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

Did you know we have another daily podcast? It's called the Bible kneecap, like kneeling in prayer,

because your girl loves a pun. Anyway, it's a short

prayer of response to what we've read and recapped each day, and each episode is about 60 to 90

seconds long. To give you a taste of it, we've uploaded a free preview of the Bible kneecap for

you today, so be sure to look for that in your feed. Yesterday we read Luke's account of the birth of Jesus, and today we get more information from Matthew's account.

Jesus is born in a village called Bethlehem, in a kingdom called Judea.

At the time he's born, all of Judea is under Roman rule and occupation.

Imagine a large and powerful country takes over the country where you live, stationed soldiers in

every major city, is involved with every level of your government, and makes you pay taxes to

support that occupying army.

That's what's happening here.

Rome is in charge of things, and they put a guy named Herod the Great in charge of Judea.

Herod is a great builder, making port cities and aqueducts

and even renovating the Second Temple complex so that it's much bigger and more magnificent.

For a while, he's even the president of the Olympics, but in his later years, he becomes jealous

and paranoid. For instance, he spends six years building a massive fortress in the middle of the

desert in case enemies attack and never spends a single night there. He kills his sons so they

won't take over his throne, and he even kills his favorite wife, then mummifies her in honey

when he later regrets it. He is driven by fear, which prompts him to try to control everything around him,

which is where we find ourselves today. We're at Herod's palace and some foreign wise men

show up on his doorstep and say, hey, we're here to see the new king. We saw a sign in the sky that

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