40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Ezra 4:6-5:17 (Episode 355)

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Chad and Daniel look at letters sent back and forth from different rulers that are trying to figure out if the Jews have really been told to rebuild their temple and city. Some are in good faith, and some seem not to be. And God doesn't leave His people without a preacher. Have a listen! Donate 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. And while you're over there, you can check out everything else that 1517 is doing. All those events, all those academies, all those daily articles, all the stuff that we have to offer. Go over there, check it all out, and see if there's anything else over there that you find useful. Chad, we are in Ezra chapter 4, and we had the people come back to, you know, they got to go back home.

They decided, let's get some altar building underway. Let's get some temple building underway. And everything seemed like it was going pretty good, but then they got a little discouraged. They declined some help from some people that wanted to help them, and they didn't want any help because, you know, who knows who these people are. We've got to stay away from idolatry and all this kind of stuff. We don't need the help of people that we don't know. But it seems like that group took that a little personal

and decided they were going to go and find ways to make this more difficult. Hey, if you're not going to let me help you, then how about I sabotage all your stuff? And that's kind of where we left it. Yeah, this is kind of the ancient form of bureaucratic stalling, more or less, is what we're going to see here. Bureaucracy is certainly nothing that is new to the modern age. We're going to actually be introduced here to a whole bunch of stuff that's, I guess, presented in abbreviated form is the way we can think about this. Because it's kind of easy. And believe me, when I was kind of looking through this a week or two ago, it was confusing because it's like everything is pushed together into what looks like a short amount of time.

But actually, we're dealing here with a whole bunch of obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, that are over an extended period of time. But it's all presented here kind of together. And I think the reason they do this is they're trying to present before us kind of a complete picture of all the obstacles that were facing the people as they tried to rebuild, not just the temple, but as we'll see in a second, but the whole city. so we're going to be first of all uh introduced to four different kings in a row and then we're going to read a letter that is addressed to one of these kings and then his response so we're going to start here with verse five this is ezra 4 5 we hear about uh the the enemies who are bribing counselors to frustrate the purpose of the of the jews and this happened it says all the days of Cyrus king of Persia even until the reign of Darius king of Persia

so actually skip over so there was a ruling between Cyrus and Darius Cambyses uh who was 529 to 521 but the the picture here is that this this happened over a long period of time of course it was the decree of Cyrus that allowed them to return and then Darius was uh after him uh and then you're introduced in verse six to somebody else the reign the reign of ahasuerus uh who is also known as xerxes the first so this is another one of these kings so ahasuerus or xerxes the first uh says in his reign beginning of his reign they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of judah and jerusalem so you've got when they're trying to build the temple you have people who are getting in the way hiring counselors uh coming up these these bureaucratic stall techniques

this extends all the way into the reign of xerxes the first or ahasuerus where they're writing these letters against the inhabitants of jerusalem all right so we hear about that we've heard about cyrus darius ahasuerus slash slash xerxes the first verse seven then introduces us to still another king artaxerxes so we've heard about a lot uh so far but we're going to now kind of be introduced to the details of how some of this worked. And this is going to be another letter. So verse 7 says, in the days of Artaxerxes, people named Bishlam and Mithradoth and Tabeel, and then their associates, they get together and they wrote a letter to the king of Persia, to Artaxerxes. And we read that the letter was written in Aramaic. So most of the time when we

we talk about the languages of which the scriptures were written we say new testament in greek and old testament in hebrew and that's of course generally speaking true uh not completely true though because we have about uh oh depending on how you count the verses uh around seven or or or eight chapters that are uh written in aramaic and some of these are starting now in the book of ezra so ezra four eight through six eight are in aramaic and then skipping the chapter 7, verses 12 through 26 are in Aramaic. And then when you get to Daniel, you have some more. So Daniel 2, 4 through 7, 28 are also written in Aramaic. Aramaic is basically a sister language to Hebrew. It's kind of like if you compare the Romance languages, French and

