Hello, I'm Gary Stevens, and welcome to the History in the Bible podcast.

All the history, in all the books, in all the Bibles.

Thank you. Bonus episode number two.

In this bonus episode, Steve Guerr of the History of the Papacy podcast joins me to ramble on about the second temple period.

You can visit Steve at a to Z History page.com.

Thanks again to Steve for doing all the hard editing work.

My half of the audio still doesn't sound too good thanks to a microphone failure.

Well, eh, the History in the Bible podcast resumes as usual next Sunday.

The second temple period is probably a good chunk of where our two podcasts would overlap.

Can you maybe fill people in on what that exactly means the second temple period? Yeah, the second temple period refers to the

period between the time that the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile until the destruction

of the temple by the emperor Vespasian in 70 AD or so. Now, it's called the second temple period, but there's actually

two temples that were made during the period. The first was by Ezra and Nehemiah after they came back

from the Babylonian exile, and that was effectively replaced and doubled in size by a temple made

by Herod the Great, he of New Testament fame.

I should probably know this, but are Ezra and Nehemiah people who are, what's their historicity?

Can they be nailed down as actually existing?

Actually, that's a very good point.

There are no great arguments against their existence, which is often the best thing you could say in that period.

I'd say, from what I've read, yes, there's fairly good arguments that they existed or there were people filling those roles who existed and who were maybe called later Ezra and

Nehemiah. There's no reason to doubt their existence or to doubt what they did. And

particularly with Nehemiah, when it's recounted how he came back and tried to rebuild

...