Welcome to the Book of Mormon Central. Come follow me podcast with your host, Lynn Wilson and John Cho.

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This week we're covering Ezra Ni Hamaha. Now, this one is very historically relevant.

So take us through the history here. I think it's just the last hundred years of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.

And so the rest of many of the prophets and the other writings fit into this last hundred years.

So we've just been going through kings.

And then Chronicles is the things that were left out of Kings.

This initially was part of the book of chronicles.

And it was just one long book

of history that went from the time of David to the end of the Hebrew Bible. And when the

Septuagint was dividing them into scrolls, they cut it into separate books. So we had first

chronicles, second chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. So we begin here historically after the Babylonian exile has taken place for a few years.

And this is, depending if you're talking about the first or the second or the third deportation, it's 50 to 70 years that the Israelites that were living in the southern area of Palestine are now having the opportunity to have a change of king and a change of political ideas and a return to their promised land.

It's really quite interesting to see this political foreign policy change in the Persians, very different than from the Babylonians.

So now the Persians are in charge, right?

Yeah, the Medes and the Persians come through.

And the Israelites who were inspired, I believe, by this bird of the Lord, who felt like they wanted to go back to the promised land, come and show this Persian king named Cyrus this scripture from Isaiah.

And they show him his own name in their scripture.

And this is 140 years before the time that it was happening if we believe that Isaiah was written by the prophet Isaiah who lived at the time of Hezekiah,

which I do. And in Isaiah 44, he says, this is starting about in verse 28 and I'll just keep going.

Now in the first year of the Cyrus king of Persia, and then he goes on and he calls him,

he is my shepherd.

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