Spanish and Italian, there's a lot of similarities between them. Aramaic is the same way, uses the same script, but it's not just like a form of Hebrew. It's a completely different language. but by this time, I think we talked about this toward the end of second Kings by this time, it's become the lingua franca of, of that world. So it's the, it's kind of like English is today, you know, English is known worldwide. It's, uh, you know, if you're going to learn a second language, that's probably, if you're not an English speaker and you're gonna learn a second language, that's probably the one that you're going to learn. Same thing was, uh, was prevalent in this time period. And of course, Aramaic still existed as the lingua franca all the way into the

time of the first century so jesus would have spoken aramaic as well and as he probably knew hebrew and and in greek also but aramaic was still kind of the the spoken language so what's what's about to be recorded here is something that was written then in in aramaic and in ezra itself these next few chapters are going to be going to be in aramaic so anyway that that's the the letter and uh verse eight picks it up from there it says uh rahum the commander and shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against jerusalem to artaxerxes the king as follows and then we have the introduction where they say their names this is ram the commander shimshai the scribe the rest of their associates judges governors officials persians men of eric the babylonians minnesota that is

the elamites the rest of the nations whom the great and noble asnapar deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and in the rest of the provinces beyond the river. So that's a long, formal introduction to all these people that were involved. And then he says, this is the copy of the letter that they sent. All right. So these guys get together, write this letter against Jerusalem, and here's what they said. So listen to it and tell me if you think it's accurate, if you think it's partially accurate, if it's just basically nothing more than mudslinging. So this is the letter they send to Artaxerxes, the king, your servants, the men of the province beyond the river, that would be beyond the Euphrates, send their greetings.

So hello. And now be it known to the king that the Jews who came up from you to us have gone to Jerusalem. They are rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city. They're finishing the walls and repairing the foundations. now be it known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and the walls finished they will not pay tribute custom or toll and the royal revenue will be impaired now because we eat the salt of the palace i want to come back to that explain what that idiom means now because we eat the salt of the palace and it's not fitting for us to witness the king's dishonor therefore we send and inform

the king in order that search may be made in the book of the record of your fathers you will find in the book of the records and learn that this city is a rebellious city hurtful to kings and provinces and that sedition was stirred up in it from of old that's why this city was laid waste we make known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and its walls finished you will then have no possession in the province beyond the river End of letter This doesn't seem like the cold hard facts They're asserting a couple things

It seems in here You can have these concerns Describing a city as Rebellious and wicked That seems like an opinion Not a fact I actually don't think this letter is too genius Because

It sort of reads like You're telling a king that he doesn't know something Really important right so you're hey i don't know what you're doing but uh just so you know if this happens then you're not going to be able to take they're not going to play tribute you got you're gonna have a huge problem on your hand i would be a little insulted personally if i got this letter because i i one i would i would take it as you need to go look in the go look at your history don't you know how bad this city is that's a little insulting and then also if they build

these walls you won't be like this is a horror this is a horrible thing is going to happen as if i don't have the military strength to to do something about it if i wanted to so that's that's how i feel i i don't think it's like that genius of a letter uh no it's it seems a little over the top uh i mean and what you said and kind of my reading of it too uh leads me to be surprised at the king's response but uh which we'll get to in a minute but yeah it it comes across just on the surface as if they're pushing things a little bit too far. They're exaggerating things a little bit too much. Now, granted, there was a time in the nation's history, in this city's history, when in fact they were a rebellious city. I mean, no doubt about that, right? That's the reason the

city got destroyed. The Babylonians came in, and Nebuchadnezzar at first was happy with just basically making them to be a vassal state so if they had not rebelled against him if they just basically continued to pay tribute to the babylonians and not stirred up strife and all those sorts of things that any tyrant wants from his subjects then everything would have been fine in fact that's what jeremiah told them to do he told them don't rebel against the babylonians of course, they did not listen. They did become a rebellious city. And because of that, God had the Babylonians destroy the city. So that's what I mean. There's an element of truth to this. If you go way back, the problem is that what these letter writers have done is they've taken the city's

