followHIM - Ezra 1; 3-7 & Nehemiah 2; 4-6; 8 -- Part 1 : Dr. Jared W. Ludlow

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Do we ever simultaneously rejoice and weep? Dr. Jared Ludlow explores the Jewish people returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and rejoicing to have what they had lost, as well as feeling sorrowful for the years of exile and the loss of the glory of Solomon’s temple.Please rate and review the podcast!Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.co/old-testament/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive ProducersDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing & SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Show Notes/TranscriptsJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Rough Video EditorAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsKrystal Roberts: French TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-piano

Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come Follow Me study. I'm Hank Smith. And I'm John, by the way. We love to learn. We love to laugh. We want to learn and laugh with you. As together, 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. 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.

I really, I'm doing a great work up here on my podcast. It's a good application. I cannot come down. Well, John, that phrase comes from the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah, say that a bunch of times in a row. And we have a wonderful friend of ours and a brilliant scholar to join us on our podcast this week to tell our audience who is with us. Yes, we have Dr. Jared Ludlow with us. He has 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. I 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. 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. 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. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's some tough footsteps to follow in, but I'm hoping I'm not ruining it. And 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.

I think everyone, 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? Jared 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. You know, in the 400s BC, that's where Ezra and Nehemiah is placed. 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?

Yeah, and 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. And so, the writings, the last part of their Hebrew Bible is Ezra and Nehemiah, and Malachi is kind of back there, Haggai, Zechariah. All of these are pushed right at the end. And 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. 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, and they consider this kind of a historical book, continuation of 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. And 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 an Amos up in the northern kingdom before the tribes are taken away. Or we'll have Isaiah with King Hezekiah, or Jeremiah with around the time of Josiah and others. And so later on, we'll kind of fill in the gaps with these prophets. Let's make sure our listeners understand this, John. So we're doing history right now. We've been doing history. Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, which we found out was 1 and 2 Kings, and then there was 1 Kings, which is known as 3 Kings, and 2 Kings, which is known as 4 Kings. Oh, let me tell you, it gets even more confusing with Ezra and Nehemiah. You look at different

Bibles and you have up to 5th Ezra, depending on which denomination you go to. 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 kind of open to how you want to break it down and where you're going to put the breaks between them. And 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. And then what we're going to do is we're going to stop Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, which aren't historical

books per se, not telling us a history. They're called, what did you say? The writings. They're called the writings. How would you define writing? 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. I think writings is kind of a catch-all 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, and it's got its own kind of teaching story of- Kind of separate, right?

Yeah. Can somebody be good in the face of all this evil and bad coming upon them, tackling the issue of theodicy, the justice of God, and those kinds of things. And so, these writings, I think, tend to be tackling certain topics, if you will, and exploring God's wisdom. 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? Jared Yeah, definitely. You could put Isaiah with King Hezekiah's reign on Jeremiah later on, and they classify some as the great prophets or major prophets and minor prophets. And that's

more just not by how wonderful they were or not, but just the size of the book. And 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. This is excellent because I think our listeners love to just understand the setup, you know, 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. I was just sitting here thinking how we get kind of used to the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Mormon does have a flashback or two, and then the Jaredites kind of 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. He's doing Kings and Chronicles, and I'm kind of like, yeah, there's some repetition. So it's nice to kind of have somebody categorize it a little bit so we kind of know what we're looking at. Yeah. So, Jared, the last we left, the Northern Kingdom looked like things were about to fall down, where they were coming down, and the Southern Kingdom, just a century or so later,

things looked like they were going to come down too. Fill us in. What has happened since we left off in 2 Kings? You know, the kingdom of Israel really becomes a story of empires. They just get conquered, one empire by the next, by the next. And so you mentioned the northern kingdom taken away by the Assyrians, and a lot of the 10 tribes were taken away. They become lost to history, so we call them the Lost 10 Tribes. The southern kingdom barely survived, and that's under King Hezekiah. And then, like you mentioned, about a century later, the Babylonians come because they've now conquered the Assyrians.

And so then they basically inherit and take over the same territory that the Assyrians had, but they want to expand. And so they want to take over the southern kingdom. And Jerusalem is the prized jewel of that southern kingdom. And so they want to conquer it. And they eventually are successful. And 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, and 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, this 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. And he said it would be about 70 years before they could come back. And 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. 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, and 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. And so the Jews, of course, say, well, we're part of this, so 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. And in a nutshell, that's kind of 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. Yeah, the gardens. 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. And 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, the successor to Cyrus, pushes down and even conquers Egypt for a while. Their empire gets even bigger. And they're going to last for a couple of hundred years until Alexander the Great comes on the scene. And 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.

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 Nehemiah and 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? Yeah, I think you had some continuation of worship, but suddenly they're without a temple. And 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 temple 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?

