Today is the 20th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible.

I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today as our journey continues forward step by step day by day in the

final days of this year and we're kind of on a trend right now as we move

through the the minor profits in the Old

Testament where we absorb an entire book in a day. Now it won't happen every single day

for the rest of the year but it will happen today we have arrived at the tenth of 12 books of

prophecy known as the minor prophets and today we will read the Prophet Hakiyi and like a lot of the other minor prophets, there's not a lot to give us like who

Haki I was, what he did.

We know that Haghi was among those who had returned from the Babylonian exile and were living

in Jerusalem, and he was probably one of the first wave of exiles to be able to return back to Jerusalem.

And we also know that from the writing here he had access to those in power because he

indicates that his message was delivered to Zarubabel, the governor of Judah.

And we might remember that name because we learned of Zerubel when we read through the book of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and he also delivered this message to

Jishua the High Priest, so he had access. And the message is largely

motivational but we have to look at a timeline to understand why.

Babylon conquered Jerusalem, and we read all about that as we've been going through the scriptures this year and let her people

into exile and that happened at 586 BC.

Babylon then was conquered by the Persian Empire in 539 BC, and it was the Persian King Cyrus that allowed the first of the exiles to go back to Jerusalem, under Zerubabell's leadership around 538 BC.

Hagia's message, the one we're about to read, comes 18 years later in 520 BC. In fact, these prophecies in the Book of Haghi are some of the most precisely

dated utterances that we know in the Bible because the dates are contained in the book,

August 29th through December 18th, 520 BC.

So during the 18 years, from the time that the exiles were first allowed to return until the time that Hagii pronounces this prophecy,

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