Hello and welcome to the Scriptures Are Real, the podcast where we talk about different elements of the scriptures that have become real to us and that help us then draw more power from the scriptures so that we can apply it to our

lives. I'm your host, Kerry Meelstein, and this is a shortcast where we'll do a historical

overview to help us just get to understand a little bit how we got to the point of the story

of Ezra and Nehemiah. So we know that as our last reading ended, the Jews had been conquered.

The kingdom of Judah been conquered. Babylon has come in and destroyed Jerusalem.

There are all sorts of interesting historical details about that from the archaeology.

We find homes that were destroyed and burned by the Babylonians. We find places

where there were arrowheads from the Babylonians shooting up into the city. There's plenty of

archaeological evidence to attest exactly how real that conquest was. It's a very, very real thing.

I think of the, we talked in the podcast last week about the despair of the people in Laquiche, but the people in Jerusalem are equally or more in despair as they're besieged and their starvation and then there's all the warfare.

And finally the Babylonians get in and burn and pillage and take home

slaves. And it's a terrible thing. And so many of the Jews are taken. And it's worth noting that

when we get to just the kingdom of Judah, they would call anyone who lived there, a Judeite or Yehudite, which we translate as Jews.

And this is about the time period where we really start to speak and use that terminology

Jews rather than Israelites and so on because there's only the one kingdom.

And we should note that there are people from every tribe in the kingdom of Judah.

We've had several migrations that have happened.

And we'll talk a little bit more about this when we do Hezekiah's Day in the book of Isaiah.

There's a tremendous amount of history that we just passed over so briefly.

But we'll cover it some more as we do Isaiah and Jeremiah.

But there were migrations during a number of time periods,

but most especially when Assyria was coming through and pillaging the Northern Kingdom,

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