So, So here you and I are in Nehemiah Chapter 13, the very last chapter of the narrative part of the Old Testament before we get a big long narrative break.

And then the next thing that happens after that is John the Baptist and Jesus getting born and all of that business.

So it's a pretty big deal how we're going to leave off here.

We're going to have to sit and think about it for a long time.

It's like when you play a ball game and you don't have another one scheduled for a week or a month even

whatever happens there you just get to sit and think about that for all of that time

until you get back on the field.

So what we're staring down here and it's kind of a bummer because chapter 13 of

Nehemiah, the last narrative chapter of the Old Testament, it's not going very well because Nehemiah, the guy who's

held everything together from human perspective at least, he left everything in

great shape and went back to Cup Bear for his buddy and the king, Arteserxes, the first of Persia.

And then he came back to Jerusalem to discover that it was all screwed up and that it wasn't just randomly all screwed up but

that the guy who should have been most invested in making sure it didn't all get

screwed up, Ellie Ashib, the priest, instead let it get all screwed up. It was instrumental in letting the whole

thing get screwed up. So Nehemiah comes back to town and as we discussed yesterday he was on a bit of

a righteous rampage and I have no problem with this he went

and did an eviction he comes back to Jerusalem probably in the 32nd year of

artisans the text is a little ambiguous in terms of how to read the timeline here,

but he comes back after a significant time away.

Tobiah, one of the three bad guys has been ruining everything, has moved into part of the temple, and what's been moved

out to accommodate him? Well, all of the storerooms, of all of the places where all of the

tithes are supposed to go, to fund all of the systems and all of the people who operate the systems that make the whole religious life of the Jewish people in Jerusalem go.

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