Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast.

Forgive me, you're still getting sick voice. Someday I'm going to get better and it's going to be great what I do.

But in the meantime, here's a two-part episode. This is the second part of a double episode

where we're working through an evaluation of the

Xerxian era and we're setting up to think about what stuff from that era or how stuff from that era

would have informed how the original audience thought

about things in the next era, the art of Xerxian era that comes into focus as we look

at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah coming up next. So much fun and even if history is not your

favorite thing in the world I just love that you let me do this from time to time

because I think it's awesome and I think it's super fascinating and I think it helps me

understand the Bible better.

All right, my friend Jeffrey, play some cool music,

and then we're going to pick it back up where we left off. Another aspect of the Xerxian era that I think people would have looked back on and

remembered with clarity would have been the building aspect of his reign.

He seemed to want to expand on the stuff that his dad had built and so he built up

Persepolis he made improvements at Susa there are engravings to that effect

that you can still see in both places or maybe they've been moved but they were in both of those places

There's art all around Persepolis depicting people coming to this great throne room to get an audience with the

king and they're all clothed in different attire from all around the world

which I think would have been another thing that people would have recalled from this era, just how

cosmopolitan it was, and how proud Xerxes was to be a global emperor of all of these people,

like his children that he was gathering under his wings but he liked to build and clearly he got that impulse from his dad who did super grandiose things and it looked like Xerxes retirement plan would have been to spend more time at

...