past, they've exaggerated and applied it to the people of the present, and they've attributed to them motives which for which there is no evidence so they're trying to say you know what it's a really really really bad place and the people that are that they're now they have these terrible evil motivations for repairing the walls of this city and as soon as they get done they are going to turn around and stab you in the back well there's of course no evidence at all that this is what the israelites were doing in fact there's plenty of evidence to the contrary everything that's been presented to us so far about the Israelites who have returned portray them as very much kind of law-abiding vassals of the Persians. I mean, they're doing exactly what Cyrus allowed them to

do. They're not trying to take more territory that's been given to them. They're not trying to stir up sedition and strife. They actually seem to be kind of model citizens. They're not free by any means but they seem to be you know doing a pretty good job of being model model citizens but again this is and they're and they're you know they're a generation removed from i mean it's it there's a and i and i know you could speak of people groups this way at this time so it's like well you know how the chaldeans are or whatever um and you can be talking about them as a group uh this is you're talking about a group that like you're like hey These are some rebellious, wicked people over here.

But these people, like the vast majority of them, they never lived there before. They were born probably in captivity. They're going, like, these are completely different people. But you get to speak in this sort of generalities where you're like, you know how the Jews are. It'd be like saying, well, you know how Dan's great-grandfather was. yeah you know as if you're like the spitting image of his weaknesses and strengths no no it's a different person you know how those welsh immigrants are they're terrible as if that has anything to do with me

well this is the this is the letter oh i was going to explain the the whole eating the salt of the palace uh yeah that's a that's a kind of interesting image there it's explained in different ways some people think it just means basically it's saying uh that these people enjoy the benefits of kind of imperial provisions you know we're the people who uh oh king we we eat of all the good things that you provide for us well it's a possibility it does seem kind of strange that they would if that's all that means that they would narrow in on salt i mean why not say some something else besides that so we do know from uh multiple passages in the old testament that salt was connected with kind of agreements and making covenants in fact there's there's

reference to uh the salt of the covenant so probably what this is is some sort of idiom for so when they say we eat the salt of the palace it's their way of saying we we have uh come into in agreement with you. We're kind of living in covenant with you. We've cut a covenant. We've shared salt together in that sort of way. So we're tight. In other words, we might put it in today's dating. We're close. We're bound to you, we might say. And because of that, we're really concerned. Of course, they're portraying themselves in this real positive light. We have a grave of concern about these Israelites, O king. Of course, this is self-serving for them. Unfortunately, as we'll see in the king's response, you know, either he doesn't get this or maybe just, you

know, the servants, the officials he put in charge of answering these kinds of questions didn't see it. But either way, he's going to send a response back, and that response is recorded in verses 17 and and following so the king sent this answer uh he first of all addresses the people who wrote the letter ray i'm the commander and shimshai the scribe and all their associates who live in samaria and in the province beyond the river greetings he says uh the letter that you sent to us has been plainly read before me so he got the correspondence he read it and he made a decree and they did they searched the archives and they found that this city from of old has risen against kings and that rebellion and sedition have been made in it well yeah if they have any archives

from back in the days of nebuchadnezzar that would have been obvious you go back and read the history it's like oh yeah this city did rebel against uh the king of the king of babylon yeah unthinkable that a city would fight back yeah shocking shocking verse 20 goes on to say uh in this letter and mighty kings have been over jerusalem who ruled over the whole province beyond the river to whom tribute custom and toll were paid well i guess yeah mighty kings i mean that's a relative term but certainly solomon was it was a mighty king and his he had a a very expansive empire for israel and even david before him i mean he did conquer some of the surrounding nations and they paid tribute and custom yeah i mean so no israelite king was a was like a

Nebuchadnezzar or Osiris. I mean, their territory was never as vast as these guys. Israel was always a minor league player as far as the nations around them. They were never as powerful as the Assyrian or Babylonian empire. But yeah, they had some mighty kings, relatively speaking, and Solomon was certainly one of those. So he says all that. So yeah, we checked it out, and it seems that basically what you're saying is true.

And on the basis of that, verse 21, the letter continues, Therefore, make a decree that these men be made to cease, and that this city be not rebuilt until a decree is made by me. And take care not to be slack in this matter. Why should damage grow to the hurt of the king? So he received the letter. He had people check out the archives, found out that, yeah, this city has a past. And so he makes this decree that at least for the time being, that the work on the city walls and the foundation is to be is to be halted.