And that's kind of the crisis that they faced was, what do I do? Now, some continue 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 and that's what they could develop. If you fast forward, the Jews have the Talmud, which is a collection of their laws and interpretations of the laws and so forth. And we have a Babylonian Talmud and a Palestinian or a Jerusalem Talmud that developed later on. Now we're talking about 400 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. And 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. 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 and I got hired by an Iraqi Jewish family just to do yard work and things around their house. And they had fled

from Iraq because of the tension that they now felt in this Arab country. Their ancestors went back to Iraq all the way back to the exile. Yeah, as far as you can tell, they were there for centuries and centuries from that time period. This brings up another question that my students sometimes ask that I'd love to get your perspective on, and that is that they often ask, well, what do the Jews do today without the temple? Or do they still do sacrifices? And so, sounds like the Babylonians had to come up with a we don't have the temple type of worship. And what do the Orthodox Jews do today regarding the temple?

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. And 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 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 continue to do sacrifices on Mount Gerizim. And so every Passover, they have a major sacrifice of lambs and all getting ready for Passover on top of the mount.

So sacrifice is kind of continued off and on in different groups. But a vast majority of Jews today, it's all about synagogue worship. It's all about prayer, scripture study, those kinds of things. And 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. It's past. And others will say, well, when the Messiah comes, maybe something will happen with the temple. And then there's others that are very actively, particularly those in Jerusalem, actively trying to rebuild the temple.

And of course, that can cause some political issues today. In the same spot where the old one was. Yeah. Yeah. We'll just get rid of the Dome of the Rock. Currently occupied. 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. And then we divided, right? Then we divided into two kingdoms, the north and the south. Eventually the northern kingdom.

Israel in the north. Israel in the north. Judah in the south. Ten tribes in the north, two tribes in the north. Judah in the south. Ten tribes in the north, two tribes in the south. 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. Pete Yeah. God is on our side. Why would he

allow his city, his people, his temple to be taken over? Jared 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. Yeah. 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. And that's where we get the stories of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Is that right? They're in Babylon. Yeah. And so they could have had a young men's group in Jerusalem with Nephi and Daniel and others. All about the same age. Yeah. 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 occupier. Yeah, I think the Assyrians were worse, but Babylon still is 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. Right. Compared to Assyria and Babylon before, it's a different administration, you could say. Okay.

So Babylon rules for about 70 years. And then here comes King Cyrus and the Persians saying, go home, go rebuild. And did Cyrus see himself as a liberator? I think you could say that. And 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 kind of called a shepherd. He's called an anointed one, somebody who could come and deliver them. And so in Isaiah 44, 28, it says, that saith of Cyrus, he is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying to Jerusalem, thou shalt 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. And so Cyrus is viewed, I think, very favorably by the Jews. What year would that be for Cyrus saying, I'm here, you can go home? That's around 525. And so I think it was 538 that the Persians take over the Babylonians. Just about a decade later, he issues this decree. And it's kind of exciting to see it in the British Museum, frankly. I mean, I had read about it so much, and then all of a sudden here I'm in this

room, and I kind of walked by it at first, and I thought, oh, it's another Akkadian or cuneiform clay tablet. And then I kind of circled back, and I was and I thought, oh, it's another Akkadian or cuneiform clay tablet. And then I kind of circled back and I was like, wait, no, this is the Cyrus cylinder. This is the one that we always talk about. That's cool. It's kind of cool that we have it preserved. Let's keep going with our story. So, 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 return to just Jerusalem. Jared, do they return to the whole land? 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. And in fact, later on, I think it's in Nehemiah that they even have to 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 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. 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 are worried about revolting leading you know organizing the leadership the organ 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. And 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. And 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. And so 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. And 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. So 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. And 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, this is part of our tradition too. We're Jewish too. And they don't want their help because they feel like they've corrupted themselves, I guess you could say. You're not real Israelites anymore.

That's what Harry Potter would call a half-blood. Some Jewish blood, some non-Jewish blood. It's a major tension. I think historians tend to call them Samarians 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. And so then they finally say, well, okay, we'll build our own temple. And so they go to Mount Gerizim okay we'll build our own temple and so they go to Mount

Gerizim and they build their own temple and 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. That Gerizim temple comes up in Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well. Exactly, because she says, we've worshipped 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 God in spirit and in truth. 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.

They're still Persians, right, 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. 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. You know, Babylon only lasted not even 100 years. They were just too brutal. And the Syrians as well. These were kind of very powerful, short-lived flame 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. Jared, do you feel like we're ready to get into

the text here? Well, let's start with just Ezra 1, just because it is kind of 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 Mithridath, the treasurer, and numbered them

unto Sheshbazar, the prince of Judah. Sheshbazar is this local ruler that's going to be set up in Jerusalem area, and they're going to bring back these vessels. And 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. And 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. And so that's kind of what happens in chapter one is just finally this coming back and starting to rebuild the temple. Ezra 3 talks about they start with the altar. I mean, what they want to do first is offer sacrifices again. And 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. And so 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 is finally completed. And so that's a good 10 years. And 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, O 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 saith the Lord of hosts, consider your ways. In other words, let's rethink this. Let's rebuild this.

