Now the story of the Jewish exiles who lost everything and the one man who had no choice but to help them rebuild it.

It's the Book of Nehemiah.

You ever watch a show or read something that you want to recommend to a friend

and they ask the obvious question

when you tell them it's great

and they should

watch it or read it they're like well what's it about and then you start to explain

it and you're like oh dang I'm not doing a very good job of this this is it's a very complex

plot and that's kind of what makes it good but I haven't really thought about the elevator pitch.

I don't know how to boil this thing down.

Look, you are not going to have trouble with that when it comes to selling your friends on the book of

Nehemiah. This one is easy, almost as easy as that little

arrested development bit that we did on the front end there. What you got is a

situation where the Jewish people got taken into exile and everything got

wrecked. Looks like they're done and gone to the world,

but then gradually over the course of a couple of generations,

they are allowed to rebuild the temple

and start to rebuild themselves as a people back in Israel, but at the time that the book of

Nehemiah starts there aren't any walls around that city and in the ancient world

not having walls around your city is a lot like not having a city at all.

It's a sitting duck and Nehemiah is heartbroken over the fact that there aren't walls around the city and he knows the job will never be done and things will never be right

until those walls are built so he makes that problem his problem and the book is

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