Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Even though this book is named after Ezra, we don't meet him until later in the book.

This short book covers almost a century, and it's a historical narrative,

not a prophetic book. We start out with King Cyrus of Persia. We've read about him before.

If you recall, God has prophesied through both Isaiah and Daniel that Cyrus would play a key

role in rebuilding Jerusalem after the 70 years of the Babylonian exile are complete.

And now that Persia has defeated Babylon where all the exiles live, King Cyrus is on the scene and God is setting the

wheels in motion. The Lord stirred up his spirit, the spirit of a pagan, to rebuild the temple in

Jerusalem for the exiles who live in his land. This sounds great, but if he's a pagan and God is

stirring up his spirit, doesn't that violate his free will? Put a pen in that. We'll cover that term

a bit more later in today's podcast. Cyrus tells all the exiles from Judah that they can return to

Jerusalem and that he'll send provisions with them so they can rebuild God's house.

Verse five tells us that God stirred up the spirits of lots of the exiles to return.

They bring all the best things back to Jerusalem.

Not only that, but Cyrus also goes into the China cabinet and pulls out the temple vessels,

you know, the ones King Nebby stole and the same ones King B was partying out of right before God struck

him dead, and he packs those up to ship back to Jerusalem too. They even had to rent the extra

large U-haul because there were 5,400 of those vessels. In Chapter 2, we get a list of all the

families that returned, and we know this is important because it's giving us a historical record

that not only places those people in Jerusalem at present,

but also tracks them back to the families that left Jerusalem in the exile.

In verse 59, the author gives us a separate list of people and basically says,

...