And so it took a little prompting from Haggai and Zechariah, another prophet of this time period, to kind of light the fire under the Israelites to remember part of why you're back here is to rebuild the temple. And so even though probably they had started some of the worship going on there, the temple still needed to be completed. And so they eventually do that. And so this is what we refer to often as the second temple. And it starts a new historical period. And 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. And when they rebuilt it,

it's interesting because there's different reactions. Some were tremendously excited. 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. And this is just an exilic group coming back, barely trying to rebuild their houses and city and the temple. That reminds me, Jared, of Nephi when he says he tried to build the temple, but he said it was not like Solomon's. Yeah, it was patterned after Solomon's, but he knew it wasn't the same as Solomon's.

So the first temple we talk about, we call Solomon's Temple. From Solomon all the way to the destruction by Babylon. Correct. 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? Well, it is the same temple. Same, yeah, ground. But what Herod does when he comes on the scene is he wants to make it magnificent again, more like Solomon's temple. And 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 courtyard exactly so we would say solomon's temple and then we would say the second temple so when we say second temple herod's temple we're not talking about two different things you're talking about the same building a remodel if you will the remodeled you fixed up the grounds. 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. Yeah. If it looks like Ogden, it's going to look a lot different. 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 and strengthen the foundation and all, 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. 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. Yeah. 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. And then I've got these other Jews who are half Jewish, half, what would you

call, half Gentile, I guess. Half Gentile. They want to help as well. So, this whole return, this has been stressful. 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. And 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 kind of 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. 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. And so it's also a clash of political power. And 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. And so these local people try to stop these rebuilding projects by claiming, you don't have permission to do this. We're here. We've been here. They have to appeal back to Persia. And that's where you get some of these chapters where we have a repetition of the decrees. And 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 kind of the dominant lingua franca of the day. And 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. And so they do have the Persian backing to allow them to continue to rebuild. I'm looking at the synopsis for Ezra chapter four, 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. It's been going on for 400 years.

Yeah. 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 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? had moved into the Jerusalem area, and so they still are there kind of antagonizing. Some of this is groups of neighboring Ammonites, for example, that can kind of come in and assert some authority now that a lot of the Jews are gone. And so they are in the mix here as well. 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. Goodness, this is messy. It gets really messy. 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. And 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- Is anybody going to get started on this? Then another time, I was serious about that. So, Jared, does that kind of feel the same to you as when we read those church history stories?

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. And then added to it is this opposition that kind of helps delay things. It's like not getting the right permit or something. So you have to go through the permit process until you finally, the Persians say, yes, they can go on. It's a factor as well as just the natural opposition that's coming against them. 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. 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. And 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. They didn't have to make appointments though, to build the temple. We have to make appointments. Our life is really hard, John. We have to go online and make an appointment. Gee, I need some names. I can out my own family members, just like that. But John, I mean, that takes ink. And just give me a break here, John. Let me know. My life is hard.

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. Going, yeah, whenever we want to build a temple in the world, everybody just loves it. Yeah. No one ever hires counselors to stop the work. There's never local opposition, right? Never. 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. So Zerubbabel is one of these kind of local governor that is under the Persians. The name sounds like it's related to Baal, but it's actually related to Babel, Babylon. And Zerah is seed, so seed of Babylon. So he's come from that area, but now is here in Jerusalem. And he helps kind of start the community and get things going here, because Ezra doesn't show up himself until chapter 7. And so 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 is about 458.

So almost 100 years after Persia had conquered the Babylonians, Ezra finally comes on the scene. And 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 like if this is the Artaxerxes I, II, III. 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. So that gets confusing. And 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. And if you feel at all confused, you're not alone. So we just try to keep it pretty basic and say, you know, the Persians came. They start to rebuild the temple.

It finally gets rebuilt. But then Ezra is going to come. Nehemiah is going to come. Particularly Ezra is 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 and what we're doing. Nehemiah is going to come back because he's heard that the city still is kind of 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, right? He's like a canary in a mine. Yeah. And so it's a dangerous position, but it's also a very trusted position because you could imagine that a cupbearer could easily turn against the king and pass on food that he himself has poisoned. 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 his 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. 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. And 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 have guards to protect them. And so you have a tool in one hand and maybe a weapon in another. And it kind of 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. And 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. 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. 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. And 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. And 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. Interesting. This makes the book so much more accessible. 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?

We don't know. Ezra follows in the same vein as 1 and 2 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 1 Nephi, maybe reflecting back on some of the events that had happened earlier and so forth. And so, 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. And it's very pro those who are trying to return and rebuild. Definitely from that perspective. I wonder what would a Samaritan history sound like?

We had our own city. Who are these outsiders that think that they can come in and take over? Right. Please join us for part two of this podcast.