastern religions from UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union.

John Bytheway: 01:42 His primary research interests are in ancient Judaism and early Christianity. His dissertation was published as a book: Abraham Meets Death, Narrative Humor in the Testament of Abraham by Sheffield Academic Press. We got to hear about that. He’s also produced a world history textbook, Revealing World History to 1500, and a book related to the Apocrypha, Exploring the Apocrypha from a Latter-day Saint Perspective. He has regularly presented papers at the Society of Biblical Literature meetings, has participated in Sperry and similar symposia at BYU.

John Bytheway: 02:19 He enjoys teaching Bible courses, Book of Mormon, world religions and world history. He served a mission to Campinas, Brazil and also lived in Germany and Israel, teaching twice at the BYU Jerusalem Center. He likes sports, hiking, snorkeling, and traveling. He’s married to Margaret Nelson. They have five children: Jared Jr., Joshua, Joseph, Marissa, and Malia. I have a great feeling of love and appreciation for the Ludlow family and just want to thank you and your whole family for the influence you’ve had on my life. So welcome, Dr. Ludlow.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 02:52 Well, thank you. Yeah. That’s some tough footsteps to follow in, but I’m hoping I’m not ruining it. Thank you for having me. And I appreciate all that you do, Hank and John, to help strengthen the faith of others, youth, young adults, adults, and really look forward to having this conversation.

Hank Smith: 03:12 I think everyone at the faculty at BYU and elsewhere would say that Jared Ludlow is the pure example, the epitome of humility. Jared, the lesson this week is in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And if I’m correct here, we just jumped a long ways into the future. Is that right?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 03:34 We did do a little bit of a jump there, and I think probably most significantly, we’re at the end of the Old Testament chronological period. In the 400s BC, that’s where Ezra and Nehemiah is placed.

Hank Smith: 03:49 If you’re going to say, “Hey, I’m reading the Bible chronologically,” you wouldn’t put Ezra and Nehemiah right here in almost the middle, would you?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 03:56 Yeah. That’s certainly not how the Jews place it. In their Bible, they do the law first, the first five books of Moses, and then they have all the prophets, and then they have what they call the Writings. So the Writings, the last part of their Hebrew Bible is Ezra and Nehemiah. Malachi’s back there, Haggai, Zechariah, all of these are pushed right at the end. Of course, that’s where our Malachi sits. And those are the last verses we tend to read before we flip a page, jump 400 years, and start the New Testament.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 04:33 But what we’re going to do here in Come Follow Me, we’re following the order of what most Protestant and other Christian Bibles have. They consider this a historical book, continuation of First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. So it’s included among these historical books, and then we’ll come back and hit a lot of the prophets and where they fit. So we’ll have like Amos up in the Northern Kingdom before the tribes are taken away or we’ll have Isaiah with King Hezekiah or Jeremiah around the time of Josiah and others, and so later on, we’ll fill in the gaps with these prophets.

Hank Smith: 05:16 Let’s make sure our listeners understand this, John. So we’re doing history right now. We’ve been doing history. Joshua, Judges, First and Second Samuel, which we found out was First and Second Kings. And then there was First Kings, which is known as Third Kings and Second Kings, which is known as Fourth Kings.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 05:35 Oh, let me tell you, it gets even more confusing with Ezra and Nehemiah. You look at different Bibles and you have up to Fifth Ezra depending on which denomination you go to.

John Bytheway: 05:45 Oh, wow.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 05:46 And some just have one book of Ezra that includes Ezra and Nehemiah. Others break it down into First, Second, Third, Fourth, and even a Fifth. It’s just open to how you want to break it down and where you’re going to put the breaks between them. I think it makes sense to have Ezra and Nehemiah in this case because we do focus a lot on Nehemiah in the second part. But if you look at the end of Ezra, it really doesn’t end as a book. It’s just a continuation on into Nehemiah.

Hank Smith: 06:15 Okay. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to stop everything for a minute, and we’re going to do Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which aren’t historical books per se. They’re not telling us a history. They’re called… What did you say?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 06:32 The Writings.

Hank Smith: 06:32 They’re called the Writings. How would you define writing since… Let’s try to place this. So we’ve done history up to this point. We’re going to continue to do history today, but then we’re going to get into writings?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 06:42 I think writings is a catchall topic that they used. You have Proverbs, Psalms. These wisdom sayings is how a lot of them are classified, wisdom literature. Job probably jumps back in time a much earlier period. It’s got its own teaching story of-

Hank Smith: 07:03 Kind of separate, right?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 07:05 Yeah. Can somebody be good in the face of all this evil and bad coming upon them, and tackling the issue of theodicy, the justice of God and those kinds of things. So these writings, I think, tend to be tackling certain topics, if you will, and exploring God’s wisdom.

Hank Smith: 07:26 So Jared, would it be possible then, because the next part after Psalms and Proverbs, is going to be what you called the Prophets, and would it be possible to take Joshua through Nehemiah and then place each book of the Prophets in that history somewhere?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 07:44 Yeah, definitely. You could put Isaiah with King Hezekiah’s reign, and Jeremiah later on and they classify some as the great prophets or major prophets and minor prophets. That’s more just not by how wonderful they were, or not, but just the size of the book. So Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel, these are all major prophets because we have lots of chapters from them. Whereas, the minor prophets sometimes were included all on one scroll, the 12 prophets at the end, because they were short enough that you could just include them all on one scroll.

