Today is the fifth day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today.

As we continue our journey forward. So yesterday we concluded the book of Second Kings.

So we had moved through the books of Samuel and the books of Kings ending up with no kingdom left.

The northern kingdom of Israel had been carried away into exile by the Assyrian Empire.

And then the kingdom of Judah in the south was carried away into exile by the Babylonian Empire.

Resulting in the destruction of Jerusalem including the destruction of the temple of the Most High God.

Now we are about to turn the page and open the book of first Chronicles.

And obviously there is a second Chronicles following that.

And we'll be covering a lot of the same Torah, same territory. So it's almost like...

Didn't we already... haven't we already heard this story? Didn't we already go through this territory?

And the answer would be yes. We're going back through this territory from a different perspective and time.

Chronicles looks at the same history through the eyes of the priests.

So as we just said we finished the books of Kings yesterday. And Judah was exiled to Babylon.

And first and second Chronicles were written from this exile.

And we're not sure who was the author or who collected the Chronicles together.

There is Jewish tradition that suggests that the scribe and priest Ezra was involved.

And even though there isn't total consensus among biblical scholars which is not a surprise.

The books were probably written about four centuries before the time of Jesus which would make them contemporary with Ezra.

And as we begin we have the first nine chapters that will cover a lot of genealogy.

It's that part of the Bible where we have all these hard-pronounced names.

And they're long lists. And we're like what is going on?

And I don't even know how to pronounce these names and why are these people's names in the Bible? And what is the purpose of this?

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