This is the Baimah podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we wake up in the ancient city of Sartis to see her history and glory, which should help us understand the message in the letter to her church.

It's right. We are going to have a presentation today with kind of pictures, not a lot of them, but scattered throughout the whole conversation today.

So if you want to pull up your presentation, if you're somewhere you can do that, obviously not driving, then feel free to do that.

These photos will also be in the chapter artwork if you have a podcast player that supports it. So you can find those pictures there as we talk about them.

So we now turn our attention to the next church that receives one of the letters in Revelation, the church in Sartis.

Also known as Safarad, Safarad in the ancient world. Before it was Sartis, the Greco-Roman city of Sartis, it was known as being Safarad.

Well, language is that. It's a wonderful question.

Prior to green. Well, Safarad is going to be Hebrew.

It may have a more Semitic root as well and have a very similar, another Semitic language is, but yeah, Safarad in the Hebrew.

We'll be using the same hermeneutic that we've been using this whole time for all of John's apocalyptic literature.

We studied this and really kind of rounded out our study of this hermeneutic in Thyatira.

So this hermeneutic is built on the idea of John's simultaneous and two-sided approach to what we're going to call text and context.

Text to context. Text to context. Hashtag text to context.

John takes the text of the Hebrew scriptures and applies it to the context of the Greco-Roman world of Asia.

So let's start by pulling apart some of this context Sartis was an ancient city founded by the Hittites perhaps maybe earlier, but as far as we know, the Hittites founded the ancient, ancient, ancient city that would become Sartis.

And they eventually touted a population of over 100,000 people.

It's main economic staples or agriculture.

Purple die made from a particular regional oak tree.

So there's purple die kind of all throughout the Roman Empire, but they had a very special purple die that they were known for.

And gold mined from the mountains of Sartis.

The city was built around two mountains, which was generally, I'm sure there's another city that has that, but by and large of major Greco-Roman cities in Asian, Asian, Minor, that is unique to Sartis.

Sartis is the only one to have two almost twin mountains.

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