Hank Smith: 08:24 This is excellent because I think our listeners love to just understand the setup and where we’re coming at this. So we’re still in the history, not in the Writings yet, not in the Prophets. We’re still in the history. Joshua through Nehemiah, you could say, is the history books.

John Bytheway: 08:40 I was just sitting here thinking how we get used to the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Mormon does have a flashback or two, and then the Jaredites at the end, chronologically could be at the first. But it’s a little easier. My son’s trying to go through the Old Testament and he’s doing Kings and Chronicles and I’m like, “Yeah, there’s some repetition.” So it’s nice to have somebody categorize it a little bit so we know what we’re looking at.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 09:05 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 09:05 So Jared, the last we left, the Northern Kingdom looked like things were about to fall down or they were coming down and the Southern Kingdom, just a century or so later, things look like they were going to come down too. Fill us in. What has happened since we left off in Second Kings?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 09:26 The kingdom of Israel really becomes a story of empires. They just get conquered one empire by the next, by the next. So you mentioned the Northern Kingdom taken away by the Assyrians. A lot of the 10 tribes were taken away. They become lost to history. So, we call them the Lost Ten Tribes. The Southern Kingdom barely survived, and that’s under King Hezekiah. Then, like you mentioned, about a century later, the Babylonians come because they’ve now conquered the Assyrians. So then they basically inherit and take over the same territory that the Assyrians had, but they want to expand. So they want to take over the Southern Kingdom, and Jerusalem is the prize jewel of that Southern Kingdom. And so they want to conquer it, and they eventually are successful.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 10:14 I think it’s important to connect here with the Book of Mormon, because this is the time period of Lehi and Nephi, and this is why they have to leave Jerusalem is because the Babylonians are coming and are going to conquer. They receive these prophecies that if they don’t leave, they could be taken into captivity or worse killed, as a part of that. One of the worst parts of this Babylonian invasion ends up being the destruction of the temple, Solomon’s Temple is a magnificent building, particularly by ancient standards, is destroyed around 586, 587 BC. A bunch of the inhabitants of the land are taken away to Babylon. So they’re put into exile, and this begins the period of the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah the prophet prophesied that this would happen. He said it would be about 70 years before they could come back. Depending, I guess, on when you… Because Babylon comes several times to attack Jerusalem, they actually come back maybe a little bit sooner unless you count it from one of the earlier attacks of Babylon.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 11:17 The Persians then conquer the Babylonians, and the Persians decide that they’re going to have maybe a little bit more tolerant policy towards their conquered peoples. They’re going to allow them to go back to their homelands if they had been exiled under Babylon or Assyria, before. They’re going to allow them to rebuild their religious temples. King Cyrus has a decree and we even have the cylinder, the clay cuneiform cylinder that this decree is written on. It’s in the British Museum. So you can go and read it. We sometimes mistakenly think it’s just for the Jews. It’s not. It’s for all the peoples of their land. So the Jews of course say, “Well, we’re part of this, so we we’ll take that to mean that we can return to Jerusalem and we are going to rebuild our temple.” That’s what a lot of the beginning of the book of Ezra talks about, is the return of some of these exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem so that they can rebuild their temple, rebuild their community, rebuild Jerusalem.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 12:23 In a nutshell, that’s what Ezra and Nehemiah is all about is those rebuilding efforts. But, and here’s another point we sometimes miss, not all the Jews wanted to go back. Some were perfectly comfortable in Babylon. They had a lot of water there. It was plentiful as far as agriculture and some other things.

Hank Smith: 12:45 Yeah, the gardens.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 12:46 Yeah, the gardens of Babylon. So that’s why, for example, Nehemiah is going to come back later because he just stayed there in the Persian empire. By the way, the Persians are a little bit further east than the Babylonians. Today, if you think of modern Iraq, that’s kind of the area of Babylon, Southern Iraq. Persia was more the modern Iran. So, they’ve come from the east and they’ve now conquered the Babylonians, and so they inherit again all of their empire, and they push even down into Egypt. Cambyses’s the successor to Cyrus, pushes down and even conquers Egypt for a while. Their empire gets even bigger. They’re going to last for a couple of hundred years until Alexander the Great comes on the scene. Then of course, he takes over and it becomes Greek empires. Then the Romans are going to come. So it’s just one empire after another.

John Bytheway: 13:43 This reminds me of something that I appreciated from the manual said, “The Jewish people had been held captive in Babylonia 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.” I’m glad you commented on this. They were taken captive, but we might assume, and they just practiced their religion there. But it sounds like when we read Nehemiahen stuff they’re, “Oh, hey, wait, we’re supposed to do this?” It’s like they had lost a lot of what they were supposed to be about. Is that a fair way to put it?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 14:19 Yeah. I think you had some continuation of worship, but suddenly they’re without a temple.

