The Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and it's epilogue

week we're going through what happened after Nehemiah and how the events of the

books of Nehemiah and Ezra and Esther as well shaped the story of the

Mediterranean world and the descendants of Abraham over the next few hundred years and how all of that dovetails so beautifully into the

world of Jesus, the world of the New Testament, and the situation that we're going to run into

in our next season here on this podcast, which starts in a couple episodes, on the book of Galatians.

So where we left off was the Eastern powers, Persia, Babylon before them, they've all tapered off kind of into oblivion.

There's still money and people out there, but Rome is the new dominant force in the world.

By the time you get into the first century BC that is the

hundred years before Jesus is born and the Jewish people they've had a kingdom

for a while from the one 60s BC into the 60s BC they have had

their own fairly dysfunctional fairly secular looking didn't go great not wildly

successful kingdom.

And eventually, if you recall from our last conversation, stuff got so bad that they looked

west.

For the first time ever, they didn't look east to Persia or Babylon or north to the Assyrians or south to Egypt

they turn their eyes west and make a contract they make a deal in the hopes to

receive political protection and a bailout from yet another superpower.

The attentive reader will note that this has been an oft-repeated refrain throughout the Old Testament and the results are

really similar pretty much every time Israel makes a deal like that they come

out on the losing end and that's how it plays out here Pompeii or I think a lot of people are good at Latin say Pompeii, but then you're saying

Pompeii.

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