Now, this letter gets back to the recipients. Verse 23, the copy of the letter from King Artaxerxes was read before these guys. And so they take off. They go in haste to the Jews at Jerusalem and by force and power made them cease. well, that's going beyond what the letter said. I don't think Artaxerxes ever said in that letter, so I want you to take up arms, and I want you to, by force and power, go make them stop. Really, all they should have done was read the letter from Artaxerxes, and by his authority alone, that should have made them stop. But of course, they're going to take things too far.

So that takes us through almost the entirety of the chapter. So that's through verse 23. three. Now, keep in mind what I said when we started this, that there's a whole lot of history over a long period of time that have been packed into this portrayal of the various kinds of obstacles that the people of God faced when they were trying to rebuild the temple. And then later when they're trying to rebuild the city walls and the foundations and basically put all the infrastructure back together. All right. So we went from Cyrus to Darius to Hasuerus to Artaxerxes you know this list of kings now verse 24 which is the last verse in the chapter is going to as it were pick up the story and take us back to where we were before we kind of went

on this long historical trail down to the reign of artaxerxes because verse 24 says this then the work on the house of god that's in jerusalem stopped and it ceased until the second reign of darius king of persia now this is the reason i said this is confusing because we go from cyrus to darius but then as you wear us next thing is mentioned our dessert season next thing is mentioned and then we get to the very end of the chapter and it it circles back to darius and takes us back to where we all started where there was a cessation of work on the temple itself all right so that's why it's a little bit confusing so he's he's thrown a bunch of history at us, throwing a bunch of stories of obstacles and quoted the letters and whatnot, just to kind

of give us the overall impression that, man, if you were a Jew living in Jerusalem and just trying to get everything back together, it was like every time you turned around, there was some new bureaucratic obstacle in the way, or some new people group that had issues with you, or some new letter from the king stopping the work that you were trying to do. Just a lot of problems, a lot of obstacles. And then when he kind of presents this all, he goes back and says, now, So all that was kind of a footnote, by the way. So let me get back to the subject at hand, and that is how we were going to try and get the temple rebuilt.

That's anyway kind of my general impression of Ezra 4, the way it's set up structurally. My great takeaway from all this is that none of these guys are as smart as Cyrus. That would be a great takeaway. That's my takeaway. Cyrus is better than all these guys. I feel like the political shrewdness declined after Cyrus. That tends to be what happens with empires.

Yeah. I just don't think he takes this letter the same way. Yeah. Cyrus would have been like, whatever. Write back to them and tell them, I made the decree. Leave them alone. Yes. Basically.

Yeah. Yes, okay, I'm aware every city has a past, all right? The past does not determine the present in this case. So I made the decree, I gave the Jews all their stuff back, and told them to rebuild the temple. So quit being a pain

in the rear end and let them do their work. That's my impression. I feel like he would have been more insulted by this letter than... He probably would have said something like, don't write me again yes right i received your letter don't send another one yeah yeah so uh

anyway yeah that so cyrus is definitely the uh at the top of the intellectual and political ladder as far as these these kinds of leadership decisions go okay we're so we're we're we're kind of back now to where we were before we took this long trip forward and we're uh we're trying going to get the temple rebuilt. So let's figure out how this happens, which is what Ezra 5 tells us. And here we're introduced to two guys that we know. So if you've memorized the books of the Bible, maybe back in Sunday school, then two of the names that you memorized in the Old Testament are Haggai and Zechariah. These are part of the so-called minor prophets, Book of the Twelve sometimes called. And so we have their writings. And I don't know, when Dan and I are substantially

the older we'll get to yeah well there'll be uh my beard has been rapidly graying over the course of the last uh two years yeah and by then i'm i'm certain that you will be looking at a full gray beard when we delve into hag eyes i might even have a gray beard by then yeah yeah you uh you'll be uh have some color on there as as well yeah i got my wife to noted the other day at a basketball game uh she's like oh a little more a little more salt in that pepper and that beard so uh it's that it's happening i think it's the second kid second kid got me and all this suddenly it's your sudden uh lack of sleep yeah that you're experiencing suddenly i got gray hairs popping out all over the place so we'll see what happens i i have a