Hank Smith: 14:24 Huge.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 14:26 When two thirds of your law revolves around the temple, suddenly you’re like, what am I supposed to do? We kind of experienced this lately as Latter-day Saints with COVID, when all of a sudden the temples shut, and we’re like, “Wait, what am I supposed to do? This is where I drew a lot of spiritual strength was by going to the temple regularly. And what about all these family names that I’m accumulating? What do I do about this and how do I worship without the temple?” That’s kind of the crisis that they faced was what do I do? Now, some continued to certainly practice and worship. And maybe this is the beginning of where we get the synagogues and more focus on scripture study because those in Babylon, that’s what they had. That’s what they could develop.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 15:12 If you fast forward, the Jews have the Talmud, which is a collection of their laws and interpretations of the laws and so forth. We have a Babylonian Talmud and a Palestinian or a Jerusalem Talmud that develop later on. Now we’re talking about 4 or 500 AD because there’s still such a community in Babylon of Jews that studied scripture, that tried to practice the law as much as they could without the temple, but they didn’t have the temple there. As far as we know, they never tried to build a temple in the Babylonian area, but they had Jews there all the way up until the 1900s.

Hank Smith: 15:51 Wow.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 15:51 It really was when the State of Israel was formed when suddenly Jews didn’t feel so comfortable in some Arab country because of the backlash against the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. When I was in grad school, you mentioned I went to UC Berkeley, and one summer to earn some money, I just did odd jobs. I got hired by an Iraqi Jewish family just to do yard work and things around their house. They had fled from Iraq because of the tension that they now felt in this Arab country.

Hank Smith: 16:24 Their ancestors went back to Iraq all the way back to the exile.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 16:28 Yeah. As far as you can tell. They were there for centuries and centuries from that time period.

John Bytheway: 16:34 This brings up another question that my students sometimes ask that I’d love to get your perspective on. That is that they often ask, “Well, what do the Jews do today without the temple? Or do they still do sacrifices?” It sounds like the Babylonians had to come up with a we don’t have the temple type of worship. Then what do the Orthodox Jews do today regarding the temple?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 16:56 They’ve kind of faced the same thing because the Jerusalem temple that we know from the time of Jesus and the New Testament, Herod’s Temple, as we often call it, that gets destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Since then, there hasn’t been a temple functioning like it was before then. Now, sometimes you’ll see synagogues called temples. temple Emmanuel. But that’s just a name that they use for synagogue. It doesn’t mean that it’s a temple like in Jerusalem. Throughout time there have been certain Jewish groups that may continue to do sacrifices on the side or whatever. The Samaritans, that we’ll talk a little bit more about today, they continued to do sacrifices on Mount Gerizim. Every Passover, they have a major sacrifice of lambs and all getting ready for Passover on top of the Mount. So, sacrifices continued off and on in different groups.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 17:52 But a vast majority of Jews today, it’s all about synagogue worship. It’s all about prayer, scripture study, those kinds of things. Frankly, if you ask particularly Western Jews, are they excited to rebuild the temple? A lot of them would say, “Why? Are we going to go back to animal sacrifice? That’s ancient stuff that’s passed.” And others will say, “Well, when the Messiah comes, maybe something will happen with the temple.” Then there’s others that are very actively, particularly those in Jerusalem, actively trying to rebuild the temple. Of course, that can cause some political issues today.

John Bytheway: 18:30 In the same spot where the old one was. Yeah.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 18:33 Yeah. We’ll just get rid of the Dome of the Rock.

John Bytheway: 18:34 It’s currently occupied.

Hank Smith: 18:36 I like how you said that. It’s currently occupied. If you’ll both help me with this. We came back in with Joshua, and then Samuel came along and we chose a king and we went three kings in a row and they didn’t seem to go very well. Saul, David, and Solomon. Then we divided. Then we divided into two kingdoms, the North and the South. Eventually the Northern Kingdom-

John Bytheway: 19:00 Israel in the north.

Hank Smith: 19:01 Yeah, Israel in the north.

John Bytheway: 19:01 Judah in the south. Ten tribes in the north. Two tribes in the south.

Hank Smith: 19:05 The Northern Kingdom was destroyed by Assyria 721 years before Jesus. Then the Southern Kingdom barely hangs on. And we just did that last week under King Hezekiah. But then they eventually fall in 586 to Babylon, who had taken Assyria, as Jared just told us. I can see why Laman and Lemuel didn’t think Jerusalem could be destroyed because Hezekiah and Isaiah preserved them.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 19:32 Yeah. God is on our side. Why would he allow his city, his people, his temple to be taken over?

John Bytheway: 19:40 It’s one of my favorite lines in the whole Old Testament, the army of the Assyrians, “And behold, when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”

Hank Smith: 19:47 Yeah. Sennacherib. He’s like, “We can’t fight this. Let’s go home.” And also you mentioned that some Jews are taken captive in 586, just after Lehi is preaching. That’s where we get the stories of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Is that right?

John Bytheway: 20:05 They’re in Babylon.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 20:07 Correct. Yeah. So they could have had a young men’s group in Jerusalem with Nephi and Daniel and others there.

