Hey, everybody. It's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. I have a question for you, but it's a difficult one to frame. Let me just try this here. Can you think of any examples of a time in history where there's a conflict between two teams? We'll call them Team A and Team B. And in the midst of that conflict, a ruse. A deception was employed that goes as follows.

Somebody from Team A impersonated in writing a leader from Team B and wrote orders in the name of Team B, maybe with the imperial seal of Team B, so as to trick the underlings from Team B into thinking that the leader of Team B had told them to do something, but that something is actually very destructive to Team B.

I know that was a little bit overwrought, but what do you

call that? It's not quite a false flag. I can think of a few examples. Maybe this will help you

understand what I'm talking about. There is a play by a guy named Euripides. I mean, this is back

like Trojan War era stuff, written a little bit after the fact. And one of his characters,

a very famous character

named Ulysses, has a political rival that he wants to get rid of. But Palamedes, I think that's

the name of the political rival, he's so popular that nothing can be done. So Ulysses, instead of

attacking him straight on, he attacks his reputation by forging a bunch of letters in the name and with the signature of Palamedes that makes it look like he's planning a betrayal of some sort.

And then Ulysses gets his wish, those forged documents, they undermine Palamedes.

And, yeah, it's really hard to check because it's just a document right i mean they didn't have all the fail safes that maybe we would have now

digitally maybe the most famous example i can think of from literature is just julius caesar i mean

the shakespeare version of it do you remember the part where cassius is is it Cassius? Dang, it's been a minute.

Okay, I'm going to say it's Cassius. Yeah, of course it would be. Cassius writes letters or maybe a letter in the

name of the Roman people and he throws it into the house of Marcus Junius Brutus to convince Brutus that this is what

everybody's thinking. Well, the letter was forged, but if Brutus took the letter to be

authentic, it would change his behavior. And so, thus, it's a very effective deception on the

part of Cassius. Actually, from history, Hannibal, during one of his Roman campaigns during the Punic Wars,

that's a series of three wars fought between, well, they were Phoenicians, but they moved to

North Africa and went by the name the Carthaginians.

The Carthaginians and the Romans were close rivals, and Rome kind of barely beat him. And Carthage's

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