feeling that that's sort of like uh i know this is a total aside but i don't know but as i've observed uh it seems that the grain is a is very much a snowball thing well once it's this is once it starts it's uh it don't stop very much so yeah yeah yeah i've i definitely have observed the snowball effect so yeah my my prophecy speaking of prophets now my prophecy is i give myself two more years before there would be very very little pepper and a whole lot of salt in my beard there you got it so uh yeah these prophets haggai and zechariah we'll get to them eventually uh they're uh this is one more case we saw this when we covered uh second kings of course where you'll be going through historical narrative and you're like ah hey i know this guy's name it was isaiah

that popped up then so here we are in this historical narrative uh after the exile around around 520, something like that, 520 B.C., and here we have these guys' names pop up that we know, and we can read their books. So Haggai is a pretty short book. Zechariah is much longer, and Zechariah is also one of these very apocalyptic kinds of books, and we see more and more of that genre of biblical literature

becoming prevalent around this time and it's going to continue i mean you have the the literature of of enoch and then of course you get to the new testament you have revelations so much more uh of a rise of apocalyptic during during this time period but anyway haggai and zechariah uh these two guys together simultaneously so they're they're contemporaneous with each other they prophesied to the jews who were in judah and jerusalem and i guess let me add this too i think it's uh isn't it great that uh that that god did not withhold prophets from him yeah you know he before this you had a lot of prophets of course who were kind of leading up to the exile and and then after the exile god still is going to send them these uh these men of god who are

actually going to speak in god's name and here they're not really warning them about you know an impending destruction or something like that like jeremiah and a lot of the other ones did uh they're basically going to be more of a kind of a uh you know an encourager uh admonisher we might say in some cases maybe an arm twister they're trying to get the temple rebuilt is really what they're what they're trying to do i mean and if you read their books uh then you'll see they have more to say than just that they're more than than just kind of you know cheerleaders for rebuilding the temple but at least in ezra that's the way they're presented as they're there to preach the people into action

so they actually get this house done. So the prophets Haggai and Zechariah prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the God we've already talked about, and this Jesus character, Yeshua, the son of a Josedach,

we've already talked about these two fellows before, they arose and began to rebuild the house of God that's in jerusalem and the prophets of god were with them supporting them so you got kind of everybody involved even though zerubbabel is not a king he is a leader and then you have yeshua who's part of the levitical priestly leadership so you got really you know you don't have a king but you have someone at least in the line of david who's there you have the priest active you have the prophets so you got all these folks again being active and used by god and at the same time uh we're introduced to another obstacle so and we thought we may be past this nope nope a guy by

the name of tatanai who was the governor he was the one who was in charge of this province beyond the river uh he and then uh another guy named shethar bazanai and their associates they came to them and spoke to them now i i'm not sure how to read this i don't know that this is necessarily kind of another sinister move on their part I think this might just be kind of the guy in charge making sure that what's being

done is legal that they have actually imperial authority to do what they're doing anyway it's a weird time it's hard imagine if you're like living in a place and then like a displaced people

group like comes back and they start building all this stuff and it's not like you pick up the phone you know or check your email figure out like you know maybe do a google search and see if this is legit or not uh you don't know it's easy to see how you be like hey wait a minute what's going on here like do you have permission to do this yeah yeah i think that's what's going on there i mean he's worried he's well he's the guy in charge yeah he's got to make sure that it's a pretty big deal these guys are rebuilding a temple i mean why do they have some kind of authority to do this and like you said there's communication takes it takes time so he comes up to them and he says uh who gave you a decree to build this house and to finish

the structure and then they also follow up they want they want i want some names he said uh what are the names of the men who are building this building so he's uh he's asking he's taking names he's going to find out who's in charge and then if they have the authority to do what to do what they're doing so ask these questions whatever his motivation was whether it was purely kind of uh governmental and making sure everything was done as it should be done if maybe there were some sinister motives going on we really don't know but as it's presented it seems like it's just uh he's making sure that everything is every t is crossed and every die is audited so he asked these questions it's a bummer you know it's a bummer when the guy that told you to do this or