Hank Smith: 20:13 All about the same age.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 20:14 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 20:16 So now Israel, you would say, is in exile. The Northern Kingdom is no more. The Southern Kingdom is no more. And Babylon, from what I’ve read, Jared, is a pretty brutal, how would you… occupier?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 20:28 Yeah. I think the Assyrians were worse-

Hank Smith: 20:31 Oh, really?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 20:31 … but Babylon still was pretty harsh, especially compared to the Persians that are going to come. Now, the Persians of course are going to maintain an empire. So, they’re still going to have soldiers and expect taxes and things like that. It’s not just kumbaya and we’re all hugging and… Compared to Assyria and Babylon before, it’s a different administration, you could say.

Hank Smith: 20:53 Okay, so Babylon rules for about 70 years. Then here comes King Cyrus and the Persians saying, “Go home, go rebuild.” And did Cyrus see himself as a liberator?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 21:05 I think you could say that. I think certainly that’s how the Jews viewed him. In fact, he’s viewed very favorably in the book of Isaiah. So we could maybe read a couple of verses. He’s called a shepherd. He’s called an anointed one, somebody who could come and deliver them. In Isaiah 44:28, it says, “That sayeth of Cyrus, he is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem, ‘Thou shall be built,’ and to the temple, ‘Thy foundation shall be laid.'” And so Isaiah and the Jews certainly had a very positive view, and God used, as he does throughout history, non-covenant people to accomplish his purposes, sometimes unknowingly by themselves. Sometimes it’s in justice; sometimes it’s in mercy. And certainly I think in this case, we see more of the mercy side of bringing them back and allowing them to rebuild. So Cyrus is viewed, I think, very favorably by the Jews.

Hank Smith: 22:15 What year would that be, for Cyrus saying, “I’m here, you can go home”?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 22:20 That’s around 525. I think it was 538 that the Persians take over the Babylonians. Just about a decade later, he issues this decree. It’s exciting to see it in the British Museum, frankly.

John Bytheway: 22:36 Wow.

Hank Smith: 22:36 Yeah.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 22:36 I’d had read about it so much, and then all of a sudden here I’m in this room. I kind of walked by it at first and I thought, “Oh, it’s another cuneiform clay tablet.” And then I circled back and I was like, “Wait, no. This is the Cyrus cylinder. This is the one that we always talk about.”

Hank Smith: 22:51 That’s cool.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 22:52 It’s kind of cool that we have it preserved.

Hank Smith: 22:54 Let’s keep going with our story because I think we’re almost to Ezra. So, when we say Cyrus allows the Jews to return, we’re not talking the kingdom of Israel is back. We’re talking a small portion of those who are exiled returned to just Jerusalem. Jared, do they return to the whole land?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 23:12 They’re primarily just returning to Jerusalem and its environs. It’s the area around Jerusalem because that had been the capital city and they wanted to strengthen it. In fact, later on, I think it’s in Nehemiah that they even have to like cast lots to get people to move out of Jerusalem, to start settling more of the areas around because they just want to expand the territory a little bit. But people are feeling like, “I feel safer inside the city. I’m safer with more people around me.” In our own Latter-day Saint history, we maybe see that, that sometimes everybody wants to be in the city and sometimes it’s hard to expand, or some want to expand when Joseph says, “No, you need to stay in the city for protection.”

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 23:57 I think one important point is we mentioned that there’s the exiles from the North Kingdom; there’s exiles from the Southern Kingdom, but that doesn’t mean everybody. It mostly means the upper class, the elite, the ones that they’re worried about revolting, leading-

John Bytheway: 24:15 Organizing.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 24:15 … the leadership. Yeah. They can organize some kind of rebellion and so forth. So, they want them closer, in a different part of the empire that they’re not comfortable with; they don’t have the same connections to the land and they don’t have the same knowledge about where’s the defensive places and so forth, and so they can keep tabs on them better. But that means they leave a lot of people behind, mostly lower class, mostly so that they can continue working the land because you want to tax the land. If nobody knows what grows where and where the water sources are and where’s the best place to herd your animals, these kinds of things, then you don’t have much revenue. So they leave the lower class there.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 25:00 What the Assyrians particularly did, and the Babylonians did this a little bit as well, is they brought peoples from other part of their empire into the land. Suddenly, you have a mixture of peoples left in the land with outside peoples, non-Israelites, coming in, kind of for the same purpose. They’re not going to know this land. They’re not going to have the same knowledge of defense and these kinds of things. It’s that intermarriage that occurs between the people left in the land and these outsiders that become a big problem for Ezra particularly, and a little bit in Nehemiah as well. This is the beginnings of what later become known as the Samaritans, this intermarriage between people left in the land, people from outside.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 25:51 They continue having many of the same worship practices, traditions, trying to follow the law of Moses. But they’re also bringing in some other ideas. It’s becoming this mixture. So, when some of these Jews come back from Babylon to rebuild the temple, there’s people here in Jerusalem that want to help, that say, “Well, this is part of our tradition, too.”

Hank Smith: 26:19 We’re Jewish, too. Right.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 26:21 And they don’t want their help because they feel like they’ve corrupted themselves, I guess you could say.

John Bytheway: 26:28 You’re not real Israelites anymore.

