You're listening to the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. It's fast, fun, free daily deep dive Bible and right now we're working on the book of Nehemiah.

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Yesterday I was talking about the exploitative innkeeper in the Willie Wanca remake

that came out a while back with Timothy Shalome and I was point out out morally simple it. You don't have to be some kind of ethical philosopher to figure out, wait,

that lady right there is taking advantage of the poor and effectively enslaving them.

She is bad.

You're supposed to be able to just figure that out intuitively.

And really her character in that Wonka remake is very reminiscent of the delightful but deplorable master of the house couple from the musical

Le Miserab who really do the exact same thing. They find people down on their luck. is a

who really do the exact same thing. They find people down on their luck and they collect

them and they exploit them all while pretending to be their friend and

benefactor who feels their pain and is here to help.

Looks like the same kind of people showed up during a very difficult time in Nehemiah 5

when you have, really just all of Nehemiah in general, when you've got this awful confluence of a famine, a really heavy season in the history of the Persian Empire in terms of taxes,

enemies at the gates, well the burned out gates that's part of the problem

right there wanting to kill you and throw at your work and also all of the businesses

are put on hold while you're trying to rebuild the walls is a crazy moment in history and most

people looked at that from among the returning exiles and they rolled up their sleeves and

they mustard all of their gumption and elbow grease and they pulled themselves up by their boot straps and they pitched in and they started fixing that wall except for a few jack wagons who looked at that and were like hey this is a great opportunity to make in that

and were like, hey, this is a great opportunity to make money

while appearing to be sympathetic so I get social cred and money.

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