Gide. I'm Gary Stevens.

And welcome to the second series of the History in the Bible podcast.

More of the history in more of the books in all the Bibles.

Episode 2.6, Leaving Babylon Part 4.

Nehemiah and Ezra stand against Ruth.

In the last episode of the history in the Bible, we left the Judeans in 515 BC.

Happy to finally have a new temple,

reconstructed by Zerebabel and Joshua.

After the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of both leaders

and the rededication of the temple,

the Bible's historical narrative is largely mute

until a third wave of returnees under Nehemiah and Ezra,

65 years later. That silence is broken only by the short book of Malachi. Malachi is traditionally

regarded as the last written book of the Old Testament. His name means my messenger.

Curiously, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint,

does not regard Malachi as a personal name, but as a description.

To the Septuagint, the book is anonymous. Some later Jewish traditions thought that Malachi

was actually the priest Ezra. Like the prophets Obadiah and Habakkuk, Malachi says nothing of his

ancestry or his historical context. Our best guess is that Malachi was a priest who wrote in the

decades after the temple reconstruction, after the mixed efforts of Zerebabel and Joshua. But before

the work of Nehemiah and Ezra, the priests and people had lost their watchfulness about God's coming.

Malachi opposed this malaise with a series of disputations.

...