Hank Smith: 26:30 That’s what Harry Potter would call a half-blood. Some Jewish blood, some non-Jewish blood.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 26:37 It’s a major tension. I think historians tend to call them Sumerians earlier on, and then they become known as the Samaritans. As we open the New Testament, we know that these two groups are antagonistic towards each other. Why? Well, just go back a few hundred years and you see this is the beginning of it because they’re not welcome to rebuild the temple. So then they finally say, “Well, okay, we’ll build our own temple.” And so they go to Mount Gerizim and they build their own temple. That’s where they go to worship until that temple gets destroyed by later Jews who decide no, that’s an illegal temple. So, that adds to this antagonism between them because at the root they’re both following the law of Moses. They both have the Torah. But they start practicing some things differently, or they’re just viewed as not as pure.

John Bytheway: 27:34 That Gerizim temple comes up in Jesus’s conversation with the woman at the well.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 27:39 Exactly. Because she says, “We’ve worshiped here. You worship in Jerusalem. So which is it?” And Jesus’ response is, “Well, in a little while, it’s going to be neither place. It’s going to be in your heart, really, that you worship.”

John Bytheway: 27:52 God and spirit and in truth and… Yeah.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 27:54 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 27:54 Jared, and when Cyrus allows this small portion of Jews to return, he’s not saying go back and have a kingdom of your own. There’s still Persians that are going to pay their taxes. Why is he allowing them to return then? Just because he’s trying to… How to win friends and influence people and saying, “Listen, if I give you this, you’ll probably not rebel”?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 28:16 Yeah. I think that’s exactly it. He thinks if they’re happy where they’re at, then they will be less likely to rebel. Yes, he’s still going to require taxes from them. They still will have a governor over them that’s going to be from under Persian control. There will be military garrisons nearby and things like that. But he just thought if you oppress the people too much, then they’re going to want to rebel, and so let’s ease up a little bit. Let them practice some of the worship that they want to do, but keep being loyal to Persia. For the most part, it worked for 200 years, much longer. Babylon only lasted not even a 100 years.

Hank Smith: 29:02 They were just too brutal.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 29:04 And the Assyrians as well. These were very powerful, short-lived flames that rose up and then burned out pretty quick. But Persians tended to last until Alexander came and had a series of wars with them and eventually took them over.

Hank Smith: 29:21 Jared, do you feel like we’re ready to get into the text here?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 29:23 Well, let’s start with just Ezra 1 just because it is the retelling of this commission to rebuild the temple and the return of temple instruments. I guess that’s one thing we haven’t mentioned is that when Babylon conquered the temple, they took a lot of the temple vessels. So, things used for the sacrifices and altar of incense type things, and they took them off to Babylon and now they’re being allowed to bring them back. For example, in verse 7, it says, “Also Cyrus the king brought forth the vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had brought forth out of Jerusalem and had put them in the house of his gods. Even those did Cyrus, king of Persia, bring forth by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer and numbered them under Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah. Sheshbazzar is this local ruler that’s going to be set up in Jerusalem area, and they’re going to bring back these vessels.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 30:23 One thing that frankly gets a little tedious, I guess you could say, about Ezra and Nehemiah is we have these lengthy lists of offerings that are brought back, donations made for the temple, people. These can be kind of tedious, but this is what a historical source is. It tries to record all of these things that happen. It will repeat some of the decrees of the Persian rulers. We could easily be cynical and say, “Oh, well that’s just all made up.” But I think a lot of historians think actually, no, this is probably pretty accurate of retelling some of these decrees. Granted, it’s gone through a translation into Hebrew and then now into English, and so it’s going to look a little different that way, but the core elements of it would remain. So that’s kind of what happens in chapter 1 is just finally this coming back and starting to rebuild the temple Ezra.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 31:26 Ezra 3 talks about they start with the altar. What they want to do first is offer sacrifices again. I think we see that throughout scripture, starting with Adam. What’s one of the first things he does after he’s kicked out of the garden of Eden? Build an altar, give thanks and pray. Lehi and his family, when they get to the promised land, they build an altar. They want to rebuild the altar there so that they can offer thanks for being back in the land, and this is where it can get confusing. It seems like they start rebuilding the temple, but it’s not going to be done for a while. I think most put it about 515 is when the temple’s finally completed. And so that’s a good 10 years.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 32:16 In fact, here we get a little overlap. We have Haggai, prophet from later in the Old Testament, but from this time period, obviously. He comes along and he says, “Wait, look at your houses and then compare that to the house of the Lord. You’re building your houses before you’re rebuilding the house of the Lord. Let’s get our priorities straight here and let’s get the temple.” So Haggai the prophet, in Haggai 1, starting in verse 3, “Then came the word of the Lord by Haggai the prophet saying, Is it time for you, oh, ye to dwell in your sealed houses,” or as the footnote there reads, paneled houses, nicely adorned houses, I guess, is probably how we could say it. “And this house,” meaning the temple, “lie waste. Now therefore, thus sayeth the Lord of hosts, consider your ways.” In other words, let’s rethink this. Let’s rebuild this. So, it took a little prompting from Haggai and Zachariah, another prophet of this time period, to light the fire under the Israelites to remember part of why you’re back here is to rebuild the temple.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 33:33 Even though probably they had started some of the worship going on there, the temple still needed to be completed. So, they eventually do that. This is what we refer to often as the Second Temple and it starts a new historical period. This is the period I love to study. This is my main area, is the Second Temple period. It’s basically from mid-400s BC to around 70 AD when the temple is destroyed. So it straddles the end of the Persian, all of the Greek period, and the beginning of the Roman period in the land here. When they rebuilt it, it’s interesting because there’s different reactions. Some were tremendously excited. Well, I think all were excited. “Yes! We have a temple again.” But some that knew the old temple, knew that this new temple wasn’t the same as Solomon’s Temple. They didn’t have the resources that Solomon had. Solomon was wealthy. He had connections all over the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing in the finest craftsmen and supplies and things. This is just an exilic group coming back, barely trying to rebuild their houses and city and the temple.