gave you permission and really gave you all the supplies when he's dead that makes it that makes a bummer it makes it harder yeah i think that there would it would have been better communication so like letters would have been sent also to the people in charge saying hey there's gonna be this group of people coming back they're called the jews they're going to rebuild the temple in jerusalem but if that correspondence was sent it was either lost or or not not received now verse five does tell us that the eye of the eye of their god so despite these questions and this possible cessation of work the eye of their god was on the elders of judah and they did not stop them until the report should reach darius and then an answer be returned by letter concerning

it so at least even though these guys show up start asking questions they didn't stop they they kept they kept on building a kind of a strange uh strange phrase by the way the eye of their god was on the elders of of the jews usually if there's any part of god's body that's said to be on the people for their favorites the hand so like the hand of the lord was on them or the hand of the lord was with them but here it's the here it's the eye i was reading one commentary on ezra that said there's a possibility here that's sort of a uh an illusion being made to the fact that kind of the Not necessarily the spies, but maybe the people who were employed by the king who were to make sure that kind of everything was being done right in the empire were called the eyes of the king. So they were checking things out.

So some people think that this is sort of a playoff of that, that maybe the eyes of these other people were on the Jews, but more importantly, the eye of their God was on them. He was watching out for them, had their interest in mind, and was acting on that to make sure they were successful. Yeah, you know, well, you know, God has got a, you know, he's had a tough relationship with, you know, with the Jews so far. So, you know, maybe he's like, before I put my hand on you, I'm going to just like take a, I'm just going to, you know, like, it's like when you tell someone, I got my eye on you, you know, and so he's, God's got his eye on him. He's looking out for them, but he's going to see how it goes. Yeah. They have a checkered past, God and the Israelites, to put it mildly. Yeah, maybe God's like, we're not totally back together yet.

We'll see how this works out. Yeah, we'll see how things go for a while, test the waters. It is interesting, though, going back to something you said, which I think is important, is that you could feel like you know you're reading stuff that god's had enough and like you know that's just people going to captivity and exile and that he's just done with them and the the way you know that god is not finished is that when he doesn't refrain from giving you a preacher and god is that god is always giving you even if you're in exile i mean you you can you can

read the books of they're written when they're in exile that god is he is faithful to give them a preacher always yeah there's always a preacher no matter what else is going on everything else could look like it's gone to crap but like uh there's always a preacher and it's really not until you know you get to the end of the old testament and you have like those so they're silent years and the reason they're called the silent years because you don't have any books or anything because because there's no preacher leading up to the preacher right the john the baptist is going to come and be and be that guy but uh up until then like israel doesn't have these big huge gaps where they have no one speaking the word of the lord that god doesn't

do that to them the only two only two instances i can think of where that happened in the entire old testament are uh number one when israel was in egypt so i mean which is that that's significant right they were waiting and waiting they had the promise god told abraham that he was going to bring his people out after they'd been there for a while, but there was no prophet. And then Moses shows up, right? And then you have a parallel to that happening,

like you just pointed out, in between Malachi and then the rising of John the Baptist. There's this long period of prophetic silence, which is why, and this is kind of taking us aside, but I think it's a good point to make, which is why when John showed up

preaching in the wilderness, everybody's flocking out to him. I mean, we've been waiting centuries for God to send a prophet, and now there he is. Isn't it weird that you can know when it's legit? Because it's not as though, you know, I mean, you're talking about a lot of, I mean, hundreds of years. It's not as though, like, no one probably tried to rise up and, like, speak some words or anything like that. I mean, no doubt this happened, right? I mean, you have guys trying to seize, you know, it wasn't as though no one claimed to be speaking for God.

