Hey my friends it's Matt this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and yesterday we started talking about a conundrum

the Bible problem I don't actually think as much of a Bible problem but it seemed like a big Bible problem when there was less data about the Persian Empire

and more confusion about who was king and when they were king, about a hundred years ago or

150 years ago in the world of biblical and ancient world scholarship and because of that

confusion what has trickled down to us is a suggestion that's been passed down from book to book to without really taking into consideration the new data

that maybe there's a timeline problem with Ezra and Nehemiah

wherein we got an overlap we got two different revivals one at the end of Ezra one at the end of Nehemiah that are presented as being

Separate but some of the critics of the Bible were looking at this you know hundred know, a hundred years ago and they were like,

no, no, no, there's confusion. There's the same revival and it's all screwed up.

Bible's screwed up. I made a mistake here. So we're trying to sort through

what actually happened and we're doing names and dates and all of that stuff

picking up from what we were talking about yesterday. There, I think we are now reset and ready to charge forward.

I'm going to ask my friend Jeffrey to play some music and we'll get into this.

Okay, let's just go with the text here and break down the timeline of events.

The first half of Ezra clearly puts itself during the reign of Cyrus and then during the reign of Darius.

Now Xerxes and Art of Xerxes get a little flash forward mention in there, but

this is all about the time of Cyrus and Darius.

So we're talking about the late 500s BC.

And in it, okay, in the first year, Cyrus King of Persia.

So that tells us 539 BC is where Ezra opens.

That's how we measure time in the ancient world.

What year of the reign of what king?

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