Hank Smith: 34:47 That reminds me, Jared, of Nephi when he says he tried to build the temple, but he said it was not like Solomon’s.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 34:56 Yeah. It was patterned after Solomon’s, but he knew it wasn’t the same as Solomon’s.

Hank Smith: 35:00 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 35:01 So the First Temple we talk about, we call Solomon’s Temple.

Hank Smith: 35:04 From Solomon all the way to the destruction by Babylon.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 35:08 Correct.

John Bytheway: 35:09 And then trying to rebuild it, we’re going to call that the Second Temple. But that’s not the same as Herod’s Temple, right?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 35:16 Well, it is the same temple. Same as-

John Bytheway: 35:19 Yeah. Ground, real estate.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 35:21 What Herod does when he comes on the scene is he wants to make it magnificent again, more like Solomon’s Temple. By his time, he did have the resources that he could do that. He expands the courtyards. He expands the stoa, the porches around. He can add to the facade. He can do all of these things to make it a truly magnificent building. I think his real intention is to show off to the Romans, “Look at our beautiful temple.” So he makes all of this, and we often call it Herod’s Temple. The structure didn’t change. It just was like the outside and the area around it changed.

Hank Smith: 36:05 Courtyard.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 36:06 Exactly.

John Bytheway: 36:07 So, we would say Solomon’s Temple. And then we would say the Second Temple. When we say Second Temple, Herod’s Temple, we’re not talking about two different things?

Hank Smith: 36:17 Yeah, we’re talking about the same building.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 36:19 A remodel, if you will.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 36:21 The remodel. I like that.

John Bytheway: 36:23 He fixed up the grounds and the…

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 36:24 Yeah, Provo has announced that they’re going to redo our temple. It’s going to look a lot different than it did before, but it’s going to be in the same space. That’s going to be even more radical than I think what Herod did to the Jerusalem temple.

John Bytheway: 36:41 Yeah. If it looks like Ogden, it’s going to look a lot different.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 36:44 Yeah. Maybe to think of how they reacted to this new temple, the Second Temple, let’s think about the Salt Lake Temple. What if we, rather than trying to remodel and refurbish it and strengthen the foundational, what if we just raised it and then just put up a little temple, like during President Hinckley’s era, when we had the small temples. It still would be a temple. It’d still be functioning and we’d be happy to have a temple, but anybody who knew the Salt Lake Temple would be like, “It’s not the Salt Lake Temple. Well, it’s not the same as it was before.” That’s what I think a lot of them were going through was feeling this lacking of that.

John Bytheway: 37:30 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 37:30 It’s hard to get excited. If any of our listeners ever hear First Temple period, think Solomon down to the Babylon. If you ever hear Second Temple period, think of this returning under Cyrus all the way down past Jesus to when the temple is destroyed after Jesus dies. So we have two basic temple periods. We’re giving our audience a little mini doctorate degree in Jewish history. Jared, I’m rebuilding the temple. It doesn’t feel like I’m rebuilding the big, beautiful temple. Then I’ve got these other Jews who are half-Jewish, half… What would you call? Half-Gentile, I guess.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 38:08 Half-Gentile.

Hank Smith: 38:09 They want to help as well. So this whole return, this has been stressful.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 38:14 It is a very stressful period. We in our day could look at how these people of the land are treated and say, “Well, that’s not very fair. That’s not very tolerant.” To a certain extent, that’s true. However, there’s a whole political layer that’s underneath this. By allowing them to help rebuild the temple, you’re allowing them more political power because frankly, they kind of filled in a power vacuum when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and took all the upper class and the royalty away, they had their own local rule under of course the imperial rule over them. But they had quite a bit of power on their own underneath that system.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 39:04 But suddenly, you’ve got this whole other group coming back, some of which are related to Davidic lines and so forth. Now, they are the top dogs. So, it’s also a clash of political power. I think part of the reason they weren’t allowed to help rebuild the temple is not for spiritual reasons, although that is how the text points out. But I think for the political reason, no, we are in charge here. So, these local people try to stop these rebuilding projects by claiming you don’t have permission to do this. We’re here.

Hank Smith: 39:44 We’ve been here.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 39:45 They have to appeal back to Persia. That’s where you get some of these chapters where we have a repetition of the decrees. In fact, you don’t see this in the King James version, but there’s several chapters, I think chapter 4 through 6 in Ezra that is actually written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew in the Hebrew Bible. There’s different parts of the Hebrew Bible where they just have kept the Aramaic from these decrees because under the Persian empire, Aramaic became the dominant lingua franca of the day. That’s why, by the time of Jesus, Aramaic was a common spoken language because they had been dominated by the Persians for so long. It maintains some of these Aramaic decrees and letters back and forth. But the Persians, as they check their archives and check probably Cyrus’s cylinder, they find no, they are given permission to do this. So they do have the Persian backing to allow them to continue to rebuild.