It's just ridiculous to think that'd be the case. But for whatever reason, even if you don't like it, even if you don't like what they're saying, which happens a lot to the prophets, right? Most of the time happens to the prophets. You still kind of know that that's the guy. yeah it's like i think was it ezekiel that god told us to that whether they listen to you or not they will know that a prophet has been among them yeah and whether you like him or not whether you rebel against him or not whether you kill him or not you'd be like yeah that dude i didn't like anything he said but he was a prophet yeah for sure yeah and that's how it is with john i mean

like john the baptist isn't like that's not the guy you pick right i mean this guy is a total total freak but the people are flocking out to him why they some because the word of the lord is like that and like when you when you hear it you know like this is not uh and even the scribes and pharisees they knew like they're going out there they're like this is uh i mean for them they're like this is a problem but they there was no denying that this is different than the words coming out of somebody else's mouth right yeah yeah so uh uh thank god that he he sent his preachers and uh and even and even thank god that he did that that gap happened between malachi and john because that way when john showed up it was like oh something's happening something big in

fact is uh is on the horizon so uh yeah we have uh we have haggai zechariah they're preaching and And then we have Tat and I showing up and kind of wrap up here with just briefly going over his letter. We're going to next next time we'll get to the decree that Darius issues as a result of this letter. But the letter is it's kind of long. So it's verses six through through 17 of this chapter. It's kind of summarizes it because it kind of retells a lot of the history. So he sends this letter to Darius, he says, peace, he just wants it to be known that in the province of Judah that the temple is being rebuilt. He describes how they're taking huge stones and timber and the work is going on diligently. And he says, hey, we went to the elders and we said, basically, who gave you the authority to do this?

Who gave you the decree to build this house and to finish the structure? And he says, we asked for their names, information, so on and so forth. Now, listen to this reply. This is verse 11. So, Tatanai, who's writing to Darius, is now supposedly quoting what these people said. We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding the house that was built many years ago, which a great king of Israel built and finished. But because our fathers had angered the God of heaven, he gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the Chaldean, who destroyed this house and carried away the people to Babylonia. Well, so far, that's exactly what happened. They're being very accurate.

However, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Babylon, Cyrus the king made a decree that this house of God should be rebuilt. In fact, he even gave back the gold and silver vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had taken. They were delivered to Shesh-bazar, and he was made governor. And verse 15 says that he was instructed to take the vessels and go back to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple on its site. so verse 16 says that sheshubzar came laid the foundations and from that time until now it's being it's being rebuilt so he he quotes these words from the israelites back to darius and then he wraps it up in verse 17 by saying therefore if it seems good to the king let search be made in the royal archives there there in babylon to see whether a decree was issued by cyrus for rebuilding

this house of god in jerusalem and then let us know what you find out send us your pleasure in this matter. So that's why it seems to me like Tat and I is just trying to make sure that everything that's being done is legit. And I love the fact that he quotes the Jews in this letter. And what they say is, I mean, it's kind of a welcome honesty. It's like, yeah, you know, here's what happened. Our forefathers rebelled against God and he let Nebuchadnezzar come and these terrible things happened to us. But thanks be to God, he's given us a second chance. He's given us Cyrus and his decree and all this stuff that we can use to rebuild. So it's kind of a refreshing humility, I guess, on the part of the Jews to say, listen, yeah, we royally screwed up in the past.

Our forefathers did. We suffered as a result. But listen, we're just trying to make things right now. We're trying to rebuild our house of God. And that's really all we're asking is to let us continue. Let us continue the work. Yeah, this letter reads very different than the other letter. This seems like a much more honest letter than the previous one that we read.

Yeah, it just asks for information. I'm just making sure everything is on the up and up here. That's all. I want to make sure I don't make Darius mad at me. What's going to be wild is, and we'll get to this next episode, but they're going to say, well, let's go back in the archives and see, did Cyrus do that? How do you not know this?

Yeah, it seems short term national memory or something yeah you gotta go like look did Cyrus tell them

to do that like you don't know if he did that or not it's weird it's like literally carved

in stone it's read on that rock right there it's written it's been decreed this is

this should be public knowledge yeah pretty wild well alright well we are out of time so we'll leave it there next episode and see

see what Darius this says about this whole matter and how that plays out. Chad, I'll see you then. All right, see you then.