John Bytheway: 40:49 I’m looking at the synopsis for Ezra chapter 4. The Samaritans offer help, then hinder the work. It’s a little more complex than we think about this relationship with the Samaritans going way back to these Old Testament times, like we’re talking about. I think that helps us when we get to Jesus and the Samaritans and that history they have of that rival temple, like you said, in Gerizim.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 41:11 It’s been going on for 400 years.

John Bytheway: 41:13 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 41:14 Right. If I’m of a lower class family, let’s just say I’ve lived really long. I’ve seen Assyria come in. I’ve seen Babylon come in. Then Madeline, my daughter, fell in love with-

John Bytheway: 41:27 A Persian.

Hank Smith: 41:27 … Truman the Babylonian. Yeah. Truman, the Persian. They had children. So now I’ve got children who are half-Jewish, half non-Jewish. Here comes this rebuilding group. I want to be part of it. And they say, absolutely not. You can’t be part of it. So do I leave then, at that point? Is that when I go to the north and go live in what’s called Samaria, or am I already there?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 41:50 I think a lot of the people are wherever they are, and a lot of them are in Samaria, but I think some of the movers and shakers, if you will, of that group had moved into the Jerusalem area. So, they still are there antagonizing. Some of this is groups of neighboring Ammonites, for example, that can come in and assert some authority now that a lot of the Jews are gone. So they are in the mix here as well as there’s the people of the land that I think are more just the people left over that have now intermarried. But then there’s also some of these other groups that are coming in and trying to assert more authority.

Hank Smith: 42:31 Goodness, this is messy.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 42:33 It gets really messy.

Hank Smith: 42:35 Sometimes when I’ve thought about this history, I’ve thought just everybody get along. Just everybody rebuild the walls and everybody rebuild the temple. It’s awesome. We all get to go back. But we do complicate things. It was interesting that you said that they’re supposed to rebuild the temple and yet they build their own homes first. Because we saw that so often last year, John, where the Lord said in the Doctrine and Covenants, “Build the temple,” and then two years later, “Hey, is anybody going to…”

John Bytheway: 43:01 Is anybody going to get started on this?

Hank Smith: 43:03 Then another time, “I was serious about that.” Jared, does that feel the same to you as when we read those church history stories?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 43:10 Yeah. I think that’s exactly it because it’s a sacrifice. If you’re going to work on the temple, then that means you’re not working on your own things. And so being able to have faith enough to put the Lord’s house first and then that you’ll still be able to do your own, that’s a challenge. Then attitude is this opposition that helps delay things. It’s like not getting the right permit or something, so you have to go through the permit process until finally the Persians say, yes, they can go on. It’s like a factor as well, is just the natural opposition that’s coming against them.

Hank Smith: 43:47 That’s interesting. And what an awesome way we could apply this to it’s a sacrifice to put the house of the Lord first. That’s the same way today, isn’t it? You’ve got to make time to go to the temple because, like you said, I’ve got to sacrifice what I could be doing in my own life to go do the Lord’s work.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 44:06 Sacrifices will vary as far as how hard that is. That’s one of the efforts of the church is to get temples as close to members as possible, but still some people have to travel incredible amounts of time and make incredible efforts to attend the temple. Yet sometimes, I’m five minutes away from a temple, and I realize, “Wait, I haven’t done my part yet for a while. I need to get to the temple and…”

Hank Smith: 44:32 They didn’t have to make appointments, though, to build the temple. We have to make appointments. Our life is really hard, John.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 44:38 I know.

Hank Smith: 44:38 We have to go online and make an appointment, and…

John Bytheway: 44:42 Gee, I need some names. I can print out my own family members just like that.

Hank Smith: 44:46 But John, I mean that takes ink and just give me a break here, John, let me know. I mean, my life is hard.

John Bytheway: 44:52 Yeah. Another way to look at it is interesting to me is like in Ezra 4, it talks about the Samaritans hired counselors or the people of the land hired counselors against them to frustrate their purpose of going. Yeah. Whenever we want to build a temple in the world, everybody just loves it.

Hank Smith: 45:12 Yeah. No one ever hires counselors to stop the work.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 45:16 There’s never local opposition. Right?

John Bytheway: 45:18 Never.

Hank Smith: 45:19 Yeah. Isn’t that right out of the manual? “The Lord’s work rarely goes unopposed. And this was certainly true of the efforts led by Zerubbabel.” Jared, tell us who Zerubbabel is.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 45:32 Zerubbabel is one of these local governor that is under the Persians. The name sounds like it’s related to Baal, but it’s actually related to Babel, Babylon. Zeru is seed, so seed of Babylon. So, he’s come from that area but now is here in Jerusalem, and he helps start the community and get things going here because Ezra doesn’t show up himself until chapter 7. What the first chapters are, are just all this background from when the Persians had taken over up until Ezra comes on the scene, and Ezra’s about 458. So almost a 100 years after Persia had conquered the Babylonians, Ezra finally comes on the scene. Even among seasoned biblical scholars, the chronology of Ezra and Nehemiah is one of the most confusing things in the Bible. It’s listing a lot of kings, but it doesn’t list if this is the Artaxerxes the First, the Second, Third. There’s Darius, we see in the book of Daniel, but this is not the same Darius that’s mentioned here, and there’s going to be a later Darius that Alexander conquers.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 46:49 So, that gets confusing. Then we have a Nehemiah that’s mentioned that’s not the Nehemiah that the book’s named after, and which came first and when? If you feel at all confused, you’re not alone. We just try to keep it pretty basic and say the Persians came; they start to rebuild the temple; it finally gets rebuilt, but then Ezra’s going to come. Nehemiah’s going to come. Particularly, Ezra’s going to focus on the law, on the worship aspect of it. Okay. Now that we have the temple, let’s make sure we’re following the law in our daily lives in what we’re doing. Nehemiah’s going to come back because he’s heard that the city still is in ruins as far as the walls of the city and so forth. He’s like, “Wait, this is Jerusalem. It can’t be that way.” Nehemiah is a cup bearer to the Persian king, a cup bearer, as you know, is the one that basically taste tests the food and the wine, the drink for the king so that if anything’s poisoned, he’s out before the king gets it.

Hank Smith: 47:53 He’s like a canary in a mine. Yeah.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 47:55 Uh-huh. It’s a dangerous position, but it’s also a very trusted position because you could imagine that a cup bearer could easily turn against the king and pass on food that he himself has poisoned, and so it has to be somebody that’s trusted. So it’s quite amazing that a non-Persian is given this very trusted position. But because of this connection to the king, the king one day notices, “Wait, Nehemiah, why are you so down? What’s up?” Finally, Nehemiah shares, “I’ve heard from some of my colleagues back in Jerusalem that came that things are not good there. The walls are still in ruins.” And so the king says, “Well, why don’t you go back and help rebuild them,” with, it sounds like, the intention that Nehemiah would return. And he does actually return. We just aren’t sure how long he stays.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 48:48 He will return back to Jerusalem later. Nehemiah’s efforts are primarily with the walls of the city. My wife, Margaret, this is one of her favorite parts of the story, and partly I think because of our time in Jerusalem. Because of the opposition, Nehemiah has to go out at night and inspect the walls of the city and figure out, “Okay, where do we need to rebuild and strengthen the walls? How can we do this?” Kind of does a reconnaissance trip at night, going around the walls and inspecting them and so forth. Then he begins this rebuilding effort that included not only how we’re going to construct, but how are we going to defend ourselves from this opposition while we’re building? It’s kind of like the Kirtland temple when they had to build the temple and they had to-

John Bytheway: 49:35 Have guards.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 49:36 … to protect them. So you have a tool in one hand and maybe a weapon in another. It describes that in Nehemiah of some of these efforts to rebuild the walls. Nehemiah’s main project was getting the city back to where it was. But again, the local opposition is trying to tell the Persians, “Look, if you let them rebuild the walls, then of course they’re going to rebel. They now have a fortified city.” Because of Nehemiah’s position, I think he’s able to assure the king, “No, we’re just trying to make the city what it was. And we’re still loyal to you. It provides a fortified city for you because we’re under your empire.” So he finally does get the permission and the resources and everything, and they’re able to finish with a lot of rejoicing once it’s finally done.

Hank Smith: 50:22 This is fantastic. I didn’t realize so much opposition, and it wasn’t necessarily enemies because it seems to me that they’re not enemies of Persia who are fighting against this rebuilding a temple. It’s the locals.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 50:35 I would say it’s internal opposition. We have in the church some that are outside of the church that may attack or not agree with us and try to thwart our purposes. But then we have some within the church that also oppose some of the things and sometimes those are even harder to deal with. So they’re trying to carry out what they feel they should be doing with the temple and the walls and everything amidst all of this opposition, again, because there’s a political layer underneath all this. He who can rebuild the walls, controls the walls and the city and gates. That’s one of the things Nehemiah does is he decrees when the gates can be open, when they’re going to be closed, and those kinds of things. So it gives power to whoever has that control.

Hank Smith: 51:28 Interesting. This makes the book so much more accessible. Like, you can understand as you read. It’s a historian wanting to tell us… How long after the fact were these books written, do we know?

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 51:39 We don’t know. Ezra follows in the same vein as First and Second Kings and others where it’s just a third person narrative redactor, and we don’t know who’s exactly recording this. Nehemiah is interesting in that it’s more of a first person account. I think it’s a little bit more like First Nephi, maybe reflecting back on some of the events that had happened earlier and so forth. I can’t imagine it’s going to be that much later than the time period it’s recording, but it’s obviously going to go through some editorial process in the transmission.

Hank Smith: 52:18 And it’s very pro those who are trying to return and rebuild.

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 52:22 Yeah, definitely from that perspective.

Hank Smith: 52:25 What would a Samaritan history sound like? “We had our own city and…”

Dr. Jared Ludlow: 52:28 Yeah. Who are these outsiders that think that they can come in and take over and… Yeah.

Hank Smith: 52:34 Yeah, right.

John Bytheway: 52:38 Please join us for part two of this podcast.